14 DAY TRIAL // For those of you not in the loop, the GNOME Project is currently working hard on implementing new features of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, and they are about to seed the first development milestone.
GNOME 3.21.1 will be the first development version towards the major GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release on September 21, 2016, and it should be ready for deployments tomorrow, April 27, 2016, according to the release schedule. And, as part of this first GNOME 3.22 milestone, several core components have been updated with new features and bug fixes.
The popular GNOME Software package manager, which is now used by default in the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, has been updated to version 3.21.1, a release that adds an initial loading panel for those times when no metadata is present, initial Steam support, as well as support for installing GNOME Shell extensions.
Among other exciting new features, we can mention support for adding and removing application shortcuts, for adding remotes as sources thanks to the new outline ostree plugin, for free-but-unspecified SPDX tokens, for fwupd 0.7.0 for the FwupdClient component, and for the Fedora Linux themed image for the upgrade banner.
Bug fixes, under-the-hood improvements
There are many other small changes implemented in this first development release of the GNOME Software 3.22 applications, and among some noteworthy ones are an unreviewable application quirk, background PackageKit refreshes, the ability to hide the "Software Sources" menu when the respective action is disabled, and a revamp of the distro upgrades dialog to match the new mockup.
Other than that, it is now possible to split the "size" property into size-download and size-installed, a link is now used for history instead of a button, the GdkPixbuf widget is now used for parsing icns files, a GsApp is now created by "dpkg-deb info" when the user double-clicks a .deb file, and AppStream files are now used for the Featured, Popular, and Extra category data.
Last but not least, GNOME Software 3.22 will let users enable or disable the "sources" action via GNOME's GSettings, and everything that comes from a non-trusted source is marked automatically as non-third-party. You can grab the GNOME Software 3.21.1 sources via our website, and check the changelog below for more details about the changes implemented in this first development release.