The first set of features for GNOME 3.18 were unveiled

Apr 17, 2015 19:57 GMT  ·  By

While the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment got its first point release today, the GNOME developers are already planning the features for the next major version of the acclaimed project, GNOME 3.18, due for release in October 2015.

Thus, the first set of features that will be implemented in the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment were unveiled and consist of Wayland improvements, implementation of additional information in the Calendar applet, and GNOME Calendar enhancements.

The GNOME developers promise to work hard on bringing a full Wayland session with GNOME 3.18, after implementing a Wayland login screen in the GNOME 3.16 release of the desktop environment. This change will affect the GNOME Shell, Mutter, GTK+, and GNOME Settings Daemon components.

The Calendar applet and GNOME Calendar app will get some attention

In addition to the complete Wayland session, which is under heavy development since GNOME 3.14, the redesigned Calendar applet from the GNOME Panel that landed in GNOME 3.16 will get some additional information, including birthdays and weather info in the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment. This work affects the GNOME Shell component.

Furthermore, the new GNOME Calendar application introduced as a Preview version in GNOME 3.16 will be greatly improved in the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment with additional functionally and new features. The team aims to make GNOME Calendar mature enough to be usable in our daily life.

Of course, numerous other core components of the GNOME desktop will receive enhancements and bug fixes in the next version, which will get a first development build in the coming weeks, most probably by the end of April 2015.

As noted by Frederic Peters in today's announcement for GNOME 3.16.1, a first development release, GNOME 3.17.1, will hit the streets very soon. The final version of GNOME 3.18 will arrive sometime in October 2015.