The first alpha release of GNOME 48 is out today! See what’s new in the desktop environment that will be default in next Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42.
First, GNOME 48 introduced new core app called Decibels. It’s a simple audio player that features playback speed adjustment, easy seek controls, and hows the waveform of the track.
GNOME 48
To promote healthier habits and/or parental control, the new release introduced initial screen time limits support! It added initial Wellbeing panel in GNOME Control Center (aka Settings), allowing to view screen time usage on the device and set daily time limits. However, the feature is disabled by default!
For laptop/tablet devices, GNOME 48 finally introduced battery charge limiting option in Power settings page. Somehow, it’s NOT available in my case when trying it out in an old laptop … And, the power settings page is redesigned into “General” and “Power Saving” tabs with clear design.
Loupe, the default image viewer, in the release now has the ability to edit JPEG and PNG files with crop, rotate, and flip options. And, it now displays XMP metadata for JPEG images.
Loupe Image viewer now has basic editing support
Other features in the new release include new default wallpaper, prepare Vulkan and libva based hardware acceleration for GNOME Remote Desktop, as well as:
- Handle Epiphany webapps in GNOME Control Center.
- Add “undo” option when deleting a wallpaper.
- Rename “Color” panel to “Color Management” (Gnome Control Center)
- Fix using wifi hotspot with multiple wifi adapters
- Add screen limits schema for Gsettings.
- Fix blank screen in remote headless sessions
- Speed up thumbnail loading for Nautilus file manager.
- Fix misplaced windows and random resizes on scaled monitors
- Fix maximized X11 when using native Xwayland scaling
- Improve accessibility of keyboard backlight quick settings toggle
There are as well various other improvements and bug-fixes, see the announce page for the change-log and .iso image links.
Next GNOME 48 Dev Releases
According to the GNOME Release Calendar page, GNOME 48 is planned to be released on 2025-03-19.
Before the final release, there will be a Beta and RC releases though no planned date available.
