The GNOME developers have implemented an impressive number of features

Mar 26, 2014 19:29 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME development team has announced that the final version of its latest GNOME desktop environment 3.12 has been officially released.

GNOME 3.12 is one of the most expected updates for this desktop environment in a while, perhaps with the exception of the first release in the 3.0 branch. Even if GNOME lost a lot of supporters that day, the project has managed to win a lot of them back by improving with each new update.

Usually, GNOME major updates come with a lot of features and new options, but in 3.12 the developers have outdone themselves and it's now practically impossible to enumerate all of them. There are a couple of caveats though, which are generally true for each new version of GNOME.

Not all GNOME packages have been updated. This being such a big release, most of the apps and packages have at least a few changes, but there are some smaller packages that will not get updated. Also, you can't just download GNOME 3.12 and install it in your distribution. Actually you can, but you don't want to. It's best to wait for your distribution to get the packages in the repositories.

Here are just a few of the major improvements that you can expect to find in GNOME 3.12, although this is just scratching the surface. For example, Videos has received a brand new UI and it's now acting just like another GNOME 3 app, GNOME Software features a huge number of improvements like fresh screenshots, a new rating system, better performance, and more, and the Geolocation has been drastically improved and it's now able to use cell towers and GPS (3G modems).

“There are also major developments in the developer space, with the new notifications API, new GTK+ widgets, new capabilities for launching processes, and improved documentation. I think that 3.12 is probably our strongest for developers in a long time,” noted a GNOME developer in an older announcement.

Other packages and apps that received major updates are Photos (Facebook integration, better search), Terminal (shell search provider and line wrapping), Music (playlists), Maps (better panning between locations), the Web browser (history dialog, passwords dialog, cookies dialog, new window style for incognito mode), gedit (new simple and cooler UI, header bar), and Core.

A number of smaller but equally important changes include High DPI density display support, unicode 6.3.0 support, better developer documentation, lower memory consumption, improved symbolic icon theme, and even a new design based on user testing study funded by Intel.

You can check out the official announced on GNOME.org.