14 DAY TRIAL // A few moments ago, GNOME Project's Michael Catanzaro announced via an email announcement that the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment has officially entered Beta stages of development.
Expected to launch earlier in the week, more specifically on August 9, the GNOME 3.26 Beta milestone (technical version number GNOME 3.25.90) is finally here, as we thought that it would land by the end of the week because many maintainers are on vacation these days and not all the packages were ready for prime time.
GNOME 3.26 entering Beta stages of development is a significant milestone for the upcoming major release of one of the most popular GNU/Linux desktop environments, meaning that it lands an important layer of new features for many of the supported GNOME apps and core components (click for detailed changelogs.
"We have been in feature freeze, UI freeze, and API freeze for the past week, so developers should be focused on bugfixes and stability improvements for the next month as we approach GNOME 3.26," said Michael Catanzaro. "We are also a week into the string change announcement period. Full string freeze begins next week."
GNOME 3.26 slated for release on September 13, 2017
We told you what's coming in the Nautilus (GNOME Files), GNOME Calendar, and Epiphany (GNOME Web) apps, but we'll have a more in-depth story when the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment gets closers to the final release, due on September 13, 2017. Until then, we expect to see a second Beta release (3.25.91) in two weeks, on August 23.
There will also be an RC (Release Candidate) build released for GNOME 3.26, on September 6, but the GNOME development team will only focus their efforts on fixing critical bugs for these remaining milestones. After the release of GNOME 3.26 on mid-September, it would take a few weeks or even a month until it all packages will land in the stable repos of your favorite Linux distro.