14 DAY TRIAL // As part of yesterday's GNOME 3.24 Beta desktop environment release, last minute updates for the GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window manager landed as well with numerous improvements.
In this article, we'd like to tell you about the new features and improvements that have been implemented in the first Beta release of GNOME Shell, which is the most important component of GNOME 3.24 because without it users couldn't even interact with the desktop environment.
We have to admit that the changelog of GNOME Shell 3.24 Beta, which you can find attached at the end of the article, consists mostly of various bug fixes and under-the-hood performance improvements, but we can't help but notice that a new night light indicator was added to the status area, which should warm up your computer's display at night.
There's now a "kill-switch" for user extensions in case you want to terminate a GNOME extension that doesn't work as expected, and it looks like it's now possible to toggle the power-off and suspend button on long-press. Additionally, GNOME Shell can now handle both the Ctrl+W and Ctrl+Q keyboard shortcuts in the portal window, and you'll finally be able to scroll the iBus list with the mouse wheel.
Apps are now automatically reloaded when desktop file content changes
Another interesting new feature that landed in the first Beta release of GNOME Shell 3.24 is the ability to automatically reload the application when the content of the desktop file changes, and security indicators have been added to protect the user against malicious portals, and the portal helper now uses private cache and data dirs. Moreover, GNOME Shell will now always keep the network lists sorted on rename.
A whole lot of bugs and annoyances were patched in this new pre-release version, and you should check out the attached changelog for all the technical details on that. A bunch of language translations have been updated, too, and you can download the source tarball of GNOME Shell 3.24 Beta (technical version number is 3.23.90) right now from our website if you plan on taking it for a test drive this coming weekend.