GNOME 3.14 has been released, and if you head over to webupd8 you can See What’s New.

GNOME 3.12 video changelog.

GNOME Software 3.12.0 Released!

Not a huge number of improvements it seems, some nice tweaks and under-the-hood improvements it looks like though.

GIMP 2.9 (2.10 Development Builds) Available In New PPA For Ubuntu 13.10. Looks nice! You can also check out the GIMP roadmap to see where they’re going.

GNOME 3.10 us out the door!

The GNOME project is proud to present GNOME 3.10. The release comes six months after 3.8, and contains 34786 changes by approximately 985 contributors. It contains major new features as well as a large collection of smaller enhancements. 3.10 provides an improved experience for users, as well as new capabilities for application developers.

See What’s New In GNOME 3.10 at webupd8.

The GNOME 3.8 Release Notes have all the details.

Great job GNOME team!

Congrats to the GNOME team for another great looking release! You can check out the GNOME 3.6 Release Notes for details of what’s changed since 3.5.

GNOME 3.6 is the latest update to GNOME 3 and represents 6 months of work by the GNOME Project. It delivers a number of major new features, including a reworked Activities Overview, updated message tray and notifications, an enhanced Files application, as well as improved accessibility support and integrated input sources for using different languages. It also incorporates a host of smaller enhancements. Together, these changes make GNOME 3 better than ever before.

You can get GNOME 3.6 here, either in a live CD or the details for your existing linux distro.

Interesting read: GNOME Founder Says Desktop Linux is Dead

Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of the GNOME project, has said that OS X has ‘killed the Linux desktop’.

Definitely some stuff to think on in there, and as someone who was a full on Linux fanboy from 1994 to 2008 or so, it’s sad but (in a way, and IMHO), true. There will always be a Linux Desktop, and I think that everyone will agree that the “Year of the Linux Desktop” is mostly a joke right now, and this is just someone enumerating why the Linux Desktop failed.

All is not lost. Apple is getting some interesting blow back for being too big (after years of getting blow back for being too small), Windows is… well, Windows, and Microsoft is the company everyone loves to hate, so Linux really is the OS to go to for a lot of people. Thing that has to happen is the default install on say, an 8 core, 6G modern machine, shouldn’t peg the RAM and CPU for the first 5 minutes of use, at least, based on my Ubuntu 12.04 install on a modern and fast laptop.

Regardless of my bitching about Ubuntu, Miguel has some good points about the alienation of third party software developers, seen in the lack of a stable standard for things like audio and video and the massive number of available linux distributions.

Alex Cabal has a great post Dear Gnome devs: Please stop trashing Gnome! talking about some of the recent issues with GNOME and the Linux desktop environment. I personally picked out the personal entreaty to the gnome developers

Simplicity is not the same as slashing-and-burning features that you personally never use. I know that 37signal’s web 3.0 siren song of “simple and beautiful” is tempting, but it’s done more damage than good: Developers get sucked in to this “people only understand simple” fantasy world and forget that they’re developers, not designers, and not only that but in this case they don’t even represent their own target market.

I think that the ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ quote is appropriate here as well, and that while I love Linux, it’s time to face certain realities and start aiming at

Hit the GNOME 3.4 Release Notes for all that’s new and improved.

Upcoming GNOME 3.4 Previewed

Day explains that the beta release marks the beginning of the UI freeze, so “now seems like a good time to check out the cool stuff that’s coming in 3.4.” Day begins his tour stating that applications are “where many of the big changes can be found for this release.” Documents and Contact will now be joined by Boxes but more importantly, they will sport a sleeker new look.

Focus here is on polish, which is a good place to be (though I personally haven’t spent enough time in GNOME 3 to say if I like it or not). More details on the blog post.

Ars reviews GNOME 3.0. Short story - they mostly like it except for some stuff that hopefully will be better in the next few updates.

GNOME: The Free Software Desktop has finally after a few delays, actually released GNOME 3.0. Wow, that's a long time coming, I remember the discussions starting about this .... well, one of the first references I could find was a newsgroup post from 2001. Anyway:

• OMG Ubuntu story
  
• Release Notes
  

Huge congrats to the GNOME team, I can't wait to get this going!

Datamation.com (via slashdot) has the latest from the GNOME vs. KDE world and how the Linux desktop landscape is looking these days.

The good news for people tired of all the Apple news is that there's a GNOME 3 live CD to try out.

Good news if you want to check out the latest goodies that are coming out in the GNOME world.... Gnome-Shell gets a Live CD, so you can safely try what will be coming out in the not-so-far future in Linux GNOME based distros.

GNOME 3.org is up and available, filled with details and bits of information (all still alpha) about the next generation of GNOME.

So you like Ubuntu and GNOME and have played with the various "elementary" themes. If so, you might be interested in the elementary Project, essentially a Ubuntu "complete mod" using the elementary look and feel, and eventually including various custom built elementary apps to replace nautilus, rhythmbox, etc.

Interesting interview by Jon-o-Bacon with some Ubuntu devs where they talk about the "Unity" development, and what's going to be going on for the next Ubuntu release. If you're unfamiliar with Unity you can get more information about it.

I won't lie and say I didn't see this coming, but according to the official page, GNOME 3.0 is Rescheduled for March 2011 Release.

GNOME is driven by its goals to provide a quality free software desktop, and we feel that our users and downstream community are better served by holding the GNOME 3.0 release until March 2011. This gives adequate time not only for feature development, but user feedback and testing.

Having 3.0 ready for the "next" GNOME release was a pretty aggressive goal, especially with no "real" alphas or test releases out, and the only real evidence that the great "3.0" milestone being a hodgepodge of software released. Still, I'd rather 3.0 come out fully baked and ready for the world than a thrown together mix of software, paradigms and APIs. Still, it is a bit of sad news for those of us who were looking forward to 3.0 to come out this year.

A great look at the future of Nautilus, the GNOME file browser. Nice to see some cleanup coming down the pipe in future versions.

Now this stuff is friggin' awesome. Check out Redshift, an app that will do some color shifting magic to help your eyes adjust towards sleep more easily.

The color temperature of your screen is set according to the position of the sun. A different color temperature is set during night and daytime.

Merry Ubuntu release day!!

As of this time, the home page of Ubuntu.com hasn't been updated, but I got the email that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (desktop and server) has been released to the world (or will be very very soon).

Release notes are here and the mailing list announcement.

Update: The home page and tour is updated.

The Zeitgeist Project (the GNOME information logger, not the conspiracy theory nuts) has announced 0.3.3 which ads a bunch of fixes and magic. Looks like a nifty upgrade for folks running some of the GNOME 3.0 beta stuff.

This one may not be an AFJ.... Check out the GNOME 2.30 Release Notes or the press release. Mostly iterative, cleaning up the platform and introducing a few new programs and features. Congrats on the GNOME team, and looking forward to GNOME 3.0 (ETA today + 6 months!)

Great look at what some people's ideas of The Future Of Nautilus. A nice look at some of the horrible UI that's in the current version, and some very sexy mockups of what it could look like. Fingers crossed for something like this in Lucid.

Mike passed on this Ars Technica article on how the "Task Pooper" could revolutionize GNOME desktop and it's out the box thinking.

The GNOME community's design and usability experts gathered for a week-long hackfest hosted by Canonical in the UK to shape the next major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 3, which is tentatively scheduled for release in September, will introduce new user interface paradigms and include an upgraded desktop shell environment.

Sounds like the New Features In Gnome-Shell are going to be pretty damn awesome.

Here's a quick Visual Tour of GNOME 3 Shell (in Ubuntu 9.10) and how to install it, all via OSNews.

Via OSNews I found that GNOME 3.0 is Pushed Back Six Months. Sucks I guess cause I want to see what they've got going, but I want it to not be crashy :)

OMG actual Linux news? From OMG Ubuntu, an excellent site I discovered recently, it sounds like Gnome 3.0 Will Be Delayed Until September 2010 simply because of the state of the project (beta quality) and the GNOME release timetable. Personally I'd rather wait and get something good instead of having something unstable. Course, I'd also like to have the new GNOME 3.0 shell to play with, cause it looks like this'll make GNOME take a revolutionary step forward instead of the evolutionary ones that the last few 2.x releases have been.

Details on GIMP 2.8 and its (huge) improvements to the User Interface. Mostly related to going to a single window paradigm (finally giving in I guess). Don't despair though, looks like there's lots of hybrid single/multi-window options :)

OSNews points to some good details about how the upcoming GNOME 3 Launchers Change Behaviour towards a bit more like how MacOS and (possibly) Windows 7 deal with some of their application launching.

The very cool mono-based image management tool F-Spot has released version 0.6.0. Link has all the changelog goodness.

Vincent Untz sent a message to the Gnome Devel list this morning regarding Planning for GNOME 3.0. Citing the belief of the community that GNOME Is lacking excitement and vision, some of the core release team members started planning for the (mythical) GNOME 3.0. This is basically a call to arms for discussion about what 3.0 will be all about. Well done I say, especially since GNOME 2.0 was released June 2002.

His follow up email has more details from the different areas he hits in his initial mail.

Interesting tidbit about the GNOME linux desktop project from OSNews.... seems they are Migrating to Git for their revision control system.

This is interesting, as git was created for the Linux kernel developers after the non-free software that was being used (BitKeeper) went to a for-pay scheme. Git semed to explode as the Ruby on Rails project (with GitHub and friends), and this seems to be a second (that I know of) major Linux project to adopt git for their SCM.

Check out the GNOME 2.26 Release Notes for all the new goodness that's been revealed in the latest release. Short summary is better disk burning with Brasero integrated, better file sharing with the integration of webdav and bluetooth, Evolution mail client upgrades, more PulseAudio integration, easier multi-monitor configuration, better IM (including video), lots of other minor tweaks.

Again it is (IMHO) an evolutionary upgrade, with not a lot of really new stuff or quite frankly, exciting stuff. It is good to see the improvements, improved developer APIs, internationalization, etc, but there's no huge jumps that I've seen, or really compelling reasons to upgrade. Of course I will, as I'm a sucker for pretty much any upgrades :) In fact, I'm looking for the Ubuntu packages now :)

Congrats to the GNOME developers and contributors on another great release!

An oldie but a goodie.... from Dave: Hitler Reacts to Canucks Missing 2008 Playoffs.

Found a facebook-notify for GNOME. Works not too badly either.

Well, the latest in the GNOME stable series appeared today.... the GNOME 2.24 Release Notes are online and have details of all the gnomey goodness in this release.

I'm not hugely impressed with the release (based on the notes) so far, it's definitely evolutionary, a new messanger tool included, tweaks to some software, tabbed file browser, new/better screen controls, new backgrounds (is this really such a big thing that it makes the release notes?!), and other stuff along the same lines. Maybe it's just that GNOME is a mature platform and there's not a huge amount of improvements you can make. I see this as a similar problem in Windows and MacOS as well...

Still, I'm looking forward to using this myself when the packages are up for my distro.... :)

Yup, after (another) 6 months of work the latest in GNOME is out... check out the GNOME 2.22 Release Notes for all the details.

Nice early look at Tour of GNOME Online Desktop from Havoc Pennington. Still pre-alpha, but an idea at least about where GNOME is wanting to go with the online desktop metaphor.

Kaisergemuese has a nice introduction and screencast about PulseAudio, a proposed new sound daemon for the GNOME desktop. A third of the way in it looks really cool, but only if you have multiple soundcards....

That said, I'm only 5 minutes into the 14 minute screencast :)

Ars has an overview of GNOME 2.20.

Well, after many months of hard work by the GNOME team, GNOME 2.20 is released and out in the wild. Ubuntu's new release (expected in just under a month) will have this, and hopefully other distros will get this new release in as well. Great work from the GNOME team... congrats!

The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site.

The best new feature I see though, is this one, the mail client will warn you if you say you attached a file, and then forget to attach the file. Worth switching right then and there :)

Found the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes, or at least a beta. Not sure if they'll stay there, so get 'em fast... or wait the two days to read the final ones yourself.

Looking through I'm again fairly underwhelmed :( It seems like (again) a lot of small, needed fixes are there that will make life using the GNOME desktop that much nicer (ie: the taskbar button width changing bug is now gone, GDM has a 'leave a note' function, tweaks and UI improvements in Evolution, Epiphany now has smooth scrolling and favicon support, interactive PDFs work in eVince, Tomboy Notes has a sync functionality, some control panel applets cleanup)...

None of these fixes, even taken all together, makes me go whoah!. I suppose though it took Microsoft 6 years to update Windows XP to vista (which was a "whoah"). Maybe I'll have that moment in 2.22, or maybe 3.0 should it ever arrive.

That all said, I'll wait till the newest gnome is a) released and b) installed on my system and given a fair shake before I bitch too loudly. The people working on it are working their butts off and doing it all for free and for the love of it, and the changes they are making are making the Linux desktop that much nicer to work with each and every release. Heck, where was GNOME 6 years ago? Around version 1.4 which if anyone remembers that far back, was very different to work with :)

Well, GNOME 2.20 is starting to ramp up, and some release notes for 2.19 are out, to give you a bit of a taste as to what's to come.

— desrt Ryan Lortie writes about how i’m excited about the future of gnome. Basically a laundry list of the new stuff that's going into GNOME, showing how it's not stagnant with just boring incremental updates. However, some of the things he lists are... well, boring incremental updates (IMHO). Tracker as the new search engine, dconf as the new low level config manager, a new web rendering engine in Epiphany, etc all really sound like minor updates to components of GNOME, instead of something really big and exciting (again, IMHO).

Still, it is nice to see what's upcoming in my favorite desktop platform.

Some similar opinions to mine are in the OSNews comments for the story.

I just found a post on Hidden things in GNOME. I knew about Epiphany, and had no clue about the mouse scrolling less output in GNOME-Terminal! (and as mentioned in the comments, it works in VIM as well). Planet Gnome for the win! This wiki page also has other tips and tricks.

Gnome panel mania has a great look at some new panels and panel alternatives that are available...

sebp posts about some new stuff in deskbar applet including a movie. Looks good!

Wh00t! Finally at 15:30 PST the GNOME 2.18 Desktop & Developer Platform was released to the world. Let the recompiling begin!

The release notes is of course the page to start looking at things. A quick glance makes it look like this isn't a really exciting release. Some tweaks I'm sure, updated apps (evince now deals with multi monitor better, addition of the power manager, tomboy now in the official release), but nothing groundbreaking. I'll install it myself in the next few days and see if I should be disappointed or not. Regardless, congrats to all those who worked hard on this project!

Wh00t! Live CDs of GNOME 2.18 are available in bootable CD, vmware, qemu and virtual server flavors.

Gnome 2.18 RC1 got released recently.... check out the TwoPointSeventeen wiki page and the release notes.

Aaron Bockover writes up a cool entry on Cracking down on heap abuse in Mono, telling how he did optimization work in TagLib-Sharp (a mono library for MP3 tagging) and moved memory allocation down from (for example) 103mb to 16mb! I honestly don't 100% understand a lot of what is actually going on, but seeing optimization work like this really is cool to me. Keep up the good work!

Philip shows off some of the work he's been doing on Tinymail, a stripped down, PDA oriented mail library based off of camel, what evolution (AKA a memory hungry pig) uses. Anyway, his patches and graphs show what happens when a group of people are dedicated to optimization. I'm pretty sure that you'll be hard pressed to find a mail client/library that uses under 12mb of memory when downloading 30,000 imap headers, much less 8mb! (8-ish, can't read the graph exactly).

Glad to see this stuff happening, hope some of it makes it back to Evolution so I can start using that again instead of always falling back to good 'ol Mutt for performance / convenience reasons.

Ars has a nice first look at GNOME 2.16 with lots of screenshots and good writing as always.

After reading through this Gnome 2.16 Preview, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed. Nothing in there made me excited to install this... it looks more like a bugfix release than any major feature release :( Course, this isn't the "official" preview that comes out a couple of weeks before a new GNOME is released, so we'll see, maybe it was just badly written (or maybe it is just that, not an exciting release).

Just found think KDE preview in the comments.... a very cool new K start menu is incoming sometime soon it appears. Still not a KDE fan, but that start menu is hawt!

I admit that I'm really an eyecandy eye candy and XGL fan under gnome.... I like this guy's setup with it up with a touchscreen. There's something really nifty about physically spinning your desktop around with the touch of a finger. Course, from everything I've read ergonomic-wise, touchscreens suck (or really build up the shoulder muscles). Still, visually very cool :)

Ever thought about how your bug hunting and reporting is a bit like an RPG? Davyd thought just that and created GNOME: the MMORPG. Looks kinda nifty...

The GNOME art site has set up some GnomeArt Tutorials on the gnome wiki.

/me waits for this feature to be announced for vista for 200567

Update - It's been pointed out to me that tagging of sorts is in Vista's feature list already, I remember that now. It's almost true I am a grass roots yuppie vista hater, and I'm also strong enough to admit when I'm wrong :) However that said I don't think that the tagging in vista will be quite that sweet and easy. I can't find any screenshots of tagging in vista, other than this shot which has the "keywords" at the bottom of the bottom window. There's also a google hit on this page which talks about security concerns with metadata. Anyone have better references?

That said, the person who pointed out I was a yuppie also noted that leaftag through nautilus wasn't released either (however, with the 6 month GNOME relesae cycle, I have faith that that'll be out before Vista.... ).

• Documents are first class objects
• Search and tagging as the interface

Hopefully some of these will be implemented, and not lost or politiced away.

Anyway, the release notes should have all the info and screenshots you need, and there is also a livecd (.torrent) out there for us impatient folks :)

• new stuff in evolution
• quick and easy sharing of folders on the network via smb/dav
• menu revamp
• finally! proper tansparency for applets and panels
• typeahead in the new filechooser
• new backgrounds included by default

Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for.

Regardless of this it's still a nifty site with some good info (IE: learning that Evolution 2.0 will automatically do junk mail filtering if Spamassassin is installed locally.

Here's the message to the GNOME announce list.

In other GIMP news, "Film-GIMP", a version of the gimp designed for 16 bit images, film and other such like is now (well, probably really old news) known as CinePaint. Hope they can update this to use the new 2.0 release UI.

A desktop Tape would homogenise multiple desktops into one whole: rather than moving from screen to screen, you move smoothly along a long, 'infinite' horizontal space, like several screens glued on to eachother; or, like a long tape.

Nifty vids of some of the new features here.

The graphics landscape has changed a bit since the 2.0 series started, and the wider acceptance of digital cameras and amateur photographers are showing a need for graphics applications aimed specifically at that market (ie: Adobe Elements, MS Digital Image whatever, and so on). Maybe GIMP could be spun off so that a different UI could take advantage of all the technology behind it, but be focused more on digital cameras and imaging than a full blown image program.

I'm pretty sure it's not nearly as pretty or lickable as the real Expos�, but it does thumbnailing and automagically shows you all your windows. This combined with the new XServer stuff might bring the Apple eye candy a bit closer for Linux users (Windows folks will still have to wait until [2006 or whenever] Longhorn is released.

To be honest though, some things in Linux/GNOME are beginning to piss me off. There were a flurry of posts over the last couple of days on the gnome-desktop-devel list about the gnome clipboard, and how to fix it (you can't copy from an app, close the app, and paste... the app has to stay open). All I could think was "this is what is still trying to be fixed???!!!" Gnome is in a 2.2, almost 2.4 release, and the GTK toolkit has been around now for years, and the clipboard still doesn't work "properly" for text (we're not even talking about graphics here yet)! WTF?

That doesn't stop me from using it every day in a desktop environment though, because I still feel it's better than the alternatives.

From: Philip Langdale 
Subject: [Galeon-devel] Galeon 1.2.8 and 1.3.2 released!
                                                                                                         
Hi all!
                                                                                                         
After a couple of months of quiet, we are happy to announce the release
of new version of galeon from both the stable and gnome2 branches.
                                                                                                         
They are:
                                                                                                         
Galeon 1.2.8 "Gettextize me captain!"
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6999&release_id=140473
                                                                                                         
and
                                                                                                         
Galeon 1.3.2 "Stop calling us dead, or we'll haunt you"
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6999&release_id=140648
                                                                                                         
They both support Mozilla 1.3b, the latest release (and Galeon 1.3.x
requires at least Mozilla 1.3a) and feature bug fixes and 1.3.x also has
some nice new features. In the interest of brevity, the release notes
can be found with the files in our sourceforge area, if you follow the
links above. We currently have source tarballs up with rpms on the way.
Enjoy!
                                                                                                         
--phil

Let the downloading begin!

Do you ever hear complaints from OsX users about the OsX file-system? Is the OsX file-system any more intuitive than the Linux one? Do you even know anything about the OsX file-system? Will you ever know anything about the OsX file-system? Probably not. Microsoft have added the My Documents Folder to Windows... Apple have abstracted the desktop from the file-system in OsX... Which OS is acclaimed for being intuitive and easy to use?

After many months of ideas and development, we are proud to announce art.gnome.org. This site is dedicated to GNOME users, developers, artists, and everyone else that have been involved in the project over the past years. We would like to thank you for your great work.

The Gnome hackers and a cast of thousands proudly present, after years in the making, the final Gnome 2 releases of:

- Nautilus, the Gnome file manager

and the sidekick helper library:

- Eel, The eazel extension library

Availible for download now at:

http://ftp.gnome.org/[...]/nautilus-2.0.0.tar.gz http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/[...]/eel-2.0.0.tar.gz