14 DAY TRIAL // Javier Jardón from the GNOME development team has announced that GNOME 3.13.4 has been released, taking the desktop environment a little closer to the final version.
The development cycle for the next iteration of GNOME is moving according to schedule and no major delays have affected the project. This branch of GNOME will eventually mature into 3.14, which is the next stable release.
GNOME 3.13.4 is actually packed with a lot of interesting stuff. Some of the packages that saw some interesting changes and improvements are GNOME Shell, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Tracker, and a few others. It's actually interesting to see that, despite the fact that the development cycle has advanced quite a bit, the devs are still bringing major features into their applications and packages.
“Here the new GNOME release just in time for GUADEC, this time from Strasburg!! Remember this is a development release, so go ahead and test it, break it, send bug report and patches! And of course enjoy GUADEC! To compile GNOME 3.13.4, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published by the release team (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release),” says Javier Jardón in the official announcement.
GNOME 3.13.4 updates the following core apps: NetworkManager, adwaita-icon-theme, atk, baobab, clutter, cogl, dconf, Eye of GNOME, gdk-pixbuf, gnome-calculator, gnome-control-center, gnome-desktop, gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-shell, gnome-system-monitor, gtk+, mutter, Nautilus, tracker, vala, and a few others.
As usual, beside the regular updates for the core packages, some of the integrated application have also been updated, such as bijiben, cheese, devhelp, evolution, file-roller, four-in-a-row, gedit, gitg, gnome-boxes, gnome-maps, gnome-software, gnome-photos, gnome-music, gnome-weather, iagno, quadrapassel, rygel, tali, vinagre, and a few otjers.
The GNOME developers are working on integrating the 3.14 release into the upcoming Fedora 21. The initial window for that integration was very tight, but Fedora 21 has been delayed for three weeks and that means that the GNOME developers now have a little more breathing space.
If everything goes well on the GNOME front and if Fedora suffers any more delays, it's even possible that we will get the 3.14 branch well before the release of the new Fedora OS.
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download GNOME 3.13.4 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.