14 DAY TRIAL // On May 29, the GNOME Project, through Javier Jardón, had the pleasure of informing all users and developers of the GNOME desktop environment, which is used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, that the second milestone towards GNOME 3.18 is available for testing.
According to Bastien Nocera, a renowned GNOME developer, the GNOME 3.17.2 release of the acclaimed open-source desktop environment comes with better support for accelerometer sensors in modern laptops, which is implemented via the iio-sensor-proxy 1.0 software that now comes with a D-Bus interface, allowing for support for more than accelerometers.
"Hey GNOMErs! Here is the second snapshot of the GNOME 3.17 development cycle, the 3.17.2 release," says Javier Jardón Cabezas on behalf of the GNOME Release Team. "To build GNOME 3.17.2, you can use the jhbuild modulesets (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release)."
Another interesting feature that has been implemented in GNOME 3.17.2 is better brightness control, as the ambient light sensor received some code changes. As such, GNOME users are now under control of the brightness feature, as it will adapt to their tastes, and as you can see from the attached screenshot, there's now a new "Automatic Brightness" option in the Control Center.
Also, many of the core components and applications received various improvements and new features, as we reported in multiple articles during the last week of May. You can check out the official announcement to learn about how to test the GNOME 3.17.2 desktop environment right now in your GNU/Linux operating system.