GNOME 3.12

This post doesn’t cover all the distributions, just let’s say the most famous ones, and only their official repositories. Of course whatever applies for parent distros it more or less applies for their derivatives as well.

Additionally I’m not following the news of every distro out there, so feel free to correct me ;)

Arch

Arch is one of the most popular choices for Gnome-Users, and they (Arch) traditionally include the latest GNOME releases inside the first 2 weeks. Archers are going to be the first to get 3.12 in an officially way. Anyway, nothing much to say about Arch :)

The only issue with Arch is that they don’t ship GNOME-Software App, due to libalpm “incompatibility” with the latest PackageKit. ALPM (Arch Linux Package Management) is the backend of Pacman (the upgrade tool of Arch).

Gentoo

Another rolling release distro like Arch, mostly used in large and critical deployments, famous for its scale-ability, performance and customization. GNOME 3.10 arrived in Gentoo just within the last couple of weeks, and GNOME 3.12 is expected to come in the next few weeks but not in stable.

However you can tweak your ebuilds and use the GNOME Overlay where GNOME development takes place. Currently you will find GNOME 3.11.92 -and possibly 3.12 in a few days.

Fedora 20

Fedora 21 is expected to be released somewhere at the end of 2014 with GNOME 3.14. They still have a decision to make, shipping GNOME 3.12 as a regular update in Fedora 20, or using the Copr repository. A decision that can take a month or so.. Fedora never was good in deadlines, while they usually include GNOME around 1+ month after the GNOME initial release. Pretty bad.

For now you can use GNOME 3.12 on Fedora 20 from Copr building system with your own risk. There is no support for Copr, you cannot file bugs (there are bugs!), and you should have a good knowledge how to downgrade in case things go wrong.

It is a worth to mention that Fedora.Next (aka 21) is going to be the closest thing in what we like to call “GNOME OS”.

Ubuntu-GNOME 14.04

Ubuntu GNOME officially ships GNOME 3.10, and that means no 3.12 there.

With your own risk you can use the highly unstable GNOME3 Staging PPA, that includes GNOME 3.12. Not all modules have been updated to 3.12, but Ubuntu GNOME hasn’t been released yet.

Final release is scheduled for April 17, including Ubuntu and all Ubuntu official spins.

openSUSE 13.1

openSUSE current version 13.1 ships GNOME 3.10. GNOME 3.12 might be available on some unsupported OBS repo at some point, if it’s possible to build it against an “old” distro without changing the entire system.

The next openSUSE release (13.2) is scheduled for November 2014 and that means that they might directly include GNOME 3.14 and skip 3.12, pretty much the same as Fedora 21 does.

openSUSE Factory is the repo that openSUSE.Next is branched from, and it currently includes GNOME 3.10.

Mageia 4

Mageia is one of the best GNOME distros you will find around. Mageia 4 currently ships GNOME 3.10, where Mageia Cauldron ships GNOME 3.12.

Cauldron is the Mageia.Next (aka Mageia 5). Mageia 5 is scheduled for December 19.

Mageia’s 5 technical specifications haven’t yet published but ..with GNOME 3.14 coming in September and Mageia 5 Beta1 coming in September 30, it is possible to get a Mageia 5/GNOME 3.14 release.

Again like the openSUSE case, Mageia can have a 3.12 skip, but maybe an unofficial GNOME 3.12 backport will come.

Debian

The current stable distribution of Debian is version 7, codenamed “wheezy”. It was initially released as version 7.0 on May 4th, 2013 and its latest update, version 7.4, was released on February 8th, 2014. Next Debian version is codenamed “jessie” and a release date is to be announced, but it will take place inside 2015.

I’m apologizing to the friends of Debian but when I see this in the Debian GNOME page..

DebianSqueeze includes GNOME 2.30.

DebianWheezy includes GNOME 3.4.

DebianUnstable includes GNOME 3.8.

..I think there isn’t any reason to say anything more. They don’t “care” much about GNOME, and Debian isn’t much of a desktop distro anyway. Debian is more for the enterprise and less for the home.

However, you can check the GNOME 3.10 Status and GNOME 3.12 Status on Debian, and you can get GNOME 3.10 (but not a 3.12!) there, but not with a officially supported way.

Oh, and by the way Steam OS uses GNOME Shell 3.4. This is totally a GNOME dis-advertisement..

BSDs

Just in short, you can have GNOME 3.12 in BSDs!

FreeBSD http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2014/03/26/gnome-3-12-and-freebsd-and-a-virtual-machine/

http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2014/03/26/gnome-3-12-and-freebsd-and-a-virtual-machine/ OpenBSD http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&m=139591115404328&w=2

It seems that BSDs do better than Linux when we come to GNOME ..Interesting ;)

Note that there isn’t any implementation of Systemd (soft GNOME requirement) for BSD systems. You can read an interview (FOSDEM 2013) of the legendary Lennart Poettering about Systemd in BSD.

GNOME 3.12 and Distros..

As you can see the only way to get GNOME 3.12 for now is Arch Linux. In the future I am expecting a better support from Fedora.Next (closest release dates) and from Ubuntu GNOME. In any case I want to say that Getting GNOME page is totally obsoleted. Just let Arch there.. At least for now..