Features To Look Forward To With GNOME 3.18

GNOME 3.18 is set to be released tomorrow. If you've fallen behind in your Phoronix reading, here's a list of some the changes and new features to look forward to with this significant desktop environment update.

- Much better Wayland support! There's been a lot of improvements to GTK+, Mutter, and more for playing nicely on Wayland directly without X11. The support seems good enough for day-to-day GNOME Wayland desktop use from all my trials thus far. There's also been Wayland-related improvements in Clutter and other less thought about packages along with new functionality like Wayland touchpad gestures. Fedora 24 is planning for Wayland by default thanks to the progress made in the GNOME world.

- HiDPI support is still seeing a bit of churn and with GNOME 3.18 it finally fixes HiDPI cursor scaling.

- A longstanding NVIDIA driver fix.

- Proper Google Drive integration at long last.

- GNOME's Epiphany Web Browser blocks ads by default and enables DNT.

- GTK+ has Mir back-end fixes.

- File chooser improvements.

- Work towards UEFI firmware updates through GNOME Software.

- Nautilus and Calendar improvements.

- RandR 1.5 support.

- GTK+ dropped Windows XP support.

- Many other improvements and bug-fixes.

What are you looking forward to most about GNOME 3.18? Be sure to share your thoughts by commenting on this article in our forums.