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Introducing GNOME 3.10

The GNOME project is proud to present GNOME 3.10. The release comes six months after 3.8, and contains 34786 changes by approximately 985 contributors. It contains major new features as well as a large collection of smaller enhancements. 3.10 provides an improved experience for users, as well as new capabilities for application developers.

New features in GNOME 3.10 include:

Wayland

Wayland is the next generation technology for display and input on Linux. It promises to deliver smoother graphics, with improved animations and transitions. Wayland's modern architecture will provide greater flexibility for developers, and will enable more secure sandboxed applications. 3.10 introduces experimental Wayland support, which allows GNOME as well as GNOME applications to be run using Wayland. This is an important milestone on the road to full Wayland adoption, and will let developers test their software with Wayland. More details can be found in the developer notes.

Integrated System Status

GNOME 3.10 features a new, redesigned system status area. In previous versions, the system status area was made up of a series of menus in the corner of the top bar. The new system status area replaces this with a single menu. This allows you to quickly get an overview of the state of your device, and provides a more focused top bar which only displays information that you care about. Among many improvements, the new menu provides easier mouse interaction, privacy enhancements, a new screen brightness slider, and a better airplane mode.

Header Bars

A new interface element has been introduced in 3.10: header bars. These merge titlebars and toolbars into a single element, giving more screen space to window content. Header bars also allow more dynamic application interfaces whose controls adjust to the current view, and they ensure that window close buttons are always present, irrespective of whether a window is maximized or unmaximized.

New Applications

GNOME's mission to create a new set of core applications continues in GNOME 3.10. There is a whole collection of new applications in this version, including Music, Photos, Notes, Software and Maps. For more details, see below.

Software

GNOME 3.10 includes a brand new application for finding and installing applications, called Software. It provides an integrated place to do all your software related tasks, like browsing, installing and removing applications, and viewing and installing software updates. It contains sections for recommended applications and an easy to use interface for browsing available applications. We have lots of plans for the future of Software, including user ratings, comments and screenshots of applications that you might want to install.

Geolocation

A new geolocation framework has been created for GNOME 3.10. This allows your location to be automatically determined using various data sources, including your internet connection and GPS. The new framework is being used in a number of places: a new Automatic Time Zone setting makes your device's clock update when you move to different time zones, and Clocks will automatically show a clock for your current location. GNOME 3.10 also introduces a new maps application, which can detect where you are and show a map of your location.

And that's not all

There's much more to GNOME 3.10. Read on to find out...

Getting GNOME 3.10

GNOME's software is Free Software: all our code is available for download and can be freely modified and redistributed. To install it, we recommend that you wait for the official packages provided by your vendor or distribution. Popular distributions will make GNOME 3.10 available very soon, and some already have development versions that include the new GNOME release.

About GNOME

The GNOME Project is an international community supported by a non-profit Foundation. We focus on user experience excellence and first-class internationalization and accessibility. GNOME is a free and open project: if you want to join us, you can.

Developer Information

GNOME 3.10 introduces a number of new features and enhancements for those working with GNOME technologies.

Wayland

With GNOME 3.10, it is possible to run a GNOME session as well as GNOME applications using Wayland. This support is experimental and is intended for testing purposes only. gnome-shell or applications running on Wayland may be unstable and could crash.

To run gnome-shell under Wayland, execute the following command in a terminal:

gnome-session --session=gnome-wayland

It is also possible to run individual applications on Wayland by specifying the GDK_BACKEND. Run the following command, substituting application-name for the name of the application's executable:

GDK_BACKEND=wayland application-name

If an application fails to run on Wayland, it will try to fall back to X11.

Further details about GNOME on Wayland can be found on the GNOME Wayland wiki page.

New GTK+ Widgets

GTK+ 3.10 introduces a collection of new interface widgets. These provide additional abilities, such as adding animated transitions, as well as greater flexibility. In some cases they provide easy-to-use alternatives to existing widgets. The new widgets have been created in line with the latest GNOME 3 application designs.

Composite Widget Templates

Composite widget templates are a new feature in GTK+ 3.10. The new feature allows composite widgets to be defined using XML, which avoids the need to construct them manually. GTK+ is already taking advantage of this feature to define its own composite widgets, such as GtkVolumeButton and GtkFileChooserDefault. Application authors can use the same capability to make their own, which can be done by directly with XML or with the Glade interface builder.

Tristan Van Berkom has written a detailed blog post about this new feature, which includes a tutorial and a working example that you can try.

Baseline Alignment in GTK+

GTK+ 3.10 introduces baseline alignment for text. This allows text labels to be properly vertically aligned in relation to containers, which has the added advantage of ensuring consistent text alignment.

Base line alignment is available for a range of common widgets. Developers wanting to use it are required to set the vertical alignment for the text widget to GTK_ALIGNMENT_BASELINE (this is done automatically when using helper functions such as new_from_label()).

GLib

GApplication has gained a number of new features for GNOME 3.10:

GLib has a number of other enhancements in 3.10:

Geolocation

The new geolocation abilities in GNOME 3.10 allow applications to access information on places and to identify the current location of the system. To do this, two new components have been introduced:

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.10 offers support for more than 50 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated. User documentation is also available in many languages.

Numerous other languages are partially supported, with more than half of their strings translated.

Detailed statistics and more information are all available on GNOME's translation status site. You can also find out how to help translate GNOME.

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