GNOMEGNOME 49 has been officially released! Head over to the release notes to discover all the new features and enhancements:
Many thanks to our community for your work over the past 6 months. You're amazing!
Thank you to everyone who helped make GNOME 49 a reality—especially every Friend of GNOME whose financial support sustains the GNOME Foundation!
If you'd like to join us on the road to GNOME 50, consider donating to become a Friend of GNOME today. With your help, we can continue to build a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem to realize a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust.
Itching to try GNOME 49 today? Developers and curious testers can try GNOME OS in a virtual machine or bare metal:
Just remember that GNOME OS itself is considered pre-release software; bad things may happen if you use it in production. Happy testing!
DansLeRuSH ᴱᶰ@gnome I'd give a shot this summer on an old laptop but was unable to pass the installation step (partition part) ... a small idea when a proper (and installable) version will come ? 🤓
razze@danslerush @gnome I guess you will need to be more specific, I successfully installed it this summer. Multiple times.
@danslerush @gnome it would still be interesting, to figure out where it failed for you, to either fix it or at least improve communication
zaire arcana@gnome the fedora 43 beta also seems to have it!
Val Packett 🧉. @gnome I signed up literally yesterday and GNOME 49 got released today. Coincidence??? :D
@gnome a section some might gloss over is the one about how the Software app is snappier now. I’m checking it out right now and it really is a lot more usable than i remember it being before (in prior releases it would often lock up for seemingly no reason). it’s a major improvement
it’s still pretty bare UX wise but it’s consistently usable and people will appreciate that a ton, especially those new to linux
@gnome the next notable point i think in this release is the inclusion of Showtime, which i consider a bit too minimalist and also kinda clunky, i still prefer Clapper, but anything’s an improvement over the dated Totem so i’m not complaining
elementary@gnome congrats on the release! 🎉
Mitex Leo@gnome Congrats! Waiting for fedora to release it.
Dr. Raphael Weyland@gnome love it, my Desktop for decades
Hans-Peter Gauster@gnome Congrats and many thanks for all the hard work.
Ivo 🇪🇺@gnome Wow 🤩- You made me want to try Gnome .
Mr. ESE💧🕹️@gnome
Wait, does this mean that we'll be getting GNOME 50 next?
Wait, does this mean that we'll be getting GNOME 50 next?
Fedora Project@gnome happy release day! Looking forward to seeing it on Fedora Workstation soon!
Nix Inch Nails
spartanatreyu@gnome To anybody who uses gnome today: I haven't used gnome in a few years. I stopped because it didn't have a system tray for things like steam, discord, teams, docker, podman, etc...
I had to use an extension to get one there but it broke after every update.
Is a system tray (or something like it) built in yet? Where do the icons for those background apps sit? Are they forced into the space of the dock with the other apps? Or is there another approach that doesn't break after every update?
Natanox 🇺🇦🇵🇸@spartanatreyu @gnome I asked that a while ago. They do not plan to ever support tray icons again, Neither do they want to support the common APIs originally used for tray icons. Only the list in the main menu on the top right is supported, and only apps using the xdg-portals pop up there (afaik).
For full functionality you won't get around Extensions. And for those they also do not plan to do any API, but only monkey-patching code. So both upgrades breaking them and desktop instability remain.
Raven667@Natanox @spartanatreyu @gnome I don't understand this resistance to using Extensions, adding these UI features for people who want them is the whole point of having an Extension system. I use gnome-shell-extension-appindicator from ubuntu and haven't had any problems with it. I also use Dash to Panel, Frippery Move Clock, GSConnect, Places Status Indicator and XWayland Indicator, and haven't had any problems with those either. There is no reward for running "pure" GNOME and there are plenty of well-maintained extensions for common non-default behavior for people who want them, please use them if you want, without guilt.
@raven667 @spartanatreyu @gnome We did mention two reasons:
1. Your desktop will break upon every upgrade
2. You desktop can become unstable and break
I used Gnome for quite a while and I would love to keep using it, but after losing both work progress and game progress three times due to gnome-shell crashing I counted my losses and moved over to KDE.
The Gnome Extension system is *not* stable, and they refuse to change anything on it. They decided against creating an API for stability.
@Natanox @spartanatreyu @gnome I may be incredibly lucky, but I've never experienced a gnome-shell crash, and I've been using GNOME3 with extensions as my daily driver for nearly 10y for work. Maybe some optional telemetry can/should/does exist to report failing extensions so they can be pulled or flagged if they are causing problems, but I understand why GNOME prioritizes privacy over telemetry and probably doesn't have good comprehensive automated data on reliability issues. I'm sorry that happened to you.
Maybe someday a developer will volunteer to create a more sandboxed extension API, like how Firefox moved from extensions just running inside the browser engine to standardized WebExtensions, but I'm not sure that's the biggest pain point right now so I don't foresee that happening in the near future.
@raven667 @spartanatreyu @gnome Gnome decided in a meeting they won't work on an extension API to preserve "developer freedom" (not like creating an API would necessarily slam shut the door to the old, unsafe method...), so I doubt anyone will waste time on something that'll most likely get rejected anyway.
@Natanox of course it would, the whole point of defining an extension API is to remove the capability of injecting arbitrary extension code into the gnome-shell process, and sandboxing them so they cant cause instability, which necessarily involves defining and limiting what an extension is allowed to change (literally only the features implemented in the API), it doesn't have any purpose otherwise
@raven667 That's not true, it completely depends on how they implement it. Nothing stops them from still allowing the unsafe patching for extensions that need to use that (e.g. to customize distros like Ubuntu or Zorin) while also having an API for extensions that can then be marked and sorted as "safe", which won't break every upgrade, can gracefully crash without taking down the shell and are in general easier to develop.
It's a matter of will, not of technical feasability.