Softpedia has been informed today, February 16, by Roberto J. Dohnert, CEO of Black Lab Software, about the immediate availability for download of the Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 GNOME Edition computer operating system.

According to Mr. Dohnert, it would appear that the GNOME desktop environment has been the most requested feature by many Black Lab Linux users over the past few months. Therefore, they decided to keep maintain the GNOME and Xfce editions of the distribution and drop support for the KDE and MATE ones.

However, it looks like Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 GNOME Edition ships today with a ancient version of the GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 3.10, while the developer promises to include the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment in the future Black Lab Linux 8.0 GNOME Edition.

"Recently, GNOME has been the most requested desktop by our customers and users; ever responsive, we are releasing it to the masses," said Roberto J. Dohnert. "For the foreseeable future Black Lab's GNOME and the XFCE versions will be released simultaneously – KDE and MATE editions are being discontinued."

While hoping that the GNOME 3.10 mention in the press release is a typo and that the distro is, in fact, shipping with the latest stable GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, we can tell you a little about the new features implemented in the new Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 GNOME Edition operating system.

First of all, the GNOME desktop environment has been tweaked the same way as it was available in a previously release. Second of all, the distro ships with the new LibreOffice 5.1 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 44.0.2 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 38.5.1 email and news client, and the Linux 3.19 kernel from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 GNOME Edition is available for download right now via our website, and users can install it only on 64-bit computers. More details about the release, including some special notes can be found in today's announcement.