The team behind the GNOME desktop environment has released GNOME 48, sporting the code name “Bengaluru.” It brings several new features, including more efficient notifications and a new audio player.
Maybe the most interesting addition for Bengaluru is a “Digital Wellbeing” dashboard in the GNOME settings menu. Reminiscent of the Screen Time app on macOS and iPhone, Digital Wellbeing can show your screen time and give you controls for enforcing time limits, enabling grayscale, and scheduling reminder notifications to give your eyes a break or move your body.
Speaking of notifications, the notification experience on GNOME has been optimized with the introduction of notification “stacking.” You’ll be familiar with this if you’ve noticed your phone or computer grouping notifications from the same app together in an expandable panel instead of showing all your notifications in a mixed list. They’re still chronological on GNOME, but grouped in a panel you can expand and contract while you read them.
Battery management for laptops is also a focal point for GNOME 48, as it features a brand new battery health preservation tool. Not unlike Windows 10 and 11’s Smart Charging feature, the feature limits battery charges to 80 percent instead of allowing the battery to charge to 100 percent. This is meant to reduce wear and tear, thereby extending the overall life of your laptop’s battery.
If you go to Power settings, you’ll find the option there to enable it under “Battery Charging.” Keep in mind though that this is a hardware-dependent feature. Not every laptop out there supports this kind of charge limiting. If yours doesn’t, the option won’t be available to you. If it is, just remember to switch it off when you’re charging right before a trip or another situation where you probably want the maximum battery life possible.
Also new is the fact that GNOME’s built-in image viewer now has image editing features. The image viewer was introduced in GNOME 45, but now you can use it to crop, rotate, and flip the images you’re viewing. It isn’t very advanced, with just a few simple toggles and presets. Regardless, this should save you some time as you review images on your GNOME computer that just need basic tweaks.
The image viewer also has a few more minor additions, including overhauled zoom controls and experimental support for RAW images and metadata formats such as XMP. As the image viewer improves, ideally you’ll have less and less reason to open a dedicated image editor. On my KDE Plasma desktop, I rarely have need to leave its Gwenview image viewer since Gwenview’s built-in editing tools are so powerful.
Bengaluru is also bringing new software, specifically a simple audio player called Decibels. Considering its feature set, it’s more useful for podcasts and interview recordings than for music. Beyond Decibels, there are also new additions to GNOME’s curated app collection, GNOME Circle. It includes a drum machine app, a simple note-taking app called Iotas, and a typing practice utility called Keypunch.
There are also some visual improvements arriving with GNOME 48, including brand new interface fonts. Adwaita Sans is what you’ll see around the desktop, replacing the Cantarell font. You’ll also see the terminal font has been replaced by another Adwaita sibling, Adwaita Mono. Going beyond fonts, there’s now system-level HDR support with GNOME 48, improving your overal display experience on HDR-enabled monitors.
This GNOME release brings several under-the-hood performance improvements, too, including:
- Improved CPU and RAM usage by the JavaScript engine
- A more memory-efficient file indexing system
- More stable connections between monitors and discrete graphics cards
I’m only scratching the surface of GNOME 48’s improvements, though. If you want to see everything, check out the release notes linked below. To use GNOME 48 yourself, one of the simplest ways is to get Ubuntu 25.04 when it releases April 17, since it’s expected to run the latest version of GNOME by default.
Source: GNOME
