14 DAY TRIAL // We're always monitoring everything that's going on in the Open Source world, especially big projects like GNOME and KDE, and today we'd like to reveal some of the upcoming features of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.
First off, a little background for those who missed our previous reports on GNOME 3.26. The desktop environment will be dubbed "Manchester," after the name of the host city of the GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2017 event, and has been slated for release on September 13, 2017.
Development already started, and a first milestone should hit the streets next Wednesday, April 24, dubbed as GNOME 3.25.1. The first set of upcoming features were also revealed today, and it looks like debugging support is coming to the GNOME Builder IDE implemented by developer Christian Hergert.
New sharing framework, new usage app coming soon
GNOME Usage is a new app planned for the GNOME 3.26 cycle, promising to be a GNOME 3 application that can display the current resource usage of the host system where the GNOME desktop is installed. This change alone could affect the existing Baobab (GNOME Disk Usage) and GNOME System Monitor apps.
Rui Matos will work on revamping the Display panel in GNOME Control Center, and it looks like a brand-new sharing framework developed by Debarshi Ray and initially planned for GNOME 3.24 should finally see the light of day in GNOME 3.26, making use of portals for sharing things across various social networks.
Debarshi Ray will also continue to improve his GNOME Photos app by allowing it to import photos from digital cameras (another feature that didn't make it to the GNOME 3.24 release), and Felipe Borges is bringing Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) support to the GNOME Boxes virtualization app.
Last but not least, it appears that the Seahorse (Passwords and Keys) application could be finally replaced by a modern app designed for managing stored passwords and keys in your GNOME desktop environment. We'll let you know more GNOME 3.26 news as soon as we have it and when development advances.