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We now have an official release date for the upcoming GNOME 40 desktop environment, which will be the next major version coming in 2021 after the GNOME 3.38 series.
If you’ve been wondering what’s happening with the GNOME 40 desktop environment after its groundbreaking reveal last month, let me tell you that there’s a lot going on behind the curtains.
While some of you are still discovering the cool new features of the latest GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series, the GNOME Project has put the wheels in motion to kick off the six-month-long development cycle of GNOME 40, which will be totally different from the previous series.
GNOME 40 desktop’s development cycle has been simplified. First, there will no longer be four development milestones released before beta stage is reached. Only three development milestones will be published in six months, an alpha, a beta and a Release Candidate (RC).
Public testers will be able to get their hands on the GNOME 40 alpha release as soon as early January 2021, while the beta and RC releases are expected to hit the streets in mid-February and March respectively.
The final release of the GNOME 40 desktop environment series is set for March 24th, 2021, just in time for the Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) operating system, due for release on April 22nd, or Fedora 34, due for release on April 27th.
This ultra simplified development cycle will give GNOME devs more time to work on what really matters than releasing milestones no one cares (or doesn’t have time) to test, and it should not affect the quality of the final version.
It’s too early to know the new features or major changes coming to the GNOME 40 desktop environment, but rest assured that you’ll be the first to read about them when they will be revealed by the GNOME developers in the months to follow, so stay tuned on this space.
Last updated 3 years ago
