The GNOME 48 release candidate "48.rc" is out this evening as we approach the stable release of the [1]GNOME 48 desktop in two weeks.

There are a number of late, last minute feature changes and other notable alterations to find with today's GNOME 48 release candidate. Some of the most noticeable GNOME 48.rc changes include:

- Epiphany (GNOME Web) now changes the default protocol to HTTPS from HTTP.

- The Evince document viewer has improved support for Adobe PDF open parameters.

- GNOME Backgrounds has switched back to using JPEG for its default wallpaper rather than JPEG-XL. Reverting back to JPEG was done for performance reasons.

- GNOME Control Center adds the HDR luminance settings UI.

- Continued GNOME Control Center improvements to the "digital wellbeing" options.

- GNOME Remote Desktop now supports hardware-encoded AVC444.

- GNOME Shell now groups notifications by app.

- GNOME Software brings minor UI improvements to the updates page along with some performance improvements and crash fixes.

- [2]Many last minute GNOME Mutter improvements including Wayland color management protocol support, dynamic triple buffering, cursor shape protocol support, and presentation time v2 support.

- GTK brings Wayland cursor shape protocol support, better font rendering with the new GNOME default font, and fixes to the new Android back-end.

- The Nautilus file manager has reworked and sped-up adding of files to view.

- The XDG Desktop Portal GNOME code has added the global shortcuts portal back-end.

More details via the GNOME 48 release candidate announcement on [3]discourse.gnome.org .



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

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-48-RC

[3] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-48-rc-released/27497