So now that the Alpha release for Fedora 15 has been declared gold, all the features are in, only polish and bug fixing are to be applied until final, is the time for previews are reviews, it was also the time for me to look at the new default desktop and understand what is coming.

Innovation is one of those things we pretend to want and then complain when it happens. When the KDE team decided to innovate with plasma, all they got were heaps and heaps of criticism thrown at them. Now it appears that Gnome 3.0 is going to suffer the same fate.

Back in July of 2008 we learned of GNOME 3.0 as plans were laid out during the GUADEC '08 conference to make the GNOME 2.30 release their "3.0" version in March of 2010. However, it looks like GNOME 3.0 may not hit in H1'2010 but rather September of next year.

While the European Linux scene has been busy with KDE and Qt, a relatively unnoticed but important gathering occurred in the U.S. to determine the future of the GNOME desktop: the GNOME Boston Summit 2009.

In the last few years Ubuntu has emerged as the dominant force in the Linux Deskop field. During the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to conduct the following interview with Shuttleworth. Sees good possibility of having a common meta-release cycle with Debian - Not sure if GNOME3 will make the next LTS

The next major version of the GNOME desktop environment, version 3.0, may contain more than the one Mono-dependent application than it currently does, according to GNOME Foundation member Dave Neary.

This research aims at finding the needs, and practices of users of Gnome 2.x. Analyzing that data will give the Gnome Usability Team very precious information that will shape up the form of Gnome 3.0.

During the first few months of 2008, a few Release Team members discussed here and there about the state of GNOME. So let's go to the core topic and discuss what the GNOME 3.0 effort should be. We propose the following list of areas to focus our efforts on...