GNOME 3.0 Is Coming, And Coming Soon!

Posted by Michael Larabel on July 10, 2008

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.

Permitting that the GNOME development community will be continuing with their six-month release cycles and they plan on having GNOME 2.26 and GNOME 2.28 stable releases before GNOME 2.30/3.0, this would place their effective release date for GNOME 3.0 in early 2010. In fact, it would be right before the release of Ubuntu 10.4 LTS.

Meanwhile, the next GNOME release is GNOME 2.24 and its release is targeted for September. When we have any other information on GNOME 3.0 we will be sure to pass it along. Share your hopes and expectations for GNOME 3.0 in the Phoronix Forums.

UPDATE: With GNOME 3.0 will come GTK+ 3.0. Lucas Rocha just blogged about GTK+ 3.0 / GNOME 3.0 and that the transition process from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 is expected to be smooth.

呵呵,怎么说也是大版本升级,我觉得平滑也是相对的吧?

不就是从2.30->3.0么，那里大了。不过目前也看不出来什么，毕竟gtk+3还没有出现，除了YY还是YY。我的推测是未来一年内gtk2和gtk3共存，gnome的平滑过渡做的很到位的，比如这次的gnome-vfs->gvfs，核心组件大多数跟进了，但依然保留gnome-vfs，表面上也看不出来什么大区别。窃以为，不是非要界面做的连老娘都认不出来了才算版本变化。过于激进的改革只会造成大面积的恐慌和反弹。