14 DAY TRIAL // A week later than initially expected, the upcoming GNOME 3.28 desktop environment entered beta stages of development today, just in time for some Valentine's Day testing.
GNOME 3.28 is the next major update to the widely-used Linux desktop environment, which is now used by default in the popular Ubuntu operating system. It promises many new features, as well as a wide range of enhancements, especially under the hood as most of the components were ported to the Meson build system.
Most importantly, the beta was delayed because the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment is now using BuildStream project's build sandbox, which ensures a reliable build process regardless of the dependencies you might have installed on your GNU/Linux operating system.
"With this release, the release team is no longer going to be building or releasing non-core applications. We have renamed the apps moduleset to word to reflect this. App developers are encouraged to test their applications against new versions of GNOME to make sure they are still building and working well," says Michael Catanzaro.
However, this beta comes with some build issues, meaning that various components aren't present. These include gtkmm, gedit, and gnome-documents, both planned to be reintroduced in the final release when the issues are resolved. Also, GNOME 3.28 beta comes with the older GNOME Shell 3.27.1 and Mutter 3.27.1 packages.
GNOME 3.28 launches March 14, 2018
A second beta release of the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment should be released by the end of the month, but it doesn't like it's gonna hit the shelves because of this inevitable delay of the first beta. As such, the GNOME Project decided to skip it and release the release candidate builds early next month instead.
If you want to compile the GNOME 3.28 beta release on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, you can use the official snapshot provided by the BuildStream project. For details on what's new in GNOME 3.28 beta, you should study the changelog. The final release of the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment is expected on March 14, 2018.