Open Source Guild

With Gnome 2.26 safely out the door the Gnome development team is now planning for Gnome 3.0, a release it expects to make in March next year. Responding to growing criticism that the Gnome project lacks vision the team says that the 3.0 milestone release will have to have “big user-visible changes”.

“If you look closely at our community, it’d be wrong to say that people are lacking a vision; but the project as a whole does indeed have this issue,” the team said in its public posting. With this in mind the team is looking at a release that will both streamline the desktop as well as revamp the overall user experience by giving users new ways of interacting with their desktop and managing files.

Central to these changes are Gnome Shell, which manages the way users open applications and manage them, and Zeitgeist, which aims to change, and make simpler, the way users find and manage files.

Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist
The team says of Gnome Shell that the idea is “not just about changing the panel and the window manager. It’s about changing the way you start an activity and how you switch between two different activities. Or more generally, how you manage your different activities on the desktop.” Gnome Shell screenshots and mockups show a substantially changed desktop appearance with desktops and menus overlaying the screen.

Likewise, Zeitgeist is an attempt to completely re-write the way that users interact with files. “Having to deal with a filesystem in their daily work is not what makes users happy - on the contrary, they generally just want to access their documents and not to browse their hard disk,” the Gnome team says. Part of the solution to the challenge, the Gnome team is hoping, is to use a combination of timelines, tags and bookmarks to create multiple ways of accessing files. This video (6.9MB) demonstrates some of the early Zeitgeist capabilities.

With more than six years of development behind it since its 2.0 launch, Gnome carries with it the legacy of years of evolving development. “New APIs have landed and some other APIs have been deprecated. There are even some platform libraries that are now nearly unused. This just creates some confusion and does not make the life of developers easy,” the team says. With a fresh new start in 3.0, the Gnome team suggests moving all of the deprecated libraries out of the platform and creating a staging area for libraries intended to be in the platform so developers are clear on intension.

Timeline
In its posting the Gnome team says it is hoping that the 3.0 release will be ready by the time 2.30 is expected to be released. New releases of Gnome are made every six months and with 2.26 now out and 2.28 planned for September, a 2.30 release should be expected in at the end of March 2010. “Making GNOME 2.30 a 3.0 version is of course still an ambitious goal, but we can achieve it thanks to what we learnt in the past,” the team says.

The team has left the door a little bit open, however, saying “of course, we should be prepared to consider the fact that GNOME 2.30 might not be good enough for us to call it 3.0. All of our time-based releases are also quality-based releases: if the QA Team feels a release should be delayed, then it will be delayed … we should not be afraid of keeping GNOME 2.30 as 2.30 and waiting for Gnome 2.32 for the 3.0 release, for example. That being said, we want the community to try as hard as possible to make ‘Gnome 2.30 = Gnome 3.0′ a success.”

Source: Tectonic