Gnome 51 “A Coruña”

This Wednesday (16th), the stable version of Gnome 51, the famous desktop environment for Linux, was released. (Announcement video.) The highlight is improvements in performance and graphics. I don’t know if it was already there, but I’m glad to see that Sushi is a default app and was ported to GTK4. It displays file content by pressing the Space key in the file manager — similar to the quick Look of macOS.

Unfortunately the new overlay of the search results, which was expected to land in Gnome 51, didn’t make the cut.

Gnome Shell Design Dreams 
blogs.gnome.org

The Gnome Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping. As always, getting things like these implemented depends on developer capacity and interest (and sometimes funding).

I like the ideas. None of them represents a major break from the current interface; several bring Gnome in line with the experience that’s expected and common in other desktop environments and operating systems.

The most advanced one, which should appear in the next version (Gnome 51), is the overlay showing search results (image), instead of these appearing on their own dedicated/full screen. The change is justified in light of the philosophy adopted in Gnome 40: “When you navigate GNOME Shell, interface elements always come from somewhere, and exit to somewhere else, in a way that’s semantic and predictable over time.”