Development kicks off April 19 with the first dev release

Mar 24, 2018 15:53 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Project announced today the availability of the official release schedule for the next major release of their widely-used GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

While most of the Linux community hasn't yet managed to install the recently released GNOME 3.28 desktop environment on their favorite GNU/Linux distributions, the GNOME developers are already focusing on the next major release, GNOME 3.30, which was slated for release this fall on September 5, 2018.

Development of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, which is dubbed "Almería" after the host city where this year's GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) event is taking place between July 6-11, will kick off next month with the first dev release under the GNOME 3.29.x umbrella.

GNOME 3.30 beta to arrive for public testing in early August

According to the release schedule, GNOME 3.30 will get the usual four development milestones until the first beta release, which will arrive for public testing on August 1, 2018. A second beta is expected just two weeks later, on August 15, and the Release Candidate (RC) milestone should land at the end of the month, on August 29.

The first point release of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, GNOME 3.30.1, is currently scheduled for release on September 27, 2018, when most probably all GNU/Linux distributions will receive the new stable release. Until then, we're waiting for the first point release of the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment.

GNOME 3.28.1 should be out next month on April 16, ready to land in the stable software repositories of most GNU/Linux distros. A second and probably the last point release, GNOME 3.28.2, is arriving on May 10, 2018, with more bug fixes and improvements. There's no word on the upcoming features of GNOME 3.30 at the moment of publishing.