14 DAY TRIAL // Javier Jardón from the GNOME development team has announced that the second development version of GNOME 3.13.x has been released and is now available for download.
The development cycle for the next iteration of GNOME has just reached its second milestone, and this branch will eventually evolve into GNOME 3.14, which is scheduled for launch in September 2014.
Unlike the previous 3.11.x development cycle, the current release seems to be arriving on time and with some very important changes and improvements. The developers have already implemented a number of significant changes in some of the packages, but the most interesting one is probably the Wayland support, which has received more attention than usual.
“Note that as part of Wayland development, 3.13.2 temporarily depends on systemd. This is needed because Wayland support in GNOME depends on systemd, but before 3.14 is released Wayland support will be made optional.”
“This release is a snapshot of early development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status,” reads the official announcement.
This was to be expected, because the GNOME developers have announced right from the start that they intend to make the Wayland integration much better. In fact, the Wayland support was supposed to be present in the 3.12 release, but this is a complex piece of software and it's difficult to integrate.
Also, Wayland still has some problems that need to be solved somehow. For example, there is no official support for it in the NVIDIA and AMD drivers, which means that users will have to employ the open source drivers and those don't really provide the optimal experience possible. It's unclear when this support will arrive, but it's out of their hands.
GNOME 3.13.2 updates the following core apps: atk, baobab, empathy, eye of gnome, gtk+, gucharmap, epiphany, evolution-data-server, gnome-backgrounds, gnome-desktop, gnome shell, libgdata, libgweather, mutter, trackerm vte, and a few others.
As usual, a number of applications have also been updated, such as Glade, Evolution, Gedit, Polari, Seahorse, Vinagre, GNOME Music, and many more.
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download GNOME 3.13.2 sources right now from Softpedia. Regular customers won't find any use for the sources, but they might be interested in the changes that are being made.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.