14 DAY TRIAL // On July 23, the GNOME Project, through Matthias Clasen, announced the release of the fourth development milestone towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due out on September 23, 2015.
GNOME 3.17.4 is an anticipated snapshot that updated many of the core components and applications of the acclaimed desktop environment, which is used in numerous popular Linux distributions, including Fedora, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu GNOME, and others. The release introduces several under-the-hood changes designed for improving the overall stability and performance of the project.
Highlights of GNOME 3.17.4 include support for underscanning, support for tiled monitors (mostly 4K monitors), numerous translation updates, support for exporting Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) information, and deprecation of unused Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) parsing code.
"Among the new things in this release, you can find improved Wayland hi-dpi support in mutter, IP addresses for vms in gnome-boxes, MathML support in orca, performance improvements in tracker, events from different boots in gnome-logs, a new places view in the GTK+ file chooser, a new application preview: gnome-todo, and many small improvements and bug fixes all over the place," says Matthias Clasen.
Mutter and GNOME Shell received improvements as well
The Mutter window manager received better support for HiDPI when running on the Wayland display server, it now boasts compositor-side animated cursors, support for creating basic configurations of dummy outputs in the nested component.
Furthermore, support for sending the 'wl_surface.leave' and 'wl_surface.enter' functions when the output is modified has been added to Mutter 3.17.4. On the other hand, the GNOME Shell interface got updated to version 3.17.4 with support for four-finger swipe gestures on touchpads, and a patch for an issue with the fuzziness of the app menu icon.
There are many core components and apps that received improvements as part of the GNOME 3.17.4 snapshot, and for some of them we wrote separate articles in the past few days. Therefore, we recommend reading them if you want to know more about the new features that were implemented in those projects. In the meantime, you can check out the GNOME 3.17.4 sources and binaries.