A month after the jump to the 49 series, the GNOME Project publish your first maintenance point with GNOME 49.1, a release focused on polishing the daily experience with bug fixes and performance improvements from the ground up to the applications.
The goal of this update is to fine-tune the stability, accessibility and fluidity Desktop: less crashes when moving or resizing windows, smoother animations, better touch handling in X11, and fixes affecting critical modules such as GDM, GNOME Software, and GNOME Remote Desktop.
Shell and Mutter are slimmer in GNOME 49.1
The GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor duo gets a nice batch of tweaks to make the desktop feel more like a more reactive and reliable, especially when dragging, resizing, or managing multiple inputs.
- Fixed freezes when adjusting sliders. quick settings on touch screens and jerks in the search animations of the Summary of activities.
- Mutter improves reliability when moving and enlarging windows, reduces glitches during resize drags and fine-tunes multitouch gestures under X11.
- Fixed loss of keyboard focus in the Activity Summary and an issue with maximized windows reaching get in under the panel.
- The keyboard indicator on layout changes with modifier keys is updated, the style of warnings in dialogs is unified, and the layout change with modifier keys is fixed.
xkb-options.
It also fixes a crash that could cause GTK apps to hang after entering pop-up submenus, an improvement that should be noticeable in everyday use. complex interfaces.
Session, login, and online accounts
In the startup and session management there are important changes designed to avoid scares and hung processes that consume resources unnecessarily, reinforcing the startup reliability and the exit.
- GDM fixes a crash that could leave GNOME Shell in a frozen state during startup. login and stop assuming Wayland is unavailable if Xwayland is missing.
- gnome-session no longer leaves zombie processes of applications it launches, removing waste after the session closes.
- The home screen has improved accessibility icons, and spotlights and warnings have been refined for clearer access.
- GNOME Online Accounts fixes saving of Kerberos passwords after the first login and allows for correct changing of expired passwords.
GNOME Initial Setup incorporates spoken password quality levels, a useful aid for those who need accessible guidance when creating credentials.
Applications: Files, Web and company
Core applications are also receiving specific attention with fixes targeting stability, compatibility, and interface consistency.
- Nautilus (Files): Fixed a crash due to internal file management. callbacks, issues with pasting large images, cropped element contrast, default app switcher focus, testing long-running compressed file operations, and the drag start point in the sidebar.
- Epiphany (GNOME Browser): The address bar no longer displays the dropdown in erroneous cases (e.g., opening a link in a new tab) or stays open after losing focus; fixes to the location field display mode, non-Latin character rendering, and a regression that caused favicons to have a black background; the profile migrator adds OpenSearch functionality to the predefined DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Google search engines; and fixes the cursor position after pressing Ctrl+K.
- GNOME Software: Update notifications and plugin dependency resolution work reliably again, improving visibility of new versions.
- GNOME Remote Desktop: Fixed a long-standing image corruption issue with certain NVIDIA GPUs.
- Calculator: Fixed incorrect conversion rates in BDT currency.
- GNOME Calls 49.1/49.1.1: GNOME session integration, D-Bus activation, and USSD support with oFono.
Platform and toolkits
The technology layer on which GNOME apps are built brings fixes that touch everything from text rendering to accessibility, adding visual and input consistency on Wayland and X11.
- GTK 4.20.2: Fixes text shadow stacking, cursor rendering, and transformations on Wayland, and introduces the API
GtkAccessibleHypertext. - GTK 3.24.51: Improves UTF-8 title handling on Wayland and thread safety on X11.
- libadwaita 1.8.1: Improved feel and accessibility components, plus more consistent alignment in RTL interfaces.
- GJS 1.86.0: Moves to GLib 2.86 and fixes testing and introspection.
- Glycin 2.0.3: Sandboxing and animation handling improvements.
- LocalSearch 3.10.1 and TinySPARQL 3.10.1: More robust database, improved memory management and crash recovery.
These tweaks, while subtle, translate into a cleaner developer platform and a smoother user experience. more polished for the general public.
Accessibility in GNOME 49.1: Screen Reader and More
The Orca screen reader takes a leap in control and performance for those who need assistance, with new features that facilitate navigation and reduce latencies in the face of many events. accessibility.
- Orca adds Orca-controlled cursor navigation for all text types (not just web), toggled with Orca + F12.
- Commands and settings on the D-Bus remote controller have been expanded, and the presentation of the Budgie desktop switch and panel has been improved.
- OnlyShowIn=GNOME has been restored to the autostart file so that Orca 49 and later can start on older versions of the GNOME desktop, and voice names in Preferences have been refined (using variants and sorting the list).
Along with this, GNOME Shell itself improves icons and signals on the start screen, while Initial Setup offers spoken directions on the strength of passwords.
GNOME 49.1 Availability
GNOME 49.1 will be arriving in the stable repositories of major distributions in the coming weeks; rolling release distributions usually receive it first, so users of Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, or similar will be able to try it out. before the improvements.
With this update point, GNOME reinforces its commitment to a modern and reliable desktop: fewer crashes when moving or resizing, better accessibility, fine-tuned apps and a more solid technical foundation that should be noticeable both on touch devices and in environments with NVIDIA and Wayland/X11.