Everything you love, made even better. OS 8.1 improves the Secure Session and Dock, enhances accessibility, improves support for your devices, and addresses your feedback with over 1,100 issue reports fixed
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@elementary Sounds like a great release! And awesome to hear how much work you've put into accessibility!
In OS 8 we kept the Classic Session as default with the option to try a Secure Session. Since then we’ve released updates fixing issues, app developers have updated, and hardware makers have fixed issues in their drivers. The Secure Session now provides a better experience for most people and supports a broader range of modern hardware
In OS 8.1, the Secure Session is now the default session, with the option to fall back to the Classic Session if you still need it
Password authentication dialogs have a new feature in a Secure Session: when opened, the rest of the screen will dim and other windows won’t be allowed to steal focus. This prevents accidentally typing your password anywhere other than the authentication dialog and you’ll be able to make sure these are legitimate system dialogs and not an application trying to read your password
We’ve brought the workspace switcher up from the Multitasking View directly into the Dock. You can press the “+” tile to open new workspaces or select an existing workspace to switch to it, drag-n-drop to rearrange workspaces and, clicking on a workspace that’s already open will show the Multitasking View
In AppCenter we now show a simple percentage-based app rating when ratings are available from ODRS—the same ratings server used by apps like GNOME Software. When developers provide screenshots for multiple platforms, we now show you the ones intended for elementary OS. We’ve added support for app addons, and we now show when a game supports playing with controllers
This year @zersiax joined us again for another round of accessibility testing. Installer views should all have much improved accessible labels. Thanks to this feedback, OS 8.1 can be installed and set up completely blind in most cases.
Thanks to feedback from @fireborn, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both added screen reader support. We’ve also improved screen reader labels in Calendar, In System Settings → Firmware updates, and in AppCenter to name a few cases.
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In System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts → Custom you can now choose from a list of installed apps and their actions—in addition to being able to execute custom commands. This makes it super straightforward to add a keyboard shortcut for your most common workflows like composing a new email or adding a new Calendar event. Plus System Settings will also now warn you if your desired keyboard shortcut conflicts with a common system shortcut like "Copy", "Paste", or "New Tab"
For the first time we now also offer ARM64 builds for devices that boot with UEFI. This means you'll be able to run OS 8.1 on M-series Apple Silicon and devices where you can load UEFI-supporting firmware like Raspberry Pi. This version of Linux also supports certain Qualcomm and Rockchip processors, for example
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