Linux GNOME 3.0 Is Coming, And Coming Soon!

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The K Desktop Environment community came out earlier this year with their brand new KDE 4.0 release that marked significant advancements to this open-source desktop environment compared to its KDE 3.5.x code-base. Meanwhile, the GNOME community has been living in a 2.0 cycle for quite some time with no signs of a major overhaul, but their six-month release cycles just continue to deliver new refinements and minor improvements. The plans for GNOME 3.0 just put this release out when there is significant API/ABI breakage to GNOME 2.0 / GTK+ or a major rewrite. Well, in addition to announcing Stormy Peters joining GNOME, at GUADEC 2008 they have just announced plans for GNOME 3.0!

The details are still emerging from this GNOME conference taking placed in Istanbul, Turkey. All the information that has reached the Internet so far are several GNOME developers briefly mentioning it on their blogs (aggregated through Planet GNOME). The only real information that has hit the blogs so far is that GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0. This was mentioned on Vincent Untz's blog with a photograph. As of yet, no GNOME 3.0 information has appeared on any of the GNOME mailing lists.

Gnome 3.0 Features : ThreePointZero - GNOME Live!
Source : [Phoronix] GNOME 3.0 Is Coming, And Coming Soon! | The GNOME Conference 2008 ? GUADEC
 
Details have not even been decided yet, but hope it is good. Gnome gets more corporate participation than KDE so hopefully it won't see bad press despite good work.

Inclusion in general purpose distros could be 2 years away, what say?
 
bingoUV said:
Gnome gets more corporate participation than KDE so hopefully it won't see bad press despite good work.

You mean the press has been unfair to KDE ? :S
 
Pat said:
You mean the press has been unfair to KDE ? :S

I take it you are dissatisfied with KDE4. If not, please stop reading and let me know why you made this comment :)

From the developers' point of view, they did a lot of good work. It is not complete yet but you can see lots of new and innovative new paradigms being explored. Some might hate it, some would love it. In true KDE style, once the development is complete there will be lots of options to keep the parts you love and remove the parts you hate.

Overall KDE's management and distro's overzealousness in supplying latest KDE4 in "stable" distros has got it a lot of bad press. Management because the release was called 4.0 (rather than beta) before many end users would consider it a completed project. Distros because most users were simply not warned that KDE4 is not finished yet, all features of KDE 3.5 have not been ported yet, there is still a lot of instability. Distros that are usually somewhat stable though bleeding edge (e.g. fedora) included KDE4 in quite an unpolished state.

You might argue that why was KDE4 not completed in time. One reason is, unlike Gnome, KDE development is more done by amateurs in their free time. Whatever they do is a service to humanity. You as a user of course have a right to accept/reject a product.
 
bingoUV said:
I take it you are dissatisfied with KDE4. If not, please stop reading and let me know why you made this comment :)

From the developers' point of view, they did a lot of good work. It is not complete yet but you can see lots of new and innovative new paradigms being explored. Some might hate it, some would love it. In true KDE style, once the development is complete there will be lots of options to keep the parts you love and remove the parts you hate.

Overall KDE's management and distro's overzealousness in supplying latest KDE4 in "stable" distros has got it a lot of bad press. Management because the release was called 4.0 (rather than beta) before many end users would consider it a completed project. Distros because most users were simply not warned that KDE4 is not finished yet, all features of KDE 3.5 have not been ported yet, there is still a lot of instability. Distros that are usually somewhat stable though bleeding edge (e.g. fedora) included KDE4 in quite an unpolished state.

You might argue that why was KDE4 not completed in time. One reason is, unlike Gnome, KDE development is more done by amateurs in their free time. Whatever they do is a service to humanity. You as a user of course have a right to accept/reject a product.

Yes I was not impressed by the supposedly 4.0 stable release. That is one mistake they made. Apart from that, I agree that probably they are working in the correct direction and KDE 4.x needs to be given a lot more time to mature. I completely agree with your point that it was also a mistake on the part of OpenSuse (and prolly other distros I cant think of currently) a> not letting enough people know that KDE 4.x is still beta (although the label says otherwise) and b:> a little over-enthusiastic approach of rolling out a pre-mature DE to the masses.

I would be very interested to see how KDE shapes up when 4.2 is available. Currently though, not only stability, its usability also bears a big question mark .
 
I hate the new KDE menu, the tabbed one. Every time you open it, it could be in a different state depending upon how you last left it. 2 main reasons:
1. If you open one submenu the last time, that does not mean you will need the same submenu again. At all.
2. Now you have to read the opened menu before clicking anything. You cannot just go by the remembered position of submenus, and menu items inside those. After you have experience with any environment, reading menus is criminally wasteful of time. You just go by the remembered positions.

When KDE4 is fully developed, I hope to have an option to go back to the earlier kind of menu. I think you can already add the old menu in addition to the new tabbed menu.

This is the reason I hate MS Office menus too. The less frequently used items are hidden by default and appear only after some delay. Every time you have to read the whole menu to figure out whether the option you want to select appears in it. Even if you remember its exact position in the expanded state of the menu. Hate to see KDE go that way.
 
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