14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project announced recently that a new development version of the GNOME Software universal, all-in-one package manager for GNU/Linux distributions has been made available for download and testing.
GNOME Software 3.17.3 has been released as part of the third milestone towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment and brings with it new attractive features like initial support for Limba bundles, automatic download of new firmware metadata from the recently introduced Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).
Moreover, the application has been updated to display new notifications every time security updates remain unapplied, to hide the 'Updates' user interface on managed systems, to display the installation progress when installing apps, as well as to use various new apps to the 'Picked' category.
There are also numerous issues that have been resolved in GNOME Software 3.17.3. For example, apps that aren't available when searching them by category will no longer be displayed, a notification will be withdrawn every time a prepared update gets invalidated, and better error messages are now displayed on failure of offline updates.
GNOME Software 3.18 will be released along with GNOME 3.18
In addition to the changes mentioned above, the third milestone towards GNOME Software 3.18, which will be released as part of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment in approximately one month, on September 23, fixes a crash that occurred during loading of app icons, and another crash that occurred during launching of apps without desktop IDs.
Last but not least, GNOME Software fixes a locking issues in the AppStream code, which also addresses multiple crashes, and it will no longer display apps that don't have AppData in the category view. Several languages translations have been updated as well. You can download GNOME Software 3.17.3 right now from Softpedia, but please try to keep in mind that it's a pre-release version, not ready for production use.