After being in hard development for six months, the gnome foundation announces finally the general availability of the stable release of the popular Linux desktop environment Gnome 3.38 codenamed "Orbis".
This release showcases a new "Tour" application shown at first login after the initial setup. It primarily highlights the main functionality of the desktop, giving first-time users a nice welcome to GNOME.
In GNOME 3.38, the "Frequent" and "All apps" views have been replaced with a single customizable and consistent view that allows you to reorder apps and organize them into custom folders by simply click and drag to move apps around, several utilities like the screenshot tool, the sound recorder app have been visually refreshed, and users can now manage parental controls for Standard user accounts through the new Parental Controls option in the Settings app ( in the Users section) and the installed applications can be filtered from the application overview preventing them from being launched by the managed user, Parental Controls are also integrated with existing Software application restrictions, allowing you to select which applications can be installed.
The Settings includes also a new fingerprint enrollment interface for devices with fingerprint readers, and protection from unauthorized USB devices when the screen is locked, and an option to show battery percentage indicator in the system menu.
In the Wayland sessions, GNOME Shell can now drive multiple monitors with different refresh rates, the default browser Epiphany or "GNOME Web" features now an Intelligent Tracking Prevention to protect users from cross-site tracking, and it is enabled by default, support for importing passwords and bookmarks from Google Chrome, a redesigned password manager, the ability to mute or unmute individual tabs, redesigned preferences and history dialogs, and the privacy settings in the browser now allow blocking websites from storing any local data in your browser.
The Maps app can now display labels in the satellite view, and switch Maps to night mode to emphasize the visual content of the maps, and the Games app now supports Nintendo 64 games, has some improvements to the search functionality in the app, a new "collections" tab has been added to the app, so you can organize games into groups for easy access.
This release brings also some new icons for The Calculator, Cheese, Tali, Sudoku, Robots, Quadrapassel, and Nibbles apps, and for developers and advanced users, Boxes now allows editing a virtual machine’s liberty XML directly, enabling them to change advanced settings not available in the user interface.