GNOME 44, the latest release of the popular desktop environment for Linux, was released recently. As always, Learn Linux TV has a full review so you can check out all of its new features. It’s a great release, although one feature in particular completely missed its mark.
It seems like Gnome likes to push out their WIP projects. It’s good that they’re working on the background apps or security dashboard functionality, but when things are missing it causes confusion and that reduces the excitement for new features. People won’t use the features and won’t realize when they improved because they stopped looking to it for anything helpful.
My prediction for the security dashboard? People are going to forget about it until it’s finished, and it may not get as much excitement as it could have if it just launched when it was ready. But then again, I could also see the logic behind release something unfinished but stable to get feedback.
I think this is more as a “preview” of what’s coming, since there are only a few distributions that ship with the latest versions of Gnome, or at least without any modifications to some extent.
For me, the main thing that I wish Gnome would re-introduce is desktop icons… it’s called a desktop environment, after all.