GNOME 51.beta was officially declared today and some of the updates to find in this new test version include:
- The GNOME Control Center added a new fingerprint management UI to the users area.
- GNOME Initial Setup gained support for systemd-homed accounts.
- GNOME Shell now honors the "reduced-motion" setting for those wanting reduced motions/visuals. There is also SVG-based cursor support in the same format handled by KDE.
- The Mutter compositor now supports the background blur effect on Wayland and various other improvements .
- GNOME Software improved the performance of icon loading and PackageKit repositories refine.
- GTK now supports the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol, reworked GDK frame-clock to improve precision and reduce frame drops, and other enhancements.
- The GVFS daemon added auto-unmount support for idle backends.
- Various small refinements to the Nautilus file manager.
- The GNOME Web Epiphany web browser has re-enabled WebRTC support, added pinning support for URLs in history and overview model, and other improvements.
- The Glycin image loading code now supports XMP in GIF, TIFF, and WebP image files. There is also now support in Glycin for the Radiance HDR format.
- GNOME Connections now enables H.264 in the Flatpak build.
- Various bug fixes and translation updates throughout.
Downloads and more details on today's GNOME 51 Beta desktop via discourse.gnome.org . The release candidate of GNOME 51 should be out around the end of August while GNOME 51.0 stable is expected to arrive on 18 September.