14 DAY TRIAL // After six months of hard work, the GNOME Project's development team was proud to announce today, September 13, 2017, the immediate release and general availability of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.
Dubbed "Manchester," after the city where the annual GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) developer conference took place this year, the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment packs many enhancements for the apps and core components included in the GNOME Stack, along with new features.
This year, on August 15, the GNOME Project celebrated its 20th anniversary, and we couldn't be happier to be using GNOME as our main desktop environment. The biggest new features of the GNOME 3.26 release are support for emoji, Flatpak improvements, as well as a brand-new Control Center that's now called simply "Settings."
"Color emoji are now supported throughout GNOME and will be visible wherever they appear. GNOME 3.26 also includes ways to insert emoji into chats, messages and documents," reads today's announcement. "Elsewhere in the GNOME platform, a more modern JavaScript experience can be found, thanks to the adoption of SpiderMonkey 52."
What's new for the main GNOME components
As for the main GNOME components, GNOME Shell received better search view with a new layout and support for searching system actions, more Wayland improvements, animated transitions for maximized and unmaximized windows, slightly revamped activities overview, and transparency for the top bar.
Fractional display scaling has been introduced in GNOME 3.26 to make the desktop environment look better on HiDPI displays, the Photos app comes with new zoom controls, the Maps app now lets you switch between aerial and street views using keyboard shortcuts, and System Monitor now monitors disk IO per process.
Moreover, the Boxes app now lets you share folders between guest and host, the Disks app allows the creation of new image files that can be mounted as loop devices and supports resizing of partitions together with their file system, Epiphany (Web) comes with Firefox Sync support, and the Calendar app now supports recurrent events.
GNOME 3.26 introduces a couple of new apps, namely Simple Scan and To Do (features Todoist integration), and adds small improvements to other apps, including Logs, Evolution, Polari, Software, Builder, GTK+, GJS, and Evolution-Data-Server. Also, the GNOME Tweak Tool app was renamed to Tweaks in this release.
Coming soon to a distro near you
Other than that, the Terminal app now supports hyperlinks and allows you to copy the selection in HTML format to clipboard, and the Orca screen reader and magnifier handles Flatpak apps. Various of GNOME 3.26's components are available for download as source tarballs right now through our web portal, but it could take up to a month for the release to land in your distro's repos.
Rolling release GNU/Linux distributions like Arch Linux, OpenSuSE Tumbleweed or Solus would probably be the first to get the GNOME 3.26 treatment, but not until the first point release, GNOME 3.26.1, hits the streets, which will happen in approximately three weeks form the moment of writing, around the date of October 4, 2017. Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) will be released on October 19 with GNOME 3.26 by default.
