This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/fedora by /u/adila01 on 2024-06-29 08:28:22+00:00.

GNOME releases in 2023 and 2024 have been on a the quieter end when compared to the blockbuster 2021 and 2022 years. This is a result of various reasons.

One include the decline of Purism has a major upstream contributor. Luckily, the German government’s Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has made up a portion of the drop. They are even planning to expand their investment going forward.

Another reason is that the blockbuster releases of 2021 and 2022 was really saw a culmination of major long term projects. GNOME 47 will be another release that just so happens to see a culmination of major long term projects. What can we expect?

• (Red Hat) HDR: Due to Red Hat customer demand, HDR is a long time coming to GNOME. It will take some time to get it polished and available in Settings but at least some major bits will land in 47.
• (Endless) Digital Wellbeing: Something that Endless wanted to do for so many years is adding functionality to manage your health when using the operating system. The merge requests for much of the functionality is here and here.
• (Community) Accent Colors: After STF funding adding a lot of updates for the CSS engine in GTK, it was pretty quick for the GNOME designers to finalize on a strategy and for this to be merged.
• (STF) Notification Groupings by App: A long running investment to clean up legacy code around notifications and provide some groupings for notifications.
• (STF) Global Hotkeys: As past of the accessibility work, this feature will allow for applications to register actions that can be triggered regardless of what the user is doing. It will be useful for gamers for software like Discord.
• (Community) DRM Lease: A feature needed for Virtual Reality Support. Luckily, the amazing Jose Esposito of libinput fame has donated his time to implement this functionality.
• (Red Hat) Installing Nvidia drivers with SecureBoot Enabled: With SecureBoot being a commonly turned on feature for hardware, Nvidia driver installation wasn’t possible within just GNOME Software. This enhancements allows GNOME Software to do just that.
• (Intel) Screen Tearing: Screen tearing is a feature that is useful for gamers who don’t mind tearing (or have VRR enabled to alleviate it) in order to minimize any frame delay. Although this will very likely not land in 47, there is a lot of quick feedback and response from all the developers involved so fingers crossed.
• (Canonical) Triple Buffering: This has been in the works for years but the path to get this merged is clear. With there being interest by core mutter developers to be merged in for 47 this feature will enable GNOME to provide smoother feel on weaker hardware.
• (Red Hat) Wayland Only Build: As an end user this isn’t an impacting feature but it is important for the health of GNOME. This feature came from Red Hat’s Automotive division. Thankfully, we are seeing many Red Hat technologies like Pipewire and Shell/Mutter being reused there and as a result seeing features that otherwise may not have happened.

Of course some of these items could slip into the next release. Even if some do, this is shaping up to be one of the best releases ever.

A special thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund of really making up the drop in Purism support. We can expect to many new enhancements in the coming year due to them.

Are you already looking towards GNOME 48? Take a look here for some ideas on what is to come.