[Posted September 17, 2026 by corbet]
Version 51 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released. The list of changes includes a number of performance improvements, offline data and better transit information in the Maps application, a new interface for the file previewer, and more.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 17, 2026 16:09 UTC (Thu) by stockerta (subscriber, #165517) [Link] (30 responses)
What feature did they take out this time because it would confuse someone?
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 17, 2026 16:21 UTC (Thu) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link] (1 responses)
They added the option for you to use another desktop if you want.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 18, 2026 17:25 UTC (Fri) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]
Oddly, I recently switched my work desktop to fedora and that option had gone away (x session support removed from gdm)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 18, 2026 7:14 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (27 responses)
I beg of you: find another joke, this one is 25 years old.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 18, 2026 7:27 UTC (Fri) by stockerta (subscriber, #165517) [Link] (26 responses)
I will find another one when GNOME stops being useless. GNOME 1-2 was good, the current one is just a mess without basic features. Luckily KDE exist.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 18, 2026 8:14 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
It might not be to your liking, or perhaps it doesn't do something you want it to do. It is, demonstrably, not useless, given that many many people use it every day.
It's useful to get in the habit of noticing subjective opinions incorrectly posted as objective statements.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 18, 2026 10:17 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (guest, #2582) [Link] (17 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 19, 2026 16:12 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (16 responses)
Gnome is good for new users.
Gnome is also good for experienced users who have found a combination of settings and extensions that makes the system behave the way they want. One of the things about Gnome that seems to get missed in these conversations is that it has an extension mechanism and hundreds of extensions ready to install at the click of a mouse. It's really designed to be customized, so looking at the out-of-box behavior is missing the point.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 19, 2026 16:28 UTC (Sat) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (2 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 20, 2026 0:29 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 20, 2026 7:09 UTC (Sun) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
The core mechanism focus on extensions' authors declaring on which version of GNOME the extension run. Which inevitably lags, not every author has time to test, update metadata and push the release more often than every few weeks.
Nb. I wanted to provide a list of extensions currently failing on my laptop, for context. But I see that tooltip with Error Details says:
The installed version of this extension (46) is incompatible with the current version of GNOME (undefined). The extension has been disabled.
(undefined) version. Yay for less brittle.
Also, I never said I expected things to be stable. It's a straw man.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 19, 2026 21:33 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (12 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 20, 2026 0:31 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (8 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 11:33 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)
Maybe it is about what is changed. XFCE essentially implements an UI from the 1990's, just better. There are extensions, but the changes do not invalidate the user's "finger memory". This is one reason I like it (other being its relatively low memory usage; I want to run applications, not the desktop).
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 15:31 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]
This is why I stick to XFCE4. It has looked and worked more-or-less the same for 25+ years. And for me, that's a feature, not a bug.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 15:28 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 16:27 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 16:59 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)
Facts! I put my very non-technical Mom and brother-in-law on a fairly locked-down XFCE4 desktop.
I shudder to think of them trying to use GNOME or KDE...
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 17:34 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 17:39 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 15:29 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 20, 2026 0:34 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)
Another problem with extensions is that automated deployment of them (e.g., Ansible) seems to be nigh impossible. The installer tools seem to need a DBus session active which means that to deploy it, each target user needs to log-in in order to "properly" activate. I tried all kinds of things to hack up a DBus session to use for it (including just extracting the extension archives in the right place after a manual deployment), but things just never got wired up properly.
Luckily, we could drop a full DE session (Qt fonts were rendered very poorly if it couldn't detect a DE…got fixed on Qt's side at some point) and go back to a VNC server with TWM running instead of a full session. And for reference, the extension of interest was not starting in the "Expose" mode (which confused the heck out of the UI testing infrastructure).
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 20, 2026 5:17 UTC (Sun) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)
Another problem with extensions is that automated deployment of them (e.g., Ansible) seems to be nigh impossible. The installer tools seem to need a DBus session active which means that to deploy it, each target user needs to log-in in order to "properly" activate.
Why would you even do that? Why is it not enough to just unzip the extension into $XDG_DATA_HOME/gnome-shell/extensions (or the appropriate system-wide path)?
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 20, 2026 17:40 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I thought that would be enough too, but AFAICT, that just makes it "available", not "enabled". There's probably some gsettings call to actually enable it, but I couldn't find the path. Anyways, it's not necessary anymore as we don't run any DE at this point.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 18, 2026 17:08 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (6 responses)
So why are you commenting here then?
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 19, 2026 2:22 UTC (Sat) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (5 responses)
Perhaps because Gnome gets all the attention while the orthodox continuation of the project, MATE, which I find actually useful, minimal, and sane, does not. The "capture" of the Gnome community now all those years ago still smarts to some of us, and the resources available to better desktops are reduced.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 19, 2026 3:08 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 0:57 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)
That's not quite fair. A significant amount of GNOME work was sponsored by RedHat and other companies. It was not a result of free choice by people.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 2:51 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 8:05 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)
There's a difference between working on a project just for fun and working on a project because you're paid to do so.
Feature de-creep
Posted Sep 21, 2026 14:13 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
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