GNOME 47 Finally Adding Accent Color Support

GNOME 47, the next release of the popular Linux Desktop environment, is in alpha stage now!

GNOME 47, which is scheduled to be released on Sep 14, 2024, will be the default desktop for next Ubuntu 24.10 and Fedora Workstation 41 if everything goes well.

The first alpha development released was out a few days ago. Which, introduced accent color support!

Ubuntu since 22.04 already has the feature out-of-the-box. Under “Appearance” settings page, there are some big dots with different colors under “Style” section. They are called accent colors. Choose one from there will apply the color to all toggle switches, check-boxes, slider-bars, selection borders, etc in the desktop.

Other Linux with GNOME (e.g., Fedora Workstation, Arch, and Manjaro) will finally include the feature for those boring with the default Blue! Though, it provides 9 colors including Blue (default), Teal, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, Pink, Purple, Slat, while Ubuntu has 10.

As you may know, Fedora is planning to remove the classic Xorg session. In the GNOME 47 Alpha release, the Mutter window manager made the first step by allowing to build without X11 support.

For Linux laptop, the new release now allows to use touchpad gestures with more than 3 fingers. Meaning users can now use 4-finger (or even more fingers) swipe action to switch workspace and trigger overview. And, there’s an option (no sure build level or user level) to configure how many fingers allowed for gestures support.

The spacings in the overview screen now is dynamic. So it will work well in different screen sizes, and allow the dash to use large icon size for small displays.

Other changes in the alpha of GNOME 47 include:

• GNOME Remote Desktop now supports persistent remote login sessions
• Online Accounts adds ability to restrict which services of a particular account type are available
• GNOME Maps now uses the vector by default, and remove the old raster tiles
• Support VND currency, and keep last conversion options at launch of Gnome Calculator
• Epiphany, aka Gnome Web, adds preference to toggle navigation gestures, allows to set brightness and contrast for dark reader mode

Try Out GNOME 47 Alpha

The announcement page provides an iso image for the release for testing purpose.

And here are the future release plans of GNOME 47, according to this page.

• GNOME 47 Beta – 2024-08-03
• GNOME 47 RC – 2024-08-31
• GNOME 47.0 Stable – 2024-09-14