14 DAY TRIAL // Mathias Clasen from the GNOME development team has announced that the third development version of GNOME 3.13.x is now available for download and testing.
The development cycle for the next iteration of GNOME has advanced to version 3.13.3, in a branch that will eventually evolve to become the next GNOME 3.14 stable.
GNOME 3.13.3 is a very exciting release and it's packed with a lot of features. In fact, this version seems to have gathered the most changes and it looks like the final version of GNOME will be a very interesting one. Numerous changes and improvements have been made, maybe even more than in the 3.12 branch, which has been welcomed with open arms by the community.
“There is quite a bit of good new stuff in this release, starting with an rewritten and improved Adwaita theme that is now part of GTK+. Next, I’ve noticed that our sharing infrastructure has become network aware, and lets you change what is shared depending on what network you’re on.”
“I noticed that GNOME shell now remembers which workspace windows where on when you disconnect and reconnect external monitors. This is also a good occasion to announce publicly that we are aiming to have GNOME 3.14 in Fedora 21 – it may be a little tight, schedule-wise (the GNOME 3.13.91 beta release happens on September 1, a few days after the beta freeze for F21), but we’ve been able to squeeze things in, in the past,” said Mathias Clasen in the official announcement.
This is actually very good news for the Fedora fans, who will be among the first ones to get GNOME 3.14 in its stable form. It's also very likely that the GNOME project will also release a new Live Fedora installation to showcase the final version.
GNOME 3.13.3 updates the following core apps: NetworkManager, adwaita-icon-theme, clutter, empathy, evince, folks, gjs, glib, glibmm, gnome-calculator, gnome-contacts, gtk+, gtkmm, libsoup, mutter, vino, gupnp, gnome-online-accounts, gnome-desktop, and a few others.
As usual, a number of applications have also been updated, such as bijiben, evolution, four-in-a-row, gedit, gnome-boxes, gnome-klotski, gnome-logs, gnome-maps, gnome-music, gnome-robots, gnome-software, gnome-sudoku, gnome-weather, orca, and rygel.
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download GNOME 3.13.3 sources right now from Softpedia. Regular customers won't find any use for the sources, but they might be interested in the changes that are being made.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.