Tracking Gnome Deskop Features -- Where can I find a high-level overview on which Desktop features are implemented in which versions and the caveats for those releases?

Desktop
1

I am looking at switching to a Linux distribution. I want to do my due dilligence and determine if the specific features that I want from a desktop environment are supported by the distribution that I’m going with. For things like Wayland, Mesa, and my drivers, that’s pretty easy – go to their gitlab, look at their merge history and release tags, search for mentions of that feature. Gnome seems more complicated…A distribution usually tells me that it uses Gnome version XX.X on their current release

Where in the Gnome ecosystem do I go to look to see the specific Gnome version that implements a given desktop feature? I found the Gnome gitlab, but there are so many separate projects there that I’m not even sure where to even begin looking.

  • Reddit will often have some of these answers for me, but I want to get better at going directly to the source of truth.

  • Other times my distribution bundler will explicitly say “We support X”, but then when I install the distribution or a given update, I somtimes find that “We support X” is really “We support X with caveats Y and Z”, and figuring out what those caveats are is proving difficult.

  • If I go to the release notes for Gnome XX.X, I find what was implemented in that specific version, but if the feature was implemented in some prior version, I need to start working backwards – IF it’s even something that they specifically call out in the release notes, which appear to be a high level overview.

Is there some single place in the Gnome ecosystem that tracks the status of individual desktop features, and what versions they were released in?

Let’s say I wanted to look at whether a given Gnome version supports HDR under Wayland.

Will Gnome Version XX.X always be bundled with Wayland version YY.Y if it’s bundled with Wayland at all? And if Gnome version XX.X is bundled with Wayland YY.Y which supports HDR, does that necessarily guarantee that Gnome Version XX.X supports HDR?

Or does it depend on a particular gnome component? And can those versions vary within a distribution’s gnome release? Like, can Gnome Version XX.X have different versions of Gnome subcomponent that implements my feature, and do I need to determine what that component is and what version I have and work downwards from there?

2

AFAIK there is no page that provides releases notes for the whole GNOME ecosystem going into more detail than release.gnome.org.

The more fine details can be found for the individual components. That being said, these detailed release lists can be, well detailed, and technical. They are written for those people who work more closely with the components. An combined list wouldn’t be really that useful for them. And for a normal user the technical information could be more confusing than helpful.

As for the versions:
From my understanding, the versions in a distribution will almost always be on the same time frame.
Distributions with rolling release, like Arch Linux, will pretty much always provide the latest state of software released.

And distributions with releases will often do a freeze some time before the release and the provide that set of versions for it, plus additional fixes.

As an example:
If we take the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, it provides the GNOME release from Spring 2024, so GNOME 46. It will add bug- and security fixes to it, but the features remain at this time frame. And this will largely be consistent over the system. The next set of features would be added with the next release, which on Ubuntu LTS would be 26.04.

But, in pretty much all cases, you will always find a specific release of a distribution to use the same version for the GNOME core software. You shouldn’t run into a case where for example GNOME Shell 47 is used with Mutter 48.

Anyways, unless you intend to get deep into the technical details, I wouldn’t say it brings that much to compare version numbers and features lists in that much detail.
If you pick a broadly used distribution with an frequent update cycle (think twice a year for feature releases and fast responses with bug- and security fixes), you will be on a fairly new version for it to not be an issue.

I’d personally would recommend Fedora on that matter, but that’s just my view. The non-LTS version of Ubuntu and some others may also be a good option as well.

1 Like
3

I’m actually on Fedora currently – what prompted this question was that I am looking to change to an immutable linux distribution. When I first adopted Fedora, gnome was a bit of a pain point – none of the features that I care about like Wayland support, VRR, HDR, etc. were in a very good state, and I ended up installing the KDE desktop environment instead.

I know that Gnome tends to lag behind KDE in major feature development, and that distributions take even more time to include the gnome updates after that (some taking a considerable amount of time to ensure stability), so I was looking to try and get better at discerning the differences in support between Gnome on Distribution A vs Gnome on Distribution B.

Like, when I ask someone “Does the current Bazzite support HDR, Wayland, and VRR under the Gnome desktop environment?”, and they give me a binary yes or no, they have to get that information from somewhere.

I would like to become a bit of a technical user that is able to dive into these things and understand them at depth. I am a software engineer, but I’ve never had to wrap my head around how these distributions are versioned and packaged, or how to determine whether they actually support a given feature from the packages that they do expose.

4

They checked what GNOME version Bazzite ships.

Realistically speaking, your best bet to learn about new features is to just look at https://release.gnome.org/, just like CodedOre said.

For those projects that maintain NEWS file, you can check them here Index of /sources/ . Just keep in mind that they’re often developer oriented.

5

This topic was automatically closed 45 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.