GNOME 40.beta released!

[Abderrahim Kitouni <a kitouni gmail com>]

Hello,

GNOME 40.beta is now available. It also marks the start of the UI,
feature and API freezes
(collectively known as The Freeze). Any string changes need to be
announced to the i18n mailing list in advance of the string freeze
which should start next weekend. If you'd like to target the GNOME 40
platform, this is the best time to start testing your apps or
extensions.

 You can use the 40beta branch of the flatpak runtimes, which is now
available on Flathub beta. The highlights of this branch is the
addition of GTK 4 (although other libraries such as WebKitGTK and VTE
are still using GTK 3, and GTK 3 will be kept in the runtimes for some
time), as well as libhandy and librest.

An installer image is also available for testing and porting extensions

https://os.gnome.org/download/40.beta/gnome_os_installer_40.beta.iso

This is meant to be installed in a virtual machine with EFI support
(such as the GNOME Boxes version available on Flathub). You can also
try to install it on bare metal but be warned that hardware support is
very limited.

The following components have important patches which are not
available in the latest tarball
- glib has a bug that causes gnome-shell to crash
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/1958

- dconf-editor and cheese won't compile with the latest version of vala
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dconf-editor/-/merge_requests/17
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/cheese/-/merge_requests/41

- gedit crashes on startup with the latest version of nautilus
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gedit/-/merge_requests/102

If you want to compile GNOME 40.beta yourself, you can use the
official BuildStream project snapshot:

https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/40.beta/gnome-40.beta.tar.xz

The list of updated modules and changes is available here:

https://download.gnome.org/core/40/40.beta/NEWS

The source packages are available here:

https://download.gnome.org/core/40/40.beta/sources/

WARNING!
--------
This is beta quality software. This release is intended for GNOME
developers and beta testers. For more information about GNOME 40,
including the full schedule, please see our wiki page:

https://www.gnome.org/start/unstable


Cheers,

Abderrahim Kitouni
GNOME Release Team