GNOME 51 adds passkey logins, offline maps and drawn PDF signatures
GNOME 51 ships passkey and smart card logins, offline Maps, and drops proprietary NVIDIA driver support for GeForce 700-series and older cards.
GNOME 51, codenamed A Coruña, was released on September 16 and will ship in Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10. GDM adds smart card, passkey and QR code login, while the Settings Network panel drops legacy WEP Wi-Fi encryption. The release removes EGLStreams/EGLDevice code from Mutter, so older GeForce cards (700 series and earlier, except GTX 750 Ti/750/745) lose the proprietary NVIDIA driver under GNOME and fall back to Nouveau. Papers gains hand-drawn visual PDF signatures, though they carry no cryptographic signer identity or tamper detection.
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