With GNOME 45 released (though point releases will continue) development attention now turns to its follow-up, namely GNOME 46.
And the GNOME 46 release schedule is out, giving us a good idea (dates are always subject to change, remember) of when the next release will appear.
Drum roll š„ā¦
Tension buildsā¦
Hands shake in anticipationā¦
Da-dum: GNOME 46 is due for release on March 20, 2024.
Obviously this date isn’t much of a surprise. GNOME releases typically emerge at 6 month intervals, one in March and one in September.
Even so, this is the date to jot down in your calendar app of choice.
GNOME 46 will likely ship as the default desktop environment in next year’s Fedora 40 Workstation release, and there’s a good chance it’ll make it in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, though as that’s a long-term support release that’s not a given at this point.
Ahead of a stable release there’ll be the usual array of alpha, beta, and release candidate builds to test. The dates for those, along with the key cut-off point for UI changes and new features, is as follows:
- GNOME 46 (alpha): January 6, 2024
- GNOME 46 (beta): February 10, 2024
- Also UI Freeze, Feature Freeze & API/ABI Freeze
- GNOME 46 (RC): March 2, 2024
- GNOME 46 (stable): March 20, 2024
- GNOME 46.1: April 20, 2024
Exciting stuff.
We’ll start to learn more about what we can expect in GNOME 46 in the coming months, though I hope that the revamped network display feature I covered in the summer squeaks in after not being polished enough for GNOME 45 – that feature will please a ton of people.
For more details, or to check if any dates have changed since I wrote this article, head over to the GNOME Wiki.
