It includes various Wayland improvements and Flatpak support

May 28, 2016 00:32 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Project, through Javier Jardón, has announced the release of the second development snapshot towards the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, version 3.21.2.

Delayed for two days, the GNOME 3.21.2 milestone of the acclaimed desktop environment used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems by default, including Ubuntu GNOME, OpenSuSE, Sabayon, Debian GNU/Linux, and many others, is finally ready for public testing.

But don't get to excited because there aren't many updated core components and apps released as part of this early preview of GNOME 3.22, as we've already mentioned in several articles published earlier this week. Probably the most important change introduced is support for Flatpak packages in GNOME Software.

Also, the GNOME Calendar app has received support for rescheduling events using drag and drop, as well as improvements to the Year View, and the GNOME Games app now lists Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 titles. Moreover, the Polari IRC client supports new commands, and the total revamp of GNOME Control Center's interface is in progress.

GNOME 3.21.2 is ready for public testing on select distributions

As mentioned before, GNOME 3.21.2 is an early preview of what's coming in GNOME 3.22 later this year, which means that it is not recommended for normal desktop users right now. However, public beta testers and early adopters can compile it using the jhbuild and modulesets.

The development cycle of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment will continue with the third and fourth preview releases, which should be out on June 22 and July 20, respectively. Then, the first and second Beta releases will be made available for public testing on August 17 and 31, followed by the RC build on September 14, 2016.

The final GNOME 3.22 release is currently scheduled for September 21, and it will be dubbed Karlsruhe, after the German city where the upcoming GUADEC 2016 conference for GNOME developers will be held. See you next month for more GNOME 3.22 news.