In working toward the stable GNOME 51 desktop release due out in September, today marks the alpha release of GNOME 51.

GNOME 51 comes with many changes scattered about its many different components. No one change stands out particularly exciting at this stage but a wide variety of smaller improvements to provide more polish and added functionality over GNOME 50. Some of the GNOME 51 Alpha changes that caught my eye include:

- The Epiphany browser added a keyboard shortcut to copy the current page URL, among other improvements.

- The GDM display manager now has compatibility with the KMSCON VT. There is also now a GDM setting to change the fallback session.

- GNOME Calendar has been reworked with performance improvements, rendering optimizations, and other internal code refactoring.

- GNOME Control Center has reordered the System Software / Hardware information page, new display options, the ability to disable a touchpad while a mouse is plugged in, GNOME QR code widget support for WiFi sharing, and other additions.

- GNOME Maps now has offline map download support.

- GNOME Remote Desktop has fixed and enabled hardware acceleration support with the AMD graphics driver.

- GNOME Session now enables use of the oo7-portal as the implementation of the Secret portal.

- GNOME Shell now supports rate control for the vA-API H.264 screencasting. GNOME Shell also now supports version 2 of text_input_v3 protocol.

- GTK now respects the reduced motion setting in various places and avoids animations.

- The Loupe image viewer can now show creator, copyright information, camera lens, and used software within the image metadata.

- Many fixes for the Mutter compositor.

- The Nautilus file manager now has enhanced view reloading performance, among other changes.

- Sushi has been ported to GTK4.

- XDG Desktop Portal GNOME now has support for session persistence in the Input Capture portal.

More details on the GNOME 51 Alpha release via GNOME Discourse.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.