We’ve announced last week that the development cycle of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment ended with the Release Candidate (RC) version, which was made available for testing to users worldwide on March 18, 2015.

Today, we see more and more GNOME 3.16 core components and applications published on the project’s FTP site, so we thought it would be a good idea to write down some of its major new features. First, we remind everyone that GNOME 3.16 will be released on Wednesday, March 25, 2015.

So, without any further ado, we can report that GNOME 3.16 will bring a much-improved GNOME Shell user interface that now has a cool, modern, and flat gray theme, as well as a redesigned notification system, including enhanced notification popups, and new window decorations. The notification system has been integrated into the Calendar panel applet.

Nautilus improvements, overlay scrollbars for all applications, and other goodies

Moreover, the Nautilus file manager will be greatly improved, Ctrl+Tab tab window switching has been implemented, and new GNOME apps added. In addition to the above, GNOME 3.16 will now let users read EPUB eBooks in GNOME Documents, will support native monitor hot-plugging and implement overlay scrollbars for all applications, finally!

This major release of GNOME will also add check-in support for Foursquare in GNOME Maps, improves the Mutter and Tracker components, adds OpenGL support and a Mir backend to GTK+, enhances the High Contrast theme, and introduces an all-new login screen for the Wayland display server.

The new applications of GNOME 3.16

Among the new applications included in GNOME 3.16, we can mention GNOME MultiWriter, a tool to write an ISO image file to multiple USB devices at once, GNOME Calendar, a standalone calendar application that supports multiple calendar sources, GNOME Characters, a character map application, and GNOME Taquin, a sliding-block puzzle game.

Of course, there will be many new features for developers, distributors, and administrators. Almost every GNOME application received improvements, such as the Eye of GNOME image viewer, which got a brand-new user interface, and numerous under-the-hood improvements have been implemented, which will be revealed in a complete article on the day of the release.

How to get GNOME 3.16 on your Linux distribution

Of course, the most popular question, after the release of GNOME 3.16, will be about how to install the desktop environment on an existing Linux kernel-based operating system. Unfortunately, this is not possible in the first days or even weeks, as GNOME consists of numerous core components and libraries that must be optimized and compiled for your distribution.

Arch Linux might be one of the first to have the GNOME 3.16 packages in approximately 2-3 weeks after the announcement, but who knows, maybe users of other distributions will be luckier. Gentoo? Ubuntu? Anyway, the fact of the matter is that you will probably be able to test GNOME 3.16 immediately after its announcement, on March 25, using a Live DVD image.