GNOME 51 arrived on September 16, 2026, wrapping up six months of development under a codename honoring A Coruña, the Galician city that hosted GUADEC 2026 in July. The headline feature isn’t a redesign, it’s something GNOME’s Maps app has lacked for years: offline maps.
What’s New
Starting with this release, Maps lets you download a region and use it without a network connection, with downloaded areas tracked in a simple list you can manage or delete. For anyone traveling abroad on a data plan, or living somewhere coverage is spotty, that’s a real, immediate use case rather than a cosmetic tweak. Maps also picked up live departure times, real-time delay information, platform and stop details, and walking-time estimates for transit directions, enough that GNOME is calling it the app’s most significant release in years.
Elsewhere, the changes are smaller but add up. Mutter’s frame scheduling was reworked so animations stay smooth under load, screen recording got faster, and GNOME now remembers monitor brightness across reboots. Settings gained auto-rotate and orientation lock for tablets with accelerometers, a touchpad-disable-on-mouse-connect option, and DNS domain search support, while support for WEP wireless security was dropped entirely.
Papers, the document viewer, can now insert visual signatures, draw one with a mouse or touchscreen, or import a photo of your handwritten signature and let Papers strip the background. They’re not cryptographically verified like a digital signature, but the release notes note they’re widely accepted for everyday paperwork. The feature came out of an Outreachy internship project by Malika Asman.
The long-neglected file previewer, Sushi, got rebuilt on GTK 4 and libadwaita, adding dark mode and matching the rest of the desktop’s look. Files, Calendar, Software, and Web all saw incremental polish: grouped notifications, a faster and more responsive Calendar month view, end-of-life warnings before installing abandoned apps, and a keyboard shortcut to copy the current page URL in Web.
Accessibility work touched the shell itself, extending Reduced Motion support and letting users fully adjust screenshot selections with the keyboard. The Circle program, GNOME’s endorsement for community apps welcomed three newcomers: the SQLite browser Bobby, the counter app Tally, and Bazaar, a new Flathub-focused app store.
GNOME 51 rolls out to major Linux distributions over the coming weeks. Users who don’t want to wait can try it via GNOME OS Nightlies or grab updated GNOME apps directly from Flathub now.
