GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Our first look at the default desktop for Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 'Plucky Puffin'

The next version of the default desktop for most of the big Linux distros is in beta. Here's what to expect next month, or soon thereafter.

GNOME 48 has entered beta testing, which also means that it's in feature, API, and UI freeze. In other words, nothing substantial should change from now until its release, which is expected on March 19. There is a full list of changes in the Beta News announcement, and it's substantial, so we'll try to focus on some of the highlights.

Version 48 doesn't look to be a massive release. It carries on the trajectory of recent GNOME releases, such as reducing dependencies on X11 on its way to a pure-Wayland future. Some of the new accessories that have replaced older apps in the desktop's portfolio continue to gain new functionality, which will help push worthy veterans such as Gedit and Evince into retirement.

In terms of the long and troubled road to Wayland, version 49 of the GNOME Display Manager, gdm for short, no longer requires Xwayland. So, on a pure Wayland system, it won't require X11 at all right from the login screen onward. Even some desktops and distributions that don't use anything else from GNOME use GDM for their login screen, so this change may have a wide impact. The latest version of Gtk 4 will also remove OpenGL support, and it deprecates X11 and the Broadway in-browser display. It does add Android support, though.

Among other changes to display handling, there's a new tool called GNOME Display Control, which allows the OS to set the display config from the command line (or, of course, from scripts). There's also a new D-bus API to handle High Dynamic Range displays.

Among the changes that we suspect will affect quite a few people in this release, there are tweaks to package management, music playback, and file viewing.

GNOME Software can now handle web links to Flatpak apps, as explained in a 2023 discussion and a 2024 proposal, which catches up with similar functionality in Canonical's Snap. A discussion is going on about potentially completely removing RPM support from the app in future, which may surprise some folks on the other side of the fence from the Debian world.

GNOME has a new default music player, though many distros may choose to replace it. The new app is a very simple player called Decibels, which is now part of the Core suite. It doesn't yet completely supplant the existing GNOME Music, which in this release supports HiDPI album covers.

Another new app is GNOME Papers, a simple file and document viewer, which can display various document and image formats, including e-books and electronic comics. This replaces the well-established Evince document viewer, and that might have a knock-on effect on this vulture's preferred tool, Linux Mint's Xreader, which was forked from Evince.

Some of the other changes are probably less visible. The new GNOME Text Editor has some functional changes, such as a properties panel that replaces the View menu and the indentation selection dialog, the search bar moved to the bottom of the window, language choice shows the most recently used first, a new full-screen mode, and other changes. Gedit is now retired, but the code base isn't totally dead. Mint's Xed and MATE's Pluma carry the family forward.

A change that will be obvious to some viewers and, we suspect, all but invisible to others is a change of the default font. The Adwaita fonts replace the previous Cantarell from Google.

The GNOME web browser, formerly known by its internal code name of Epiphany, now has improved file import. Although it's a capable tool, and one of the more visible WebKit-based browsers outside of the Apple software ecosystem – especially on the experimental Haiku OS – most distros tend to bundle Firefox instead. Another app we rarely see, the GNOME Builder IDE, now has better integration with the Adwaita theme. The release-news file also mentions "better integration with Elementary," without further explanation – possibly referring to Elementary OS. Although Elementary's Pantheon desktop isn't GNOME-based, the developers have in the past written about using the GNOME-focused Vala programming language.

The file manager, formerly Nautilus and now just Files, should be noticeably faster in places, such as when deleting large numbers of files or searching. So should GNOME Remote Desktop, which now can use more hardware acceleration. GNOME Calendar now lets you specify the timezone for the beginning and end of events, and GNOME Maps has better place marker handling and public-transport planning. The GNOME Settings app has some tweaks, too, including better search handling, a single-pane view, tweaked media keys support in the Keyboard screen, and a new "Wellbeing" page that lets you track your screen time.

GNOME 48 will be the default desktop for Fedora version 42, which will be a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-themed release, as we mentioned when we looked at Fedora 41. With some of Canonical's usual customizations, it will also be the default desktop of the next interim Ubuntu release, 25.04 or Plucky Puffin. That is still a year away from the next Ubuntu LTS, though, so GNOME 48 will be long gone by then.

However, some people may be seeing it for years to come. Canonical developer Jeremy Bicha shared an update in which he says he's working to get it into Debian 13. If GNOME 48 makes it into "Trixie," Debianisti who are also GNOME enthusiasts will be using this release until 2027 or so. ®