GNOME 3.28 Beta Released With Many Improvements

Following a slight delay, the beta release of GNOME 3.28 is now available ahead of next month's official release.

In pouring through the change-log, the highlights of this GNOME 3.27.90 (3.28 Beta) release include:

- Eye of GNOME (EOG) has dropped Autotools in favor of Meson.

- The Epiphany web-browser has better handling of zoom, no longer depends upon gnome-desktop, adds touch support for address bar icons, and has a number of fixes.

- GDM now supports configurations from /run and has a udev rule to disable Wayland with the Cirrus driver that is commonly used by KVM guests.

- GJS has added back a profiler as well as introducing some new APIs.

- The GNOME Boxes virtualization tool has added a drag-and-drop file transfer interface.

- GNOME Calendar has gone through a big code refactoring to improve its stability as well as taking care of some "huge" memory leaks.

- GNOME Music has finished up HiDPI support and other improvements.

- Minor user-interface improvements to GNOME TODO.

- The many GTK4 changes incorporated into GTK+ 3.93.0 like improving the OpenGL renderer in GSK, dropping GdkScreen, and other changes.

- Nautilus now supports closing tabs by middle-clicking.

- The GNOME Calculator now has Snap packaging support.

- More Meson build system work to a variety of the GNOME packages, including GNOME Control Center / GNOME Settings Daemon / GNOME Logs now supporting Meson.

- Various fixes.

The GNOME 3.27.90 release though isn't as complete as it should be. Some packages -- most notably GNOME Shell and Mutter -- weren't ready in time for the 3.27.90 tagging.

Next up is the GNOME 3.28 release candidate in early March while the goal is to officially ship GNOME 3.28.0 on 14 March.

The brief v3.27.90 release announcement can be read on the devel announce list.