GNOME 51 has officially arrived, and with it - plenty of fancy new features for the popular Linux desktop environment. You'll have to wait for your distribution to upgrade, or try it out via GNOME OS Nightly.
As the GNOME team said on their Mastodon social media page: "We spent the last 6 months polishing the experience, to make it more accessible and more user-friendly. Unlike the current tech industry, we go slow and fix things!"
They've had a nice focus on performance improvements with this release bringing the likes of:
- Improved frame scheduling: Animations will run more smoothly, even when the system is under load, thanks to Mutter's reworked scheduling and screen frame delivery system.
- Faster screen capture: We improved screen recording across the board by reducing redundant work and buffer copying.
- Saved monitor brightness: GNOME now remembers your monitor's brightness level across reboots and HDR toggling.
- Simplified graphics support: we removed support for legacy NVIDIA driver interfaces, as GNOME now uses the modern, standard graphics interfaces exclusively. This simplifies the code and benefits everyone using current drivers.
There's also upgrades for:
- Settings
- Remote Desktop
- Maps
- File Manager
- Web Browsing
- GNOME Software app store
- Image Viewer
- + many more apps upgraded
Accessibility saw another round of improvements too like:
- Reduced motion, extended: the Reduced Motion accessibility setting is now respected in more places than ever, including in many core widgets and in the shell itself. If you prefer a calmer interface, fewer parts of the desktop will animate.
- Keyboard-friendly screenshots: the screenshot area selection can now be adjusted entirely with the keyboard. Use the arrow keys to resize the selection, hold down Alt to move it instead, and press Shift or Ctrl for coarse or fine adjustments, or R to reset the area.
- Focus ring timeout: a new setting in the Accessibility settings lets you disable the focus timeout, which is useful when assistive technology needs more time to interact with interface elements.
- Cleaner screen reader output: the screen reader no longer announces the app dock twice, search results are described more usefully, and the app grid is easier to navigate.
Plus lots and lots more - it's six months of work from various people to make GNOME even better.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
About the author - Liam Squires-Hand
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
See more from me
See more from me
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
You can also find comments for this article on social media: All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.
4 comments
I was surprised to see that the GOL stats note 26% of users on Gnome, compared to 46% on KDE Plasma. I thought it would be closer.
Given that Arch is so popular, I wonder if Arch leans more towards Plasma in default set ups (e.g. CachyOS, Garuda and Endeavour).
Given that Arch is so popular, I wonder if Arch leans more towards Plasma in default set ups (e.g. CachyOS, Garuda and Endeavour).
1 Likes 👍 (1) See more...
Caldathras 17 Sep 2026
Simplified graphics support: we removed support for legacy NVIDIA driver interfaces, as GNOME now uses the modern, standard graphics interfaces exclusively. This simplifies the code and benefits everyone using current drivers.Not sure if this is good thing or not. Will this impact users with older hardware?
0 Likes
Quoting: scaineI was surprised to see that the GOL stats note 26% of users on Gnome, compared to 46% on KDE Plasma. I thought it would be closer.Historically, GNOME was always more widely used than KDE Plasma. During the GNOME 3 and GTK3 era, there was a "civil war" that resulted in numerous forks, and KDE gained more prominence; a prime example of this is LXDE switching to Qt instead of GTK3. Consequently, GNOME and KDE were essentially neck and neck—though we lacked precise telemetry data, the balance was evident in terms of popularity among major distributions and online community engagement. However, with the arrival of the Steam Deck (which runs KDE) and last year's Linux boom, almost all new users gravitate directly toward KDE or Linux Mint. Distributions like Bazzite and CachyOS recommend KDE Plasma for a SteamOS-like experience. Plasma’s interface is more similar to Windows; new users appreciate the customization options and often dislike restrictive, "walled-garden" environments. Within the Linux community, GNOME isn't viewed very favorably due to controversies surrounding the GNOME Foundation, updates that remove features, the campaign to eliminate themes, and GTK4’s heavy reliance on Adwaita (designed by and for GNOME, much like the GTK3 era).
Given that Arch is so popular, I wonder if Arch leans more towards Plasma in default set ups (e.g. CachyOS, Garuda and Endeavour).
The figures don't surprise me; they make sense (though keep in mind this is a gaming-focused niche).
I like the direction GNOME is taking recently—specifically with the latest update and the roadmap for 2026. I’m eagerly awaiting the new versions, as they will incorporate features I currently rely on extensions for; it seems they are becoming a bit more flexible.
2 Likes 👍 (2) See more...
Personally I stopped using Gnome because of the developer attitude, the "our way or the highway" of it all. So it's good to hear that they're becoming more flexible.
I needed an obscene number of extensions (okay, it was about five or six) to feel comfortable using it and when Plasma 6 landed and I read an excellent Nate Graham post on its development, I thought I'd give it another chance.
Haven't looked back. If I'm honest with myself, I can't even imagine what it would take for me to jump ship back to Gnome at this point. Plasma just keeps getting better and better and the developer commentary is so open.
I needed an obscene number of extensions (okay, it was about five or six) to feel comfortable using it and when Plasma 6 landed and I read an excellent Nate Graham post on its development, I thought I'd give it another chance.
Haven't looked back. If I'm honest with myself, I can't even imagine what it would take for me to jump ship back to Gnome at this point. Plasma just keeps getting better and better and the developer commentary is so open.
5 Likes 👍 (5) See more...
Patreon
PayPal