What’s new in GNOME 3.24

The latest GNOME release doesn’t have too many user-facing changes, although it does feature NightLight, which tweaks your display temperature to reduce the amount of blue light it radiates during night hours. By making the display warmer at night time, eyestrain and tiredness should be reduced. Such programs have been around for a while, for example there’s the cross-platform but closed source f.lux, or the open source Redshift. People, in particular the people that write for Linux magazines, are spending more and more time looking at screens well into the small hours and their retinal health and circadian rhythms are suffering. So it’s nice to see this functionality being incorporated natively into GNOME now, if nothing else it’s one less out-of-place icon in the system tray. Also Redshift doesn’t currently work with Wayland, and seems to disagree with heavy duty applications such as Chromium, where as NightLight played nicely with everything during our testing.

Besides saving our retinae, GNOME 3.24 includes some new applications which can be installed separately – Recipes is pretty much what you’d expect. It can make shopping lists for you and lets you share your own recipes too. There’s a fullscreen mode too which could be handy if you have a touch-enabled laptop in the kitchen. There’s also Games, which can manage not only natively-installed DRM-free games, but also your Steam library and libretropowered emulators.