GNOME 3.38 - Tour of the New Features, and a few thoughts

It's that time of year again, where the new version of GNOME is upon us. Like every 6 months, this release includes a bunch of improvements to the desktop experience, and will be included in Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora 33, and will hit Arch and other rolling releases pretty quickly.

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The main focus of GNOME 3.38 seems to be the shell. The app launcher loses its frequent apps page, and now defaults to a multi-paged app grid. App folders are still there, but now they can have pages as well, if you have more apps than what could fit in a single folder.

The app grid can also be rearranged, meaning you can move any icon to any position you like, which is a lot more practical than using the alphabetical sort order. You can obviously still use the keyboard to type an app's name, and I'd expect most users to work like this, but a little bit of customisation can't hurt. To complete all of this, the app grid now resizes with your screen size, and displays more icons on larger displays.

The date menu will now also show calendar appointments under the date panel so they're more visible.

Epiphany, also called GNOME Web has received the brunt of the work here. It has a new preferences dialog, but most importantly, it has popup blocking and intelligent tracking protection enabled by default, and it will automatically block autoplay videos with sound. You can obviously tweak these settings if you like.
Epiphany also allows you to mute audio for each individual browser tab, and it can import chromium data. It's built-in reader mode can now be linked to directly, so you can share the URL of a page with reading mode enabled.

Sure, the engine powering epiphany is still lagging behind what Firefox or Chromium offers, but it's getting dangerously close to being a browser I could use daily.

GNOME maps is now responsive, so people using Phosh on their pinephones will have a great maps apps now. The satellite view now displays labels on the maps, so it can actually serve a purpose now, and Maps has a night mode option that can be enabled or disabled independently of the rest of the system's settings.

There is also a new Welcome app which replaces the previous one that linked to various help pages. It's a lot easier to use, and makes discovering the concepts behind GNOME a breeze. Since GNOME 3 is such a big departure from the usual desktop metaphor, I think newcomers will be pleased to have that good onboarding experience.

Finally, the screenshot tool has a new interface, although it didn't gain any new capabilities.

As always, GNOME settings sees some changes : the biggest one is the new parental controls. You can now create "child" accounts, and define a few permissions for each. You can limit the web browsers they can use, block installing new applications and set age ratings for them, or even restrict the use of specific applications.

This change might seem small, but for computers used by families, it's a game changer.

GNOME is also starting to implement some of the settings that GNOME Tweaks used to ship, which is a very, very good thing. The first one of these is a small one, but letting you display your battery percentage in the shell is definitely something a lot of people would want to do, so better late than never. It seems that this work will continue in future releases of GNOME, to integrate most if not all settings that GNOME Tweaks exposes inside the regular GNOME settings. I can't say I'm displeased about this, as removing the need to install a separate tool to enable basic customisation options is always a great step.

You can also now share your device's internet connexion with more ease, as the hotspot page now sports a QR code you can just flash using any mobile app. That's going to be useful, especially when GNOME 3.38 hits mobile devices.

GNOME also has improved fingerprint support. I can't test it, since I don't have any compatible hardware, but you can now log your fingerprint in the user settings and use them to log in to your desktop. Most of that work has been contributed by the Ubuntu team, so kudos to them. Now we're just waiting for more hardware support :)

To finish this tour, GNOME will also block users from installing updates when the battery is low, to avoid half finished updates breaking the system, and the window manager had a bunch of improvements for Wayland and screencasting, notably support for fullscreen unredirect which will stop the compositor when playing a full screen game, to gain some CPU and GPU power.

GNOME 3.38 will release officially on September the 16th.

[harshal]

Love Gnome for it's minimalist design. Glad to hear positive words about the project. :)

[SlimePaws]

I can't seem to get away from Gnome, It is clean and gets out my way when I'm working

[EduardoMedinaEdlinks]

In its early years GNOME looked lost in the concept of desktop environment that it wanted to offer, but since version 3.16 GNOME found a way to be built on two pillars: simplicity and automation. The road was not easy, but today GNOME is simple, powerful and very automated. I use it with Fedora 32 Workstation in its vanilla form, without any extension, and I feel it like a desktop environment with a full, simple, extremely ordered and direct user experience. Everything is in the Activities area, so you don't have to know tons of steps to work with it.

From a year ago I see any Windows-like desktop disordered, dirty and overloaded.

[lingux_yt]

I love Gnome. I thought it would just be a "big cellphone", but it works great.
I always disable its animations, so it will run faster. But I do that in all desktop environments, and in Windows as well.

Another feature it should have OotB is the Sound Chooser. It shouldn't be in Tweaks

[xbxntx]

I like the direction Gnome is going. I can't wait to try this on Ubuntu 20.10! The best parts of Ubuntu come from outside Ubuntu. Great job, Gnome devs!

[eldanialonso]

I'm doing the switch from MacOS to Ubuntu with GNOME, and so far GNOME is doing really well as replacement. I may miss some apps, specially Google and MS cloud drives integrations, but definitely giving 10+ years of life to my 10 years old Mac. Claps for these enhancements and the job done by GNOME Team!

[jonnyso]

I feel like Gnome is going in the right direction, even if its only small incremental changes.

[chorba]

I've tried many desktop environments (KDE, XFCE, Budgie, Pantheon) but I always come back to Gnome. It's fast, clean and very intuitive, and it really fits all my needs.

[corium]

Most unbiased Linux channel on YT!
Love it!

[developerpranav]

I like how this channel is growing, and he still calls it an experiment! 😃

[tandeshmukh]

I like to consider a power user and have tried KDE, XFCE, and many of the main window managers, but I just keep coming back to the simple beauty of GNOME. Great video man. I can’t wait to try this on my Arch install until. Fedora 33 releases.

[hamobu]

Linux would have a much higher desktop market share if Gnome wasn't a default desktop on all the major distributions.

Gnome is like a car that doesn't have a steering wheel or a gas and brake pedals but instead uses an anal joystick that you sit on. Developers claim that Gnome way of driving a car is much better once you get used to it but regular people really don't want to re-learn things they already know how to do.

[perdomot]

I agree that Gnome is a good system. I switched from XFCE a few months ago and its fast and stable so far.

[tmch]

I like Gnome because of its activities. This is a really handy feature that allows me to conveniently build my workflow. I really like the concept of placing function buttons in the application header. It will be very interesting to see a video about the new design of Gnome 40. Many have expressed concerns that the workflow might be disrupted.

[arthemis]

I love KDE and use it everywhere : however one thing I miss is the way Gnome ties the system together with it's account system, allowing me to just setup my Nextcloud account once and have it linked everywhere...

[JS-wlgi]

Gnome is really out pacing my Windows 10, feature set just allows me to work better. Its now my go to full on work os.

[metammetta]

I started using Linux about a year and a half ago, and my experience with GNOME has been nothing but positive. I guess its poor reputation is a relic of the past because a new user like myself should have no problems with modern versions of GNOME (except that it doesn't look like Windows 7 lol).

[mii_beta]

when Nick in 5:30 says that GNOME 3.38 is a small update, when in reality is one of the most heavy development cyrcles (even with Covid), he makes me realizing that he might have a point, in the sense that when you're following the commits you may see all the work, but when you're watching a video and see the actual "front-end" features and improvements, you're realizing that the update wasn't that massive as you might thought :/

[akamfoad]

07:07 that is what make me feel better and more productive after converting from Win10 to Ubuntu 20.04 with Gnome 3.36

[jannikmeissner]

With just a few extensions, gnome is such a powerful desktop for me. I found I was never as productive in KDE or even a tiling window manager; I run it on both my Pop!_OS home install and my openSUSE Leap Work install. I found KDE was just a tiny bit more stable, but not to the extend it is problematic (still way more stable than macOS on my 2014 Macbook)

And I bet most of my issues on my Workstation are more likely caused by the Nvidia driver