14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project officially kicked off the development cycle of their upcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems and released the first development snapshot for public testing.
GNOME 3.29.1 is the first development snapshot of the forthcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, which is dubbed "Almeria" after the host city of the GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2018 event later this year, and it brings a few updated core components and apps, but without any significant changes.
"There are actually not very many changes to GNOME modules themselves, because not many maintainers provided updated tarballs, but there are new versions for a few applications and libraries," said Michael Catanzaro on behalf of the GNOME Release Team. "Notably, GNOME Shell was not updated in this release, which is a bit sad."
One major was recorded in the build metadata though, in the way that the entire base system used for building the GNOME desktop environment from being based on Debian packages to being based on the Freedesktop.org SDK (Software Development Kit), which will enable the GNOME devs to use gnome-build-meta to build Flatpak runtimes.
But not without regressions, as it appears Rust support is no longer available, forcing the GNOME developers to downgrade the librsvg library in this first GNOME 3.30 development snapshot. Also, it looks like this is the first GNOME release to ship without the Zenity package. As such, application developers are urged to make sure their components and apps aren't using Zenity anymore.
GNOME 3.29.2 development snapshot coming May 23, 2018
If you want to take the GNOME 3.29.1 development snapshot for a test drive on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, you can use either the official BuildStream project snapshot or the source packages, which are available to download here. A complete list of updated modules and their changes is available here.
The development cycle of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment will continue next month with the second development snapshot, GNOME 3.29.2, which should be released on May 23, 2018. After that, there will be two more such snapshots released before and after the GUADEC 2018 conference, GNOME 3.29.3 on June 20 and GNOME 3.29.4 on July 18.
GNOME 3.30 will enter beta stages of development on August 1, 2018, with the first beta release. A second beta version should be available for public testing later that month, on August 15, and the Release Candidate (RC) milestone is expected to land on August 29. The final GNOME 3.30 "Almeria" desktop environment is hitting the streets on September 5, 2018.