GNOME 3.34 Desktop Environment Development Kicks Off With First Snapshot
(GNOME 3.34: it's now faster and smoother!)Not too long after KDE Plasma 5.16 released this June, GNOME released its latest stable version 3.34 this Thursday, 12 September 2019. This release codenamed Thessaloniki and named after the Greece city where latest GUADEC conference took place. I tested 3.34 on Fedora since last Friday. This is my short report on my findings over this latest GNOME version. Let's go!Subscribe to UbuntuBuzz Telegram Channel to get article updates directly.Links Release Announcement
Release Notes
Detailed Notes
Announcement (Mailing List)
Language Support
Source Code
Video
Donation
Its Release ScheduleFirst, let's see latest GNOME Project's schedule. As you can see at ThirtyPointThree (notice odd number) page, we can see the date planned to release 3.34 (ThirtyPointFour, notice even number) is Thursday 12 September 2019. For your information, the project has unique numbering for GNOME releases, where odd number is used for development (non-stable version) and even number is used for the actual release (stable version). We clearly see here that 3.34 is indeed planned after GUADEC being held. (Release plan of GNOME 3.34 from its official wiki)Its Relase AnnouncementI love GNOME announcements in their presentation! I like the design, the layout, and how short their words to describe multiple technical stuffs that are hard to describe. The announcement publication for GNOME 3.34 --as always-- divided into 5 sources: mailing list (first place), web announcement (simple), release notes (long), developer notes (long), and video (YouTube, Invidious). See the web announcement and I believe you will like it too.(Epiphany browser showing Thessaloniki release announcement beautifully)1. GNOME ThessalonikiGUADEC 2019, the international GNOME conference, was held in Thessaloniki, Greece from 23 until 28 August. So GNOME 3.34 codenamed after GUADEC team this year, Thessaloniki. There were many, many interesting talks there as we could see here. Watch more than 40 videos of it at Ubicast!(The cool badge --as always-- of this year's GUADEC conference)(Badge license: Public Domain; badge source: PNG, SVG, more) (The venue on its official website --via OpenStreetMap, of course--)All and all, I like the badges. They are gorgeous!2. New WallpaperThe new wallpaper is adwaita-day. It looks modern, glossy, translucent for me and I like it. Somehow, it reminds me to Qubes OS's logo.(A fresh GNOME 3.34 look on Fedora Rawhide)3. Performance ImprovementGood news for us, it is better now! Try it! I ran 3.34 on Pentium 4GB laptop and it ran smoother and more responsive from LiveUSB. I felt the start menu worked far smoother both in overview and icons modes. See picture below, normally running 8 programs like these would be very heavy on my laptop, with much lagging to switch between programs and to show/hide overview like this. But on 3.34, I don't know why, it's so smooth. I'm glad!(The system runs Firefox, Kdenlive, Krita, Inkscape, System Settings, and 3 Nautilus)4. MusicNow, GNOME Music (package name: gnome-music) automatically scans /Music directory so whenever we put MP3s there it will instantly read it. (Music --not to be confused with Rhythmbox-- reads my audio files automatically from my Home directory)5. Epiphany and FirefoxNow, GNOME Web (package name: epiphany) features Pin Tab. Simply right-click a tab and select Pin Tab to keep it on the browser. Outside of official apps, if we run Mozilla Firefox on GNOME 3.34, its top bar joined with tab bar, you can see the close button is now at same level with tabs line, although originally both are separated. I don't think I'm accustomed to this, though. I tried version 66 (native RPM) and 69 (AppImage) and both run the same.(GNU and GIMP websites pinned, while GNOME website opened on Epiphany)(Left: with menubar on; right: without menubar; compare these to Epiphany above)6. System Settings and My Night LightIt's now located under System Settings > Devices > Displays > Night Light tab. When GNOME included this since 3.24, I was very glad, as I was an active Redshift user (until now) and since then I do not need to install it anymore as my desktop already has that feature built-in. 7. Nautilus File Manager and SysprofNow, it reports "Could not paste files" whenever we press Ctrl+V on a protected directory.(Nautilus 3.34)On development side, GNOME 3.34 introduces new face of Sysprof (an advanced but user-friendly profiling tool for programmers) to profile performance of applications. It now can measure any application's usage of battery, energy, network, and disk. (Sysprof main page)9. AppImagesI believe some of you know that I like AppImage --portable application format for GNU/Linux-- more than Snap than Flatpak. I ran Kdenlive, Krita, and Inkscape from their portable executable files and they look okay on GNOME 3.34. The title bars (header bars in GNOME terminology) in my vision look very huge though, but I think that's okay.(Running portable apps on GNOME 3.34)10. My CommentsThat's all for now. As always, I love how simple and beautiful GNOME release announcement was. After testing in 3 days, I immediately like this version more than the previous one for the speed improvement and I hope Ubuntu and other distros adopt it soon. Ah, I forgot, regarding Ubuntu, good news for us: next October's Ubuntu Eoan Ermine will feature 3.34! Regarding GNOME, I don't know if this is coincidence or what, but this year's KDE Plasma is faster and smoother and so is GNOME. I think next GNOME 3.36 will be faster and better as well. Finally I would love to say thank you GNOME developers! You all did well in last 6 month.How do you think about 3.34? Let me know in the comment section!DonateYou can help develop GNOME by donating to the project. See GNOME Friends page for more information.This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
GNOME 3.34 Desktop Environment Development Kicks Off with First Snapshot
GNOME 3.34 is the latest iterative release of open-source desktop environment for Linux systems. After 6 months long development cycle, GNOME 3.34 is released and this release brings some long-pending troublemaker feature fixes for this widely used desktop environment.
GNOME 3.34 has significantly improved the performance and responsiveness of the desktop than earlier releases. The team worked hard to give users, developers or heavy users a nice and fast desktop environment with this release.
Native support for ZFS on the root partition is introduced as an experimental desktop installer option. Coupled with the new zsys package, benefits include automated snapshots of file system states, allowing users to boot to a previous update and easily roll forwards and backwards in case of failure.
It is common for GNOME applications to release a gnome-3-34 branch of their project when the 3.34 version of GNOME is released (or shortly thereafter). Keeping this in mind, the build snap looks for this first to provide access to various GNOME libraries on their gnome-3-34 branch, to distribute the latest stable version that corresponds to the GNOME 3.34 release.
Technology previews are packages, stacks, or features delivered by SUSE to provide glimpses into upcoming innovations.Technology previews are included for your convenience to give you a chance to test new technologies within your environment.We would appreciate your feedback!If you test a technology preview, please contact your SUSE representative and let them know about your experience and use cases.Your input is helpful for future development.
SUSE Linux Enterprise was the first enterprise Linux distribution to support journaling file systems and logical volume managers back in 2000.Later, we introduced XFS to Linux, which today is seen as the primary work horse for large-scale file systems, systems with heavy load and multiple parallel reading and writing operations.With SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, we went the next step of innovation and started using the copy-on-write file system Btrfs as the default for the operating system, to support system snapshots and rollback.