GNOME Shell mock-ups have been making some evolutionary changes to the desktop and that work is coming together. Merged on Friday to GNOME Shell is making horizontal workspaces . That code is now in place but follow-up improvements are expected.
This goes along with making the dash and App Grid horizontal, various GNOME Shell Overview improvements, a new Overview gesture, and other UI/UX changes ahead of the GNOME 40 debut in March.
GNOME 40 has also been seeing plenty of lower-level work too like moving some code to GTK4 , XWayland on-demand by default , threaded input , making use of atomic mode-setting , and much more.