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?

There’s been some grumbling among the Gnome community about if and when Gnome would have a major overhaul. Well with Gnome 3 we’ll have it in the form of Gnome Shell. It pretty much replaces the panel and window manager in a normal Gnome installation with a fully composited environment with some great new functionality.

bout half a year ago i was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the gnome community. i was concerned that gnome had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. i think i was very wrong. i’d like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the gnome community that have me very excited.

Released just a few days ago, GNOME 3 is the latest major version of the GNOME desktop environment. If you are currently running a GNOME-based Linux or BSD distribution, you are probably using version 2.30 or 2.32, but that should change in the upcoming release cycle when many of the distributions will be shipping with GNOME 3 as the default.

For many Linux desktop users, GNOME is their home. But it's a home that's in the process of a major renovation. In a session at the FUDcon Fedora Linux user and developer conference this week, contributors showed off some preliminary work for GNOME 3, the next major evolution of the GNOME platform.

At the recent GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC), the GNOME release team announced a proposal for developing the next major iteration of the open source desktop environment. The plan offers a long-term strategy for moving GNOME development forward and defining future goals for the desktop.

Gnome Shell is the future window manager for UNIX-like operating systems running the Gnome desktop environment. It is slated to be part of the Gnome 3.0, which will probably be released sometime next year. However, this does not mean you cannot try Gnome Shell now and get the first impression of what it ought to be.

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.32, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment and of its developer platform. Released on schedule, to the day, GNOME 2.32 builds on top of a long series of successful six months releases to offer the best experience to users and developers.

The new version of GNOME 2.28 has been released (complete release notes).