GNOME 3.31.1 is now available for public testing

Oct 12, 2018 09:17 GMT  ·  By

GNOME Project's Abderrahim Kitouni emailed the community to inform us all that the development cycle of the upcoming GNOME 3.32 desktop environment kicked off officially and that the first development milestone is now ready for public testing.

Work on the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment begun a few weeks ago after the launch of the GNOME 3.30 "Almeria" desktop environment last month, which is currently hitting the stable software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions. GNOME 3.32 will be developed under the GNOME 3.31.x umbrella for the next six months, until its March 13, 2019, launch.

GNOME 3.31.1 is now available as the first development milestone towards the final GNOME 3.32 desktop environment. Being the first development snapshot, GNOME 3.31.1 brings only a few updated core components and apps, without any notable changes, except for the removal of the application menus feature, as we reported earlier this week.

"GNOME 3.31.1 is now available. This is the first unstable release leading to 3.32 stable series," said Abderrahim Kitouni on behalf of the GNOME Release Team. "There haven't been many updates to the GNOME modules in this release, I blame this partly on the fact that we had a problem with the script sending the release reminder emails."

GNOME 3.32 to enter beta in early February 2019

The next development milestone in the development cycle of the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment, which will be used by default on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone from Purism, will be GNOME 3.31.2, due for release in mid-November. After that, two more such milestones will be released, GNOME 3.31.3 and 3.31.4, in mid-December and early January 2019.

GNOME 3.32 will enter beta in early February 2019, and a second beta release will be available for testing later that month. The Release Candidate (RC) milestone is expected to hit the streets in early March as the final release is currently scheduled for a March 13 launch. Until then, you can test the GNOME 3.31.1 milestone right now by downloading the official BuildStream project snapshot.