The first development release towards GNOME 3.18

May 3, 2015 22:33 GMT  ·  By

As we reported last week, the GNOME development team started work on the next major version of the acclaimed desktop environment, GNOME 3.18, and they've just released the first snapshot, GNOME 3.17.1.

GNOME 3.17.1 is now available for download and testing and includes various updated core components and GNOME applications, including GNOME Shell, GTK+, Brasero, Cheese, Mutter, Evince, Evolution, Gedit, Weather, Maps, Boxes, Logs, Chess, and Polari.

"The development of the next GNOME release, 3.17, has started, and the first snapshot, 3.17.1, is now available," says Javier Jardon. "To compile GNOME 3.17.1, you can use the jhbuild modulesets (which utilize the exact tarball versions from the official release)."

If you're watching our dedicated Linux section on Softpedia, you would know about some of the changes included in various components of the GNOME 3.17.1 desktop environment, as we wrote a few articles last week.

GNOME 3.18 release schedule and GUADEC 2015

The next development version of GNOME 3.18 will be GNOME 3.17.2, which should arrive at the end of May. Then, GNOME 3.17.3 ships on June 24, GNOME 3.17.4 on July 22, GNOME 3.18 Beta 1 on August 19, GNOME 3.18 Beta 2 on September 3, and the GNOME 3.18 Release Candidate (RC) version on September 16.

The final release of GNOME 3.18 will arrive on September 23, 2015. We also remind you that all members of the GNOME Project will gather together at the annual GUADEC 2015 conference where they will discuss the future of the GNOME desktop environment. GUADEC 2015 takes place in Gothenburg, Sweden, between August 7-9.

You can download the GNOME 3.17.1 sources right now from Softpedia, but most of you won't be able to test this early development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment. So we recommend waiting a little longer for a GNOME-based Linux distribution to include these packages.