GNOME Desktop 48 was officially released on Wednesday! The developer team announced it in GNOME website:
The GNOME project is excited to introduce GNOME 48, a fresh release shaped by six months of hard work from our amazing community. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who contributed to making this happen!
GNOME 48, code-name “Bengaluru”, will be the default desktop environment for upcoming Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora Workstation 42, and optional for Arch and Manjaro etc. Linux Distributions.
The new desktop release introduced new monospace font, named Adwaita Sans and Adwaita Mono. They are customized version of the popular Inter typeface by Rasmus Andersson, and custom build of the Iosevka typeface family.
GNOME Control Center, aka Settings app, added new Wellbeing page to tell how much time you spent on the screen, and includes options to limit screen time usage.
In Displays setting page, there’s now new toggle option to enable HDR, and Power setting page now provides an option to limit battery charge to 80% for PC/laptop that support the feature.
Gnome 48 Wellbeing setting page
GNOME 48 also introduced dynamic triple buffering that significantly improved the desktop performance, updated the JavaScript engine to reduce CPU and memory usage, improved file indexing for large folders, and improved the performance and stability for monitors directly attached to a discrete graphics card.
Other changes include group notifications in per-app basis to prevent the notification list from becoming too long, updated Loupe image viewer with basic editing support, introduced new core Audio Player app.
Loupe Image viewer now has basic editing support
As well as following changes:
- Global shortcuts, allowing apps to create system-wide shortcut that works even when not on focus.
- Center new windows by default.
- Orca shortcuts now work correctly in Wayland session.
- New
gdctlutility to show/set display configuration. - Load login screen banner message from file.
- Allow running custom command in lock screen.
- Add support for hardware encoded AVC444 for Gnome Remote Desktop.
For more, see the official release note.
How to Get GNOME 48
The best way to get GNOME 48 is waiting for your Linux Distribution updates. Meaning wait (or try the dev build) for Ubuntu 25.04 or Fedora Workstation 42 release.
For Arch Linux, GNOME 48 has been added into the extra-testing repository. And, other users may try GNOME OS image in virtual machine via GNOME Boxes.
