14 DAY TRIAL // As part of the recently released GNOME 3.20 Beta 1 desktop environment, the most important component, GNOME Shell, has also received various interesting improvements and bugfixes.
GNOME Shell is the user interface of the GNOME desktop environment, and without it, users wouldn't be able to interact with the GNOME applications and any other components.
The latest Beta for the upcoming GNOME 3.20 release, which should see the light of day sometime at the end of March 2016, was released this past weekend with multiple enhancements and essential changes.
As usual, we have managed to get our hands on the internal changelog, and we can tell you that it adds better support for identifying VPN (Virtual Private Network) secret requests, as well as improvements to the presentation of week numbers.
Additionally, an audio device selection dialog has been implemented, along with media controls, which have been added to the date and time drop-down menu. The position of the iBus candidate pop-up has been fixed for the Wayland display server.
Miscellaneous bug fixes, updated translations
Other than the above, the first Beta milestone towards GNOME Shell 3.20 implements a new functionality that asks users to grant applications access to location. As expected, there are several under-the-hood improvements as well in this release.
Last but not least, the Bulgarian, German, Italian, Catalan, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, French, and Friulian language translations have received updates. Early adopters can download the GNOME Shell 3.20 Beta 1 sources right now via our website.
The technical version number of this pre-release is GNOME Shell 3.19.90, and you can also test it as part of the GNOME 3.20 Beta 1 desktop environment if the packages are available in the main software repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system.
Please note that Beta releases may contain bugs.