How to install GNOME 47 Beta on Arch Linux

Gnome 47

GNOME 47 is close to release and as usual brings with it interesting new features.

I tried to install it on Arch main desktop but I had a black screen and only the active cursor, with Wayland and Xorg. I suspect Nvidia drivers issues, I tried installing the beta drivers but then gave up due to too many risks and unresolved dependencies.

I used my glorious Dell 7548 with Radeon GPU and everything work well.

GNOME Shell 47 now supports accent colors. This feature was added along with support for the Wayland DRM lease protocol in Mutter. Last year, XDG-Desktop-Portal introduced accent color support, and KDE Plasma 6 also supports it. Now, GNOME Shell can use accent colors too. Users can choose their accent color through GNOME Settings.

Libadwaita also added accent color support recently. Alice Mikhaylenko worked on the GNOME Shell accent color support for the past year. It is now ready for the GNOME 47 release in September.

GNOME 47 what’s new

Use hardware encoding for screen recordings if possible.
Allow notification portal to always use GTK protocol.
Improve Persian on-screen keyboard layout.
Build and publish GNOME OS systemd-sysext extensions.
Make overview startup notification more reliable.
Fix keyboard navigation in app folders.
Support exporting DebugControl service from looking glass.
Use low-power pipeline in screen recorder if possible.
Show notification when detecting captive portal.
Fix connecting to WPA2 enterprise networks.
Use unlinked rounded buttons in notifications and dialogs.
Misc. bug fixes and cleanups.

GNOME 47.0 is set to be released in mid-September.

Mutter compositor “47.beta”

The updates for Mutter 47 beta include:

Fixing visibility issues with XWayland.
Starting to support color state transformation for HDR.
Building and publishing GNOME OS systemd-sysext extensions.
Adding support for tablet tool key bindings and actions.
Supporting tablet tool pressure ranges.
Improving the behavior of transient dialogs.
Mutter can now recover from secondary GPU update failures.
Fixing memory leaks and other bugs.

How to install GNOME 47 beta on Arch Linux

Fabian Bornschein’s FGCU repositories no longer exist because “the project lead is now part of the Arch Linux crew, FCGU was dropped in favor of Arch’ gnome-unstable Repo“.

It is possible to install GNOME unstable by following official Arch Linux wiki guide.

In the past I had already tried to use this official unstable repositories but they were never updated, now it’s different thanks to the addition of FGCU.

The procedure is the same. Add the following code before the core section in /etc/pacman.conf.

Positioning is important to avoid carrying out partial updates that block the system.

[gnome-unstable]

Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

To install give the command

# pacman -Syuu

Remove or comment repo and give command again to uninstall all unstable packages