GNOME 51, the Linux desktop expected as default in Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora 45, is now available for Alpha testing!
The new version of this popular Linux desktop environment finally removed the code for legacy NVIDIA drivers support!
Meaning the old graphics cards, such as GeForce 700 series (except GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, and GTX 745) and earlier, will only work in a basic and fallback mode using the open‑source Nouveau driver in GNOME 51.
GNOME Desktop
GDM, the display manager that handles the GNOME login screen, now has a setting option to change the fallback session. It’s used whenever a user doesn’t have a preferred session selected, or their preferred session is unusable. And, sysadmins can use this setting to change the selected session for users that have never logged into the system before.
It also added setting to turn off local greeter sessions, which is useful for headless-only systems. And, it dropped the org.gnome.desktop.session.session-name dconf key that is used to store name of the current GNOME session.
gnome login screen handled by gdm
GNOME Control Center, aka Settings, has been updated with may UI/UX improvements. It added option to disable a touchpad while a mouse is plugged in, option to support SSH socket servers in Remote Login, as well as GNOME QR code widget for WiFi sharing.
For display that has accelerometer to detect orientation and movement, it now includes a “Auto Rotate” row in Displays settings.
And, it finally added support changing touchpad scroll speed, though the option is hidden and only available through dconf key or gsettings command.
GNOME 51 change touchpad scroll speed via Dconf Editor
glycin, the backend library for image loading, can now specify how to detect the images type via config file, instead of relying on global mime-type database. And, it now supports animated AVIF and HEIC files, loading XMP metadata in SVG, and extracting more metadata, such as key-value metadata from PNGs.
GNOME 51 alpha as well added enable-touch-scrolling propriety to add touch scrolling support through pan gesture in overview, app grid, notifications list etc components.
As well, it added rate control to VA-API H.264 screencast pipelines and ability to use any mouse button to session/a11y menu on login screen, though the features seem also available in GNOME 50.2.
Other changes include:
- New API to generate qr codes.
- Enable hardware accelerated Gnome Remote Desktop support for AMDGPU.
- Ability to enable button scrolling on a mouse.
- Long press on entries opens the touch menu (GTK4).
- Revamp the System -> About page.
- Save and restore monitor brightness.
Get GNOME 51 Alpha
For more about the release, as well as the .iso testing image, see the announcement in GNOME Discourse:
For Arch Linux, GNOME 51 Alpha is already available through the Gnome-Unstable repository. And, Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora 45 are expected to include the new desktop environment soon.
