GNOME 3.29.4 Released As Another Step Towards GNOME 3.30

GNOME 3.29.4 was released on Friday night as another step towards this September's stable release of GNOME 3.30.

Among the changes striking this latest development version of the GNOME desktop environment:

- The GNOME Shell and Mutter updates. What's notable on that front is the CPU usage optimization in Mutter, one of many recent optimizations to the GNOME performance-sensitive code paths.

- New API additions to WebKitGTK+ 2.21.5 and several crash/rendering fixes.

- The Polari 3.29.4 IRC client adds Rizon to the pre-defined networks available.

- Various improvements to BuildStream.

- GNOME Subtitles 1.4 is back to being updated and has finally been upgraded to GTK3 along with many other improvements to this code-base for making video subtitles.

- Various bug fixes and translation updates.

The brief GNOME 3.29.4 release announcement can be read on the mailing list.

Coming up next on the GNOME 3.30 release schedule is the beta release set for 1 August. When the beta is reached, there is the UI freeze as well as the API/ABI freeze. It's for the second beta in the middle of August when hitting the string freeze and then the end of the month for the GNOME 3.30 release candidate when the hard code freeze begins. If all goes well, GNOME 3.30.0 will be officially released around 5 September.