This will be a few days old by the time this blog post appears on the site, but Gnome 3.0 is set to come out by 2010!  This is huge news!  Ever since Gnome started getting into the 2.2x series, people have constantly been asking about when Gnome 3.0 would be coming out.  Since the Gnome project has decided that Gnoem 3.0 would be an appropriate time to break API and ABI compatibility, they have been saving that until it was needed.  However, ever since KDE 4 was announced a few years ago, people have increased their calls for a Gnome 3.0.  After all, they don’t want to seem so ridiculously behind when compared to KDE.  Computer geeks like you and I know that doesn’t matter, but the lay person might think Gnome was outdated.  Now that KDE 4.0 is finally out and with KDE 4.1 due at the end of this month, it seems that the momentum has finally built up for Gnome 3.0.

The source for my info is this Phoronix article.  They’re usually a pretty reliable source, but we also have the blog of a prominent Gnome developer.

One of the most exciting things is that Gnome 3.0 will also see the debut of GTK+ 3.0.  GTK 2.0 was a HUGE improvement over 1.0.  If you’ve ever seen a program that’s still compiled with GTK 1.0, you’ll agree that it’s universally considered to be ugly.  It’s like the difference between the way Windows 3.1 program windows looked and the way that Windows 95 and later looked.  One is blocky and old then the other is nice and slick.  Plus, this may give them the chance to fix up some of the things that people hate about GTK programming.  I’m pretty psyched!  After all, most of the major Linux distros us Gnome as their main desktop.