While you’re still enjoying the new features of the GNOME 42 desktop environment, the GNOME Project already kicked off work on the next major release, GNOME 43, with a release date slated for later this year.
The release schedule for the upcoming GNOME 43 desktop environment series was published at the end of March 2022, shortly after the release of the GNOME 42 desktop environment, suggesting that the final release date is slated for September 21st, 2022.
GNOME 43 will be the third major update in the GNOME 4x series, and development slowly kicked off this month but an alpha version will be readied for public testing in early July, while the beta version is expected a month later in early August. Here’s the official GNOME 43 release schedule:
- GNOME 43 Alpha – July 2nd, 2022
- GNOME 43 Beta – August 6th, 2022
- GNOME 43 RC – September 3rd, 2022
- GNOME 43 Final – September 21st, 2022
Later in July, the GNOME devs will attend this year’s GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) event, which will take place between Wednesday, July 20th, and Monday, July 25th. GUADEC 2022 will mark GNOME’s 25th anniversary and will take place in Guadalajara, Mexico.
As for the new features to be implemented in GNOME 43, it’s too early to talk about them. However, GNOME developer Christopher Davis laid out his plans for an adaptive Nautilus for mobile form factors, improved file chooser, accent colors, a new image viewer written in Rust/GTK4 called Loupe, redesign and Rust porting of Baobab (Disk Usage Analyzer), and improved accessibility. For more details and if you want to support his work, do check out his blog.
Meanwhile, if you’re using the GNOME 42 and 41 desktop environment series, look out for the GNOME 42.1 and GNOME 41.6 point releases, which are out this week and should arrive soon in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.
