GNOME is a well known Desktop Environment, which aims on simplifying the use of Linux computer Systems. Much awaited GNOME 3.16 is released today and announced by Matthias Clasen. With lots of improvements in redesigned notifications, a new shell theme, new scrollbars, and a refresh for the file manager , Image Viewer, Music, Photos and Videos. Three new preview apps are Books, Calendar and Characters. You can now download GNOME 3.16 Fedora based live image from the website for immediate use.
Some notable improvements are listed below
New Notification UI
Notifications in GNOME 3.16 will appear from the top of the screen. GNOME has been a good Desktop Environments with respect to the “Notifications”. With the new release on its way, we are supposed to see some major enhancements to the Notification area as well. GNOME 3.16 will be able to maintain the history of notifications as well. In order to accomplish all these features in Notification system, Alarms and Calendars has been tweaked and enhanced to a great extent. Looking at the notification area will help you identify the past and recent activities in pretty easy manner.
Overall there has been noteworthy improvement to all components of the notification area, not only alarms and calendars but also Disk notifications, network and other system resources.
The default GNOME theme has been changed from Raleigh to Adwaita GTK+ theme. Adwaita is a high-quality dark variant theme, it supports all updated GTK+ features and many of the CSS improvements have been made recently.
Improved Nautilus File Manager
Some interesting modifications have been made to Nautilus File Manager; there are noticeable differences in deletion, search and operations dialogs features. Nautilus has improved menus, appearance is improved, and file deletion can be undone now as well.
Overlay Scrollbars
Ubuntu first used the concept of Overlay Scrollbars. Its great feature for Mobile devices and overlay Scrollbars take less space as compared to the traditional scrollbars. As already mentioned, GNOME 3.16 is having some really awesome UI changes, since it brings GTK+ tool-kit as experimental feature; this tool-kit will be bringing overlay scrollbars to GNOME. Gladly, Overlay Scrollbars are here in GNOME 3.16. It’s one of the most awaited features in GNOME 3.16.
Mutter Improvements
Mutter is the default Windows Manager for GNOME. Alongside many new improvements and old bug fixes, new Mutter will change the way decorations are drawn. It will be removing support for the old Metacity theme as well.
Improved Control Center
GNOME 3.16 is having improved Control Center with redefined notification settings, Problem reporting settings, Privacy Control, power settings and Bluetooth settings. System Integration has been excellent, The Privacy section in GNOME setup now offers to opt out of geo-location and bug reporting.
Document Viewer Improvements
Several useful changes have been made to the Evince Document Viewer application. Its easier, CTRL+Mouse Wheel zoom functionality is now pointer-centered in new Evince. It used to be window-centered in earlier versions. Additionally, several translations including Greek, Spanish, German, Czech, Norwegian Bokmal, and Dutch have been updated in Evince 3.16.0. Other features include page scaling, search filter options, improved printing documentation etc.
Calculator and Maps
Calculator and Maps has been enhanced. Here are some additions to Maps features:
- Adding places as “Favorite”
- Send Location to Weather or Clocks
- Drag-n-drop of the Route search Entries
- Improvements in Geoclue location handling
Taquin
New sliding-block puzzle game is a GNOME module now. It has a cleaner interface and is pretty interesting.
E-Book Support
GNOME 3.16 will be including new E-book reader App. However, EPUB (short for electronic publication; sometimes called ePub) support will be available in later releases of GNOME. GNOME 3.16 will only handle comic book archives right now.
GTK+ Broadway
Web Developers might find this feature very useful, GTK+ Broadway included in GNOME 3.16, it will allow transmitting and interacting with GTK+ interfaces remotely via HTML5. It will facilitate the content rendering towards modern web browsers.
Conclusion
GNOME 3.16 is having plenty of new features with respect to both UI and functionality. One thing is clear that GNOME 3 technology continues to excite its users and provide stability. We will see more detailed reviews once GNOME 3.16 is officially released. Enjoy!
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