14 DAY TRIAL // Matthias Clasen had the pleasure of announcing last evening, May 3, that the first development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment is ready for download and testing.
We, here at Softpedia, are monitoring the development process of the GNOME desktop environment very closely, and we can report that this first development release has very few updated packages, as compared with other testing versions from the past.
"GNOME 3.9 development is starting up, with the 3.9.1 snapshot that is marking the beginning of this development cycle. Features are still being proposed and discussed. To compile GNOME 3.9.1, you can use the jhbuild modulesets (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release)." said Matthias Clasen in the official release announcement.
GNOME 3.9.1 comes only with the following updated applications: Anjuta, Cheese, Evolution, File-Roller, GNOME Chess, GNOME Nettool and Seahorse. For detailed changelogs of each application you can check out our website.
This first development release also updates the following main GNOME components: Glib2, Glib-Networking, Glibmm, ATKmm, GCR, GJS, GNOME Keyring, GNOME Online Accounts, GNOME Shell, GNOME Shell Extensions, Gstreamer Plugins Base, Gstreamer Plugins Good, Gstreamer, GTK+, Gvfs, GTKmm, Libgweather, Libsoup, Mutter, Pangomm, PyGobject and Tracker.
To mention a few notable changes from this release, the GNOME Online Accounts enables IMAP/SMTP by default, Fille-Roller supports tar.rz archives, the Workspace-indicator, Window-list and XRandr-indicator GNOME-Shell extensions have been updated, and Gstreamer adds better support for static plugins.
The next development release will be GNOME 3.9.2, which should be available for testing sometime at the end of this month, followed by GNOME 3.9.3 on March 27, 2013.
Download GNOME Shell 3.9.1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.