14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME developers are hard at work these days to push the second milestone towards the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release on September 21, 2016, to public beta testers.
Yes, we're talking about GNOME 3.21.2, a preview release expected to launch by the end of this week, sometime around the date of May 25, according to the official release schedule. Therefore, several core apps from the GNOME Stack are receiving updates with new features and improvements.
GNOME Software is one of those core GNOME apps that have gotten a lot of attention lately, especially now that it has become the default package manager of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, so version 3.21.2 has been released earlier today, May 23, 2016, with some exciting changes.
According to the internal changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, the most exciting new feature implemented in GNOME Software 3.21.2 is support for Flatpack packages (previously known as XDG-App bundles), thus providing users with sandboxed applications on their GNU/Linux distribution.
Also new in GNOME Software 3.21.2 is the addition of a "--details-pkg" option for the gnome-software binary, allowing users to view details of an individual package, support for verifying dependencies, conflicts, and requirements at startup, support for application key colors. There's also a new plugin that makes it possible to automatically add license information to a package.
There's better support for KDE4 apps
GNOME Software 3.21.2 appears to be a beefy update that also fixes some of the issues reported by users since the previous milestone or the last stable release, GNOME Software 3.20.2. For example, launching KDE4 apps should work much better now, and GNOME Software should no longer crash when changing the network before its activation.
If you’re curious to know what exactly has been modified in GNOME Software 3.21.2, do not hesitate to check out the changelog below. In the meantime, you can download the GNOME Software 3.21.2 sources right now via our website and take it for a test drive. Please try to keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version, not ready for production use.