14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME Project's Javier Jardón announced a few moments ago that the GNOME 3.25.92 milestone of the forthcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment is now available for public testing, marking the end of the development cycle.
GNOME 3.26 has been in development since early April, and it's now up to RC (Release Candidate) state, which means that the development cycle is over and the team will begin preparations for the final release of the highly anticipated desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
"This is the end of this development cycle and here comes the Release Candidate for you to download, build, and test," said Javier Jardón. "Enjoy it as fast as you can, the final release is scheduled next Wednesday! To compile GNOME 3.25.92, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published by the release team."
GNOME 3.26 to see the light of day on September 13, 2017
Next week, on Wednesday, September 13, 2017, the GNOME Project will make the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment official, unveiling all the new features that they've implemented during its six-month development cycle. Meanwhile, you can see what's new in the Release Candidate by studying the CORE NEWS and APPS NEWS files.
If you can't wait until the final release of GNOME 3.26 hits the streets, you can download the source tarballs of the RC version from https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.25.92/ and use the jhbuild modulesets at https://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/, but please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version.
Most GNU/Linux users should receive the GNOME 3.26 update when the first point release, namely GNOME 3.26.1, hits the streets, which will happen about three weeks after the September 13 launch, in early October. Distributions like Arch Linux, Fedora, and Solus could be the first to get GNOME 3.26, and Ubuntu 17.10 launches October 19 with GNOME 3.26 by default.