GNOME 51 has been released, with a whole slew of new features and improvements. Most notably, at least in my experience, will be the work done on GNOME’s graphics stack, which seems to stutter and jitter more than KDE’s on the same hardware – at least in my experience. In particular, GNOME’s compositor, Mutter, has improved frame scheduling for smoother animations, even under load. This hopefully addresses the stutters I generally experience when using GNOME.
They’ve also done a lot of work on the Settings, Maps, Calendar, Web, and other applications. Of note to many will be the array of improvements to GNOME’s file manager, including better performance, although I doubt it will convince those of us who aren’t particular fans of Nautilus in general. They’ve also improved the remote desktop experience by, among other things, adding support for smart cards and improving support for Kerberos.
GNOME 51 will make its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.
During Microsoft’s UWP phase, IBM CUA standards for cut (Shift+Del), copy (Ctrl+Ins) and paste (Shift+Ins) were absent or intentionaly removed. Only Control+C,V,X was working.
With keyboard changing shapes, they might not care much about this older compliance (the F10 key) anymore.
It would be nice to see GNOME become more performant. For all the attention it pays to design in the sense of “layout,” the performance of compositing and animations has lagged behind KDE ever since the transition to Gnome 3 and even during the bleak early KDE 4 years.
I don’t know what this is about. On anything like modern desktop hardware GNOME’s simple animations ought to run, like, infinitely well even on older hardware at high resolutions. But I’ve had laptops struggle with e.g. the old “swarm” animation (the one where you’d open the application menu) even when they could run more graphically-intense games smoothly.
Gnome, despite being the default or one of the defaults on many distros, is both resource heavy [is there a more resource heavy DE than Gnome?] and out of the box, it is almost required to use multiple Gnome extensions to make it usable.
As for Gnome apps, I think the devs have gone towards the more bare-bones philosophy. Their apps might be consistent in terms of design but in terms of features, one can’t say they are exactly loaded.