14 DAY TRIAL // Now that GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2018 is over, most of the GNOME developers are back at their posts to continue the development of the upcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment.
With a two-day delay, the GNOME Project through Javier Jardón announced today the release of the fourth and last development snapshot of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment before it enters beta testing next month, GNOME 3.29.4, which continues to add improvements to various of GNOME's core components and applications.
However, due to the summer vacation and the GUADEC conference, GNOME 3.29.4 isn't a major snapshot as many would have expected. It only adds some minor changes and bug fixes to a handful of components, including GNOME Shell, Mutter, Evolution, GNOME Photos, GNOME Builder, GNOME Online Accounts, Polari, Bijiben, Evince, Epiphany, Baobab, GNOME Control Center, and File Roller.
GNOME 3.30 beta expected to arrive on August 1, 2018
The development cycle of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment will continue at a fast pace from now on as there are only six weeks left until the final release on September 5, 2018. The next step is beta testing as GNOME 3.30 will enter beta stage on August 1, followed by a second beta release on August 15 and a Release Candidate (RC) build on August 29, 2018.
Meanwhile, if you want to test the GNOME 3.29.4 snapshot on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, you'll have to use either the source packages or the official BuildStream project snapshot, which is the recommended way to test development builds of the GNOME desktop because it doesn't need any dependencies regardless of the Linux OS you're using. For more details about the GNOME 3.29.4 development snapshot, you can check out the NEWS file.