 okay so as you know GNOME 42 was released and I was super interested in actually seeing how it performed and today I'm using a virtual box this is actually boxes by GNOME which is a pretty cool application I had never used it and it just works nicely so what's new in GNOME 42 currently I'm using GNOME 40 so I'm gonna go check the differences and the settings I'm used to type system settings because of so I can immediately already see that the look is different as an example the shadows were not there before and I think it's pretty nice the light gray also seems lighter in the header but that might also be because I'm using the Ubuntu theme in GNOME 40 still it's pretty nice and we now have an appearance tab and this is actually new from GNOME 42 which sounds weird to a person that has used like kdplasma for his entire life because appearance sounds like something you should always have but it actually has this nice feature that kdplasma doesn't have which is dynamic wallpaper so let's try a couple and I think it's incredibly cool that you can switch between wallpapers when you switch from light to dark theme I'm slightly confused by the fact that the light theme preview also has a dark window I guess that does to say that this remains dark my best guess is we also have a new look here if I'm not mistaken there's no more like indicator and it looks pretty nice like it's a let me try a couple more oh this wallpaper is lovely actually I like this one and again dynamic wallpapers which is impressive to say the least and I wonder if you can actually add dynamic wallpapers of course I have no pictures so I can test that but I wonder if you can like add a new wallpaper that's not just an image but also two images and just switch between them depending on the system theme for sure the distribution maintainers can do that the wallpapers by the way are very nice I was just going through them I like that and there's the new look here you've still got balanced versus power saving and wi-fi hopefully I've seen some mock-ups of being actually able to see like what audio I'm using directly here that would be super cool to have there's also by the way it's just style and background in the appearance tab which is less than other desktops but I mean at least it's that and also this multitasking multitasking window might not be new in gnome 42 but I surely don't have it in gnome 40 so I wanted to give it a look we've got an option to turn on and off the odd corner and active screen edges to drag windows to resize them and although I got to say I don't know why you you would want to turn this one off it's nice to have a the option to have a fixed number of workspaces although I totally do prefer dynamic ones and you have these options in case you have multi monitors on where to show the overview effect and finally if you want to include application from all workspaces or from the current workspace only when you do applications switching I'm not sure what that actually means let's try it out okay so you can see that I do have both files and settings even though they are in different workspaces and by the way files is completely looking different from what I'm used to and in theory I should also have in here the new text editor and the new console as well so let's pop that one up as well the new console what was that corrections connections the icons are so nice to see though so what I'm really impressed by oh so this is dark mode so maybe that's what was referenced in system settings what I'm really impressed by is W2D to set the theme directly from the menu bar and I guess this one is hard coded to black but you can change it to follow system theme and that's wow that's a very nice feature I really like it this I guess is text size and let's do a new file right now the text editor is very bareborn but I've seen some like developments in Twitter and it makes it look very good let's show line numbers and the right margin like right now it seems to be missing the text preview but I've seen that it is a feature that's coming and it looked super good on that peak on Twitter so a touch screen scrolling which is actually a feature that I love from g-edit or g-edit as whatever you call it seems to be missing here but that might be because of boxes I never understood I usually test live but I couldn't do it today and this is the console similarly you've got themes and that's actually about it you've got tabs even though I like a lot kd plasma I'm not against title bars that contains button the header bars especially considering that you can drag and drop from anywhere and that's something that you cannot say about kd plasma like of course you can drag and drop from anywhere on the title bar but if you try to drag and drop from Dolphin's location bar it actually doesn't work even though visually speaking the location bar is inside the header bar section of the window I'm totally impressed by the look the new look also something that's new in GNOME 42 so let's give it a look is the new way to take screenshots button which is this one so there is a integrated UI which looks very nice and you can drag and drop this square to select the place you can also do a whole screen or a particular window and there's a UI to actually select what window we're talking about you can apparently even do context menus in particular and you can switch between screenshot and screencast I wonder if screencast actually works I mean I'm recording through obvious so that should be fine and we can see the recording on the top right and let's try to move this out of the way and then stop it let's view the video and it seems to work flawlessly that's actually impressive and if it works on Wayland and I guess why not that's super useful for me when actually testing out GNOME 42 if I want to show a new feature when actually using the hardware that's super useful because most desktops don't actually come with a screen record and built-in did the screenshot the thing disappeared and it's not coming back hello oh where it is the only weird thing is that it starts from the crop area being at the center I personally think it's much better if you start from like full screen or you just select an area and it's not assumed to be this area at the center at the beginning but that's such a minor thing that shouldn't be of an issue whatsoever let's take a screenshot and you then get a digic sound which is pretty cool let's open up the screenshot and that works nicely as well notification seems to be working pretty well and this is the calendar if I add something I guess I never try this it's not about GNOME 42 specifically but if I add an hello it's me event like this just and then close it it's going to be here here wow well that's super nice in KD Plasma it's nowhere as simple and luckily because you do actually have to install the KU organizer or at least akonade and sometimes it's not included by default and the UI is not exactly the best right now but calendar is going to change that there are still some applications like this one that force the black theme but don't actually provide a option to switch between them I guess is that here these are actually the new lib at white applications as far as as I know and I mean if this is the future of GNOME then the future of GNOME looks solid really solid