14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME 3.16 development cycle continues these days with a second Beta release, which includes an improved GNOME Shell user interface. The final version of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment will be unveiled by the GNOME Project later this month, on March 25, 2015.
GNOME Shell 3.16 Beta 2 is now available for testing on selected platforms. The unstable release includes a number of improvements, bugfixes, as well as updated translations. According to the raw changelog, the brand-new Polari application is now used for IRC conversations in the GNOME desktop environment, instead of Empathy.
The GNOME Shell user interface will no longer handle non-chat notification for the Empathy application, adds unminimize animation, addresses a mouse interaction issue with the iBus candidate window, no longer wakes up the display for disabled notifications, and introduces a new, easy-to-use keyboard shortcut for viewing the notification list (Super+V).
Over 25 bugs have been squashed in GNOME Shell 3.16 Beta 2
In addition, GNOME Shell 3.16 Beta 2 adds new keyboard shortcut for dismissing notifications from the list (Del), improves the accessibility of the new calendar and messages list, no longer disables all keyboard shortcuts while non-panel menus are open, repairs a window thumbnail scaling issue in the Overview, and adds a hideable system tray area at the bottom edge of the screen for legacy status icons.
Last but not least, over 25 bugs have been squashed in the second Beta release of the GNOME Shell user interface for GNOME 3.16, which also includes updates for several translations, including Turkish, Slovak, Russian, Chinese Traditional, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, French, Chinese Simplified, Norwegian Bokmal, and Czech.
Testers and GNOME hackers can download the GNOME Shell 3.16 Beta 2 sources right now via Softpedia. When testing it, please keep in mind that its unstable and thus not recommended to be installed on production machines. The rest of the world should wait for the final GNOME 3.16 desktop environment to arrive on the official software repositories of their GNU/Linux operating systems.