The GNOME Project has officially released GNOME 48.7, a maintenance update for the old-stable GNOME 48 desktop environment series, described as a “boring bug-fix update”.
Many core modules in the GNOME stack received new version bumps in this release: at-spi2-core moved from 2.56.5 to 2.56.7; gnome-boxes from 48.0 to 48.1; gnome-control-center from 48.4 to 48.5; gnome-shell from 48.5 to 48.7; mutter from 48.5 to 48.7; libadwaita from 1.7.7 to 1.7.9; gtk+-3 from 3.24.50 to 3.24.51; and others.
The most important key fixes and improvements include:
- The GNOME Shell 48.7 component addresses several issues, including a wrong network icon on connectivity loss, improved session list sorting on the login screen, extended on-screen keyboard layouts for German and Austrian locales, elimination of zombie VPN authentication helper processes, and fixes for freezes triggered by modifier-only layout shortcut actions.
- Mutter received fixes for Wayland fullscreen window constraints and crash stability.
- at-spi2-core version 2.56.7 closes memory leaks and corrects ‘child’ reference handling, which is relevant for accessibility stack users (for example, with orca and evolution).
- Gnome-remote-desktop 48.3 includes a GPU-related fix for image corruption on some NVIDIA hardware.
At the same time, some GNOME modules were not upgraded in this release. The announcement explicitly lists many components—including NetworkManager, the gnome-software package, gnome-session, gnome-settings-daemon, and others—that remain at their previous versions.
For more information, visit the official announcement or review all the changes here.
GNOME 48.7 desktop environment is expected to land in the repos of distributions already offering version 48 over the following weeks. As usual, rolling-release ones will be the first to push it out to their users.
