GNOME celebrated its 21st birthday today with the release of last point release of the current version, GNOME 3.29. Reasonably, the new big thing for them is version 3.30.
GNOME 3.30 is all set to be landing on September 5th this year. The exceptional new release is supposed to bring new eye candies and exciting new features.
New Features in GNOME 3.30
Newbie Tip: GNOME is a desktop environment used in popular Linux distros like Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian, and openSUSE.
1. New Lock and Login Screens
GNOME 3.30 will bring some cool lock and login screens. The revamped lock and login screens use a spatial model, supported by animated transitions, to integrate the different parts. User selection doesn’t show more than eight users. If there are more than this, it allows a username to be entered in addition to picking one from the grid. You will also see the distribution name in the top-left corner.
GNOME 3.30 Tentative Lock Screen
You will see reduced notifications on the lock screen due to the display of a set of app icons with a notification count for each one.
GNOME 3.30 Login Screen Mockup
2. Automatic Updates, but only for Flatpaks
You read it right. Finally, it’s happening – GNOME 3.30 will support automatic updates so that you have one less thing to worry about! GNOME will automatically update the apps when available, but to begin with, it applies to Flatpak apps only.
Automatic Updates in GNOME 3.30
The reason behind this decision, as explained by GNOME, is to avoid auto-updating packages that are not safe all the time. Although things like firmware updates, ostree content, and package updates are automatically downloaded by default, they’re deployed manually like before.
Another tweak that will be applied is to show available updates, but not yet downloaded. The developers are trying to see if the apps can be auto-download them ahead of time, if possible. This seems like new updates could take some time to download in the updates panel before either the firmware update is performed or the offline update is scheduled. We will have to wait and see how this feature will end up.
3. Nautilus 3.30 (GNOME’s default file explorer)
GNOME 3.30 will include the upcoming Nautilus file manager 3.30, which on itself is getting some cool enhancements as well. It features a new toolbar where users can now access background actions in the list view and perform actions like creating templates or opening in a terminal.
First distribution to ship with GNOME 3.30 will be the upcoming Fedora 29 slated to be released in October 2018.
App menu actions are added to the hamburger menu for more straightforward accessibility in multi-monitor setups.
App Menu in Nautilus 3.30 File Manager
Another neat visual optimization is the use of gtk+, which enables dynamic space resizing of the items in the file manager.
Other significant new features in Nautilus 3.30 include faster file search and only current folder search capability.
Search only in a folder in Nautilus 3.30
4. Improved Desktop Performance
Many significant performance improvements are added to the new version. It consumes fewer system resources than ever before, so you get faster response and more stability while multi-tasking.
5. Improved Screen Sharing
You can now control screen sharing and remote desktop sessions easily from the newly added system menu, which displays an indicator when a remote connection is active. From there, you can quickly disconnect the session when finished.
These are significant new features. You can view the complete changelog in the official release notes.
