14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME 3.20 desktop environment is getting closer to release, and the developers are preparing for the UI and Feature Addition freeze.
GNOME 3.20 promises to be one of the most interesting releases made until now, and sometimes it feels like a race to see if they can beat the previous version in features and various other modifications.
In fact, some users of the community are complaining that things are changing too fast and not in a good direction. Some similar critiques were addressed to the project when they moved from the 2.x to the 3.x branch, although that was a much more radical change.
When is GNOME 3.20 landing?
GNOME is one of those projects that announce the launch date for the next version ahead of time, so we know that 3.20 will land on March 23, 2016. Also, the first update for it is planned for April 13, a month later.
Now, the team is also preparing for feature freeze, which means that developers will have to submit their patches and start focusing on bug fixing.
"Tarballs are due on 2016-02-15 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.19.90 beta release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC," the release team explained.
The feature freeze doesn't mean anything for regular users, but it's a good way of knowing the stage of the development cycle the team is at. With this in mind, we can tell you that GNOME 3.20 is going to be a great release, with too many features to list, but you can take a look at our coverage for the past few months.
We will keep you informed if anything out of the ordinary will make its way past the feature freeze gates.