A Release Candidate milestone will be available on August 29

Aug 16, 2018 15:15 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Project, through Michael Catanzaro, announced the availability of the second beta release of the forthcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, due for release early next month.

Coming two weeks after the first beta release, the highly anticipated GNOME 3.30 desktop environment received a second beta release today as Michael Catanzaro informed us via an email announcement. This beta 2 release is tagged as GNOME 3.29.91, and it marks the Software String Freeze stage in the development cycle.

But it doesn't look like it was an easy release for the GNOME Release Team, as Michael Catanzaro reports build failures for several components, including GNOME Boxes, which didn't make it for this second beta release. As a consequence, numerous components weren't updated in this beta 2 release.

"A couple informal notes. First, this was too hard. Too many build failures. I wound up downgrading several modules, I just removed gnome-boxes rather than fight to get it to build," said Michael Catanzaro on behalf of the GNOME Release Team. "Second, this release marks the beginning of the software string freeze."

To avoid making the release process of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment more difficult, developers are encouraged to push new tarballs of the components they maintain if a fix is available in Git to address any build failures. To see what components made it through this second beta release, check out the NEWS file for GNOME 3.29.91.

GNOME Project celebrates its 21st birthday

If you want to give feedback on this second beta release of the forthcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment by testing it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, you can download the official BuildStream project snapshot, the source packages, or use the pre-compiled, cross-distribution Flatpak Nightly builds repository.

The development cycle of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment will continue with the Release Candidate (RC) milestone, GNOME 3.29.92, which is expected to hit the streets later this month on August 29. After that, the final release of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment will launch officially on September 5, 2018.

On August 15, 2018, the GNOME Project celebrated the 21st anniversary since Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero founded the non-profit organization in an attempt to create an alternative desktop environment to KDE and other similar open source software projects for Linux-based operating systems, so happy 21st birthday from us to GNOME!