Right on schedule and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora Workstation 45, the [1]GNOME 51 desktop is officially released.

GNOME 51 debuted today with many nice improvements to Mutter for bettering the desktop responsiveness and a smoother experience with improved frame scheduling. There are also new Wayland protocols supported (such as ext-background-effect-v1) and other optimizations there, including removal of legacy NVIDIA driver support with EGLStreams. Mutter also now has support for custom pointer acceleration profiles.

GNOME 51 also brings a number of settings improvements, offline map support for GNOME Maps, faster startup of GNOME Software, the GNOME Calendar is also faster now too, and the GNOME File Previewer has a complete UI revamp.

Many more details on all the interesting changes to find with the GNOME 51 desktop can be found via today's release notes on [2]GNOME.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GNOME+51

[2] https://release.gnome.org/51/