GNOME 47 Beta Desktop Released with Many Changes, Here’s What’s New
There’s been a lot of changes added since the alpha version of the GNOME 47 desktop series, and the beta release is packed with lots of goodies, including support for hardware encoding for screen recordings, support for tablet tool keybindings and actions, support for tablet tool pressure ranges, and implementation of placement and focus logic with always-on-top windows.
GNOME 47 beta also improves the sticky behavior with transient dialogs, adds plumbing for transforming the color state, implements the ability to recover from secondary GPU update failures, adds support for the notification portal to always use the GTK protocol, improves the Persian on-screen keyboard layout, makes the overview startup notification more reliable, and adds unlinked rounded buttons in notifications and dialogs.
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GNOME 47 Beta launches with hardware encoding for screen recordings and more
According to the official schedule, GNOME 47 should be ready on September 14, two weeks after the unstable release candidate build, which is expected to become available on August 31st. No matter what happens, it is certain that the public will get it before the end of next month. However, GNOME 47 Beta is now available, and, compared to the Alpha build, it packs quite a few changes.
While support for hardware-encoded screen recording sounds great, there are also many under-the-hood changes that will make the user's life easier, such as the ability to recover from secondary GPU update failures, improved sticky behavior with transient dialogs, improved bookmark sorting in GNOME Web, drag-and-drop ICS file importing in GNOME Calendar, a modern UI for dialogs and the Disks view in GNOME System Monitor, and so on.
In addition to the new features and tweaks, multiple bugs were ironed out. Those interested in testing this work-in-progress piece of code can grab the GNOME OS 47 Beta ISO image and then run it via a virtual machine with EFI support. GNOME Discourse suggests the GNOME Boxes version, which can be grabbed from Flathub.