Orinda, CA– The GNOME Project is proud to release GNOME 3.10 today. The latest milestone release in the GNOME 3 series includes many new features, applications and bug fixes, as well as enhancements and updates to many existing applications.
“Days before the GNU System’s 30th birthday, the GNOME 3.10 release exemplifies what GNU is about — technical and ethical excellence,” said John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation. “The Free Software Foundation is proud to showcase the GNOME community’s work when talking to potential new free software users, and as GNOME users ourselves, we’re very thankful for these new improvements.”
Highlights for GNOME 3.10 include:
- Experimental Wayland support
- A reworked system status area, which gives a more focused overview of your system.
- Three new applications (which are technology previews): Maps, Music and Software.
- Three new additions to the core set of GNOME applications: Notes, Photos and Weather.
- ‟Software“, which provides an easy way to browse and install applications.
- New geolocation features, such as automatic time zones and world clocks.
- The ability to set a custom image on the lock screen.
- High-resolution display support
For developers, there are new GTK widgets, a geo-location framework that will allow location aware applications, and the ability to define composite widgets using XML.
“GNOME has pioneered the development and support of code that is now core infrastructure for many diverse Free desktops, including DBus, accessibility support and Network Manager,” said Matthew Garrett, Linux kernel developer and security expert. “As a result, it’s unsurprising that GNOME is the first to ship with support for a next-generation display server in the form of Wayland. GNOME’s commitment to improving the underlying platform is vital to the future of Free Software and provides a service to the entire community.”
Users will see many changes in this release which allows greater customization than in previous releases, such as the ability to customize the background of the lock screen. Other changes include allowing app browsing using pagination instead of scrolling, fine scrolling in applications with precise movements, an enhanced and redesigned login screen, and improvements to user settings. Finally, the system status menu has been redesigned by consolidating many of the smaller menus including wifi, bluetooth, sound, brightness and power into a single drop-down menu providing quick easy access to all.
A new Software application will provide a GNOME centric consistent interface to installing and maintaining software regardless of the distribution you will use. In the future, Software will be improved to include comments and ratings and other exciting developments to help choose the best software for your tasks.
For those using new hardware like the Chrombook Pixel, support for high resolution displays will ensure a consistent look independent of the resolution.
Allan Day, who was recognized at GUADEC as 2013’s most distingushed contributor said, “GNOME 3.10 is a significant upgrade for our users, and developers will benefit from new features in the application development platform. Our contributors did an incredible job and have created a really exciting release.”
The GNOME Foundation thanks all of the contributors for their hard work, perseverance, and vision in this release.
About GNOME
GNOME was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people around the world, it is the most popular environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. GNOME’s software has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments.
The GNOME community is made up of hundreds of contributors from all over the world, many of whom are volunteers. This community is supported by the GNOME Foundation, an independent non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal assistance. The Foundation is a democratic institution that is directed by its members, who are all active GNOME contributors. GNOME and its Foundation works to promote software freedom through the creation of innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experiences.