GNOME 51 Beta: Many Small Improvements and Prep for the September Release

The GNOME project has announced the release of the GNOME 51 beta, now available for testing. As Phoronix notes, this stage of development consists almost entirely of a host of small improvements scattered across the extensive set of desktop packages.

What's New

The Control Center has gained a new interface for managing fingerprints in the users section. The Initial Setup utility has learned to work with systemd-homed accounts.

GNOME Shell now honors the “reduced-motion” setting for those who prefer to limit animations and visual effects. Support has also been added for SVG cursors in the same format already used in KDE. The Mutter compositor has received a background-blur effect on Wayland, along with a number of other refinements.

GTK has gained support for the Wayland ext-background-effect protocol and a reworked GDK frame-clock mechanism for more accurate synchronization and fewer dropped frames. In the GNOME Software app store, icon loading and PackageKit repository updates have been sped up. The GVFS daemon has learned to automatically unmount idle backends.

Applications

The GNOME Web browser (Epiphany) has re-enabled WebRTC support and added the ability to pin addresses in the history and overview. The Glycin image-loading library now understands XMP metadata in GIF, TIFF, and WebP files, and supports the Radiance HDR format. The Flatpak build of GNOME Connections now includes the H.264 codec. The Nautilus file manager has received several minor tweaks, and bug fixes and translation updates have landed across the whole project.

Timeline

The GNOME 51 release candidate is planned for the end of August, and the stable GNOME 51.0 release is expected on September 18. Details and download links for the beta have been published on discourse.gnome.org.

Source: Phoronix