14 DAY TRIAL // Frederic Peters from the GNOME development team has just announced that the second Beta for GNOME 3.14 has been released and it's now available for download and testing.
Previous GNOME branches had all sorts of smaller delays, but it looks like everything is going as planned with 3.14. In fact, GNOME 3.14 might be one of the most exciting releases made until now, especially with the upcoming Wayland support, not to mention the other numerous changes and improvements that have been made already for various packages.
"Here comes GNOME 3.13.91, our second beta release and a new step towards 3.14.0, scheduled to be released September 24th; but before that we have to take all opportunities to test things thoroughly, so go download it, test it and file bug reports, let's make the release rock solid," said Frederic Peters in the official announcement,
As usual, not all of the packages in GNOME have been updated for this release, but this is a regular occurrence. In fact, it's possible that a small number of apps or libraries won't get any kind of upgrade whatsoever.
GNOME 3.13.91 updates the following core apps: adwaita-icon-theme, Baobab, Caribou, Clutter, Clutter-gtk, Epiphany, Evince, GNOME Display Manager, glibmm, Gnome Contacts, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Screenshot, GNOME Shell, GNOME System Monitor, grilo, GTK+, LibGWeather, Mutter, Nautilus (Files), Pango, Totem (Videos), Vala, and more.
As usual, besides the regular updates for the core packages, some of the integrated applications have also been updated, such as Bijiben, Devhelp, File Roller, GNOME Boxes, GNOME Documents, GNOME Logs, GNOME Maps, GNOME Software, GNOME Weather, Iagno, Orca, GNOME Tetravex, GNOME Sound Recorder, Tali, GNOME Mines, GNOME Mahjongg, and Quadrapassel.
GNOME 3.14 is expected to arrive on September 22, which is just a few weeks away. The developers are breezing through the intermediary releases and there is no indication that it might get delayed.
Users will also notice that with this latest update won't be hitting any repository any time soon. It's just another development step and it's unlikely that someone would go through all the trouble. You can test the previous Beta release in the branch, but that's about it.
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download GNOME 3.13.91 sources right now from Softpedia. Regular users can't really do anything with the sources, but they might be interested in the changes that are being made.