This will remain under development for a couple more months

Jan 23, 2015 14:20 GMT  ·  By

Matthias Clasen has announced that the GNOME development team has released GNOME 3.15.4, and this is now the latest and most advanced version of the desktop environment.

Until the release of GNOME 3.16, the 3.15.x branch is considered to be under development and there are still a large number of changes, improvements and fixes left to be added. The stable version of GNOME is expected to arrive by the end of March, so there is still time to see some interesting new features, in addition to the ones already made available.

The current stable branch of GNOME is 3.14 and the developers have already released a few point updates for it. Numerous distributions have already implemented it by default and it's been very well received by the community.

GNOME 3.15.4 features numerous improvements under the hood

Most of the changes done from one branch to another are actually made under the hood. It's the stuff you don't see, but that provides better support for various configurations or makes the overall experience better. There are some visual changes, but those are only a small part of the project.

"GNOME 3.15.4 is out. This is a development snapshot, so use it with caution. Among the new things in this snapshot, you can find clutter using the GDK backend, libinput used in multiple modules (we require libinput 0.8), gnome-shell using vp9 for screencasts, mutter using GTK+ themes, input configuration under Wayland, scrolling changes in GTK+, improved search in gnome-software, a new game (gnome-taquin), and many more," wrote Matthias Clasen.

Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download GNOME 3.15.4 sources right now from Softpedia. Regular users won't find any use for the sources, but they might be interested in the changes being made. The best idea is to either wait until it gets uploaded to repositories or to use a testing machine.