Next Gnome delayed until 2011

September previews planned

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco, 29th July 2010

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Linux users on Gnome must wait a full year before their favorite desktop is updated – the first such delay in the project's short history.

Gnome 3.0 has been postponed until March 2011 from the scheduled September due date that would have been in keeping Gnome's six-month release cycle, in practice since 2004.

Instead, the Gnome Project will this September deliver Gnome 2.32 with a preview release of Gnome 3.0. Some of the Linux distros will also ship Gnome 3.0 components for user previews and testing by developers.

The Project said the delay would provide time to solve performance for Gnome Accessibly and Gnome Shell and to deliver documentation.

"Gnome 2.32 will still have a number of interesting new features such as color management and UPnP support as well as the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes that have marked Gnome's timed releases for years," Gnome said in a statement.

Project organizers said while they could have pushed back version 3.0 by a month or two to land the software in 2010 it made sense to stick to the six-month cycle. ®

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Highly Rated

Posted Friday 30th July 2010 08:34 GMT

K. Adams

Brief Respite from the Badgers

Thank $DEITY!

Gnome Shell is, IMHO, one of the most draconian rewrites of the GUI paradigm that has ever been foisted on the Gnome user community.

I used to be a big fan of KDE until KDE 4.x came out. At that point, I switched to Gnome. One of the reasons I've liked Gnome so much is that it has (to this point) seemed to be more stable and easier on resources than KDE 4.x, didn't overwhelm you with a buhzillion fiddly options, and (usually) shipped with common-sense defaults.

Sure, the current edition of Gnome is nowhere near as fast and light as LXDE or Fluxbox, or even Xfce (although Xfce has recently started to get a bit top-heavy as well), but it can work on pretty much any graphics card minted since, say, 2003-ish.

However, I can't say the same thing about Gnome 3.0 (especially Gnome Shell). It's almost guaranteed to **require** hardware-accelerated graphics to run properly, with all of it's "Hey! Let's shrink the whole desktop to make room for the Activities menu!" [**] and what-not, and likely strong acceleration to boot (read: nVidia G9x core / ATi R600 core, or better). Not even KDE, with all of its current resource requirements, is **that** bad.

Oh, and Clutter/Mutter (graphics toolkit/window manager toolkit) as used by Gnome Shell is incompatible with Compiz.

[**] Wanna see what I'm talking about? Then check here:

-- YouTube (GNOME 3: Gnome Shells)

-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQUuH2dIFHM

(Badgers, because Web2.0 tech is invading my GUI toolkit.)

Posted Friday 30th July 2010 08:07 GMT

zakneutron