Hi shibes!

"OMG will this hardfork???"
No, would you let me explain first?

So, the development team has been hard at work to bring you an awesome new update for the Dogecoin wallet! And today marks the release of the first public test version.

The release notes are available here: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/blob/1.7-dev/RELEASE_NOTES_1_7_alpha.md

TL;DR of the release notes

• Code is now based on Bitcoin source. But parameters are still the same as before. No fork this time ;)
• Downgrading from 1.7 to 1.6 with a fresh wallet is not easy. Be aware of that.
• Qt client is now Dogecoin Core, added dogecoin-cli to talk to dogecoind.
• Transaction malleability-related fixes
• Testnet only for this version. It won't touch your current wallet, safe to be run in parallel. To get TestDoges see faucet below.

Now that this is said, we come to the action!
We've been testing the client for a while now and it looks solid so far. Now it's your turn to test it! We want you to try it out, send/receive transactions, explore new features, even break it! We want your feedback. Please use this post to share your findings. We appreciate every bug report!

Download
You will find everything you need here: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.7.0-Alpha-1

For Windows: Dogecoin-Qt for both 32 and 64 bit systems.
For Linux: Dogecoin-Qt, dogecoind and dogecoin-cli for both 32 and 64 bit.

IMPORTANT
There is also a dogecoin.conf file. You need to place it in your data directory to get connections!
Default directory on Windows: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Dogecoin\
Default directory on Linux: ~/.dogecoin/

Testnet faucet
As stated in release notes, you can get TestDoges here: http://testdoge.lionservers.de/
See this comment on how to get an address, URL or QR code which you can use and share :)

Mining?
You can mine there, yes. But please only CPU mine. With the low hashrate of the testnet you'd be 99%-attacking the testnet with a single GPU ;)

Thanks
Thanks to everyone who contributed so far! Especially /u/leofidus-ger and /u/rnicoll, who have done by far the most of the work for this release. But of course thanks to everyone else who contributed, may it be advice or code or whatever. Also thanks to the Bitcoin developers. And of course thanks to the Dogecoin community! You are what makes it fun to work on all this ;)

"When will it be out?"
1.7 is an extensive re-write, and as such needs a lot of testing. We're hoping to have it out shortly after next halvening, with a beta release for the adventurous closer to the time.

Mac pls?
A Mac version will follow later :)