GNOME 49 Beta Released with Per-Monitor Brightness Control

GNOME 49, the default desktop environment for next Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, is available for Beta testing.

This Beta is available more than a month after the first Alpha. There will also be a RC release, while, the final of GNOME 49 is planned for September 17.

In last Alpha, the desktop added support relative dials on tablet pads, disabled Xorg session, and introduced new Glycin loader as backend library for gdk-pixbuf and loupe image viewer.

It as well moved “Do Not Distrub” to top-right quick settings menu, added configuration for trackpoint, and touch support in Gnome Remote Desktop.

In this Beta, it updated GDM to enable systemd-based session management on the greeter and dropped the builtin service manager code.

For music players that are well integrated with GNOME, the media playback control will now even appear on the lock screen.

Media Control in lock screen

It also added an option to show “Restart” and “Power-Off” menu options to the lock screen.

This however is NOT enabled by default. If you want, either install & open “Dconf Editor” and configure it by navigating to “org.gnome.desktop.screensaver“, or run command below in a terminal to enable:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver restart-enabled true

PowerOff, Reboot from Lock screen (Not enabled by default)

For computers with multiple monitors connected, the release added per-monitor brightness control in top-right Quick Settings menu.

The feature however does NOT work in my case, when trying Ubuntu 25.10 snapshot in my laptop with an external monitor connected, though ddcutil works.

per-monitor brightness control

GNOME 49 Beta as well improved the Glycin loader image loading backend. It added support saving JXL images, and CICP support for HEIC and AVIF for specifying the color space of image/video data.

And, it added a “Donate” button in the about system page, which will open donate.gnome.org page in browser, with options to support GNOME by one-time or monthly donation.

new “Donate” button in about page

Other changes in GNOME 49 Beta include:

Add new core apps: Showtime video player, and Papers document viewer.
Hardware accelerated video encoding for Camera app.
Update to SpiderMonkey 140 for more JavaScript features.
Switch to JXL for background image.
Support fo 10/12/16bit software decoder formats.
Support floating point for bit field in GNOME Calculator.

For more about GNOME 49 Beta release, see the NEWS page.

Get GNOME 49 Beta

GNOME developer team provides a live image for the release, allowing to try it out in either bare metal or virtual machine. Get it via the link below:

GNOME 49 Beta announcement

For Ubuntu, the Beta release is already made available in Ubuntu 25.10 repository. Just download & install Ubuntu 25.10 cd image, then install all updates either through Software Updater or apt command to get it.

And for Arch Linux, GNOME 49 Beta is available through the GNOME Unstable repository.