A second beta release will be available on August 15

Aug 2, 2018 23:30 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Project through Javier Jardón announced today the release and general availability of the beta version of the forthcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.

GNOME 3.30 is the next major release of the acclaimed desktop environment used by numerous GNU/Linux distributions, including the popular Ubuntu, and it promises to bring lots of new features and improvements when it will hit the streets next month on September 5. A beta version is available today for bleeding-edge users brave enough to install it on their computers.

"GNOME 3.29.90 is now available. This is the beta release for the upcoming stable GNOME 3.30 release. At this point, we have entered feature freeze, UI freeze, and API freeze, so developers should be focused on bug fixes and stability improvements for the next month as we approach GNOME 3.30," writes Javier Jardón on behalf of the GNOME Release Team.

As expected, there were numerous core components and apps that have been updated for the GNOME 3.30 beta release (build version 3.29.90), including the GNOME Shell which received support for volume overrides over the 100% limit among several other improvements. The Nautilus file manager also got some cool new features and enhancements, and a complete changelog is available here.

GNOME 3.30 beta 2 lands August 15, 2018

The next step in the development cycle of the upcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment is a second beta release tagged with build number 3.29.91, which will be available for public testing in two weeks from the moment of writing, on August 15. After that, there will be a Release Candidate (RC) milestone (build version 3.29.92) released at the end of the month, on August 29.

Until then, if you want to give GNOME 3.30 beta a try on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, you can use the official BuildStream project snapshot, the source packages, or pre-compiled, cross-distribution Flatpak Nightly builds via this repository (thanks Antonio for the tip!). However, please try to keep mind that this is a beta software so don't install it on a production environment.