14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME 3 Release Candidate is now available indicating that the final release is very close now. It's been a very long time in the making, but the next generation GNOME desktop is almost here. The release candidate is as close as it's going to get to the final build, so there's probably little reason to hold back and not take GNOME 3 for a spin.
"3.0 is now around the corner, and this release candidate has it all already, everyone has been working really hard those last days to make it wonderful," the GNOME Project announced.
"So, what are you waiting for? Download it! Build it! Test it! Break it!," the announcement encouraged users.
From the previous beta builds, the release candidate comes with plenty of bug fixes and last minute work, but there shouldn't be any big differences overall.
While most of the work has been completed, there are still bugs to be squashed so you probably shouldn't use GNOME 3 RC in any production environment. Not that you should do that with the first release of written-from-scratch desktop environment anyway, even after the stable version is available.
"We remind you we are string frozen, no string changes may be made without confirmation from the l10n team and notification to both the release team and the GNOME Documentation Project," GNOME warned.
"Hard code freeze is also in place, no source code changes can be made without approval from the release-team. Translation and documentation can continue," it continued.
GNOME 3 is the next evolution of the GNOME desktop. It comes with some pretty radical changes, mostly due to the GNOME Shell and will most likely get a lot of users riled up once it gets adopted by Linux distributions, just like KDE 4.0 before it.
GNOME 3.0 Release Candidate is available for download here.