14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, the GNOME development team, through Frederic Peters, has announced earlier today, March 18, the immediate availability for testing of the GNOME 3.16 RC (Release Candidate) desktop environment. The release is dubbed internally GNOME 3.15.92.
Users are urged to test the release and report bugs immediately in order for the GNOME devs to fix them before the final GNOME 3.16 version gets out on March 25, 2015. As such, the GNOME 3.16 development cycle ends today, and next Wednesday we will witness the unveiling of the anticipated desktop environment used in numerous Linux distributions.
“We have now reached the end of the development cycle and here comes a release candidate for you to download, build, and test. Enjoy it as fast as you can, the final release is scheduled next Wednesday,” says Frederic Peters in an email received by Softpedia. “To compile GNOME 3.15.92, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published by the release team.”
GNOME 3.16 will be a major release that introduces attractive features
As we’ve reported all month, the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment will be a major release that introduces a great number of attractive features, among which we can mention a gorgeous flat theme for the GNOME Shell user interface, a redesigned and more user-friendly notification system, including notification popups, as well as updated core apps, components, and libraries.
The first point release of GNOME 3.16, GNOME 3.16.1, will see the light of day in approximately three weeks from March 25, on Wednesday, April 15, 2015. Most probably, a second maintenance version for GNOME 3.16 will be released in the upcoming weeks as well, when the development cycle for GNOME 3.18 will start. Watch this space in the coming days for more news about the unveiling of the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment.