14 DAY TRIAL // The great and wonderful Matthias Clasen had the pleasure of announcing the immediate and limited availability for testing of the GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 desktop environment, which was supposed to see the light of day last Thursday, on February 19.
Prominent features of GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 include a new GNOME Shell theme, a number of user interface improvement to the Nautilus (Files) file manager app, a new login screen for the Wayland display server, as well as redesigned notifications for the GNOME Shell user interface.
Eye of GNOME will receive a new graphical user interface
In addition, the first Beta release of the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment introduces a new graphical user interface (GUI) for the Eye of GNOME image viewer app, as well as the integration of multimedia codec installation into the GNOME Software application.
‘Hi all, a few days late, but here it is: GNOME 3.15.90 is now available. This is the first beta release of the 3.15 development, and it is a big release. All of the big features that we have been working on have made it into this release, in more or less complete form,” says Matthias Clasen in the mailinglist announcement.
The GNOME 3.16 desktop environment will arrive on March 25, 2015
The development cycle of GNOME 3.16 will continue with another Beta release, version 3.15.91, on March 4, as well as the usual RC (Release Candidate) version (3.15.92) on March 18. The final release of GNOME 3.16 will arrive on March 25, 2015, but it is uncertain when users will receive it on the official software repositories of their GNU/Linux distributions.
Most probably, Arch Linux will be the first operating system to offer the brand-new GNOME 3.16 packages a couple of weeks after their release, but until then, let’s hope that the GNOME Project will also update their GNOME 3 Live CD distribution. In the meantime, you can download the GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 packages from Softpedia.