GNOME 49 Alpha Released with Tablet Pad Dials Support & Xorg Disabled

One of the most notable additions is support for tablets, pads, and dials…

The first alpha release of GNOME Desktop 49 is out for testing purposes!

The developer team announced the release of this alpha one day ago. And, if everything goes well, GNOME 49 will be default in Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43.

First, GNOME 49 introduced new core apps Showtime video player and Papers document viewer. There are as well blueprint-compiler and manuals for developers. While, the totem and devhelp have been removed.

As you may know, GNOME planned to remove Xorg/X11 session support few years ago. In the new 49 release, it finally disabled the Xorg session in GDM, GCC, and other core components.

GNOME 49 now uses new Glycin loader, a sandboxed image loading framework written in rust, as default backend for decoding and saving images for gdk-pixbuf and image viewer.

As you see in the screenshot, the release moved the “Do Not Distrub” option from top-center time and date menu into top-right Quick Settings.

And, it added new option in Shortcuts dialog, allowing to disable using Super (Windows logo) key to trigger the overview screen.

GCC (Gnome Control Center) has dropped the HDR Brigthness slider as it now controlled by backlight setting. And, it added configuration for pointing stick (aka TrackPoint), and initial eps bearer settings (LTE) to APN Access Point Name dialog.

It also added support for relative dials on tablet pads, and new keyboard shortcut Ctrl+ . to open current folder in Gnome Console (work like “Open in Terminal” context menu but for Console terminal emulator).

Other changes in the release include:

• Add gnome-extensions upload command.
• Show OSD on all monitors when switching workspace.
• Add dedicated accessibility menu on login screen.
• Add support for 10/12/16 bit SW decoder YUV formats.
• Apply touchpad acceleration profile on startup.
• Add D-Bus “Remote Controller” feature for Ocra.
• Touch support in Gnome Remote Desktop.
• Add polkit rules for GDM to allow access to smartcards.
• Support for YUV422 and YUV444.
• Add passive screen casts.

Get GNOME 49 Alpha

GNOME 49 is planned to be released on 2025-09-13, and shipped by default in Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43.

For additional GNOME updates, check out our GNOME 47 alpha article detailing accent‑color support and early Xorg removals

Arch Linux users can now try it out by installing from Gnome-Unstable repository. While, there’s also GNOME OS installer can be installed either in VM or bare metal (need an entire disk for this OS):