14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME developers are hard at work these days to release the second milestone for the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which will see the light of day on September 23, 2015.
As reported by Softpedia earlier this week, several core components and applications of the GNOME desktop environment have been updated and will be distributed as part of GNOME 3.17.2 in the coming days.
GNOME Software, the default package manager app, received the first update for GNOME 3.18. GNOME Software 3.17.1 includes several under-the-hood improvements, as well as a couple of new features.
For example, it brings support for fetching firmware updates via the fwupd daemon, small tiles are now displayed on the front page of the software when monitors with small screens are detected, and the sources dialog received various improvements.
Furthermore, the internal modulesets have been rewritten to make it easier to edit the list of featured applications, better human readable names are now displayed when the user searches for font scripts, and a hand-picked list of featured apps is now used by default.
Last but not least, a spinner is now displayed when loading the history dialog's update data. You can download the GNOME Software 3.17.1 sources right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that iso-codes is now a dependency.
Several translations have been updated as well. You will be able to test the GNOME Software 3.17.1 application as part of the GNOME 3.17.2 desktop environment, which will be announced by the end of the week.