GNOME 42 Feature Highlights and Release Details

We give you all the important GNOME 42 feature highlights and release information in this article. Read on.

The GNOME 42 release is much bigger than the base Forty series. The changes are significant in terms of the future of GNOME as a desktop. Changes are spread across GNOME Shell, Mutter, native applications and core libraries.

With that in mind, here’s a summary of the important features of GNOME 42.

Table of Contents

GNOME 42 Schedule

GNOME 42 was released on March 23, 2022. Here’s a tentative schedule.

~~Alpha: January 8, 2022~~
~~Beta (UI Freeze): February 23, 2022~~
~~Release Candidate (Code Freeze): March 5, 2022~~
Final Release: March 23, 2022

GNOME 42 Feature

Work on the libadwaita

The major porting work for libadwaita already started since GNOME 41 release, and it continued in this release as well. A major milestone release, libadwaita 1.0 is due by the end of 2021. So, it is expected that the libadwaita 1.0 release soon be included in GNOME 42 with exciting UI changes.

The most important change of this release is porting of all core apps and dialogs to the libadwaita library, which is the modern building block for GTK4 applications.

It is difficult to demonstrate individual libadwaita improvements because they are incorporated in every corner of GNOME desktop. In general, you would see flat buttons, nice drop-downs, page animations, toast messages among the few changes of libadwaita.

If you want to take a look, there is a nice little libadwaita demo application that contains a demonstration of how the various component looks such as Tabs, Buttons, Lists, etc. You can try this out as a Flatpak app from GNOME Nightly (instructions are at the end of this page).

System-wide Dark Theme

This release introduces system-wide dark style preferences as the most visible GNOME 42 feature. That means, you would have a settings switch, when turned on, the entire desktop and applications that support dark theme would automatically change to dark style.

So, the native applications require additional changes to honour these system-wide dark preferences.

If an application doesn’t have native dark preferences, will be dark when this is enabled.

Content-based applications such as Files, Maps, Text Editor follow this preference when possible.

GNOME 42 - Appearance Page in Settings showing the Light and Dark Switch — GNOME 42 – Appearance Page in Settings showing the Light and Dark Switch

Rate of Input Events in Mutter

Mutter now sends input events at the device rate to applications. This should significantly increase perceived responsiveness for games and artistic applications. You can read more here.

New Screenshot UI of Shell

The new screenshot UI of the GNOME Shell, which was part of Google Summer of Code 2021, brought more features and made it a complete native screenshot and screencasting tool for GNOME. The work for making it a complete app may not finish by GNOME 42 release. But, the majority of the screenshot and screen record functionalities are already merged.

Some of the features that are expected in release 42 and which I feel the important ones from the usability perspective.

Direct saving of screenshots as file
They are also added automatically in the recent files
Asynchronous PNG compression for faster workflow while taking multiple screenshots
Click on notification to open image

GNOME Control Center

In GNOME 42, the entire Settings and its components are ported to GTK4. It is a huge change considering 30+ modules in Gnome Control Center. Functionality wise, you may not see any differences between GTK3 and GTK4 in settings. But obvious UI differences are noticeable.

Other changes mostly include bug fixes and code cleanups.

GNOME 42 - Settings Window — GNOME 42 – Settings Window

Software

GNOME Software perhaps contains more merge requests in GNOME 42. Most of them are minor tweaks, bug fixes, UI design changes in several pages of Software due to GTK4 and libadwaita port.

Adwaita Theme

The default Adwaita theme’s folder icon colour gets a revamp. They are now in Blue with a white gradient. A couple of days back it was proposed as a blue with green gradient, which looked terrible anyway. So it was dropped. As of writing this post, it is still in progress and likely to complete in the coming days.

Files

Apart from the obvious looks change for libadwaita, Files (aka Nautilus) is revamping the rename popup dialog with auto-expanding file name text box.

New Text Editor

The default text editor Gedit is expected to be replaced by a new editor called GNOME Text Editor. The new editor looks really nice and loaded with features. It is developed from scratch and well suited for libadwaita UI design principles. On the feature side, it has built-in themes for writing, coding and all the standard features of a text editor. You can read about it in detail in our exclusive write up here: Everything you need to know about GNOME Text Editor.

New Default Wallpaper

In each release of GNOME, we get a new default wallpaper with day, night variants for Adwaita. New wallpaper and its variants are expected as well in GNOME 42. This is how it looks as of now (may change in the final release). Via source.

Possible new default adwaita wallpaper for GNOME 42

Other Improvements

So, the above items are the most visible changes. But there are a huge list of bug fixes, performance improvements, code cleanups and Wayland updates landing in GNOME Shell and Mutter plus in the code applications. They are definitely making up to be a well-optimized and bug-free GNOME desktop.

Download

You can download the official GNOME OS which features GNOME 42 out of the box. You can download the ISO from the below link and try in GNOME Boxes virtual machine.

https://download.gnome.org/gnomeos/42.0/gnome_os_installer_42.0.iso

Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is expected to feature GNOME 42 when released.

Sample Commands to setup GNOME Nightly

Setup GNOME Nightly Flatpak repo

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo

List out the available nightly apps

flatpak remote-ls --app gnome-nightly

Install a nightly app (example Adwaita Demo) from above list

flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Adwaita1.Demo

Run a nightly app (example TextEditor)

flatpak run org.gnome.Adwaita1.Demo//master

Availability in Linux Distributions

GNOME 42 is expected to be featured in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish in 2022 and in Fedora 36 due in 2022.

Closing Notes

GNOME 42 is shaping up to be another huge release of GNOME History. I personally think it’s going to be bigger than GNOME 40. The libadwaita port was a long due, and it’s going to be completed, well almost. Such an impactful release from the GNOME team, and definitely would be well accepted across its user base.

So, what do you think about this release and the GNOME 42 feature? Anything you were expecting as a feature? Let me know in the comment box below.

Some image credit: GNOME Team

References used for this post