Welcome to GNOME 3.16

GNOME 3.16 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of six months' work by the GNOME project. It includes major new features, as well as a large number of smaller improvements and enhancements. The release incorporates 33525 changes, made by approximately 1043 contributors. New features and improvements being introduced in GNOME 3.16 include:

Notifications Reimagined

GNOME 3's notifications system has been overhauled for 3.16. The previous Message Tray has been replaced by a new message list that provides straightforward access to previous notifications, and notification pop-ups (called "banners") have been repositioned in order to make them more noticeable and to prevent them from interfering with applications.

As with the previous notifications design, it is possible to quickly and directly respond to notifications through their pop-up banners. This allows you to do things like quickly snooze an alarm or reply to a chat message.

The calendar drop down, which is accessed from the time indicator in the top bar, has also been redesigned for 3.16. Not only does it now present the notifications history, but it also shows event reminders and world times. This gives a great overview of what is currently happening, as well as what is scheduled for the day. The addition of weather information and birthday reminders is planned for the future.

Files Improvements

The Files application has had a number of significant updates for 3.16. The grid and list views have been improved, so that they provide bigger thumbnails, easier to read rows, and have a more attractive appearance. They are complemented by a new popover for controlling the view, which makes it easy to change the zoom level and sort order from a single place.

File deletion has also been improved for 3.16, with the addition of a new, easy to discover undo feature. This allows files and folders to be moved to the trash using Delete alone, rather than the Ctrl+Delete keyboard combination.

Finally, many of the menus in Files have been updated for consistency and logical organization.

Updated Visuals

GNOME 3's visuals have been updated for 3.16. The Activities Overview, login screen, system menus and other system components have been given a new, more contemporary look. The new visuals are designed to integrate with the visual style of GNOME applications, for a more seamless experience.

New-Look Scrollbars

3.16 introduces a new style of scrollbar for GNOME 3. Instead of being shown all the time, these new overlay scrollbars are only shown when needed: a small scroll indicator is shown when the pointer is moved, and a larger bar appears when control is wanted. This creates a cleaner, less distracting view, which helps you to focus on window content.

Updated Image Viewer

GNOME's Image Viewer application has been redesigned for this release. The new design significantly reduces the amount of window chrome, to give more space to the images themselves. A new control provides a convenient way to quickly zoom in and out, and the properties sidebar has been refined to be easier to read and more attractive.

New Preview Applications

The drive to create a new suite of core applications continues with GNOME 3.16, with the introduction of three new preview applications. These are initial versions that are intended for testing, and to give a taste of what is to come in future versions.

• Calendar provides simple and easy to use window on to your online schedule, and is integrated with Online Accounts for seamless setup.
• Characters is a new character map application. Common characters are quick and easy to browse, thanks to category-based browsing. "Type to search" provides a quick and convenient way to find characters, and a recent view presents characters that you have used in the past, for ease of retrieval.
• Books is a new e-book viewer application for GNOME. The initial version allows viewing comic book archives, with ePub support planned for the future.

And that's not all

There's much more to GNOME 3.16. Read on to find out…

Getting GNOME 3.16

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 3.16 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 3.16 introduces a number of new features and enhancements for those working with GNOME technologies.

GTK+

With 3.16, built-in OpenGL support has arrived for GTK+. This allows applications that make heavy use of 3D graphics to be written in conjunction with GTK+, using the new GtkGLArea widget. OpenGL support in GTK+ 3.16 provides an effective replacement for the previous GtkGLArea and GtkGLExt libraries.

Other changes in this version of GTK+ include:

• A display system backend for the Mir display server.
• GtkPopoverMenu, a new widget for creating menus contained with popovers.
• Themes can now simultaneously support multiple GTK+ versions, by including version-specific CSS.
• Improved support for application menus on OS X.
• Customizable selection behavior in GtkTextView.

GTK+ Inspector

GTK+'s live inspector has had lots of improvements for 3.16. New features include:

• An interactive JavaScript prompt.
• An interface for GLib's new memory tracking features.
• A magnifier for inspecting widgets (this is particularly useful for theme authors).
• Increased isolation of the inspector through the use of a separate display connection. This means that settings changes only affect the application you are inspecting, and not the inspector itself.
• A much improved user interface, which uses space more efficiently and is easier to navigate.

GLib

GNOME 3.16 is accompanied by GLib 2.44. This latest GLib release includes a number of new features:

• GObject instance counting is a new debugging feature which helps to find reference leaks. To use it, set the GOBJECT_DEBUG=instance-count environment variable, and then use g_type_get_instance_count() to get the number of live objects of a given type. GTK+ Inspector has a UI for this.
• GLib 2.44 introduces GListModel, a GSequence-based object list. This provides an alternative to GtkTreeModel, when data is naturally organized in GObjects. GtkListBox has an API (gtk_list_box_bind_model) to use such models.
• GLib's network monitor implementation has been significantly improved. This can be accessed using the existing GNetworkMonitor interface, to find out the current network state.
• The new G_DECLARE_TYPE macro reduces the amount boilerplate required when creating GObjects in C.
• g_autoptr now provides automatic cleanup for local variables (supported on GCC and Clang).
• GSimpleIOStream is a new wrapper which makes it easier to construct GIOStreams.

Builder

Builder is a brand new IDE, which is intended to make it easy to create GNOME applications. This initial 3.16 release is an early preview, which shows editing features, such as split view, snippets, auto-indentation and a VIM engine. Builder was backed by a successful crowdfunding campaign early in 2015, and there are big plans for the future. These include project management functionality, global search, version tracking, debugging, Glade integration, and much more.

MultiWriter

MultiWriter is a new application for writing image files to multiple USB devices. It has a range of possible applications, including operating system distribution, QA testing, or promotional use of live USB drives.

Other Improvements in 3.16

• GDK Pixbuf has improved support for loading and saving various image formats, including PNG, JPEG, TIFF, ICO and BMP.
• Tracker's utilities have been consolidated into a single tracker command. This replaces the previous collection of utilities, making it easier and more convenient to work with Tracker from the command line. tracker --help can be used to list all available subcommands.
• libsoup, the HTTP client/server library, now supports WebSockets, both client-side and server-side.

Looking to the Future

GNOME 3.16 includes important developments as a part of long-term GNOME technology initiatives.

• Work towards full [Wayland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_ %28display_server_protocol%29) adoption has continued apace in 3.16. Features like input configuration and pointer barriers are now Wayland compatible, and input handling has made major progress through the development of libinput. With these changes, the port to Wayland is now approaching its final stages.
• The GNOME community has begun development on an exciting new application deployment framework. Called XDG App, this aims to make it possible for developers to create applications that can run on multiple distributions, and for those applications to be sandboxed for additional security and stability.
• Finally, the arrival of OpenGL support in GTK+ marks a major achievement on the road to the implementation of the GTK+ Scene Graph, which promises to provide an advanced animation framework for GTK+.

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.16 offers support for more than 41 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated. User documentation is also available in many languages.

• Assamese
• Basque
• Bosniac
• Brazilian Portuguese
• British English
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Catalan (Valencian)
• Chinese (China)
• Chinese (Hong Kong)
• Chinese (Taiwan)
• Czech
• Danish
• Finnish
• French
• Galician
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Marathi
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Punjabi
• Russian
• Serbian
• Serbian Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Telugu
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

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.