14 DAY TRIAL // As part of yesterday's Ubuntu 17.04 Final Beta release, the Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 operating system got its second Beta milestone bringing with it the latest development version of the recently released GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.
That's right, the final release of Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 launching on April 13 will ship with the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, which is a huge milestone for the team behind this official flavor as no other previous version of the operating system shipped with the latest GNOME Stack.
GNOME 3.24 introduces a lot of attractive features that fans of the desktop environment will be able to enjoy as part of Ubuntu GNOME 17.04. Among these, we can mention Night Light, an updated Calendar app with a Week view, the brand-new GNOME Recipes app that's available for installation from the repositories, and much more.
However, some of the apps are kept at older versions because of some bugs that have not been resolved at the moment of the release. These include the Nautilus 3.20.4 file manager, GNOME Software 3.22 package manager with Flatpak 0.8 support, GNOME Terminal 3.22, Evolution 3.22, and File Roller 3.22.
Tracker search indexing engine is now sandboxed
Among other changes included in Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 Final Beta, we can mention that the chrome-gnome-shell system helper is installed by default, the Tracker search indexing engine is now sandboxed, gnome-icon-theme and gconf are no longer installed by default, and there's now an experimental Wayland session.
"The experimental Wayland session is included but is not the default. If your computer supports open source graphics drivers and you would like to try Wayland, log out, choose GNOME on Wayland from the gear menu below the password entry, and log back in," explain the developers in the release notes.
Under the hood, Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 Final Beta borrows the internals from Ubuntu 17.04 Final Beta (Zesty Zapus), such as the Linux 4.10 kernel, Mesa 17.0.1 3D Graphics Library, systemd-resolved as default DNS resolver, and use of swap files instead of swap partitions. The LibreOffice 5.3 office suite is included as well.
If you want to take the Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 Final Beta for a test drive and you can't wait until its final release on April 13, you can download either the 64-bit or 32-bit Live ISO images right now from our website. Please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, not suitable for use in production environments.
