GNOME 48 Alpha Is Now Available for Public Testing, Here’s What’s New
The alpha version of GNOME 48 is here with OSD notifications for headphone connections, support for screen time and health breaks, support for screen time limits, systemd-sysext support to toolbox tooling, convenience logging API for extensions, support for configuring monitors as for-lease, support for the system bell protocol, built-in renderdoc support, xdg-toplevel-drag-v1 protocol support, wp_viewport support for cursor surfaces, and support for the commit-timing-v1 and fifo-v1 protocols.
GNOME 48 Alpha also improves color management support, detection of preferred primary devices, input → output latency of cursor movements, frame rate on monitors attached to secondary GPUs in copy mode, accessibility of the Keyboard backlight toggle in Quick Settings, contrast of notification placeholder, on-screen keyboard appearance, and Quick Settings appearance.
UbuntuHandbook:
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GNOME 48 Alpha Released! Battery Charge Limiting & Screen Time Limiting | UbuntuHandbook
The first alpha release of GNOME 48 is out today! See what’s new in the desktop environment that will be default in next Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42.
First, GNOME 48 introduced new core app called Decibels. It’s a simple audio player that features playback speed adjustment, easy seek controls, and shows the waveform of the track.
Linux Magazine:
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Gnome 48 Alpha Ready for Testing » Linux Magazine
While Gnome 48 Alpha is not a massive upgrade, there are some new additions and improvements that go a long way in making the open source desktop better.
New features include the Decibel audio player, new notifications for headphone connections, and wellness additions, such as support for screen time limits and health breaks. The screen time support should function with other Gnome Shell and Mutter features.
This latest release also improves Wayland timing and queuing protocols for Mutter, adds image edit support for Gnome Image Viewer, improves the history dialog for the Epiphany browser, introduces initial support for Vulkan and VAAPI hardware acceleration for Gnome Remote Desktop, includes several improvements to the Orca screen reader, adds support for Adobe PDF open parameters to the Evince document viewer, and more.