GNOME 3.0 Delayed To March 2011

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME 3.0 Delayed To March 2011

Two years ago at GUADEC, the annual developer's conference for GNOME, it was announced that GNOME 2.30 would be released as GNOME 3.0. With GNOME's long-standing tradition of putting out major updates every six months, this put the GNOME 3.0 release to be in March of 2010. Last November it was then decided to delay GNOME 3.0 to September of 2010 to give developers more time to prepare on this first major overhaul to the GNOME desktop in years. It's just been announced though from this year's GUADEC conference happening this week that GNOME 3.0 will now not be released until March of 2011...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODQ1NA

[droidhacker]

So every 6 months they extend the release date by 6 months.....

INTO PERPETUITY!!!!! lol.

[brent]

Not surprising actually, the schedule was much too tight from the beginning.

[droidhacker]

I guess the good thing is that they are planning on NOT pulling a KDE 4 launch.... THAT was a DISASTER.

[movieman]

So every 6 months they extend the release date by 6 months.....

Somehow I don't see Gnome users clammering for 3.0 to be released any time soon. With no rush to release there's no reason not to get it right first.

[pingufunkybeat]

I guess the good thing is that they are planning on NOT pulling a KDE 4 launch.... THAT was a DISASTER.

This I have to agree with. It will slow down the application development, but will avoid the horrible backlash KDE had to go through. KDE 4.0 was clearly not ready.

[pingufunkybeat]

I do have to voice my utter astonishment with the fact that GNOME 3 will not work without 3d acceleration.

GNOME is a part of the GNU project, and thus closely involved with the FSF, yet they are going to FORCE PEOPLE TO USE PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE.

In other words, GNOME 3 will not work on a free system as long as you have an nvidia card or (currently) Radeon Evergreen, or Poulsbo. People running free drivers on such hardware will not be able to use GNOME 3.

That's quite outrageous.

[markg85]

And it's certainly going to follow the exact same disaster path like kde.. Just look at the delays so far.. 1 year delay!

and i guess the first couple gnome 3 releases will be as bad as the early kde 4 releases till ~4.3 or 4.4

[Delgarde]

and i guess the first couple gnome 3 releases will be as bad as the early kde 4 releases till ~4.3 or 4.4

I doubt that - Gnome 3.0 may have a very different overall UI, but the code differences between it and the last of the 2.x series will actually be very small. It mostly discards older unsupported APIs, rather than adding a lot of new stuff - to the point where right now, many Gnome packages can be switched between 2.0 and 3.0 without touching anything but the Makefile...

That's not to say it'll be perfect, of course - new code is still being written, and existing code migrated away from those old APIs. But with the exception of the radically new features like Shell, I suspect Gnome 3.0 will be more stable than the average point-zero release.

[d2kx]

So they will have to compete with KDE 4.6. Good luck, you will need it.

If you're interested, you can read a bit on what KDE plans just on the graphics/compositing/etc. side for 4.6 and onwards (and don't forget, 4.5 is right around the corner also):

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/07/next-generation-opengl-compositing-in-4-6/

KDE 4.7 will even use OpenGL 3 if avaible.

But we all knew that Gnome is left further and further in the dust and it sucks and I wish Ubuntu would simply drop that crap.
(please don't take this part too seriously)