Fans of free, open source desktop environments will be pleased to hear the GNOME 3.30 release date has been set.

Serving as the next major stable update to the GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 3.30 is scheduled for release on September 6, 2018.

Of course, before it gets there there’ll be a slate of alpha, beta and release candidate builds to sample, all tagged under the guise of GNOME 3.29.

For more details on this cycle’s release, freeze and finalisation dates you can shuffle your eyes over the GNOME release schedule.

GNOME 3.30 Release Date & Features

Released earlier this month GNOME 3.28 features include a new on-screen keyboard, better handling of Thunderbolt 3 devices, and adds the ability to star files and folders in the Nautilus file manager.

Sadly there aren’t many firm details on the kind of GNOME 3.30 features and changes we’ll see come the autumn.

Performance optimisations are likely to feature in some shape or other. A GNOME Performance Hackfest is planned for May to specifically work on improving GNOME Shell performance — including the big memory leak issue which affects current builds.

The bi-annual GUADEC (GNOME Users and Developers European conference) event is also due to take place in July. It’s likely we’ll learn more about the ambitions and aims for the next release of GNOME desktop here.

We’ll, as always, keep you up to date on all the important and noteworthy changes as and when we hear about them. If you hear about something neat before we do, do get in touch via our contact form!

Thanks to Tardis93