After six months of hard work, The GNOME project today released the highly anticipated GNOME 3.30, a major update that brings many new features and improvements.
Named Almeria after the city that hosted the GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2018, which took place last July, GNOME 3.30 brings with it a large number of improvements and new features that promise to provide a better experience for all its users.
What's new in GNOME 3.30?
Probably the most important feature of GNOME 3.30 is the return to classic mode that allows users to add icons to the desktop. After being removed from the Nautilus file manager, desktop icon handling returns as an extension of the GNOME Shell.
Best of all, desktop icons are not exclusive to this version, they can also be used in GNOME 3.28. Additionally, GNOME 3.30 adds support for volumes encrypted with TrueCrypt / Veracrypt in Nautilus and in Disk Utility.
On the other hand, Thunderbolt support is now configurable from the Settings panel, which also shows improvements to Airplane Mode, as well as hardware-related panels that are hidden by default when hardware is not present.
The famous Notes application has received a small redesign and now shows a "hamburger" menu in the main view, plus a new option for text size and an improved notes view. GNOME 3.30 has many more changes, if you are interested in knowing all of them you can check the official release notes from this link.
GNOME 3.30.1 is coming September 26, 2018
As expected, GNOME 3.30 brings with it many improvements for application developers, although it will take up to two weeks to reach the official repositories of the different distributions.
GNOME 3.30 could officially hit the repositories later this month, just as the first maintenance update is released. A month later we will see the second update, GNOME 3.30.2, which currently has a tentative release date of October 24.