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GNOME 3.6 is the latest update to GNOME 3 and represents 6 months of work by the GNOME Project. It delivers a number of major new features, including a reworked Activities Overview, updated message tray and notifications, an enhanced Files application, as well as improved accessibility support and integrated input sources for using different languages. It also incorporates a host of smaller enhancements. Together, these changes make GNOME 3 better than ever before.

The GNOME Project is an international community of contributors that is backed by a non-profit Foundation. We focus on user experience, stability, first-class internationalization, and accessibility. GNOME is Free Software and available to all. All our work is free to use, modify and redistribute.

Since the last version, 3.4, approximately 1112 people made about 38302 changes to GNOME. Anyone can get involved in GNOME to help us to improve our software. If you are interested in working on GNOME, you can join us. You can also support us financially by becoming a Friend of GNOME.

What's New in Our Core User Interface

Activities Overview

The Activities Overview has received plenty of attention this release. One change is the way that application launchers are reached. In previous versions, you used the application tab in the top-left to access your applications. This has been replaced with a new grid button that is located in the dash. This greatly improves the layout of the overview and highlights the all-important search bar.

Lock Screen

The lock screen is a major new feature for GNOME 3.6. It shows an attractive image on the screen while your computer is locked and also provides useful functionality, such as the display of notifications and the ability to control media playback.

The lock screen means that you can see what is happening while your computer is locked, and it allows you to get a summary of what has been happening while you have been away. (This functionality can be disabled via the Brightness & Lock section in System Settings.) It also means that you can easily change the volume, skip a track or pause your music without having to enter a password.

The login screen has also been updated for GNOME 3.6, and has a new visual style and other minor enhancements. Combined with the new lock screen, the result is a smoother experience when you log in or unlock your computer.

Keyboard Shortcut: The new lock screen is of course accessible by more than a mouse. Press either Return or Escape to get to the password prompt.

Message Tray

The message tray has received some major updates for GNOME 3.6. Many of these changes were based on feedback and testing, which indicated some interaction issues with the old tray design.

The new tray is clearer, better looking, and easier to interact with. It refines the existing design so that it is less error-prone and more satisfying to use. Instead of overlapping the viewing area, the new tray slides the view up, revealing the tray below. The items in the tray are also bigger, clearer, and don't move around, making them easier to use.

The way that the tray is triggered has also been altered. The hot corner – which many people had problems with – has been replaced. Instead, the whole of the bottom screen edge now acts as a trigger area; letting the mouse rest there for a short period will cause the tray to appear. We plan to improve this behavior in subsequent releases.

Keyboard Shortcut: For the first time, the message tray is also accessible with the keyboard. Press Super+M to bring up the message tray.

Notifications

GNOME's notification pop-ups have had quite a few refinements for 3.6. For the new release, we have made them:

System Settings

GNOME 3.6 comes with lots of changes to System Settings, including improvements to the main interface as well to individual settings panels.

The main System Settings interface has received a lot of attention. It now includes larger icons and a better layout. All the icons are now displayed whenever possible, without the need for scrolling, and the window size automatically adjusts to compensate for small screens. Search results are also shown in a nicer way.

Background

We looked at how someone would select a background in 3.4, and noticed a number of issues. It was quite easy to accidentally change the current background, while selecting a new background was quite difficult.

In 3.6, we show the current background as a large thumbnail. When clicked, you can easily select either a background, one of your pictures or a background color. To make your choice easier, we have made the previews bigger.

We have also refreshed the default background in 3.6, and have updated the choice of alternative backgrounds to include new images. Setting a single color as a background has also been improved and features a new set of colors.

Tip: Files and the Image Viewer allow you to select any picture as a background. Additionally, you can drag a new picture to the Background window.

Mouse & Touchpad

GNOME 3.6 includes revamped Mouse & Touchpad settings. The old settings panel was overhauled to provide a set of options that are much easier to understand. It also features a pretty new test area which enables scrolling settings to be tested – something that was not possible previously.

If you use a touchpad, the new Content sticks to fingers setting allows you to drag content as if sliding a physical piece of paper. This feature is also known as Natural Scrolling or Reverse Scrolling.

Online Accounts

Logging into Online Accounts has been made nicer, as login pages can now appear in your language. We also try to show the mobile version for the login pages, which makes it quicker and easier to use the page.

We have also added several new types of Online Accounts:

Sound

The Sound panel has been made easier to use by removing the Hardware tab. Instead, the device lists in the Input and Output tabs offer more fine-grained choices. This improvement relies on PulseAudio 2.0.

Universal Access

The Universal Access settings have been redesigned in order to make them more coherent and easy to use. All of the sections now follow the same layout. The zoom options dialog has also been redesigned to accommodate new settings for brightness, contrast, inversion and grayscale.

User Accounts

A major new feature in GNOME 3.6 is the addition of Enterprise logins (also called Active Directory or Kerberos logins). This allows GNOME to be used in centrally managed and corporate environments in a much more integrated manner. Users can enroll their computer with an enterprise network, and use their enterprise user name and password to log into GNOME.

Network

The network settings panel has been improved to make it easier to select wireless connections. A new list now gives access to all available and remembered wireless networks. You can inspect and forget access points, regardless whether they are currently in range or not.

Printers

The Add New Printer dialog has been greatly improved; it lets you add directly connected printers as well as printers discovered on a network. You can also enter a printer network address directly.

It is now possible to select a different driver (or PPD file) for a printer, by clicking on the Model field. The Options button also lets you modify the default values for many printer options that are otherwise available in the print dialog.

User Menu

The user menu has been refined for the latest GNOME release, making it more compact and adding functionality that was missed by many users. After reviewing the performance of this menu, and taking user feedback into account, the decision was made to introduce the Power Off item by default. You can suspend by pressing the Alt key in the user menu or by simply closing the lid on your laptop.

We have also endeavored to make the menu as smart as possible. As a result, the Switch User and Log Out items are now only shown when there is more than one user.

And More...

GNOME 3.6 includes many smaller changes, including bug fixes as well as enhancements. Together, these add up to a general improvement in the user experience. The following are just a few examples.

What's New in Our Applications

Files

The Files application (also known as Nautilus) has been a major focus for work in the 3.6 cycle. The newest release includes many new features and a large number of bug fixes, resulting in a more functional and effective application.

Recent Files

A new location containing recently used files has been added. This provides convenient access to files that are likely to be relevant, and also serves a useful reminding function. The new Recent location is shown when the Files application is first started, meaning that it is immediately useful.

Files has never had an effective search capability. With GNOME 3.6, this omission has finally been rectified. The new version includes a powerful search feature, which can be used by simply typing. It is case insensitive, can search for hidden files or directories, can work recursively, does not only do prefix matching, can search metadata, has ranked results based on a weighting algorithm, and can work on indexed and non-indexed directories.

Simpler and More Natural Workflows

A number of common workflows have been improved with the new version of Files. These enable users to take actions based on context, and aims to make common actions simple and straightforward.

The inclusion of new Move To... and Copy To... actions in context menus is one new workflow that offers a useful alternative to copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop.

Another addition that makes a common action that little bit easier is the New Folder with Selection context action. This makes a common action – selecting some files and putting them in a new folder – more immediate and less laborious.

Coherence and Consistency

Many small changes have been introduced to spread consistency all across the Files application. Common usage patterns have been identified and they are followed in every single aspect of Files. In this regard, a much improved and space efficient maximized window state, a more consistent menu layout and behavior, more consistent use of icons, and a more GNOME 3 style pathbar and toolbar.

More Polish

A large number of smaller enhancements have also been made to the Files application for this release. Date and time formats have been cleaned up, making date and time information easier to read and less intrusive. The menus have also been cleaned up and the preferences window has been polished.

Web

Did You Know? GNOME Web is using WebKit, the same web browser engine that is also used by Safari.

Web is the GNOME web browser.

The Overview

The most noticeable difference in 3.6 is the first version of 'The Overview'. While this is still an evolving design, it already is a solid improvement to the user experience.

The previously blank start page was replaced by a grid that holds your most visited pages. Your favorite pages are now easier to access, especially on touch devices, and valuable screen real estate is used! And if an unwanted page ends up there, you can remove it from the grid by clicking on the X icon on the top right corner of each snapshot.

Full Screen Mode

For a long time Web's full screen mode was somewhat awkward. You would still get a toolbar, so it was not really full screen, plus it would have a strange button embedded in it telling you how to go back to the safety of the vanilla mode. With more HTML5 games or presentations done inside browsers, it was about time to make your browser show you the full content and nothing but the content. So we just did that.

Other Bits and Pieces

As usual there are lots of additional features and bug fixes, too numerous to mention: automatic session recovery, tab-less mode, Do Not Track, using SoupTLD to make the URL completion smarter (so it can automatically figure out that google.com is a URL, but foo.bar is a string you want to search), support for showing details of an invalid SSL certificate, and many more.

Boxes

A preview version of Boxes was introduced in GNOME 3.4. With GNOME 3.6, this application is joining the growing family of new GNOME applications.

Did You Know? A development version of Boxes was used for various screenshots included in these release notes.

A lot of effort has been put into making Boxes work smoothly, e.g. when resizing the window of a running virtual machine. The new features implemented in 3.6 include:

Empathy

The contact list in GNOME's messaging and chat application Empathy received a cleaner design which makes the presentation of contacts consistent with Contacts. Groups have been disabled by default as we noticed most people do not make use of them. Instead, we make contacts easier to find using the integrated live search. If you still want to group contacts, this can be enabled in Preferences.

Top Contacts are always displayed at the top of the contact list. This contains the contacts that you have tagged as favorites but also those contacts that you talk to the most often.

Evolution

This release makes some small improvements to Evolution.

Disk Usage Analyzer

Disk Usage Analyzer is a graphical tool for that you can use to view and monitor your disk usage and folder structure. For 3.6 it was rewritten from scratch. It has a new user interface and received speed improvements.

Clocks

Clocks is an application to handle world times. It provides alarms, a stopwatch and a timer. It is not ready for prime time yet, however we want to show you some development screenshots to get your appetite going for 3.8:

Disks

Did You Know? The majority of the intelligence of Disks is being developed as part of the udisks freedesktop.org project.

Disks is an application to view, modify and configure disks and other storage media.

Font Viewer

The Font Viewer application has been rewritten to match the new design used for GNOME 3 applications.

What's New in Accessibility

Accessibility Always On

So far, users that needed any assistive technology had to activate accessibility support. This was cumbersome, because they had to figure out how to do that without the help of any assistive technology that they may need.

Starting with GNOME 3.6, the accessibility stack has been highly integrated into the core, so users that need any assistive technology can use GNOME right from the start.

This feature is an important milestone in GNOME's mission to deliver a free and open desktop to everyone. More than ever, it can be stated that GNOME accessibility is built-in and not bolted-on.

To summarize:

Improved Braille Support in Orca

Orca, the GNOME screen reader, presents the information from the screen via synthesized speech or via refreshable braille display. For this release, the owners of a braille output device will notice a remarkably better user experience accessing documents and web pages than in previous releases.

Web Accessibility Improvements

WebKitGTK+ received a lot of attention and many bug fixes that have resulted in a better accessibility support. We are quite pleased with the progress thus far towards making content viewed in Web compellingly accessible for Orca users.

Brightness, Contrast, Inversion and Grayscale

GNOME 3.6 brings inverse video, brightness, contrast, and grayscale options to the GNOME magnifier. The combination of these options is very powerful and is particularly useful for people with low-vision, any degree of photophobia, or just for using the computer under adverse lighting conditions.

What's New in Internationalization

Integrated Input Methods

For the very first time, GNOME comes with support for input methods out of the box. It is no longer necessary to manually choose and install an input method framework that may not fit very well into the overall user experience. Input methods are now a part of the core GNOME user experience, just like keyboard layouts.

Feedback Wanted! Integrated input methods is a major new feature, and changes functionality that is important to many users. We recognize this and want to hear about how you want the new feature to develop in the future. If you do not wish to make use of this functionality, or prefer to use another framework to provide you with input methods, this remains possible as the IBus integration can be disabled.

Both keyboard layouts and input methods appear as Input Sources in the Region & Language settings and in the GNOME shell keyboard indicator. 'Candidate windows' that are used by some input methods are presented by GNOME shell, and have the same appearance regardless of whether you are typing in an application window or in the GNOME shell search entry.

Changes to Existing Keyboard Settings: The integrated input methods feature has resulted in the rearrangement of some existing keyboard preferences. If you customize your keyboard layout, there are changes you need to be aware of:

  • The keyboard combination to change the input source or keyboard layout can now be customized by using the Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard settings.
  • Options for the Compose Key, as well as the Alternative Characters Key (also known as the 3rd level chooser key) can also be found in the Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard settings.
  • Other keyboard layout customization options can now be found in GNOME Tweak Tool.

The input method support in GNOME 3.6 is based on IBus.

What's New for Administrators

XDG Base Directory Specification Usage

Unix-like systems have traditionally lacked a standard way to store application or user data on a per-user basis. Consequently these data are often stored in an ad-hoc, inconsistent, and problematic way in "dot files" of the user's home directory.

freedesktop.org therefore issued a recommended solution for this problem.

Several applications (such as accerciser, baobab, epiphany, gconf, gdm, gnome-desktop, gnome-keyring, gnome-tweak-tool, gthumb, gtk+, jhbuild, libgnomekbd, mutter, nautilus, and planner) provide improved cross-desktop compatibility in GNOME 3.6 by inheriting the freedesktop.org directory specification.

What's New for Developers

GTK+ 3.6

GLib 2.34

Clutter 1.12

Use of Deprecated Libraries

And More...

Other GNOME Platform improvements in GNOME 3.6 include:

Plans for 3.8

Getting GNOME 3.6

The code for GNOME 3.6 is available to download as Free Software. To install it, we recommend that you wait for the official packages provided by your vendor or distribution. Popular distributions will make GNOME 3.6 available very soon, and some already have development versions that include the new GNOME release.

If you cannot wait or just want to give GNOME a try, download one of our live images!

If you have a technical background you can also build GNOME from source.

About GNOME

The GNOME Project is an international community of contributors that is backed by a non-profit Foundation. We focus on user experience, stability, first-class internationalization, and accessibility. GNOME is Free Software and available to all. All our work is free to use, modify and redistribute.

GNOME 3.6 could not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the GNOME community. Congratulations and thanks to everyone.

On behalf of all the contributors, enjoy GNOME 3.6!

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.6 offers support for more than 50 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated, including the user and administration manuals for many languages.

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

Detailed statistics, how you can help make GNOME available in your language, and more information are all available on GNOME's translation status site.

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