GNOME 41 - The first step towards a GNOME Platform?

GNOME 41 has just been released. While it doesn't bring as many visual changes as GNOME 40 did, there are still loads of stuff to talk about, especially if you consider that GNOME is now taking steps to become a platform, not just a desktop, so stick around till the end to hear my thoughts on this.

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00:00 Intro
01:38 GNOME Software
03:59 Desktop changes
06:52 Applications Changes
08:18 The GNOME Platform

OK The first BIG thing is GNOME software, the App Store of GNOME. The homepage has also been vastly improved, with big colorful headers for featured apps, a list of categories with nice artwork, and some editor's picks to showcase specific applications.

The application detail pages also have received a lot of love. There is a lot more info, presented in a much more user friendly way, with big tiles. You'll find the download size, or a safety level determined by which permissions the app can access.

You'll also get a tile to let you know on which devices the app will work well, including desktop, mobile or tablets, and an age rating. The version history is better laid out, and you get some nice info about the app's license and open source status, which is really nice.

Finally, you get some links to the project's website, translations, bug tracker, help, or even donations, and the user reviews at the bottom. Oh, and you also get a lot more space for these screenshots.

## Desktop

You now get a lot more options to change how this layout works, though, as the work to port GNOME Tweaks settings into the main settings app continues.

You'll find a new mutitasking settings panel, with a bunch of options. The first one is the ability to disable the hot corner for the activities view. You can also disable the tiling of windows when moving them to a screen edge, useful for multi-monitor setups when you want to just whip windows between displays.

Workspaces can also be configured to be dynamic, as in "a new workspace is created each time the previous one has something in it", or with a fixed number that you can define. You also get to choose if your workspaces span all of your displays, or are limited to your primary display, with secondary monitors having their own unique workspace. That's another welcome improvement for multi monitor users.

Finally, you can decide to display apps from all workspaces when using alt+Tab, or only count those from the current virtual desktop.

On laptops and devices with a battery, you now also get power profiles, directly from the main system menu.

In terms of settings, you'll also get the ability to disable animations in the accessibility settings.

Input latency has also been improved, which should be more noticeable on low refresh rates display.

## Apps
Now, in terms of the default apps, GNOME Calendar has received the ability to open .ics files and import their content to any of the already existing calendars. This means you can finally set it up as your default calendar application. Clicking on an event also shows a new event popover.

Nautilus, the file manager, now displays some information in the Trash folder, to let you know if your items will be deleted after a certain period of time. A Settings button will let you go and change that behavior.
It also now can compress archives into zip and password protected zip formats.

There is also a brand new application for handling remote desktops, called Connections. It can handle RDP and VNC and connect to Windows, Mac or Linux hosts.

[TazerXI]

Honestly, this is one of the best Linux yt channels. He covers lots of different distros, news, hardware and software. He is upfront, and welcoming to linux beginners, but also good for more experienced users. But most importantly, for me, he doesn't seem 'elitest', he doesn't say one distro is better than another outright, and I think it is really good

[christosminiotis]

Every few months there's something awesome that gives you faith in Linux as a mainstream Desktop OS again for a bit

[Christobanistan]

I'm a software dev, and I can tell you, I don't give a crap that it's super themeable. I just want shit to work, and I don't want to reach outside of GNOME's own APIs for anything. Make it a full application platform so deployment finally becomes easy on Linux, as Linus and many others have pointed out is the main obstacle to desktop Linux. Then I can finally start writing Linux apps. In C#. And deploy them without worrying about a different library version here, there, a different way to access system info depending on slight differences in each distro! Uniformity!!!

[Fenrasulfr]

I think Gnome made a smart move to standardize everything. We already have KDE for customization and that can come at the cost of usability. So Gnome is taking that away and giving an extremely polished desktop experience. I think most ordinary computer users will prefer Gnomes approach to the desktop over KDE.

[PiiskaJesusFreak]

Gnome is what got me to Linux in the first place. It has the reputation of being made for touch screens, but in my experience, it works really well with the combination of touchpad + keyboard. It is the ultimate laptop desktop.

[blyaticon]

I think the way Gnome is having its own well integrated apps is a good step for the Linux Desktop
Normies want easy UI, hardly care about looks and need funny circles to see that something is happening. The way Gnome is taking makes it more noob friendly, so more people can use Linux without having to care too much about how the system works (which is why most people get started, but I also ask people if they want to try out Linux and they refuse because they are confused by the different UIs, so if Gnome is the "beginner UI" and "The Linux look" people will have easier access to the OS).

I personally don't use Gnome that much, but I really like it on my laptop, it just feels really refined and thought through.

[RustyLoaf]

I am 100% on the same page as you about libadwaita. It makes a lot of sense to move to a more concrete theme for a widget toolkit. I couldn't imagine iOS or Android supporting themes where widget sizes, proportions, and behaviors aren't totally standardized. I also like how libadwaita is looking at system-wide accent colors similar to Material You's approach. The biggest problem I see with libadwaita is A) Adwaita is ugly, and the redesign so far continues that trend and B) They need to allow for more application-specific theming. Android dialed back on Material Design because it made everyone's app look too same-y, and I totally agree with that decision. To that point, libadwaita doesn't seem to permit much, if any app-specific theming. I can't imagine any mobile OS having that same beigey-gray color across every application, and that's the direction that GNOME seems to be going in. It'd be cool to have standard sizes, proportions, and behaviors across every app on the system without having to have the same boring color palette in every app.

[heartlesscaesar]

Their theming thing, while controversial, will be the most entertaining thing to watch and read about for non Gnome users

[sayannandy]

Regarding the limiting of themeing abilities,
I think GNOME, like Apple, has selected a particular group to target their product i.e. professionals and home users. Both don't have the need for aggressive themeing and customization. For those who do... there's always KDE( which I use) Such people would like to their apps look the same and have the same buttons in the same places(uniform UI), they don't give a hoot about 'pretty' apps. It's a decision I fully support and resonate with.

[antoniostorcke]

Since the days of Andy Hertzfeld and the Eazel project, the goal of Gnome was always to become a complete platform. Linux was simply the place upon which the platform would be built. Everything is moving along nicely.

[ElMarcoh]

I was really into theming around 2010, nowadays I use whatever dark theme works with all apps, every time I switch themes for kde or gtk I get some random issue where text is illegible or some apps have parts that are really unpleasant to look at.

[lakerssuperman]

As I understand it from some of the clarification posts that have come out from Gnome developers, it seems they are making the libadwaita changes and then looking to get a proper theme API in place later on. It doesn't sound like the intention is to completely block custom themes going forward.

It's funny how GNOME used to remove features and now they're like "putting back"

I know it seems stupid doing it but I really believe they were struggling with legacy/broken code which had a lot of problems and the only way to move forward was "wiping away" stuff to put them back later in the correct way.

[palaashatri]

gnome as a whole becoming much more touch and gesture friendly is definitely a move i will support tbh. i personally use a lot of touch screen gestures on my laptop and windows 10 is still horrible for touch screen users imo.
clean minimalistic styling is what i'd prefer.

[Marik]

I love the simplicity of Gnome and I'm totally fine using a standard and clean DE as long as it doesn't look so old. I use very few extensions but I can't stand the default icons and theme. I understand that this is subjective and plenty of people probably don't mind. There is some hope that a theming API would probably be available at some point. For now I'm content that Ubuntu LTS 22.04 will probably use Gnome 40 which is a welcomed upgrade.

[GroudFrank]

Over the past couple of iterations from Gnome, I went from having the theme and icons be the first thing that I change after a fresh install, to not using any themes or icon packs. I'm also using fewer and fewer extensions, basically only needing Freon for displaying thermals. Every other DE is a distant second when it comes to personal use and what I would recommend for new users. I don't think customization is as important as the vocal minority would like people to believe. Windows, MacOS, iOS and ChromeOS seem to be doing just fine without deep levels of customizability. As long as the basics are there, like being able to change the accent colours, it will be fine. I'd rather have stable, targetable and developer-friendly APIs on a platform than have the ability to apply some indigent knockoff MacOS theme. That's not even a close call tbh...

[mineland]

The app store changes probably wont affect me myself because i mostly just install things through the terminal, but its nice that they are reinforcing their platform for easier use. Gnome is good

[LeJimster]

The main problem I have with Gnome is that their updates break the extensions all the time. Quite irritating for those of us on rolling release distro's.

[boh]

Big time GNOME fan here that had to switch to Plasma recently. KDE just kept things more modern. I switched GNOME 40 caused some frame drops in some of my Wine and Proton instances. GTK, Extensions, the store, etc....all need major work done to them. KDE and the QT framework has just knocked it out of the park the past few years, both in design and execution.

If GNOME really wants to move into the future, they need to add a dedicated extension environment into the DE while allowing 3rd party sources as well. Getting extensions is just a PITA compared to the way every other DE works. It was revolutionary a long time ago. But now, built in, easy to access, and attractive libraries is the norm. It's expected at this point.

[MyurrDurr]

On the other hand
Maybe LibAdwaita will allow accent colors to be set in the default theme?!