GNOME News Archives

Aside from all the Phoronix video recordings of the X.Org and Wine development rooms during the FOSDEM 2013 meeting last weekend in Brussels, Vincent Untz went over the direction of GNOME and whether the GNOME community has gone crazy.

As another item that was discussed last week in Brussels during the GNOME Developer Hackfest is sandboxing of GNOME applications. GNOME developers already decided they want applications written in JavaScript but as another security measure they want to begin sandboxing applications.

At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest last week in Brussels, GNOME developers decided to recommend JavaScript as the new language for writing GNOME applications.

The GNOME 3.8 release will make several user-facing changes concerning how power management is dealt with for the open-source desktop environment.

Lennart Poettering, the controversial open-source developer behind PulseAudio and systemd among other projects, has written a lengthy blog post as he attempts to battle some myths about his Linux init daemon.

Matthias Clasen has issued an update today concerning the progress of new features for the upcoming release of GNOME 3.8.

Vincent Untz will be speaking at FOSDEM early next month in Brussels to "clarify the directions the GNOME project is taking, and to explain the rationale for various decisions." He's hoping that after this Belgian conference people will better understand the course of the GNOME desktop and begin to rebuild trust in the project.

The Debian-powered SolusOS Linux distribution has forked GNOME Classic into the Consort Desktop Environment.

Earlier this week when multi-process support was added to the HTML5 back-end in GTK+, a TODO list was also created that hints at some of the features being looked at for the "Broadway" back-end.

After pessimistic views regarding the health of the GTK+ tool-kit project were recently shared on IRC, Alberto Ruiz took it upon himself to create some statistics about the development of this critical component to GNOME to show in fact things aren't entirely bleak.

It's your last chance to participate in the 2012 GNOME User Survey to provide the community and developers with feedback on the popular Linux desktop environment.

Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen -- along with help from Kristian Høgsberg -- made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME's Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland's Weston.

Ekiga, the long-standing Linux "softphone" VoIP program for GNOME on Linux, hasn't seen a major release since Ekiga 3.2 three years ago. Arriving today fortunately is Ekiga 4.0, which is codenamed "The Victory Release", and packs a huge number of changes for this open-source telephony program.

The GNOME 3.7.2 development release was made available today. The two major changes with this latest GNOME 3.8 pre-release is the elimination of the GNOME Fallback (non-Shell) mode and now depending exclusively upon GStreamer 1.0.

Earlier this month it was decided that GNOME 3.8 would get rid of the GNOME Shell Fallback mode used for running the desktop environment in a way similar to the GNOME 2 "classic" environment while also not requiring any 3D GPU/driver configuration. Earlier today there was basically a call for forking the GNOME Classic/Fallback code so it could live on, but now it's been announced that some of the user-interface/experience elements will be brought to the GNOME 3.x world in a manner that's more easy for users to optionally enable.

GNOME's Vincent Untz has written about the recent decision to remove the GNOME3 fall-back mode with the forthcoming GNOME 3.8 release. He thinks the situation will improve but he basically calls for the community to fork and maintain the GNOME fall-back (gnome-panel, Metacity, etc) components assuming there is enough interest.

While many GNOME Linux users are upset over GNOME 3.8 dropping its fallback mode, this next release of the GNOME desktop environment is set to offer a number of new features.

Matthias Clasen on the behalf of the GNOME Release Team has announced that they have decided to eliminate GNOME's "fallback mode" with the upcoming 3.8 release that allowed a "GNOME classic" mode that didn't depend upon OpenGL/3D rendering and was more like the GNOME2 traitional desktop.

With GNOME starting the GBeers initiative, for the weekend I couldn't help but to think about what beer pairings I would do if needing to match the popular Linux desktops with beer.

Later this month in Copenhagen at the developer summit for Ubuntu 13.04, getting rid of the GNOME fallback code is a likely discussion item.

While there's many critics to the GNOME Shell desktop, will GNOME gain more followers through promoting the consumption of beer at monthly meet-ups?

GNOME 3.6 has been formally released today.

With all of the GNOME 3.6.0 packages being checked in right now for releasing the updated open-source desktop this week, GStreamer 1.0.0 finally saw its first stable release.

In advance of the GNOME 3.6 availability, the Shotwell photo manager/organizer has been released.

The last planned pre-release of GStreamer 1.0 has surfaced in anticipation of releasing this long-awaited version next weekend.

For those interested in GStreamer, Mesa, ALSA, or related Linux multimedia efforts, the videos from the GStreamer Conference are now available for viewing.

The next update to the port of WebKit rendering engine to GTK+ features several new features.

Stemming from last year's GNOME User Survey that was hosted on Phoronix since the GNOME Foundation wasn't interested, the results continue to be analyzed.

It looks like GStreamer 1.0 will be officially released in September prior to the release of GNOME 3.6.

Tim-Philipp Müller of Collabora delivered the keynote this morning on the second and final day of the 2012 GStreamer Conference. Similar to yesterday's keynote about GStreamer 1.0, Tim-Philipp Müller talked about how GStreamer 0.10 is dead and the future is with the soon-to-release GStreamer 1.0 and more of the future plans for this multimedia framework.

Keynoting the GStreamer 2012 Conference in San Diego was Wim Taymans of Collabora. Taymans was talking about GStreamer 1.0, which should be officially released very soon -- perhaps before GNOME 3.6 ships.

While disk management improvements might not be the first thing you think of when it comes to a desktop environment update, the disk utility (Disks) and udev within GNOME 3.6 will offer some new features.

Following the controversial information this weekend about some viewing GNOME as fading into abyss and losing relevance on the desktop, Christian Schaller has shared his views on the future of GNOME. In general he is very optimistic about the future of GNOME.

MATE Desktop 1.4 has been released for those using this fork of the GNOME2 package set as their desktop environment.

While some GNOME developers and users see the once fledging desktop environment fading into abyss, other GNOME developers see nothing but GNOME getting better with the best yet to come. It's been called for this week from GUADEC that GNOME 4.0 to be released in March of 2014 along with GNOME OS. That's not all of their ambitious plans but they think they can gain a 20% market-share by 2020 and they also have some other plans on their agenda.

Cinnamon, the project out of the Linux Mint camp for a new desktop that's based upon upstream GNOME but brings back memories of GNOME2, has now entered Fedora 17 through the stable updates repository.

The latest GNOME 3.5 development release is now available with a lot of changes as the developers prepare to issue the final GNOME 3.6 desktop release in late September.

Thanks to growing user-interest, it looks like there is going to be a GNOME Shell flavor of Ubuntu to satisfy those who aren't fond of the direction of Canonical's Unity desktop.

It appears that Unity 2D -- the Qt non-accelerated desktop version of the Ubuntu Unity desktop -- will be abandoned by Canonical. There's also going to be some GNOME 3.6 packages appearing in Ubuntu 12.10.

The MATE Desktop, which is the fork of the GNOME2 package-set, just experienced its 1.2 stable release. Will this be a viable fork to allow GNOME 2.x to live on?

GNOME 3.4.0 has been officially released this morning as the latest biannual update to the GNOME 3.x Shell-based desktop.

GNOME 3.4, the latest major update to the GNOME3 desktop, is set to be officially released on Wednesday. Here's a look at some of the most interesting features of this biannual GNOME update.

Cinnamon, the project by the Linux Mint developers to make the GNOME Shell more like the old GNOME2 experience, is up to its version 1.4 release. Similar to earlier releases, version 1.4 introduces several new features to further enhance this tasty desktop experience.

Earlier this month I published an article with benchmarks of the Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce. Now, however, there's a much larger comparison, including results from OpenBox, Lubuntu, GNOME classic, and other desktop alternatives.

There's now a GStreamer plug-in to utilize OpenCL within this popular Linux video framework so that an OpenCL kernel can be applied against a video stream.

A discussion for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has been ignited about bringing back an "Ubuntu Classic" option that would attempt to mimic the old GNOME 2.x experience. Meanwhile in the Fedora camp there is a discussion about a Unity desktop port to their distribution.

Cinnamon, the fork of the GNOME 3.x Shell by Linux Mint developers to make it more like the GNOME2 desktop, is now at version 1.2. This latest stable, major release does bring some tasty changes.

Version 3.3.3 packages of GNOME Shell and Mutter were independently released today. These latest development snapshots in the road to GNOME 3.4 mainly try to address outstanding issues.

For those that don't remember, the GNOME project had a goal of a 10% global desktop share by 2010, this was their "10x10" goal. Two years later, they're still a long way off.

GNOME 3.3.3 is now available as the latest update in what will ultimately become GNOME 3.4 next March.