Today a new major release of the Gnome desktop environment has been released. It is the first time that I announce that on my Blog because I used it on openSUSE Tumbleweed in version 3.18 for a few months (much longer than actually planned as it was meant to be a test run only) and although coming from KDE, Xfce and i3 I was quite impressed by how it performed on my Laptop.
Version 3.20 is not bringing big changes to the table but many nice improvements. A short overview from the Gnome announcement:
- OS upgrades can now be installed using Software
- Wayland support has improved significantly, with kinetic scrolling, drag-and-drop, and middle-click paste
- Keyboard shortcuts and gestures can be easily learned with new shortcut overlay windows
- Privacy controls have been improved with per-application location access
- Quick access to media controls directly from the shell
- Searching in Files has been much improved
- Builder can now build XDG-Apps, a new cross-distro framework for building and distributing desktop applications. These can also be installed directly from GNOME Software
Release video showcasing the improvements:
Gnome 3.20 should be available from the official openSUSE Tumbleweed repositories in the next few weeks and will be part of the next releases of Fedora etc.
Further reading
- GNOME 3.20 Released: Major New Features, Many Refinements / gnome.org (EN)
- GNOME 3.20 Released With Various Refinements And Application Updates / webupd8.org (EN)
- Gnome 3.20 freigegeben: Wayland-Support wird alltagstauglich / heise.de (DE)