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With just a week ahead of the final release of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.38 desktop environment, we finally have a look at some of the hottest new features and enhancements of the upcoming release.
GNOME 3.38 entered beta stages of development a few weeks ago, along with the Feature Freeze stage, which means that no new features will be added. But we didn’t actually know much about these new features anyway, until now.
Developer Georges Basile Stavracas Neto shares today a first look at the new features coming to the GNOME Shell interface and Mutter window and composite manager in the upcoming GNOME 3.38 release, and boy they are big.
First, there’s better multi-monitor support thanks to the implementation of a new frame clock that will no longer allow monitors with different refresh rates and times to interfere with each other. More details on this are available here.
The second major change coming to GNOME 3.38 is the ability to customize the app grid. Users will finally be able to create folders by dragging application icons over each other, move apps between folders, as well as to reorder apps inside the app grid. You can see it in action below.
Another cool new feature is the ability for Mutter to bypass the compositor when running on Wayland. What this means for the end user is reduced CPU and GPU usage, which should lead to a dramatic performance boost. However, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto says that “results will vary from hardware to hardware.”
As you may have heard from my previous articles on GNOME 3.38, there will also be some significant improvements to screencasting, especially for window screencasting. GNOME’s built-in screen recorder is now a standalone system service so screen recording will be significantly smoother, especially on Wayland.
Among other noteworthy changes, the Power Off / Log Out menu has been updated once again to make it even easier for users to restart or shutdown their computer, the Calendar applet received a bunch of visual enhancements to display events under the calendar, and parental controls are better integrated to make it easier for parents or teachers to limit access to certain apps for kids.
But that’s not all, as the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment promises even more new features and improvements across all of its components, and it will be revealed next week when the final release hits the streets, on September 16th.
Image: GNOME
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