GNOME 50.5 has been released as the latest maintenance update to the old-stable GNOME 50 desktop series. With GNOME 51 now the current stable branch, this release mainly targets distributions and users that continue to ship or run GNOME 50. In total, 22 components received updates.
GNOME Shell 50.5 fixes several user-visible issues, including glitches when switching workspaces with direct scanout, blocking when toggling wireless connectivity, duplicated locale keyboard layouts, and issues around the lock and unlock screens.
The update also ensures windows created through the new-window action open on the correct workspace, limits parallel texture loading, fixes a crash, and plugs several memory leaks.
Mutter 50.5 includes a broader collection of fixes. These include a hang triggered when hot-plugging an external monitor, multiple monitors incorrectly reported as primary, desaturated SDR content when HDR mode is enabled, and problems with cross-GPU buffer scanout.
The window manager and compositor also improve direct scanout handling, fix several crashes and memory leaks, and address graphical glitches related to resource scale changes.
GTK 4.22.5 fixes a Wayland-related segmentation fault, build failures on 32-bit ARM systems, pointer focus handling when unmapping popovers, text decoration invalidation, and several dmabuf and rendering issues.
GDM addresses an authentication regression caused by an earlier security fix. It also resolves two potential use-after-free problems, one of which could cause an entire user session to crash during screen lock or unlock.
Security fixes are also included elsewhere in the stack. GVfs 1.60.3 addresses CVE-2026-88924 related to socket ownership in its administrative backend and fixes DAV response body leaks that could cause hangs.
Meanwhile, librsvg 2.62.4 fixes a use-after-free involving duplicate XML entities inside nested XInclude documents and updates dependencies affected by two RustSec advisories.
GNOME’s Epiphany web browser moves from version 50.4 to 50.6, fixing multiple crashes, an autofill JavaScript code injection issue, and a WebExtension XPI ZIP path traversal vulnerability.
Nautilus fixes a possible crash when changing application defaults after closing the application chooser, and GNOME Software speeds up the Software Repositories dialog on non-Fedora package-based systems.
Other updated components include libadwaita 1.9.4, libsecret 0.21.8.2, GNOME Maps 50.5, LocalSearch 3.11.2, gcr 4.4.1, and several supporting libraries.
For additional details, visit the announcement or review all the changes here.
GNOME 50 users are recommended to update once the new packages become available in their Linux distribution’s repositories.
