GNOME Foundation has released the beta version of the upcoming GNOME 42 desktop environment. The beta version was planned to be released on 13 February, but it was delayed for 10 days. The new version of the desktop environment brings a couple of new features and improvements.
System-wide dark theme
The beta version comes with the new features of GNOME 42. One of the most important changes in GNOME 42 is the transition to the libadwaita library. All of the core apps of GNOME are being ported to libadwaita, which is the modern building block for GTK4 applications. The new version also brings a system-wide dark theme to the table, which is widely preferred by users on almost all kinds of interfaces.
With the GNOME 42 release, the rate of input events to applications will be sent by Mutter. It is a complicated story but in short, the applications that use device input for velocity, direction, or acceleration will see the most benefits from this change. A new screenshot and screencast tool arrives and GNOME Control Center will have a refreshed UI, thanks to transitioning to GTK4.
OSD improvements, new wallpapers
The on-screen display for volume and brightness change indications change as well as the Adwaita theme’s folder icon color. A new text editor and a new default wallpaper arrive with the GNOME 42 update.
You can download GNOME OS to try out the beta changes and test them by installing the ISO file that is linked below. However, the ISO is meant to be installed in a virtual machine with EFI support; so you might also have difficulties while installing:
Click here to download GNOME OS ISO for GNOME 42 beta
The full version is planned to be released on 23 March but it might also take additional time to be implemented into Linux distributions.