GNOME 3.14 Released: A Refined Experience

Orinda, CA– The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 3.14 today. This milestone release in the GNOME 3 series brings exciting new features, bug fixes, and an enhanced application development platform. Major new features include automatic handling for captive portals, network-aware sharing, Google photos support, and touchscreen gestures.

Jeff Fortin Tam, GNOME Foundation President, said: “With multitouch and gestures support coming to GTK+, as well as maturing support for the next-generation Wayland display protocol, GNOME is paving the way for the future of the Free Software desktop and mobile ecosystem at large. It is great to see that applications have undergone, as always, a great amount of refinement; routing in GNOME Maps and improved PDF annotation features in Evince, for instance, are long-awaited features that I’m very eager to try out in GNOME 3.14.”

GNOME 3.14 highlights include:

New animations in the Activities Overview, along with new window animations.

Automatic handling for Wi-Fi hotspots that require you to login (so called “captive portals”).

A redesigned Weather application, which uses geolocation to show the weather for your current location.

Support for browsing Google pictures in Photos.

Improved touchscreen support, with multi-touch gestures for both the system and applications.

Developers can look forward to a new live inspector for GTK+ applications, enhanced CSS capabilties, major progress on Wayland adoption, and a significant update for GNOME’s Human Interface Guidelines.

Distributions and partners have welcomed the latest GNOME release. Scott Reeves, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop Manager, said: “The GNOME 3 desktop provides a stable, feature rich experience for individual end users and for professional environments as well. GNOME 3 has reached a point of integration and polish to the extent that we will ship GNOME 3 as the desktop for our enterprise customers. We are invested in and contributing to the GNOME project and look forward to the additional functionality and improvements in GNOME 3.14 and beyond. We intend to continue including GNOME 3 in subsequent releases of our SUSE Linux Enterprise product.”

The news was also welcomed by Debian’s GNOME team. Jordi Mallach, one of the team’s members: “The Debian GNOME packagers are very happy to see another GNOME release which brings even more polish and new features to the already very reliable 3.x foundation. We’ve done our best to make sure Debian ‘jessie’ will ship with GNOME 3.14, as the improvements over previous releases will really make a difference for our next stable release. Congrats to the GNOME community!”

More information about the latest version, including details on all the new features, can be found in the release notes. A screenshot pack is also available, as well as a test image so you can try it for yourself.

The GNOME Foundation thanks all of the contributors for their hard work during this release cycle and all of its sponsors for their support.

About GNOME

GNOME was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people around the world, it is one of the most popular environments for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. GNOME’s software has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments.

The GNOME community is made up of hundreds of contributors from all over the world, many of whom are volunteers. This community is supported by the GNOME Foundation, an independent non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal assistance. The Foundation is a democratic institution that is directed by its members, who are all active GNOME contributors. GNOME and its Foundation work to promote software freedom through the creation of innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experiences.