GNOME 48 RC Released with Global Shortcuts & HDR Luminance Setting UI

GNOME 48, the default desktop environment for Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 Workstation, is now in RC testing stage. While, the final stable release is planned for 2025-03-19.

The new release candidate enhanced the new features that were introduced in last Beta and Alpha releases, fixed numerous bugs, as well introduced some new features.

The release introduced global shortcuts portal support. Meaning applications can register desktop-wide shortcuts, that work even when another program is in focus.

Last beta release added a HDR toggle switch in the Display settings page. In this RC, it also added HDR luminance settings UI.

For Wellbeing, the screen time setting page, it now supports locales where the week starts on Saturday, handles suspend/resume when tracking screen time, and fix tracking inactive time for screen time limits.

Gnome 48 Wellbeing setting page

The Loupe image viewer added support editing JPEG and PNG files in Alpha. The RC improved the way it detects if an image is editable, so the editing works for supported images with even wrong file extension. And, it improved crop action by allowing to do decrease size of crop selection from edges when fixed aspect ratio is used.

Loupe Image viewer now has basic editing support

Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, got some performance improvements in the release. It now runs code formatting in parallel, loads directory faster, and hides the Trash from left pane if it’s empty.

Other changes in GNOME 48 RC release include:

Evince document viewer has improved support for Adobe PDF open parameters.
Support image/apng mime-type to support animated PNGs again.
Use JPEG format for default wallpaper images.
Add support for hardware encoded AVC444 for Gnome Remote Desktop.
Center new windows by default.
Fix dma-bufs support for headless sessions.
Improved NVIDIA support when using as primary GPU.
For more, see the NEWS page.

How to Get or Try out GNOME 48 RC

GNOME release team provides an installer image for trying out the desktop in either Gnome Boxes or real machine.

Ubuntu 25.04 has made gnome-shell 48rc into system repository (proposed-udpates so far). You may try out the daily build image which is available to download at this page.

And for Arch Linux, GNOME 48 RC is already available to install through the Gnome Unstable repository.