GNOME 3.28.1 packages are now available to download

Apr 13, 2018 19:05 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME 3.28 desktop environment received today its first point release with a plethora of various bug fixes and improvements for numerous of its core components, marking it as ready for mass deployments.

GNOME 3.28 is the latest version of the open source desktop environment used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions, including the Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and others. It was officially released last month on March 14, but it usually takes a couple of weeks for it to land in the stable software repositories of these distros.

This usually happens when the first point release is out, GNOME 3.28.1 in this case, which was announced a few moments ago by Javier Jardón of the GNOME Release Team via an email announcement on Friday, noting the fact that the GNOME 3.28.1 packages should arrive shortly in the repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

What's new in GNOME 3.28.1

Among the most prominent changes included in the GNOME 3.28.1 point release, we can mention removal of the experimental HTTPS Everywhere support in the Epiphany web browser, proper support for the GDM login manager to stop the boot splash when local login screen is disabled, and support for GNOME Boxes to download only supported architectures.

The GNOME Software graphical package manager received a bunch of improvements, including the ability to display a "Source: " tag in the GNOME Shell search field when there are multiple matches, searching multiple times on search page, better handling of purchase failures for the Snap Store, and updated "Find out more..." link for third-party Fedora repositories.

Another interesting change is that the Nautilus file manager now lets users delete the desktop folder. Numerous other core components and libraries received various bug fixes and updated translations. A full list of all the changes included in this release is available here. The next scheduled point release is GNOME 3.28.2 and it is expected to hit the streets on May 10, 2018.

Those who want to compile the GNOME 3.28.1 release themselves can use either the official BuildStream project snapshot, which is said to build reliably on your distro regardless of the dependencies, or the source packages that can be downloaded here. The rest of you should wait until the package land in the stable repos of your distribution of choice.