GNOME News: GNOME 3.12, Screenshots, Videos, and Boxes
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-27 16:30:20 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-27 16:31:57 UTC
Announcements
The GNOME Project is proud to release GNOME 3.12 today. The next milestone release in the GNOME 3 series includes many new features, enhancements and updates, as well as new capabilities and APIs for application developers. The new version continues to improve the GNOME 3 user experience and includes many small bug fixes and enhancements.
Packaging
As a result of the work that has been going into increasing the portability of GNOME this cycle, I’m happy to announce the availablility (on “day 0ââ¬Â³) of a virtual machine image of GNOME 3.12.0 running on FreeBSD.
New Features
GNOME 3.12 was released today and it includes some important changes such as proper HiDPI support, improved Wayland support, various enhancements for the core GNOME applications as well as 3 new preview applications.
1 new GNOME Videos, 1 updated Bluetooth panel, 2 new thumbnailers, 9 grilo sources, and 1 major UPower rework.
I'm obviously very attached to the GNOME Videos UI changes, the first major UI rework in its 12-year existence.
Pre-release
Tarballs are due on 2014-03-24 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.12.0 newstable 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: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.12.0. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you'll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we'll find someone to roll the tarball for you!
I wanted to make one more post before the imminent release of 3.12 showing how gedit changed in this cycle, but the recent series of posts by Matthias feature plenty of gedit images and left me without fresh screenshot material
Boxes
I just rolled out Boxes 3.11.92, which is going to become 3.12 in a week. Apart from lots of fixes and minor improvements like addition of keyboard shortcuts for improved accessibility for example, there are some note worthy changes against 3.10
Ubuntu
So I did a bit more hacking on PackageKit, appstream-glib and gnome-software last night. We’ve now got screenshots from Debian (which are not very good) and long application descriptions from the package descriptions (which are also not very good). It works well enough now, although you now need PackageKit from master as well as appstream-glib and gnome-software.
Steve Langasek of Ubuntu Technical Board had raised his concerns when the proposal was made, “I am very concerned about this proposed support timeline. 2 years and 3 months means that the support period would end the same month that 16.04.1 is likely to be released. Given that our policy has been to not recommend (or advertise in the UI) LTS upgrades until the first point release, this effectively gives users zero margin between the dropping of security support for Ubuntu-GNOME 14.04, and the first upgrades to Ubuntu-GNOME 16.04.
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