A number of packages have been updated in this release

Oct 31, 2014 14:50 GMT  ·  By

Matthias Clasen from the GNOME development team has announced that GNOME 3.15.1 has been released, marking the start of a new development cycle for this desktop environment.

The development cycle for the next iteration of GNOME has begun and it looks like it's going to be a very interesting one. A few new features and important fixes have already made their way into the new release, but keep in mind that this is just the beginning. There is still a long way to go and many more other intermediary versions to go through.

The previous GNOME 3.14 version, made available a few weeks ago, was met with great interest from the community and the devs seem to have hit all the right notes. There aren't any complaints from users and each new version improves upon the last one. The project has come a long way since its initial 3.x debut, when most of the community was against it. The tables have turned and the 3.x branch is considered a real success.

GNOME 3.15.1 is a very interesting release

As usual, the first few versions in a new GNOME iteration are full of fun stuff and new features. Developers add all sorts of functionalities and the same has happened now, with 3.15.1. For example, the GNOME Shell package now has summarized queued up notifications and uses GResources for theme loading, GNOME Online Accounts features support for locked accounts, and GTK+ has initial support for the Mir display server that's being built by Canonical.

"This release is a snapshot of early development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status," says Matthias Clasen in the official announcement.

GNOME 3.15.4 updates the following core apps: adwaita-icon-theme, at-spi2-core, atk, glib, GNOME Calculator, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Online Accounts, GNOME Shell, GNOME System Monitor, GTK+, gtksourceview, gvfs, libmediaart, Mutter, and Tracker.

Some of the integrated applications have also been updated, such as bijiben, Cheese, File Roller, Four in a Row, GNOME Boxes, GNOME Documents, GNOME Logs, GNOME Mines, GNOME Sudoku, Hotori, Iagnom, and swell-foop.

Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download GNOME 3.15.1 sources right now from Softpedia. Regular users won't find any use for the sources, but they might be interested in the changes being made. It will take a while until a distribution is built with the packages in the new GNOME edition.