March 19, 2025
The GNOME project is excited to introduce GNOME 48, a fresh release shaped by six months of hard work from our amazing community. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who contributed to making this happen!
Named “Bengaluru”, this release pays tribute to the dedication of the GNOME Asia 2024 organizers. Let’s take a look at what’s new in GNOME 48.
Notification Stacking
GNOME 48 introduces stacking to the notification list. Notifications from the same app are grouped into stacks, each of which can be expanded to reveal individual messages. Stacking keeps the notification list organized and makes it easier to navigate. It also prevents the notification list from becoming too long.
Notification stacking is the latest in a series of notifications improvements, which included other enhancements in the previous GNOME 47 release. Together, these changes make notifications both more powerful and easier to use.
Performance Improvements
GNOME 48 includes a number of notable performance improvements. The most significant of these is the introduction of dynamic triple buffering. This change has undergone significant review and testing over a period of five years and improves the perceived smoothness of changes on screen, with fewer skipped frames and more fluid animations. This has been achieved by enhancing the concurrency capabilities of Mutter, the GNOME display manager, and is particularly effective at handling sudden bursts of activity.
Other performance improvements in GNOME 48 include:
- GNOME’s JavaScript engine, a core part of the desktop, has reduced CPU and memory usage for many common operations.
- File indexing now uses less memory when crawling large folders, and has faster multimedia metadata extraction.
- Users with monitors directly attached to a discrete graphics card will experience improved performance and stability.
- In Files, significant performance improvements have been made to folder load time and scroll rendering. These enhancements primarily apply to folders which contain a lot of thumbnails. In testing they resulted in a ×5 speed increase when loading, and a ×10 rendering speed increase for scrolling.
- Optimizations in the latest GTK version result in faster performance when app interfaces are created and resized.
Enhanced Image Viewer
GNOME introduced a new default image viewer back in version 45. For GNOME 48 this new app has received a number of exciting updates. The main change in 48 is the introduction of a new image editing feature, which allows cropping, rotating and flipping images. We are sure that these new capabilities will be incredibly helpful and convenient for simple editing tasks.
The image viewer’s zoom controls have also been redesigned for GNOME 48. The new controls have a number of advantages, including the ability to return to the default zoom level with a single click, a menu to select from a set of predefined zoom levels, and an entry to manually enter a zoom level percentage.
This version of the image viewer also brings several experimental features, including support for RAW image formats, as well as support for additional metadata formats like XMP. (Note that availability of these features may vary depending on your distribution.)
These enhancements make the new image viewer more versatile and user-friendly, aligning with GNOME’s commitment to providing integrated and efficient tools.
New Fonts
GNOME has a new interface font in version 48, as well as a new monospace font. Named Adwaita Sans and Adwaita Mono, these new fonts look fantastic, and also have many practical advantages over the previous fonts, with better rendering, more extensive ch
