Gnome 48 Goes Into Beta, Should Launch in a Month

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

GNOME 48 has entered beta testing, which also means that it's in feature, API, and UI freeze. In other words, nothing substantial should change from now until its release, which is expected on March 19. There is a full list of changes in the Beta News announcement, and it's substantial, so we'll try to focus on some of the highlights.

Version 48 doesn't look to be a massive release. It carries on the trajectory of recent GNOME releases, such as reducing dependencies on X11 on its way to a pure-Wayland future. Some of the new accessories that have replaced older apps in the desktop's portfolio continue to gain new functionality, which will help push worthy veterans such as Gedit and Evince into retirement.

In terms of the long and troubled road to Wayland, version 49 of the GNOME Display Manager, gdm for short, no longer requires Xwayland. So, on a pure Wayland system, it won't require X11 at all right from the login screen onward. Even some desktops and distributions that don't use anything else from GNOME use GDM for their login screen, so this change may have a wide impact. The latest version of Gtk 4 will also remove OpenGL support, and it deprecates X11 and the Broadway in-browser display. It does add Android support, though.

[...] Among the changes that we suspect will affect quite a few people in this release, there are tweaks to package management, music playback, and file viewing.

GNOME Software can now handle web links to Flatpak apps, as explained in a 2023 discussion and a 2024 proposal, which catches up with similar functionality in Canonical's Snap. A discussion is going on about potentially completely removing RPM support from the app in future, which may surprise some folks on the other side of the fence from the Debian world.

[...] Another new app is GNOME Papers, a simple file and document viewer, which can display various document and image formats, including e-books and electronic comics. This replaces the well-established Evince document viewer, and that might have a knock-on effect on this vulture's preferred tool, Linux Mint's Xreader, which was forked from Evince.

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