The Ubuntu GNOME developers have been very busy with their work on the 16.04 LTS, and they released some details about the packages that have been updated and about various other changes.
Ubuntu GNOME is one of the official Ubuntu flavors, and it’s been around for some time now. It implemented the vanilla version the GNOME stack, with a few small modifications. It’s a little behind the current GNOME releases, but that can’t really be helped, and it will remain in that state for the time being. The only distro with the development cycle linked to the GNOME one is Fedora.
Now that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) has been announced, the developers are hard at work to build yet another LTS (long term support) release. The previous Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS has support for three years, which means that it will reach end of life in 2017.
Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS is getting GNOME 3.19
It was to be expected for Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS to ship with GNOME 3.20, so it’s not really a surprise that the devs are starting to upload the GNOME 3.19 packages for the daily builds.
“GNOME 3.19 will be on its way to xenial/gnome3-staging PPA shortly, bear in mind that packages from this repository are considered unstable and only for experienced users. gdm packaging and binaries have been migrated to gdm3, all to match Debian, which is a change unnoticeable for casual users, but advanced users may like this change (packages, binaries, services and configurations all now use gdm3 instead of gdm,” developers wrote on Google+.
They also explained that the daily builds for Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS should work now, GNOME Builder is available in the official repos, and GNOME Calendar and GNOME Logs have been added.
There is some good news for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) as well. Users could get the latest GNOME 3.18 packages from a repository that wasn’t deemed as stable, but that’s changed now and it should be safe for use.
You can give the Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS daily build a try, but please keep in mind that it’s early work, a lot is still left to be added, and it’s highly unstable. With that in mind, enjoy!
Via Softpedia