GNOME 49 released with new video player, document viewer, improved app store and disabled X11 session

GNOME 49 "Brescia" has been officially released today with improvements big and small across this popular Linux desktop environment.

Some of the highlights you can expect to see include Showtime their fancy new video player, that they say "prioritizes a distraction-free viewing experience" with some essential features like adjustable playback speed, multiple audio and subtitle tracks, rotating video, and screenshot capture. Another new app with Papers as their new document viewer that supports "viewing, searching, annotating, and organizing formats like PDF, DjVu, TIFF, and comic-book archives (CBR, CBZ, CBT, CB7), with added features such as digital signature integration".

Pictured - GNOME 49

Other changes include various improvements to the Calendar app for exporting events to a file and improved accessibility. The Web browser has better ad blocking, a site menu, enhanced security, better in-page search and more. The GNOME Software app store also has various performance improvements to greatly reduce memory usage and speed up parsing of Flatpak repositories like Flathub. You'll also find an enhanced remote desktop experience, lock screen media controls, power connection status improvements and more.

Another one of the big changes here is that they've now disabled the X11 session, as part of their work towards a full migration to Wayland. Apps on GNOME desktops that need X11 will continue working with XWayland as you would expect.

See more in the release notes.

If you want to test it out there's the GNOME OS Nightly build and it will also ship with Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 that are both due later this year.