Gnome Archive

Linus Torvalds piped up in the comments of a Google+ posting by Linux kernel hacker Dave Jones to air his true feelings about Gnome 3: "it's not that I have rendering problems with gnome3 (although I do have those too), it's that the user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is unacceptable." People care what Linus thinks, and when he ditched KDE for Gnome a couple of years ago, people took note. Now he's using Xfce.

Something's - once again - brewing within the GNOME project. While a mere suggestion for now, and by no means any form of official policy, influential voices within the GNOME project are arguing that GNOME should become a full-fledged Linux-based operating system, and that the desktop environment should drop support for other operating systems such as Solaris and the BSDs. I have a feeling this isn't going to go down well with many of our readers.

The day is finally here, the day that the GNOME team releases GNOME 3.0, the first major revision of the GNOME project since 2002. Little of GNOME 2.x is left in GNOME 3.0, and as such, you could call it GNOME's KDE4. We're living in fortunate times, what, with two wildly divergent open source desktops.

Carlos Garnacho shows how you can use CSS to style GTK+ apps. There are four other articles in English and Spanish in the new edition of GNOME Journal, including an interview with GNOME cofounder Federico Mena Quintero. He answers the question, "what is GNOME badly missing?"

"Gnome Shell 2.91.90 was released yesterday getting some fine adjustments according to the release announcement: 'This release just about concludes user interface changes anticipated before GNOME 3.0. The only significant change we expect after this release is to add a native network indicator based on NetworkManager 0.9.' Gnome Shell 2.91.90 brings new automatic workspaces, removed minimize and maximize buttons from window titlebars, a PolicyKit authentication agent and more."

"The GNOME Project launches the new GNOME 3 website that brings you all the latest news about the new desktop of the same name. The new GNOME 3 website walks the curious as well as the new and seasoned GNOME user through all that the new GNOME 3 desktop is."

Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.

GNOME developer Dave Neary has posted the highlights of his work to determine where contributions to GNOME come from. This "Census" is a combination of data mining and surveys that gives a snapshot of gnome activity and the profile of a GNOME contributor. This project's aims were to answer three questions in particular: What does the developer community look like? What companies are investing in GNOME, and how? What does the commercial ecosystem around the GNOME project look like?

The problem with just about every virtual desktop implementation is just that - they're virtual. This means that beyond the ability to move windows to specific desktops, you're still looking at exactly the same desktop, no matter what virtual desktop number you switched to. A mockup for GNOME Shell is trying to take the virtual out of virtual desktop.

"The release of GNOME 3.0. the popular desktop's first major release in eight years, promises to be the major free software event in autumn 2010. Where is GNOME now? What can we expect of GNOME 3.0? Of GNOME 3 as a series of releases?"

Ah, Nautilus, GNOME's default file manager. It's been with us for a long time now, and it has certainly been at the centre of a number of controversies. Do we go with a spatial or a navigational Nautilus? Should we replace the location bar with a breadcrumb bar? And now, it's time to move on. Recently, it has become apparent to many that Nautilus could use a make-over.

GNOME hacker Seth Nickell has written a lengthy PDF and accompanying blog post with a number of very interesting ideas for GNOME 3.0. I pondered putting this up on the front page, but since that usually only attracts the "It's not what I'm used to so it sucks"-crowd, I decided to put it up here. Be sure to read the blog post, the PDF, and the comments on the blog post to get the entire picture.

In the item we ran yesterday about GNOME and the GNU Project, one aspect got snowed under a little bit. It turns out a claim made in the iTWire article about the role a blog post by Miguel De Icaza was false, and even though the claim wasn't ours, I did repeat it, and therefore, should correct it too. I also need to offer apologies for not framing the opening of the article clear enough - had I framed it better, a lot of pointless discussion and name-calling could've been avoided.

Over the weekend, there has been a bit of a ruffling of the feathers over in the GNOME camp. It started with complaints received about the content on Planet GNOME, and ended with people proposing and organising a vote to split GNOME from the GNU Project.