Matthias Clasen just sent out the official release announcement for GNOME 3.16 a few minutes ago. Based upon my testing of the GNOME 3.16 development packages thus far, I'm very confident in calling it their best desktop release yet!

Matthias wrote about the new release, "This is another exciting release for GNOME, and brings many new features and improvements, including redesigned notifications, a new shell theme, new scrollbars, and a refresh for the file manager. 3.16 also includes improvements to the Image Viewer, Music, Photos and Videos. We are also including three new preview apps for the first time: Books, Calendar and Characters. The login screen is now using Wayland by default."

The GNOME 3.16 changes at a component level have already been talked about in dozens of Phoronix articles. Some of the items that interest me the most are the GTK+ improvements with OpenGL support and a Mir back-end and better Wayland support, the Shell feeling more polished, better Wayland support across the board, UI refinements, Wayland for the GNOME log-in screen, and much more.

My GNOME 3.16 experiences so far have mostly been via the development state of Fedora 22 and it's been going great: it feels like a more polished experience of GNOME 3.14 and the Wayland state seems good enough for day-to-day use.

The official GNOME 3.16 release announcement can be read via the gnome-announce-list.