14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project released today the highly anticipated GNOME 3.32 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems, a major release that adds numerous new features and improvements.
Six months in development, the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment is finally here to upgrade your GNOME experience to the next level by adding lots of new features, fixing bugs from previous versions, improving existing components and apps, as well as polishing the look and feel of the user interface.
With the GNOME 3.32 release, the GNOME desktop becomes flatter, lighter, and more modern. After upgrading, users will notice that the App Menus are no longer available and their content was moved to other places, there are changes to the buttons, header bars, and switches, as well as more consistent colors and new app icons.
"This release features a refreshed visual style ranging from an entirely new set of app icons to improvements to the user interface style. Many of the base style colors have been saturated, giving them a more vivid, vibrant appearance. Buttons are more rounded and have a softer “shadow” border," reads today's announcement.
Here's what's new in GNOME 3.32
Apart from the subtle revamp of the UI, the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment adds numerous other goodies including a new color temperature setting for Night Light feature, redesigned Sound Settings panel, permissions for Flatpak apps in the new Settings panel and GNOME Software.
The Rhythmbox music player and organizer, Terminal terminal emulator, and Seahorse encryption keys and passwords manager apps got nicer header bars, the on-screen keyboard now supports emoji characters, and the Five or More game was completely revamped with a new theme and an improved GUI.
Other than that, the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment lets users rearrange the input sources in the Region & Language Settings panel using drag and drop, adds several performance improvements to the GNOME Shell, and updates numerous translations. It also comes with fractional scaling on Wayland for HiDPI/4K displays.
How to get the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment
While the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment is officially out, it will take about two-three weeks for the packages to arrive in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. This usually happens by the time the first point release, GNOME 3.32.1, is announced, which will be on April 10th, 2019.
Rolling distros like Arch Linux, and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed will probably be the first to ship the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment, and the upcoming Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) operating system, due for release on April 18th, will also feature the GNOME 3.32 desktop preinstalled by default.
The source packages are available for download as we speak for those willing to compile the entire GNOME 3.32 desktop environment or only parts of it on their GNU/Linux distributions. GNOME 3.32 will have only two maintenance updates, GNOME 3.32.1 and GNOME 3.32.2, the latter being scheduled for release on May 8th, 2019.
