Just last week GNOME's Nautilus file manager "GNOME Files" made headlines for [1]finally supporting Ctrl+INsert and Shift+Insert while this week there is more activity worth pointing out. Nautilus in GNOME 50 will be loading thumbnail images much faster than in prior versions.

With new thumbnail code merged this week for GNOME Files / Nautilus, the file manager is now making use of improvements in GTK4 and now allowing thumbnails to be loaded asynchronously.

Thus should result in "a great speedup" for thumbnails showing "as fast as never before." This improvement to GNOME Files was highlighted today by This Week in GNOME, including a comparison video of the dramatic speed impact.

A nice improvement to look forward to with the GNOME 50 release in March.

More details on this work can be found via [2]This Week in GNOME . This week also brought improvements to the GNOME Calendar, libadwaita, and Phosh 0.51 having been released.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Nautilus-Copy-Paste-Files

[2] https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2025/11/twig-226/