elementary OS 7 "Horus" Released. This is What's New

Discover the exciting new features and improvements in the latest elementary OS 7 release.

The wait is over. The new version of elementary OS 7 “Horus” is now officially available to download. This version was under development for more than a year by the elementary team. Hence you can expect many improvements across the desktops and applications.

Let’s take a look at the key highlights.

elementary OS 7: New Features

At the core, elementary OS 7 is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (first point release as of writing this). Since it follows the Ubuntu LTS cycle, this is the first elementary OS release with Ubuntu “Jammy Jellyfish”.

The mainline Linux LTS Kernel 5.15 supports a wide range of hardware, new CPU, and GPU line-ups.

Although it has been almost a year since the Ubuntu 22.04 release, the elementary OS team carefully built this version to give you a solid, bug-free experience.

Installation and welcome

The native elementary OS 7 installation wizard gets some usability updates, such as prompts for power source, network connection status and warning for virtual machines. Also, the overall pages for installation are streamlined and reduced, which gives you a perfect set of steps for installation.

When you start elementary OS 7 first time, the welcome app offers you some basic presets to customize your desktop experience. You now get a new option to enable automatic update and “sunset to sunrise” mode for light/dark switching.

New option of sunset-sunrise in onboarding app — New option of sunset-sunrise in the onboarding app

Power profiles and custom commands

In addition, for the first time in elementary OS 7, you get the three new power profile modes. They are power savers, balanced and performance. Most leading desktop environments have recently added this feature, including GNOME and KDE Plasma. So, if you are using it in Laptops, expect a better battery performance overall, thanks to Kernel 5.15 LTS and under-the-hood changes.

One of the best features in this release is the custom terminal commands for the hot corners. For example, launching a terminal or running any commands is now possible by moving the cursor to extreme corners. This feature is going to be a productivity booster for many workflows.

Responsiveness and GTK 4

The overall direction of this release is towards porting native apps with GTK 4 while maintaining unique design guidelines of elementary OS. Keeping the balance is what the developers are trying to establish. It will take time to adopt GTK 4 in all the corners completely. However, considerable changes have arrived in this version.

Hence, most of the key apps are now responsive. That means it can adapt to various screen sizes and form factors. This includes AppCenter, Music and text editor Code. They all look great in smaller to larger displays.

Key changes in native apps

The email app Mail now supports a unified mailbox with Microsft 365 exchange accounts. Also, it gives you a most professional look of a desktop email client.

The elementary OS team added GNOME Web version 43 as the default web browser. That means you can now create web apps for your favourite websites. However, you can always install the Firefox web browser.

Finally, the file manager allows choosing the double-click and single-click folder open options. This has been missing for some time since the option was not available in gsettings. I am sure, many users will be glad to get this feature without any dconf-editor hack.

option to open folder with single or double click

Other updates

The entire change is vast, and here’s a summary of the rest of the enhancements:

AppCenter now supports two-finger swipe gestures for touch devices
The detailed view of AppCenter now features improved screenshots with app accent colour
Improved side loading of Flatpak apps from Flathub
The printer settings dialog is enhanced with a clear look, and the ink status display
Three GNOME apps ship in this release: GNOME Web, Archive Manager and Document Viewer (version 43)
Almost all app icons are redesigned and give you a refreshed look of the desktop