Frederic Peters of the GNOME Project has just announced a few minutes ago that the highly anticipated GNOME 3.20 desktop environment is now officially in Release Candidate (RC) stage of development.



The GNOME 3.20 Release Candidate build is here one day late, as the official release schedule noted March 16, 2016, as the release date, but considering the fact that today's Saint Patrick's Day, it is more than welcome, and we have all the time on our hands to give it a proper test drive.
As expected, many of the core components and applications that are usually distributed as part of the GNOME desktop environment have been updated during this week, and for some of them we've already written detailed articles right here on our Linux news section.
"GNOME 3.19.92 is now out; this is our release candidate for 3.20, scheduled next week," said Frederic Peters. "To compile GNOME 3.19.92, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published by the release team (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release)."
GNOME 3.20 will be officially released on March 23, 2016 Now that the Release Candidate build of GNOME 3.20 is out the door, it means only one thing: the development of one of the most anticipated GNU/Linux technology for 2016 is over and the final release will be prepared for the March 23 launch. Yes, in exactly six days from today.
However, the GNOME 3.20 packages will make their way into the default software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux or Fedora, later this Spring; let's say in at least one month from the March 23 release. GNOME 3.20 will come as an upgrade to the current stable branch, GNOME 3.18.
Not many changes landed in GNOME 3.20 Release Candidate, but if you are curious to know what exactly has been changed, we recommend studing the core and apps changelogs. Details on how to compile and install GNOME 3.19.92 on your Linux box have been provided above.