GNOME 51 Ships Passkey Login, Drops Nvidia's Old Driver Path

GNOME 51 shipped Sept. 16 under the codename "A Coruña," named for the Galician city that hosted GUADEC 2026 in July. Matthias Clasen, posting for the GNOME release team on the project's own discussion forum, wrote: "The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 51, 'A Coruña.'"

The release adds FIDO2 passkey support to the GNOME Display Manager, alongside existing smartcard and web-based login methods, according to OMG! Ubuntu. Remote desktop sessions also gained Kerberos authentication, and a user can now plug a smartcard into the machine they are working from and use it on the machine they have connected to.

Maps works offline, and Nvidia's old path is gone

GNOME's Maps app can now download a chosen region for use without a network connection, and shows live transit departure times and delays where data is available, according to the project's official release notes. The same notes describe reworked scheduling in Mutter, GNOME's window compositor, intended to keep animations smooth when the system is under load.

Phoronix reported additional changes the release notes do not mention: a new ext-background-effect-v1 Wayland protocol, support for custom pointer acceleration profiles, and cross-GPU buffer scan-out in Mutter. The same report says GNOME 51 drops legacy support for Nvidia's EGLStreams driver path, a technical detail missing from the project's own user-facing notes. File Previewer also received what Phoronix called a complete interface redesign.

Fingerprint enrollment gets a redo

The Users settings tool has a new fingerprint enrollment interface, and the About page (renamed System Details in recent releases) was reorganized with a button that opens the release notes for whichever GNOME version is installed, per the release notes. A new Reduced Motion toggle under Accessibility now dampens animation in more of the shell's own widgets and menus than earlier releases allowed.

Ubuntu 26.10 gets it Oct. 15; the LTS branch does not

Fedora 45 already carries GNOME 51, and Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with it when that release arrives Oct. 15, OMG! Ubuntu reported. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS stays on GNOME 50, because, as the outlet put it, new GNOME releases are not backported to Ubuntu's long-term support branch. Rolling-release distributions may package GNOME 51 sooner than either.

Distribution	GNOME 51 status
Fedora 45	Ships with GNOME 51 now
Ubuntu 26.10	Ships with GNOME 51 on Oct. 15
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS	Stays on GNOME 50

The GNOME release team's own announcement sets the next release for March 2027 and points to GNOME Asia 2026, planned for Terengganu, Malaysia, as the project's next community gathering. Anyone tracking how open-source tooling gets built and reviewed or how projects handle a surge of AI-assisted contributions will recognize the same volunteer-driven rhythm behind a desktop release that still ships on a fixed six-month clock.

Neither GNOME's release notes nor the outlets covering them put a number on how much smoother frame delivery actually is under load, leaving the improvement to Mutter as a claim to test rather than a figure to cite.