14 DAY TRIAL // On October 15, GNOME developer Florian Müllner had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the GNOME Shell 3.18.1 and GNOME Shell 3.16.4 maintenance releases.
According to the release notes, the first point release of GNOME Shell 3.18, which is distributed as part of the GNOME 3.18.1 desktop environment, includes a bunch of improvements and bugfixes. Among these, we can mention fixes for various screen freezes that occurred each time a notification was pushed, System Status menu enhancements, and support for hiding the App Menu if it's disabled from the settings.
Additionally, the lightbox effect now works as expected when the animations are disabled, hotplug notifications are no longer marked as critical, there is support for animating both full-screen and non-fullscreen operations, icons will no longer be cut off in the dash, several other small bugs were fixed, and dozens of language translations were updated.
"Tarball releases are provided largely for distributions to build packages. If you are interested in building GNOME Shell from source, we would recommend building from version control using the build script described at: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell," says Florian Müllner. "Not only will that give you the very latest version of this rapidly changing project, it will be much easier than get GNOME Shell and its dependencies to build from tarballs."
GNOME Shell 3.16.4 is a small bugfix release
On the other hand, the fourth maintenance release of GNOME Shell 3.16 for the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment appears to be a small bugfix release that addresses the same screen freeze issues that were fixed in GNOME Shell 3.18.1, repairs the issue of icons getting cut off in the dash, also fixed in GNOME 3.18.1, and resolves several miscellaneous bugs that have been reported by users since the previous version.
Users of both GNOME 3.16 and GNOME 3.18 desktop environments are urged to update their distribution's GNOME Shell packages from the software repositories. The updates should be available in the coming days. In the meantime, you can download the GNOME Shell 3.18.1 and GNOME Shell 3.16.4 sources right now from Softpedia and compile them by hand using the instructions posted in the link above.