The GNOME development team has revealed today that the second Beta for GNOME 3.20 has been released and is now ready for testing.

The GNOME team is getting closer to the 3.20 stable version of the desktop environment, and the devs have just hit a new milestone. The second Beta means that they are pretty much done with active development, and they are now focusing more on bug fixes.

"GNOME 3.19.91 is now available. This is our second beta release on the way to 3.20. Please try it and let us know how well it works for you. To compile GNOME 3.19.91, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published by the release team (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release," notes GNOME developer Matthias Clasen.

The developers have entered API/ABI Freeze, Feature Freeze, and UI Freeze. This means that now they will have to focus on fixing issues and less on new features. These can still pass, but the team needs to make an exception, so it must be something really important.

You can download the GNOME 3.20 Beta 2 stack from Softpedia, but keep in mind that these are the source packages, and they are still far from being stable. Don't use a production machine for testing.

The stable version of GNOME, 3.20, is expected to land on March 23, and a couple more RCs are supposed to arrive until then.