GNOME 3.20 Gets Ready To Shine With New Features

With GNOME 3.20 on final approach for landing tomorrow, 23 March, here's a recap of some of the exciting changes and new features of this six-month update to the GNOME stack.

- Wayland, Wayland, Wayland! There's been more continued work on native Wayland support. There were multiple improvements to the GTK tool-kit's Wayland support, various fixes and improvements to Mutter and GNOME Shell, and an assortment of other work. GNOME on Wayland is pretty much day-to-day usable and in great shape. Unfortunately, it's not 100% the way there and in part why Fedora developers decided Fedora 24 will not use Wayland by default as it's not at complete feature parity with X11. Nevertheless, the continued Wayland work for GNOME 3.20 has been one of the major areas of focus.

- Aside from all of the Wayland improvements, there were also other improvements in the GTK+ 3.20 tool-kit.

- Non-destructive editing for GNOME Photos.

- Performance improvements, utilization of the new WebKit FTL B3 JIT JavaScript compiler and more in WebKitGTK+ 2.12.

- MAME support in GNOME Games.

- A much better looking and more useful GNOME Maps.

- Better searching in the Nautilus file manager.

- Better airplane / WiFi hotkey support.

- WebGL and WebAudio by default for the Epiphany web-browser.

- Improved touchpad and mouse configuration.

- A more feature-complete XDG-App for those interested in this app sandboxing approach.

Overall, GNOME 3.20 has shaped up to be a great release and is also a wonderful version for marking five years since the release of GNOME 3.0. Plenty more information on the GNOME 3.20 changes can be found via these tentative release notes. Look for GNOME 3.20 to land on Wednesday.