Contents Menu Expand

Introducing GNOME 3.8

The GNOME community is proud to present GNOME 3.8. This new release features numerous new features as well as a host of smaller enhancements.

3.8 is the result of 6 months of work by the GNOME Project and contains 35936 contributions by approximately 960 people. We think that it is the best version of GNOME to date.

Here are some of the improvements that can be found in the new release.

Application Launching

GNOME 3.8 introduces a new application launching view. The Frequent tab includes your most commonly used applications, which means that you don't have to spend time looking for the things you use most often. The All tab shows all your applications and also includes application folders, which contain several groups of applications. This makes it easier for you to browse your applications.

Searching from the Activities Overview has been revamped with a new search results view, as well as new search settings. Together, these allow any application to present search results, making Activities Overview search a more powerful way to access the content that is provided by your applications. The new search settings provide control over which applications present search results as well as their order in the results list.

Privacy & Sharing

As a part of GNOME's ongoing commitment to protecting our user's privacy, 3.8 includes a range of new privacy and sharing settings. These allow you to control who has access to the content on your computer, how much personal information is displayed on the screen and whether features that track your activity should be enabled.

Clocks

The latest GNOME release introduces a new core application, called Clocks. This handy utility was first previewed in 3.6, and has subsequently matured into a member of the default GNOME application set. It includes a number of useful features, including clocks for different world times, alarms, a stopwatch and a timer.

Improved Animation Rendering

GNOME 3.8 features a significant technological breakthrough in the way that animated graphics are rendered. By improving the coordination between the components responsible for displaying animated graphics, far greater efficiency and performance has been achieved. The result of this work is smooth and robust visual transitions and window resizing. Smoother video playback will also be found under some conditions.

Classic Mode

Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these features can be used individually or in combination with other GNOME extensions.

Details

GNOME 3.8 includes a huge number of smaller bug fixes and enhancements. Many details have been addressed to give a more polished experience, including new animated transitions, improved visuals and usability fixes. Many of these improvements were made as a part of the Every Detail Matters initiative, which fixed nearly 60 bugs during the 3.8 development cycle.

Input Methods

Integrated input methods were introduced for the first time in the previous release, GNOME 3.6. They have been the subject of a great deal of work since then, with new features being added as well as bug fixes. These include a new on screen display for input method switching, new candidate character popups, new Region & Language settings, and the inclusion of all input method engines in the input method menu.

And that's not all

There's much more to GNOME 3.8. Read on to find out more...

Getting GNOME 3.8

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 3.8 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

New features and enhancements for those working with GNOME technologies.

DevHelp

DevHelp, the GNOME developer documentation application, has been updated to be consistent with other GNOME 3 applications.

GTK+

GLib

Clutter

Boxes

Boxes now uses libosinfo for adding new operating systems and distributions for express and automated installation. This is based on XSL/XML and avoids the need to use Vala or C.

Tracker

Python Bindings (PyGObject)

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.8 offers support for more than 50 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated. User and administrator documentation are 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.

Home