14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, we reported on the availability of the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, and we promised we'd cover the most important application updates pushed as part of this unstable branch.
GNOME 3.23.2 brought many exciting improvements for the Epiphany web browser, GNOME Music audio player, Shotwell image viewer and organizer, as well as the GNOME Software package manager, and now the time has come to take a closer look at what's coming to the Evolution email, calendar and groupware client.
Evolution 3.23.2 has arrived as the second of many development releases, laying the groundwork for the next major version, namely Evolution 3.24, which will be distributed next year on March 22 as part of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment. There are many bug fixes in this update, but also some enhancements.
The most important one being support for tar.xz compressed backups if the XZ lossless data compression program is installed, which most of today's GNU/Linux distributions offer by default. Until now, Evolution supported only tar.gz backups, but it looks like tar.xz support will be enabled by default in Evolution 3.24.
The feature was requested by Francesco Turco on the GNOME Bugzilla bug tracker, and resolved by developer Milan Crha, who writes "I think it makes sense, thus I made a change which offers (and prefers) .tar.xz over .tar.gz, when 'xz' binary is available." Milan Crha also fixed the global Junk test option to respect account's settings.
Default reminder option in Preferences was reworded to sound better
Among other noteworthy improvements implemented in Evolution 3.23.2, which you can download right now from our website if you want to take it for a test drive on your GNU/Linux distribution, we can mention that the default reminder option in Preferences has been reworded to sound better.
The option "Show a reminder [ n ] [ minutes/hours/... ] before every appointment" was used only as a reminder setting for newly created appointments and appeared to be misleading, suggesting that a notification will be displayed for each appointment, even if no reminder was set. Therefore, it was reworded to "[ ] Set default reminder [ n ] [ minutes/... ] before every new appointment".
You'll now be able to scroll through an email using your keyboard's spacebar key, the Composer should look much better on HiDPI screens, there's better mouse-wheel scroll support, and the WebKit composer should no longer freeze when typing. There are many other small improvements and bug fixes, so check out the full changelog below for details.