14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME developer Javier Jardón announced the release and immediate availability of the fourth development milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.
After a two-day delay, the GNOME 3.25.4 development snapshot is here, and it's the last before GNOME 3.26 enters Beta, which will happen right after the GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2017 event, which will take place in Manchester, United Kingdom, from Friday, July 28 until Wednesday, August 2.
In GNOME 3.25.4, the development team managed to port even more apps and components to the Meson build system, including the GNOME Shell user interface, which received a bunch of improvements. However, it looks like the Meson transition is not over yet, as some components don't ship with Meson files.
"The fourth snapshot of GNOME 3.25 is now available! In this release several modules have continued the migration to Meson, which is great as its saving compilation time," said Javier Jardón. "But, at the same time some modules are still not including the Meson files in the tarball, so we are unable to build them."
GNOME 3.26 Beta expected to launch on August 9, 2017
The development of the GNOME 3.26 "Manchester" desktop environment will continue next month with the first Beta release, which is expected to launch on August 9, and which will be followed two weeks later by a second Beta, on August 23. After that, the Release Candidate (RC) should land on September 6, 2017.
The final release of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment will see the light of day on September 13, 2017, and we shall have an in-depth article prepared with all of its major new features and improvements on release day. Until then, you can see what's new in the GNOME 3.25.4 snapshot by studying the CORE NEWS and APPS NEWS files.
If you want to test out GNOME 3.25.4 on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, you'll have to compile the source tarballs using the jhbuild and modulesets from https://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/ and https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.25.4/, but please try to keep in mind that this is an unstable version of GNOME 3.26.