Just took a good look at Gnome 42.2. I know it’s only a point release, but they seem to have been busy. The glitches in the UI are happening less often. Gnome Software actually has some content instead of that annoying error of no packages. Some blogs I read even said that is how Gnome will stay. Glad I stuck it out. They still need to top up the repository, but installing was relatively painless. I tried by installing Signal, and I have to say, there is no real reason to keep Pamac (which I only used to look up the right package name), then I would download it with yay. Seems Gnome Software has that working well now and I like their integrated approach, since I don’t have plans of moving away from the DE.
Overall, I’m fairly pleased with Gnome 42. It has completely replaced my previous DE and has relolutionized my workflow. Now it looks like it is getting some more polish. Can’t wait for the September release.
Did I miss any improvements to the the point release apart from stability?
I guess it all depends where you are coming from. Let me explain…
Back in 2001/3ish, I ran Red Hat with Gnome and it was a real nightmare: riddled with bugs, klunky, slow and just a bad end user experience, but it was a GUI of sorts. I vowed not to use it again, and went to Windows 2000 Workstation and stayed in the MS camp even through Windows NT 4.0/5.0 generations, blah, blah, blah.
Fast forward today, I decided to bite the bullet when I found in February, and saw @dalto’s Btrfs Assistant and wanted to try Gnome 42 with Btrfs and Btrfs Assistant. Well Calamares installed it out of the box, and so it’s been a breath of fresh air, except for the minor growing pains I described above.
So looking at how far Gnome has come, I would say a few bugs are a small price to pay.
I’ve been using GNOME since version 0.9* and I’ve seen so much that today’s bugs don’t even look like bugs, sometimes I see people saying that the X,Y,Z feature is missing then I remember that it was removed for some reason that I don’t remember which, but usually for security and sandboxing reasons.
Now i’m trying to use an mix of fedora rawhide, flatpaks and some 43.alpha applications compiled, gnome-software now in fedora rawhide oficially, i compiled Settings (OK) and unfortunately nautilus didn’t work because it conflicted with gnome-shell because the gnome-desktop4 library required by nautilus is the latest.
Im super hyped for the extensions update of gnome web
Its really a pretty great browser especially for anything needing video decoding which it trashes anything else on linux. The only thing keeping me away was extensions.
So using epiphany with extensions vs FF with privacy tweaks + extensions = roughly the same fingerprint data BUT epiphany instead on some of the data gives out false info vs just N/A
Epiphany looks to identify partially as being Safari (which makes sense), they both reveal 17.74bits of info. EFF still gives epiphany a lower score here n the tracker test.
Epiphany Left, FF Right
Gnome Web in G43 is looking to be daily driver material
if using flatpak these are the minimum permissions afaik in flatseal for Epiphany to work properly (unless you need x11) along with access to xdg-download
I guess it all depends where you are coming from. Let me explain…
in February, and saw 
