14 DAY TRIAL // As we’ve reported in several GNOME-related articles this week, the GNOME development team is hard at work to bring you the anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, due for release on March 25, 2015. As expected, GNOME Shell will be part of this release and it is the most important component, providing the actual user interface.
GNOME Shell 3.16 Beta 1 has just been released today, February 20, introducing a number of bug fixes and improvements among which we can mention a notification redesign and visual refresh based on the redesigned GTK+ theme included in GNOME 3.16, which includes a new calendar design, revamped message tray, and updated built-in notifications. An issues with multiple monitor configurations has also been addressed.
GNOME Shell 3.16 includes a new calendar design
In addition, the “draw-cursor” option of the screen recorder now works correctly, keyboard shortcuts for switching to VT8-VT12 are now allowed, a GDM (GNOME Display Manager) fix related to the reactivity of the first user in the user list after the login banner is displayed and hidden, the "New Window" action in the dash will no longer be duplicated, the GSystem dependency has been removed, and screencast timestamps have been fixed.
Moreover, favorite apps from dash or app picker can no longer be dragged or removed when locked, an OSD (On-screen display) monitor labeler has been implemented in the shell. Several other bugs have been squashed and some code cleanup was done in GNOME Shell 3.16 Beta 1, so make sure that you check the raw changelog below for details.
Last but not least, several translations have been updated in this first Beta release of GNOME Shell 3.16, including German, Hebrew, Czech, Slovak, Italian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, and Argentinian. Download GNOME Shell 3.16 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it’s an unstable version and it should not be installed on productions machines where stability is a must.