Elementary OS 6.1 “Jolnir” has been released. It’s the follow-up to Elementary 6 Odin, which was released four months ago. In that period, they boasted 240K downloads, not including torrents.
Of course, Elementary OS 6 users already have all the new features because this distribution is a rolling release. But for newcomers, there’s a ton of new stuff to look at, so let’s begin.
What’s New in Elementary OS 6.1 Jolnir
That new release is called Jolnir. For those of you who are unaware, this is basically another name for Odin.
On the desktop side, Elementary OS 6.1 brings improvements and polish across the entire space. The distro got a new app switcher – the thing that comes up when you hit Alt+Tab.
Previously, it was a subset of the dock with only the open app icons visible. It flashed all over the place and didn’t show individual windows.
The new one is a return to the basic Alt+Tab switcher. It displays in the middle of the screen and shows one icon per open window, which is much more usable.
Elementary OS apps also now have an app picker that lets you choose an app to open a file with if multiple apps are available to handle the same file type, which is pretty handy.
The dark mode is now a standard which means that apps from other toolkits will be able to respect it once they implement that new standard.
It should arrive in GNOME 42, so Elementary apps should respect the theme in GNOME 42 and GNOME apps that are updated should respect the theme in Elementary OS if you set it to dark mode.
KDE could also implement that standard in the future if they choose to do so.
Finally, the Applications menu now offers more search results for your favorite folders or network shares. It’s still not a full file search, which is really missing from the Elementary OS experience, but it’s still a step in the right direction.
In addition, you can now right-click on an app icon and choose to open it using the dedicated GPU if your computer has a hybrid model, such as an NVIDIA card and Intel integrated graphics.
The Sound indicator uses new device icons to better represent each output and input and the buggy analog devices that sometimes appeared are now removed. The scroll interaction on the volume slider has been also improved to work with horizontal scrolling.
The default Elementary OS 6.1 apps also got some updates. Mail now groups notifications for new messages when multiple ones arrive simultaneously. Mail also got a new toolbar with a refresh button to check for new mail and new filter options manually.
The Task app introduced with Elementary OS 6 Odin has a more secure shortcut to delete tasks and prevent accidental deletion. Performance has been improved a lot, and tasks can now be moved from one list to another through simple drag-and-drop.
The Epiphany browser has moved to version 41, which features a redesigned tab bar, rounded corners, and a new and better preferences dialogue. Users can also turn on Google search recommendations, and the browser has much-improved performance and compatibility.
The file manager got plenty of fixes on the creation of bookmarks in the sidebar and now supports multiple drag selections by pressing the Ctrl key. On top of that, you can now also select all, deselect all, or invert the selection from a right-click menu.
The AppCenter also received several updates in Elementary OS 6.1. The homepage has been reworked, with banners for the most recently released apps and a list of recently updated ones directly underneath, along with their short description and an install button. Moreover, the homepage loads much faster.
Since Elementary OS has added Flatpak support, you’ll find over 90 curated apps in the AppCenter.
The System Settings also got some improvements. First, the Display settings will only show the resolutions that respect your display’s aspect ratio. All other resolutions are stashed in a sub-menu, which is handy to pick only a resolution that looks normal and not stretched.
The text scaling option, which serves in Elementary OS 6.1 as a replacement for fractional scaling, is now more granular, and you can set it to the exact size you want.
The keyboard settings have a more straightforward way of creating your own keyboard shortcuts, and now you can switch the on-screen keyboard ON from the layouts tab.
You can refer to the official announcement for detailed information about all changes.
Download
You can download Elementary OS 6.1 from the project’s website through a “pay-what-you-want” option. If you don’t want to pay, you need to manually enter “0” in the custom amount box for a download link to appear.
Of course, we encourage you to donate to this amazing Linux distribution if it’s within your means.
