After the GNOME developers had teased about the features of the GNOME 3.18 "Gothenburg" desktop environment a full day before release, the new version was finally made available in its stable form.
Each new version of GNOME has managed to offer enough excitement for users with new features and lots of cool stuff that made the new version stand out. Many projects have their ups and downs, but GNOME has yet to provide us with an uninteresting release since they made the move to 3.x.
What even more interesting is that developers are already planning the launch and features for GNOME 3.20, which just goes to show that there is still a lot of work to be done.
What's new in GNOME 3.18
The integration of Google Drive into Nautilus is probably the feature that will draw the most attention, even if there is a lot of other stuff in 3.18. This has been achieved in a very straightforward manner by adding an entry, like a bookmark right into Nautilus, which is the default file manager. Users will just have to add the Google account into Online Accounts, and they should be set.
Another big component that received a swath of new feature and various improvements is Files (former Nautilus). For example, a new location named Other that points towards local and network locations has been added in the "Save as" dialog, the Copy or Move dialog has been refined, and it provides more details (still no pause option), context menus are now available on touch screens with just a long press, recursive search has been automatically disabled for remote locations, and the drag and drop function has been improved.
A new functionality named Linux Vendor Firmware Service aims to provide hardware manufacturers to update device software much more easily under GNU/Linux, and it's been fully integrated into GNOME 3.18.
The new Calendar application that was only available as a preview in GNOME 3.16 is now completely integrated into the current release, and it's also linked with GNOME Online Accounts.
Other smaller features include automatic control for screen brightness on devices with a light sensor, a new Characters app that makes it for users to easily find any type of character, multitouch touchpad gestures, an improved Polari experience (the default IRC app), a better Boxes app (OS virtualization), kinetic scrolling for touchpads, and many more.
You can download GNOME 3.18 from Softpedia, but you need to keep in mind that these are just the source packages. If you don't know what to do with them, you should wait until the new version of the desktop environment reaches your distro. You can also try the GNOME 3.18 Live CD image provided by the devs.
