The beta release of [1]GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set.

GNOME 51.beta was officially declared today and some of the updates to find in this new test version include:

- The GNOME Control Center added a new fingerprint management UI to the users area.

- GNOME Initial Setup gained support for systemd-homed accounts.

- GNOME Shell now honors the "reduced-motion" setting for those wanting reduced motions/visuals. There is also SVG-based cursor support in the same format handled by KDE.

- The Mutter compositor now [2]supports the background blur effect on Wayland and [3]various other improvements .

- GNOME Software improved the performance of icon loading and PackageKit repositories refine.

- GTK now supports the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol, reworked GDK frame-clock to improve precision and reduce frame drops, and other enhancements.

- The GVFS daemon added auto-unmount support for idle backends.

- Various small refinements to the Nautilus file manager.

- The GNOME Web Epiphany web browser has re-enabled WebRTC support, added pinning support for URLs in history and overview model, and other improvements.

- The Glycin image loading code now supports XMP in GIF, TIFF, and WebP image files. There is also now support in Glycin for the Radiance HDR format.

- GNOME Connections now enables H.264 in the Flatpak build.

- Various bug fixes and translation updates throughout.

Downloads and more details on today's GNOME 51 Beta desktop via [4]discourse.gnome.org . The release candidate of GNOME 51 should be out around the end of August while GNOME 51.0 stable is expected to arrive on 18 September.



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

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Background-Blur

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Shell-Mutter-51-Beta

[4] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-51-beta-released/37927