14 DAY TRIAL // With a one-day delay, the GNOME Project, through Javier Jardón, announced the availability of the last milestone in the development cycle of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, the Release Candidate (RC).
Versioned 3.23.92, the RC build of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment is here only to polish the new features and improvements implemented in various of the core components and applications that will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.24 Stack across numerous GNU/Linux distributions starting next week.
"This is the end of this development cycle and here comes the Release Candidate for you to download, build, and test," said Javier Jardón in the mailing list announcement. "Enjoy it as fast as you can, the final release is scheduled next Wednesday! To compile GNOME 3.23.92, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published by the release team."
Hard code and string freeze now in effect
Now that the Release Candidate milestone of the forthcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment has hit the streets, it also means that the entire project is officially in hard code and string freeze. This means that no source code or string changes can be made without them being approved by the release team.
GNOME 3.24 promises to be a major release, as expected, and if you're curious to know what changes have been implemented in this Release Candidate version, go ahead and study the CORE NEWS and APPS NEWS changelogs. You can also download the source tarballs of the GNOME 3.23.92 release from here and here.
Mark your calendars! On Wednesday, March 22, the final release of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment will be unveiled and we'll be the first to report on its new features, so make sure that you follow us on Twitter and Facebook. However, it will take up to two weeks to land in the stable repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.