14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME development team has announced that the first Beta update GNOME 3.18 is now out and ready for testing. There is still a long way to go until the stable version is released, but the project is now in software freeze.
The GNOME 3.18 development is progressing according to schedule, and it looks like no major problems have been encountered until now. The GNOME devs have spent a lot of quality time at the latest conference, GUADEC, and they have made some serious improvements to the project. A lot of interesting changes and new features have landed in the past few days, recently for the GNOME Shell, for example.
The schedule for GNOME 3.18 is pretty strict, and we should see the stable version of GNOME land on September 23. Since the devs are now more focused on fixing bugs and other issues, instead of adding new features, there is no reason to see GNOME delayed.
GNOME 3.18 promises to be a success
The GNOME devs made some great releases in the past year. Both the 3.14 and the 3.16 branch have been very well received by the community, and there is no reason to think that the same won't happen with 3.18.
"GUADEC is now over, we had a great time in Gothenburg (special thanks to the local organizers!) and got home in time to polish patches and merge branches, to publish the first beta of this cycle, GNOME 3.17.90," wrote Frederic Peters.
The devs also decided to enter API/ABI Freeze, Feature Freeze, and UI Freeze. New stuff can still get passed the gatekeepers, but they need to be very important for that to happen.
You can download the GNOME 3.18 Beta 1 stack from Softpedia, but keep in mind that these are the source packages and they are still far from stable. Don't use a production machine for testing.