Right on schedule and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora Workstation 45, the GNOME 51 desktop is officially released.
GNOME 51 debuted today with many nice improvements to Mutter for bettering the desktop responsiveness and a smoother experience with improved frame scheduling.
There are also new Wayland protocols supported (such as ext-background-effect-v1) and other optimizations there, including removal of legacy NVIDIA driver support with EGLStreams. Mutter also now has support for custom pointer acceleration profiles.
GNOME 51 on Fedora 45
GNOME 51 also brings a number of settings improvements, offline map support for GNOME Maps, faster startup of GNOME Software, the GNOME Calendar is also faster now too, and the GNOME File Previewer has a complete UI revamp.
Many more details on all the interesting changes to find with the GNOME 51 desktop can be found via today’s release notes on GNOME.org.
Man, I can’t decide if I like more Gnome or Cosmic.
id loce to like cosmic, but my daily driver is a tablet like pc and while im not using the touch screen during my daily workflow, but there are some use cases where i need it. cosmic hasnt supported it as good as gnome.
The last time I tried out cosmic it was still quite new and lacking a lot of the customisability of gnome + tweaks. That could have changed by now tho
I’m on fedora at the moment so I’m a few months back but it still lacks some native apps and could really use some extensions system but I just love its feel, even though I miss Gnome’s consistent design and extensions.
I like them both :)