GNOME 3.27.2 brings various improvements and new features

Nov 15, 2017 13:55 GMT  ·  By

The development of the upcoming GNOME 3.28 desktop environment, due for release next year on March 14, continues today as the GNOME Project announces the availability of the second unstable release.

The GNOME 3.27.2 unstable snapshot was announced a few moments ago by Tristan Van Berkom of the GNOME Release Team via an email announcement, which informs us that several more components of the GNOME Stack have been ported to the Meson build system, though some of them are failing to build for now.

These include the GNOME Chess, GNOME Documents, GNOME Boxes, GNOME Terminal, GNOME Software, GNOME System Monitor, and fwupd. However, GNOME 3.27.2 includes many updated apps, such as the recently released NetworkManager 1.10.0, and brings various improvements to the Epiphany web browser and other apps.

Among some of the highlights of this unstable release of GNOME 3.28, we can mention better Firefox Sync support in Epiphany, removal of the Global Dark Theme tweak from GNOME Tweaks, ECDSA support in GNOME Keyring, as well as redesigned Category view and better notifications in GNOME Software.

GNOME Software will also run better on displays with low resolutions and brings better support for the Flatpak and Snap universal binary formats. On the other hand, the Nautilus file manager gains support for starring files and will no longer sort folders before files in search results.

GNOME 3.27.3 scheduled for release on December 13, 2017

Those who want to give GNOME 3.28 a try can compile GNOME 3.27.2 themselves using the BuildStream project snapshot, or use the JHBuild modulesets available here. For more details, you can study the CORE NEWS and APPS NEWS files. The next snapshot, GNOME 3.27.3, is expected to arrive on December 13, 2017.

After that, the development cycle of the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment will continue with one last snapshot before it enters beta stage, GNOME 3.27.4, which will be out January 10, 2018. The first and second betas of GNOME 3.28 are expected on February 7 and 21 respectively, and the RC launches March 7, 2018.