To kick off the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference (GUADEC) in 2022, the Gnome project released the first alpha version of the upcoming GNOME desktop v43. The latest edition of the desktop brings support for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Web Extensions.
Gnome OS gets Gnome 43 Alpha
Experienced users or developers who already want to take a look at the alpha version of Gnome 43 can do so with Gnome OS Nightly (ISO). The detailed Gnome OS Installation Guide will help you get started. The highly experimental distribution is for this testing purpose only.
The developers of the free desktop are highlighting the following innovations and optimizations as highlights of the upcoming release.
- GUI with even more consistency
- Support for Progressive Web Apps
- Gnome Web will be extensible like Firefox and Chrome
- More accessibility, more Rust, more Wayland
- Improved privacy settings
- New and optimized GTK 4 apps
- Optimizations for WireGuard
Developers have already gone into more detail about some of the new features of Gnome 43.
GUI with even more consistency
So far, very little was known about Gnome 43, only the optional alignment of the file manager Nautilus to mobile devices and form factors and a new image viewer written in Rust and GTK 4 called “Loupe”, which also uses the central GUI design concept of the in-house library ” Libadwaita” has leaked to the public so far. In the meantime, however, a number of other innovations have become known.
All relevant Gnome design concepts are brought together in the Libadwaita GUI library . It also includes new widgets and existing content from Libhandy, as well as the Human Interface Guidelines.
Gnome Web extensible like Firefox and Chrome
In the final version of Gnome 43, which after will be released on September 21st of this year, all extensions for Firefox and Google Chrome should also work with Gnome Web. The website itfoss.com has already tried some of them successfully.
The browser Gnome Web based on Apple WebKit receives extensions (Image: itfoss.com)
More accessibility, more Rust, more Wayland
The release will also include corrections for more accessibility and a Disk Usage Analyzer rewritten in Rust, which has previously used the Vala programming language, as well as optimizations for the free VPN service WireGuard.
The Disk Usage Analyzer is supposed to get a new programming language received-new-programming-language (Image: Gnome)
Gnome 43 is supposed to be released on September 21st
The first alpha is scheduled to be followed by the first beta on August 6th, while the release candidate is expected to be the end result of developments on September 3rd, according to the official roadmap. The final release is scheduled for September 21st.
Until July 25, the Gnome Project is hosting the GUADEC 2022 open source conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, while GUADEC 2021 still took place online. More information on the future of Gnome is expected at the conference.