Traduction de l’article : https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/gnome-49-new-features
GNOME 49 arrive avec un mélange de nouvelles fonctionnalités, d’applications de mise à jour et de polissage visuel pour rendre la vie quotidienne sur le bureau de Linux plus fluide, plus nette et plus cohérente.
Les utilisateurs d’Ubuntu peuvent essayer (la plupart) des nouvelles fonctionnalités de GNOME 49 dans Ubuntu 25.10, qui sortira le 9 octobre 2025. Une version bêta de cette version est disponible le 18 septembre, pour ceux qui souhaitent découvrir en avant-première les changements proposés.
Each new GNOME release is given a codename, a bit like Ubuntu or macOS. Except, it’s not animals or California landmarks GNOME uses, but the host city of community events. This time, the name comes from July’s GUADEC conference in Brescia, Italy
Here’s what you need to know about this update.
GNOME 49 New Features
Design Changes in GNOME 49
At the GNOME login screen, you’ll see a new accessibility menu in the lower-right corner. Having assistive tools in easy reach is useful for all. For instance, if my Bluetooth keyboard fails to connect I can still log in using the virtual keyboard.
On the lock screen, GNOME 49 adds a media controller widget. This appears only if music or video is playing (and uses MPRIS). Being able to see what’s playing, control it, and so on from the Lock Screen is is a feature other OSes offer.
Sticking with the Lock Screen, it’s now possible to show shutdown and restart options. These aren’t shown by default 1 , and if manually enabled ought to be used carefully (in case the active session has unsaved work).
The Quick Settings menu gains some new options.
The toggle for Do Not Disturb mode is now located in the Quick Settings menu (a placement that makes more sense than its former home in the notification/calendar applet, where it felt disconnected from the rest of the system controls).
You can now change the brightness of each monitor in a multi-monitor setup independently of each other when HDR is enabled. This wasn’t a trivial change, requiring a big restructuring in the way Mutter handles display backlighting.
Various animations in GNOME Shell 49 have been tweaked. New scale animations are introduced for notifications and pop-overs, and ‘quad’ animations for other elements, like the notification shade:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/cWFW3ufyxH0?feature=oembed The new ‘quad’ animations – they look better when not video compressed 😉
Other GNOME Shell changes include:
- Grouped screenshot and screencast notifications
- Brightness adjustments now change in 5% steps
- Animated ellipse shown for searching in the Overview
- Clearer indication when battery charging limits are active
- Improved icon for active Wi-Fi sans access point
And, of course, the usual bug fixes, performance buffs and other refinements.
Outside of the main shell, libadwaita (GNOME’s UI library) gains a new Shortcuts Dialog widget . It replaces the old shortcuts window, and many apps in GNOME 49 now use it. The new dialog is adaptive and includes an integrated search field.
New Default Apps
GNOME 49 makes changes to its set of core apps, which are developed as part of GNOME using the relevant desktop technologies and design guidelines. Linux distros that ship the GNOME desktop do not have to include these core apps.
Credits roll on Totem , as GNOME 49 replaces the venerable open-source video player with Showtime , a slicker and more modern video player built using GTK4/libadwaita (Totem uses GTK3) and making use of newer underlying media tech.
Showtime has been around for a while (and I’ve covered it many times on this blog). It plays videos in a frameless window, with overlay controls that fade out of view during playback. It supports chapters, subtitle and audio tracks, adjustable playback speed, and more.
Though Showtime doesn’t do everything Totem can, it does everything a video player needs to, all in a style in-keeping with the rest of the modern GNOME desktop. Those who prefer Totem can install it from their distro’s repositories.
Elsewhere, Papers (finally) replaces Evince as the default Document Viewer in GNOME 49. Ubuntu made the switch in 25.04 . Papers is forked from Evince but has been refactored and rebuilt using Rust, GTK4/libadwaita and modern rendering libraries.
It offers the majority of Evince’s features, plus a few it didn’t. Like Totem, Evince remains available for those who prefer the old UI and feature set.
New File Manager Features
The core-ist of core apps on the GNOME desktop is Nautilus , the file manager also known as ‘Files’.
GNOME 49 brings improvements to Nautilus, though the one that I think will be most impactful day to day is the redesigned search popover . ‘Pills’ make it search options easier to see, and a new calendar widget makes dialling in search timeframes faster.
Also new: when you cut a file(s) to move elsewhere, a dashed border is rendered around the thumbnail icon so you can see what is being moved. Hidden files and folders now render with slight transparency, making them easier to spot.
Other changes:
- Network addresses in the network panel can be copied
- Files in MTP-backed directories load incrementally
- Batch rename dialog is now adaptive
- App chooser dialog uses a modern dialog widget
- New ctrl + . shortcut opens current folder in the terminal
- Local mounts in sidebar are sorted by device name
- Slash added to path entered using ~
- More reliable trash emptying
Plus, there are the usual glut of bug fixes, accessibility improvements, code refactoring and minor usability tweaks to reduce friction in this venerable file manager.
Other Core App Updates
Many of GNOME’s other core apps pick up new features, design changes and other improvements in this edition, including:
Web (aka Epiphany) adds a new bookmark editing mode, improved ad blocking, and new options for on-page text searches. The address bar now supports inline completion, shows a mute button when sites play sound and reader mode displays estimated reading time.
Security sees a boost, with Web 49 finally baking in support for hardware smartcards for more secure login flows and the addition of new dedicated password management dialog.
Calendar benefits from a huge set of changes. The sidebar can now be hidden to give more space to the main view, and the app adapts its UI based on different window sizes, ensuring that all core features (like changing month, etc) are accessible.
Event styling in the calendar now uses greater contrast to improve legibility. Events can be exported as .ics files for sharing, and accessibility and keyboard navigation have been boosted throughout the app.
Software picks up a serious set of performance improvements. Devs have nixed a ‘major bottleneck’ in how the app parses data from Flatpak repositories like Flathub . This reduces memory usage and make searching and browsing faster.
Snapshot (aka Camera ) adds hardware-accelerated video encoding, support for scanning mirrored QR codes, and defaults to H264/MP4 formats and GTK’s YUV support (where available). A warning is shown if required GStreamer plugins are missing.
Maps adds a point-of-interest search option for vegan and vegetarian restaurants; localised railway station icons added for select regions; and clickable street names and house numbers that open a popover with options.
Weather adds F5 and Ctrl + R keyboard shortcuts to refresh, improves its grid layout and has been ported to Typescript.
Text Editor improves session saving and document filtering in search. It also reloads a document if encoding is changed from the properties dialog. It now uses libdwaita’s new searchable keyboard shortcuts dialog too.
Ptyxis terminal — default in Ubuntu 25.10 — adds a new menu to search across containers and profiles ( alt + , ), handles mailto: links, and includes a new command-line option to start the app in fullscreen ( --fullscreen ).
Connections (remote desktop app) can forward multitouch input from a client to a remote GNOME session over RDP. It also adds support for relative mouse input (useful for playing games over remote connections) and extended virtual monitors.
GNOME Control Center Changes
There are a few new toggles, switches and options present in GNOME Control Center (aka Settings ) in GNOME 49, including a new donation button and info bar in System > About encouraging users to “Support GNOME” (Ubuntu has disabled this; you won’t see it in 25.10).
The Display panel has been reworked to properly fit on smaller resolution screens (which is very useful if you switch to a smaller resolution and find the display panel itself no longer fits the screen, making it hard to switch to a higher resolution).
The Accessibility panel adds toggle to open the Orca screen reader tool.
A Mega Mutter Update
GNOME’s window manager Mutter is the conduit for how software and hardware interact. Mutter 49 picks up a plethora of improvements, including support for 10, 12 and 16 bit software decoding formats (which GNOME’s wallpapers now make use of).
Mutter improves handling of fractional scaling values by switching to new calculations using ‘exact quotients’. This should deliver sharper rendering of text and app interfaces across different screen resolutions and display types.
Other changes include:
- Speed-limited visual alerts to comply with EAA
- Touchpad acceleration profile applied at startup
- API to (un)inhibit the cursor visibility
- Support for ICC profiles
- Cursor can move at maximum refresh rate under VRR
- Windows suspend when screen shield is active
- Snippet caching reintroduced
- Pointer warp protocol implemented
- Separate trackpoint speed settings from mouse
A new Mutter Development Kit is available as part of GNOME 49. The tool is an alternative to the --nested method of running development versions of GNOME Shell on a host system, and makes use of Toolbx container tech.
X11 Session Support Disabled
Not technically a feature, but one of the most impactful changes in GNOME 49 (that has attracted more chatter and attention than any other this cycle) is the decision to disable X11/Xorg session support for GNOME desktop.
From this release, GNOME Shell runs on Wayland only (software that relies on X11 is not affected as they work via Xwayland). The GDM login screen still allows other X11-based desktop sessions to be logged in too, but not GNOME.
However, distro makers can choose re-enable X11 support in GNOME 49 at build time for affected modules. It is unlikely this will remain possible in GNOME 50, as devs plan to remove X11 code entirely, not merely disable it.
GNOME Forty Nine is Pretty Fine
In all, GNOME 49 feels like a solid refinement to the modern desktop Linux experience. I mainly sampled the changes on Ubuntu 25.10, which applies some of its own changes on top. It feels snappy (the new animations especially) and works well.
The user-facing feature and app upgrades will deepen the desktop’s consistency and modernity in the eyes of users, while lower-level changes, such as an increased use of systemd dependencies and disabling X11 support, push Linux forward on the technical side.
GNOME 49 is released on 17 September, 2025.