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.

The GNOME release team had a meeting during GUADEC and they determined its best to push back the 3.0 tagging by another release so that all of the new code and packages have another six months to mature. With that said, GNOME 2.32 will be released in September along with a "preview release" of GNOME 3.0, but the official release will not come now until March 2011.

The press release announcing the GNOME 3.0 release setback can be found at GNOME.org. At least we now have something to look forward to already for Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, and other distributions that will be updating in Q2'2011 and later.