A major release of the GNOME desktop environment

Mar 25, 2015 15:30 GMT  ·  By

The highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 update has just been announced today, March 25, on the official website of the acclaimed open-source desktop environment used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems. This is a major release that includes countless new features, updated components, and dozens of bug fixes.

Prominent features of GNOME 3.16 include new GNOME Shell theme, revamped notification system, more useful notification popups, overlay scrollbars for all GNOME applications, important usability improvements for Nautilus (Files), support for scroll wheel emulation in trackballs, NFS (Network File System) support in userspace, Foursquare support, Wayland login screen, and an updated Adwaita wallpaper.

Of course, numerous core components have been updated, including Eye of GNOME, GTK+, Tracker, GNOME Maps, GNOME Music, GNOME Control Center, Videos, GNOME Terminal, GLib2, gdk-pixbuf, libsoup, Iagno, GNOME Documents, GNOME Photos, Evince, Calculator, and Mutter, so we recommend that you read the complete release notes for more details.

If you’ve read our “Here’s What to Expect from GNOME 3.16” article, then you know that the new GNOME release introduces various new applications, such as GNOME MultiWriter, a tool that lets you write an ISO image to multiple USB sticks at once, GNOME Taquin, a sliding-block puzzle game, GNOME Books, an ebook reader app, as well as preview versions of GNOME Calendar and Characters apps.

How to get GNOME 3.16 right now?

Those of you who want to test the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment should either use a distribution of Linux that is currently in development and includes the latest GNOME 3.16 packages, such as Fedora 22, or download a Live CD based on the OpenSuSE operating system.

Users of other GNU/Linux operating systems should wait patiently until the GNOME 3.16 packages arrive on the main software repositories of their distributions, which might take some time because GNOME consists of numerous components that need to be compiled separately, then packaged for both 64 and 32-bit architectures.

Here’s what to expect from GNOME 3.18

The next major update of the desktop environment will be GNOME 3.18, which will arrive sometime in Fall 2015. It will introduce a complete GNOME Calendar application, a new option in GNOME Control Center that lets you use an Ambient Light Sensor to control the backlight brightness, as well as a new game called GNOME 2048.