14 DAY TRIAL // We've just been informed by GNOME Project's Michael Catanzaro about the general availability of the third development release in the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment cycle.
The GNOME 3.23.3 unstable release was in fact planned to be seeded to public testers tomorrow, December 14, 2016, but it looks like it arrived earlier for early adopters and those who want to help the GNOME development team discover the remaining blockers before GNOME 3.24 enters Beta, which should happen in mid-February 2017.
GNOME 3.23.3 is also the last development snapshot planned for 2016 as the team will now take a well-deserved break to enjoy the winter holidays with their families and friends. This version ships with updated versions of most of the core components and apps distributed as part of the GNOME Stack.
"Major changes include gnome-settings-daemon 3.23.2, which splits plugins out into separate helper daemons instead of running all of the code in process, and gjs 1.47.3, which now depends on SpiderMonkey 31 instead of SpiderMonkey 24 and is an important first step towards upgrading to a secure and supported JavaScript engine," said Michael Catanzaro in the email announcement.
GNOME 3.23.4 is coming on January 18, 2017
As expected, the team continues their work on the implementation of the next-generation GTK+ 4 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit, and they managed to add new parallel-installable *mm packages that are based on the libsigcplusplus 3.0 API/ABI. However, it looks like GTK+ 4 is not included in GNOME 3.23.3 due to some dependency issues.
Among other changes, Michael Catanzaro notes the fact that the NetworkManager network connection manager was downgraded to the 1.4.2 stable release, which is only a temporary move until some build issues are addressed, and the GNOME Shell user interface upgraded to version 3.23.2. For more details, we recommend checking out the CORE NEWS and APPS NEWS files.
If you want to install GNOME 3.23.3 on your GNU/Linux distribution, you'll have to use the jhbuild modulesets available at https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.23.3/. The next step in the development cycle of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment is GNOME 3.23.4, the fourth and last unstable build before it enters Beta stages. GNOME 3.23.4 will be released on January 18, 2017.