GNOME 49 'Brescia' Desktop Environment Released

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: The GNOME Project released today GNOME 49 "Brescia" as the latest stable version of this widely used desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, a major release that introduces exciting new features. Highlights of GNOME 49 include a new "Do Not Disturb" toggle in Quick Settings, a dedicated Accessibility menu in the login screen, support for handling unknown power profiles in the Quick Settings menu, support for YUV422 and YUV444 (HDR) color spaces, support for passive screen casts, and support for async keyboard map settings.

GNOME 49 also introduces support for media controls, restart and shutdown actions on the lock screen, support for dynamic users for greeter sessions in the GNOME Display Manager (GDM), and support for per-monitor brightness sliders in Quick Settings on multi-monitor setups. For a full list of changes, check out the release notes.

bah, who cares

[G00F]

Ever since gnome 3 they been saying FU to the users, no biggie, I went with mate and xfce. But then they removed the ability of GTK to change desktop colors to force the other desktops based off it to suck too. So now I hate gnome because they forced the better desktop GUIs to accept their bad UI elements. (I can make a list of other things I hate that they've done)

No, I'm not bitter or anything....

Thanks but ...

[PinkyGigglebrain]

I'll stick with my Trinity Desktop Environment [trinitydesktop.org] GUI thank you very much.

Re: Thanks but ...

[Venova]

talk about nostalgia; their website loads at dialup speeds?

Re:

[KlomDark]

Never heard of it before, but it's not bad, I like the look! The opposite of looking at (the new and old) Gnome 3 - Some kind of abortion of a Mac interface, it sucks horribly. WTF is wrong with those people? Gnome 2 was my favorite at the time, Cinnamon for me now.

Re:

[gabrieltss]

Had never heard of this one. Went to look at it and it's pretty nice looking. Will take the TTOS version for a spin and the GNUStep version too (Reminds me of the Amiga Desktop).

Re:

[KlomDark]

This! G3 is just pointless to me, cannot stand it.

Gnome updates = months of broken plugins

[OrangAsm]

My biggest issue with Gnome is that with every major version update, they change something that requires every plugin to update something to be compatible. If you rely on plugins for your UI experience, and you're on a rolling/bleeding edge distro that pulls in Gnome too early, you're often stuck with no-plugins, missing plugins, perhaps for months, until the plugin authors update their plugins. I have no idea what is involved with updating the plugins - sometimes it seems major code changes are required. There is rarely anything user-facing that seems like it would require a major code change, but seems there is a constant rewrite/refactoring going on. I don't really understand what is going on - haven't really looked into it. I started switching to alternative Wayland desktops during this broken plugin period. I tried KDE - not for me. Sway is pretty decent. Now I'm staying in one: Hyprland. I keep Gnome around as a sort of backup desktop now.

I have tried to like GNOME.

[serviscope_minor]

Every so often I install a new machine, and I give GNOME the old college try for a while to prove I'm not an old fart who can't adapt until I finally get so sick of it that I install XFCE or FVWM. I think the straw that broke my back last time was one of the strangest things I've seen.

So, GNOME appears to track which programs own which windows, but then uses that for evil^Winteraction. I was using a program (can't remember which) and it popped up an info dialog. Naturally the dialog also covered something I wanted to see, so I did the obvious thing and moved it. But that caused the dialog and the underlying window to both move together rigidly. The result is it acts like a weird hybrid of those old Windows 3.11 era MDI programs (thank god those die a death) and normal window management but somehow combining the worst aspects of both.

This is also at odds with literally every other windowing system I thin I've ever used. Now I'm not saying bold, new paradigms (ha!) have no place in F/OSS, but this was just odd. It kind of goes against the notion of windowing systems where there are multiple independent windows.

But wait, there's more! I decided instead to try resizing it. So I clicked on the lower left corner as is the usual thing dragged it and to my surprise, it resized from the middle! I tried playing with this a bit and naturally it's cursed because you now have 2 moving things per dimension and both have constraints (i.e. not going outside the screen), so it sometimes starts bouncing around all over the place, or if the dialog is too close to the top of the screen, you can't resize it downwards because that also resizes it upwards. This is, as far as I'm concerned complete whack.

Sometimes breaking from tradition is good, because there are better ways. Often it's either just change for the sake of it or completely bananas. In this case they decided to make it harder to move a window to see what's behind it, which is kind of the reason for the existence of windowing systems.

Unfortunately they seem to be really trying to get X to go away in favour of Wayland. Unfortunately rather than getting Wayland fully working over the last 16 years to replace the "broken" X11, they've got it to, say, 90% feature complete and are just hoping for the best. Too much shit still just doesn't work properly

Oh and before anyone bleats the usual excuse of BuT wAyLaNd Is JuSt A pRoToCoL, so is X11. It's also just a protocol. Plus, being just a protocol doesn't excuse the protocol from missing very important features in its design on some sort of quixotic point of principle so that people endless churn their "legacy" (i.e. working, debugged, scalable but not using the latest fashion in UI) apps.

Re:I have tried to like GNOME.

[jenningsthecat]

Every so often I install a new machine, and I give GNOME the old college try for a while to prove I'm not an old fart who can't adapt until I finally get so sick of it that I install XFCE or FVWM.

I've been using XFCE exclusively for a long time now. And the GNOME rot infects it in significant ways via GTK. Every time I upgrade I have to go through the tedious process of figuring out all the configuration hacks required to restore sane scrollbars, turn off weird scrolling modes that make my machine look like it's having a seizure, and turn off tooltips. I finally got smart and documented the process - fingers crossed that the next Gnome 'upgrade' doesn't invalidate those notes.

On top of that there's the wrestling with Firefox and Thunderbird to restore some kind of sanity. The latest version of Thunderbird - which I couldn't find a way to back out of - is still a shit-show in spite of all the about:config tweaks I've made and the addons I've installed.

WTF is wrong with UI designers these days? I have my fair share of 'get off my lawn' moments, but I really don't think my hatred for new UI paradigms falls into that category. Designers today seem to have no familiarity with the 'form follows function' concept.

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

WTF is wrong with UI designers these days? I have my fair share of 'get off my lawn' moments, but I really don't think my hatred for new UI paradigms falls into that category. Designers today seem to have no familiarity with the 'form follows function' concept.

My guess would be that it's kind of reached if not an optimum, a deep local minimum. A huge amount of the awkwardness of early GUIs has been thoroughly hammered out, and the WIMP idea has generally settled into a number of core interaction mechanisms,

Re:

[jmccue]

Unfortunately they seem to be really trying to get X to go away in favour of Wayland

Hoping I never have to use Wayland. But I expect the only GUI app I use, Firefox, will force Wayland upon us in a year or 2. Hoping I am wrong. If that does happen, I might as well go to a MAC or Windows /s since Linux will reach its goal, being a windows clone. Hoping the other browsers stick with X11.

To me, Wayland is a power grab by Red Hat similar to systemd. But IBM being IBM, I can see IBM defunding Wayland as they have done with many other things. One can hope :) I wonder if a systemd defunding

Re:

[kbahey]

I am an XFCE users for many years (Xubuntu).

Gnome is a non starter for me ...

I wish people would try it out.
It is fast, small, and stays out of the way.

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

Yep. It basically just does the job. Straightforward, no strange takes on interaction, plays well with non XFCE things, low resource, decently configurable, unopinionated and works decently out of the box.

Re:

[kbahey]

That pretty much sums it up ...

I wish it was more widely used.

The best thing about GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing about GNOME is that I don't have to use it. Thanks, KDE!

Keep it away!

[TwistedGreen]

I wanted to go back to my Red Hat roots and installed AlmaLinux as a workstation, which defaults to GNOME and wow, I had to wonder, what happened? It's pretty awful. The mantra seems to be, "Let's just remove all the useful features and turn it into a shitty tablet-like experience." Really makes you appreciate the remaining customization features in Windows 11.

Version 49?

[Tarlus]

And here I am, still on a fork of version 2.