14 DAY TRIAL // We reported the other day that the GNOME 3.23.2 desktop was out, which is the second development snapshot towards the GNOME 3.24 release, bringing many updated components and applications.
Now that you know what's coming to the GNOME Music 3.24 and Epiphany 3.24 apps, it's time to tell you a little bit about what landed for the GNOME Software graphical package manager. GNOME Software 3.23.2 has been released as the second milestone in the series, introducing a bunch of interesting new features and enhancements.
These include a new content rating interface for Linux games, allowing you to rate your favorite titles, a brand new setting that helps those with metered Internet connections to always get the most recent updates, as well as more Flatpak improvements by adding support for the DefaultBranch feature.
Moreover, application reviews can now be shown without a display name, there's support for pending updates applied on demand, the modal failure dialogs are now converted to in-app notifications, and it looks like GNOME Software will start using GNOME Project's ODRS (Open Desktop Ratings Service) server.
Software to always fetch the latest screenshot for GNOME Shell extensions
There are also various improvements and bug fixes implemented in the GNOME Software 3.23.2 milestone, making sure that the package manager will always fetch the latest screenshots for GNOME Shell extensions, along with the ability to avoid screenshot duplicates for apps.
Also, it looks like GNOME Software 3.24 will no longer fetch updates when low on batter power, display the search bar when the user hits the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut, the "Back" button won't be displayed when viewing search results, and there are some memory usage improvements for search requests.
If you want to take GNOME Software 3.23.2 for a test drive, you can download the source archive right now from our website and compile it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. You can also do that by installing the GNOME 3.23.2 desktop environment, but remember that these are pre-release versions, not suitable for daily use.