14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME development team has been hard at work and the release of the GNOME 3.12 environment is almost upon us, featuring a large number of new features and important changes.
The GNOME 3.12 desktop environment will arrive tomorrow after almost six months of development and it shows. This is one of the most interesting releases in quite a while, even if you might be tempted to think that it’s just another version in the 3.x branch.
With the release of GNOME 3.12, the old stable 3.10.2 branch will be pushed in the second tier and it will no longer receive updates. It’s very likely that most of the Linux distributions will try to upgrade to the new version, although it’s to be expected that some will choose to stick with the previous stable GNOME.
Here are just a few examples of what we can expect. GNOME Software 3.12.0 has received a lot of attention and the apps now feature an auto-generated star rating that shows the user how integrated the application is with the environment, and users will be able to continue browsing the store during the installation process.
Another very interesting feature is the ability to change the installation folder for the application, which is rather unique and it will certainly be welcomed by the community. Users can also remove the sources for a particular application, which might remove any dependency problems in the future.
Gedit 3.12 has also received a significant upgrade and the developers have made some serious changes. For example, the “new document” keyboard shortcut has been changed to ctrl+T, the application now uses GTK+ widgets and features including GtkPopover, GtkStack, GtkCenterBox, GtkHeaderBar, and CSD decorations, the GtkUIManager has been removed, and almost 3,000 lines of code have been cleaned from the source.
Also, GTK+ 3.12 has received a number of important features. One of them stands out, namely popovers. According to the developers, “one of the nice things about popovers is that they are just normal containers – you can put any widget into them, and keyboard navigation and input works like everywhere else. This is a marked contrast to menus, which are very specialized.”
Documents and Photos got a round of improvements as well, like Facebook support, a better search function, improved user help, and much more.
Other smaller fixes include changes to the system status area, airplane mode improvements, desktop file actions, and much more. Please be sure to check out our site tomorrow for the official announcement.