Allan Day, a GNOME UX designer working for Red Hat and renowned GNOME developer/contributor, opened an interesting discussion on the official GNOME mailing list about possible codenames for upcoming releases of the acclaimed desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

According to Mr. Day, it would appear that there was a discussion during the annual GUADEC conference for GNOME developers, businesses, governments, foundation leaders, users, and individuals worldwide, about codenaming the next major release of the GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 3.18, due for release on September 23, 2015.

The team agreed to codename the next releases of the open-source GNOME desktop environment, which is currently used in a large number of Linux kernel-based operating systems, after the cities where the GUADEC conference took place. As such, the forthcoming GNOME 3.18 release might be dubbed Gothenburg.

However, because the development cycle of the GNOME desktop environment is set at six months, in September and March, they decided to codename the September releases after the city where the GUADEC conference took place, as explained above, and the March releases after the city where the GNOME.Asia Summit will take place.

"I'm working on the release notes for 3.18, and I will also be working on release promotion. During GUADEC, the board and Release Team agreed to name September release after the GUADEC host city, and each March release after the GNOME.Asia host city," says Allan Day.

GNOME 3.18 arrives next month, on September 23

At the moment, the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment is in heavy development, with a first Beta release sent to testers worldwide last week, and a second Beta build on the way, scheduled for release sometime next week. The development cycle will continue with a Release Candidate (RC) version scheduled for September 16, and will conclude with the final release of GNOME 3.18 on September 23, 2015.