Development starts in April under GNOME 3.25.x umbrella

Mar 29, 2017 16:19 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Project published today the preliminary release schedule for the next major version of the popular GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 3.26, whose development will start very soon.

While many of you did not even manage to upgrade to the new GNOME 3.24 release and discover its cool new features, it looks like the GNOME development team has no time to waste, as they put together the roadmap for the next series, which will be developed during the next six months under the GNOME 3.25.x umbrella.

The development cycle of GNOME 3.26 will start next month, but the first packages will be revealed at the end of April, on the 26th, as the GNOME 3.25.1 unstable release which bleeding-edge users and early adopters will be able to install on their GNU/Linux distributions for testing purposes.

GNOME 3.26 scheduled for launch on September 13

After the release of the first development build, there will be three more such versions before the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment enters Beta stages. These are GNOME 3.25.2 on May 24, GNOME 3.25.3 on June 21, and GNOME 3.25.4 on July 19. According to the release schedule, the first GNOME 3.26 Beta is arriving on August 9.

A second Beta version will be published a couple of weeks later, on August 23, and the Release Candidate (RC) build is hitting the streets on September 6. The final release of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment is set for September 13 and its first point release, GNOME 3.26.1, for October 6, 2017.

The annual GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) event appears to take place between July 28 and August 2, in Manchester, United Kingdom. Therefore, the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment will be dubbed "Manchester." We'll be covering the entire development cycle of GNOME 3.26, so rest assured that you'll be the first to know all about its upcoming features.