The GNOME 45 beta is out and this beta milestone also marks the UI / API/ABI / feature freeze for this development cycle. Following the beta will be a GNOME 45 release candidate in early September before the official GNOME 45.0 release happens on 20 September.
Among the new changes with the GNOME 45 beta include:
- Several fixes to the Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser.
- The GJS JavaScript engine has been updated against SpiderMonkey 115 to provide new JS features.
- The new default background of GNOME 45 has been integrated. The GNOME backgrounds were also going to aim for JPEG-XL based images this cycle but ended up reverting.
- GNOME Console has added a preferences window plus seen various bug fixes.
- GNOME Control Center has a new "about" panel for displaying system information.
- Various GNOME Initial Setup improvements.
- Better performance for GWeather in finding the nearest location lookups.
- Sysprof has been redesigned and rewritten from the ground-up to provide better GTK4 integration and new features.
- GTK 4.12 brings Vulkan back-end improvements and other toolkit improvements.
- Numerous GNOME Shell and Mutter improvements .
More details on the GNOME 45 beta changes and for downloading the updated source code via GNOME.org Discourse .