Right on schedule and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora Workstation 45, the 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 on Fedora 45

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 GNOME.org.