Racing toward the [1]GNOME 48 finish line, developers have remained busy squeezing some remaining bits into place for this big open-source desktop release.

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue to highlight the interesting desktop changes being made. For this past week there are a couple items worth noting:

- The GNOME Desktop Portal now supports the Global Shortcuts Interface. This work allows sandboxed apps to register desktop-wide shortcuts and users can edit/remove them from the GNOME System Settings area.

- Orca shortcuts will now just work, including under Wayland, after keyboard monitoring support was added to Mutter, Orca, and libatspi.

- GTK and Mutter now support the Wayland cursor shape protocol (wp_cursor_shape_manager_v1). This allows for more consistent cursor themes and interoperability with other Wayland compositors. The Wayland Cursor Shape protocol provides an alternative, optional way for setting cursor images using enumerated cursors rather than a Wayland surface. Details on the protocol at [2]wayland.app .

More details on the interesting GNOME changes this week via [3]This Week in GNOME .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GNOME+48

[2] https://wayland.app/protocols/cursor-shape-v1

[3] https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2025/02/twig-189/