GNOME 51 Brings Passkeys and Offline Maps, Drops Support for Older NVIDIA Cards

GNOME 51 arrived on September 16 under the codename A Coruña, bringing a suite of features aimed at making the Linux desktop more capable and secure. The new version adds offline maps and live transit information to the Maps application, introduces passkey authentication at the login screen, and allows users to draw signatures directly onto PDF documents. It also smooths out animations when the system is under heavy load and speeds up screen recording. Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with it when they release in the coming weeks.

But the update also takes something away. Owners of older NVIDIA graphics cards—the GeForce 700 series and earlier, with a few exceptions like the GTX 750 Ti—will lose support for NVIDIA's proprietary driver on the GNOME desktop. Those users will fall back to Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA driver, which runs older cards in a basic mode. A GeForce GTX 780, for instance, will no longer have access to the optimized proprietary driver that GNOME 51 expects.

The Maps application received what GNOME's release notes call the app's "most exciting release in years." Users can now download a region and navigate it without any network connection, with downloaded areas appearing in a list for easy access. Transit directions have been substantially upgraded: the app now shows live departures at stops, real-time delays in journey instructions, platform information, and walking times between a destination and the nearest transit stop. Other applications received smaller improvements—Image Viewer now displays camera and color information, Calendar underwent performance and accessibility refinements, and the Web browser gained the ability to generate passwords.

The login screen, known as GDM, now supports smart card authentication, passkey logins, and QR code sign-in. Remote Desktop gained smartcard passthrough and Kerberos login, a feature particularly useful for organizations whose authentication already runs through Kerberos infrastructure. Fingerprint enrollment in Settings received a redesigned interface, and Remote Login now supports SSH socket servers. Papers, GNOME's document viewer, allows users to add visual signatures by drawing with a mouse or touchscreen or by importing an image, with the background automatically removed. The signature appears as an image on the page, but it contains no identifying information about the signer and cannot detect whether the document was edited after signing—anyone with the PDF file can add their own drawn signature.

Mutter, GNOME's compositor, now schedules frames so animations remain smooth even when the system is under load. Screen recording became faster after redundant buffer copies were eliminated. The system now remembers monitor brightness settings across reboots and preserves HDR toggle states. Laptops with hybrid graphics gained cross-GPU buffer scanout capability. Settings added Auto Rotate for devices with an accelerometer, an orientation lock, and an option to disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected. Accessibility improvements include broader support for Reduced Motion, keyboard-only screenshot area selection, and a setting to remove the focus-ring timeout. Files, also called Nautilus, now shows a count badge while dragging, no longer clears selections when clicking empty space, and remains responsive during slow operations.

The technical reason for dropping NVIDIA support traces back to how the driver communicates with Wayland, the modern display protocol. Jonas Ådahl, a Mutter developer, removed code that supported two NVIDIA-specific paths: EGLStreams, which applications used to draw on Wayland, and EGLDevice paired with EGLStream, which Mutter used to drive screen updates. NVIDIA created EGLStreams as its own route to Wayland, and no other GPU vendor adopted it. NVIDIA later added support for GBM, the buffer-allocation method Intel and AMD drivers use, making the old path obsolete for current hardware. In the commit removing the legacy code, Ådahl noted that the old approach had long been "replaced with the standard DMA buffer passing protocol in Wayland." That statement is accurate for current NVIDIA hardware. It is not accurate for owners of older GeForce cards.

Users running GNOME on older NVIDIA cards with the proprietary driver should check what their distribution installs before upgrading to Fedora 45 or Ubuntu 26.10. Newer NVIDIA cards using current drivers already rely on GBM and should experience no change. The official coverage does not specify which driver branches are affected, so the card model itself becomes the determining factor. The Settings Network panel also dropped WEP, a legacy Wi-Fi encryption standard, though the coverage does not clarify whether GNOME's lower-level networking tools still connect to WEP networks—anyone with an old access point should test before upgrading.

Fedora 45 is targeted for October 20, with October 27 as a fallback date. That timeline gives owners of older GeForce cards 34 days to decide: switch to Nouveau, purchase newer hardware, or postpone the upgrade. GNOME 52 is planned for March 2027.