Hello,
GNOME 41.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 41 platform, this is the best time to start testing your apps or extensions.
You can use the 41beta branch of the flatpak runtimes, which is now available on Flathub beta.
This branch is based on the 21.08 branch of freedesktop-sdk and as such has quite a few ABI breaks. In addition, this release removed zenity and librest. The additions of this release are libmanette and sysprof-capture. The release team has agreed to pre-announce removals at least one cycle in advance. Starting with GNOME 42, all removals have to be announced at least one cycle in advance. As such, the following are deprecated and will be removed in a future release: clutter and friends (cogl, clutter-gtk and clutter-gst) and libsoup version 2.x (to be replaced with version 3.x).
An installer image is also available for testing and porting extensions
https://os.gnome.org/download/41.beta/gnome_os_installer_41.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.
If you want to compile GNOME 41.beta yourself, you can use the
official BuildStream project snapshot:
https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/41.beta/gnome-41.beta.tar.xz
The list of updated modules and changes is available here:
https://download.gnome.org/core/41/41.beta/NEWS
The source packages are available here:
https://download.gnome.org/core/41/41.beta/sources/
WARNING!
This is beta quality software. This release is intended for GNOME
developers and beta testers. For more information about GNOME 41,
including the full schedule, please see our wiki page:
https://www.gnome.org/start/unstable
Cheers,
Abderrahim Kitouni
GNOME Release Team