alex diavatis | October 17, 2012

Gnome 3.6 is now ended ..Looking forward to Gnome 3.8!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Today Gnome released the 3.6.[1] version that is a major bug fixing release, typically in every Gnome 3.[x%2 == 0] series.

From today Gnome is looking forward to the next release, which from an early quick look, 3.8 seems to be another massive developing cycle that will follow the excessive work done in 3.6. New Apps, a better notification system, a re-designed Gnome Shell, better (and more) Cloud support and much more things will land in 3.8. 

gnome 3.6.1

Normally x.x.1 releases are not specially notable, but this time there were significant changes in many Gnome software. I referred only Gnome Shell and Nautilus because were the two most active modules, but also Gnome Control Center and Network received many fixes.

3.6.1 is the only major update for 3.6 and affects all Gnome software stack, but updates in individual Apps may happen even after a month. For example, Empathy 3.6.1, can jump to 3.6.2 after 4 weeks. Of course there are also the distributors updates, so Ubuntu, openSUSE , Debian etc, can update Empathy to 3.6.1-2 etc.. However major issues won’t get fixed until the next release, 3.8.

gnome 3.8 schedule

Andre Klapper published the release schedule for 3.8. The initial commit towards to 3.8 comes in October, 22  tagged as 3.7.1. Developing for 3.8 hasn’t started yet, and 3.7.1 is almost identical to 3.6.

Week

Date

Task

Notes
September

0

Sep 24

GNOME 3.6.0 stable tarballs due

Start of new feature proposals period for 3.8

Sep 26

GNOME 3.6.0 stable release
October

0

Oct 06

Boston Summit conference

Oct 07

Boston Summit conference

Oct 08

Boston Summit conference

3

Oct 15

GNOME 3.6.1 stable tarballs due

Oct 17

GNOME 3.6.1 stable release

4

Oct 22

GNOME 3.7.1 unstable tarballs due

End of new feature proposals period for 3.8

Oct 24

GNOME 3.7.1 unstable release

5

Oct 29

Feature proposals discussion heats up.
November

6

Nov 05

Release Team meets about new feature proposals for 3.8 with community input up to this point.

7

Nov 12

GNOME 3.6.2 stable tarballs due

Nov 14

GNOME 3.6.2 stable release

8

Nov 19

GNOME 3.7.2 unstable tarballs due

Nov 21

GNOME 3.7.2 unstable release
December

12

Dec 17

GNOME 3.7.3 unstable tarballs due

Dec 19

GNOME 3.7.3 unstable release
January

16

Jan 14

GNOME 3.7.4 unstable tarballs due

Jan 16

GNOME 3.7.4 unstable release
February

19

Feb 04

GNOME 3.7.5 unstable tarballs due

Feb 06

GNOME 3.7.5 unstable release

21

Feb 18

GNOME 3.7.90 beta tarballs due

The Freeze: UI Freeze: No UI changes may be made without approval from the release-team and notification to gnome-doc-list@; Feature Freeze: new functionality is implemented now; API/ABI Freeze for 3.7.x: Developer APIs should be frozen at this point; String Change Announcement Period: All string changes must be announced to both gnome-i18n@ and gnome-doc-list@.

New APIs must be fully documented

Writing of release notes begins

Feb 20

GNOME 3.7.90 beta release
March

23

Mar 04

GNOME 3.7.91 beta tarballs due

String Freeze: no string changes may be made without confirmation from the l10n team (gnome-i18n@) and notification to both the release team and the GDP (gnome-doc-list@).

Mar 06

GNOME 3.7.91 beta release

24

Mar 11

Start of new feature proposals period for 3.10

25

Mar 18

GNOME 3.7.92 rc tarballs due

Hard Code Freeze: no source code changes can be made without approval from the release-team. Translation and documentation can continue.

Mar 20

GNOME 3.7.92 rc release

26

Mar 25

GNOME 3.8.0 newstable tarballs due

Hard Code Freeze ends, but other freezes remain in effect for the stable branch.

Mar 27

GNOME 3.8.0 newstable release
April

29

Apr 15

GNOME 3.8.1 newstable tarballs due

Apr 17

GNOME 3.8.1 newstable release

So, Gnome 3.8 release comes on March 27, 2013 ..but the most noticeable thing here is the start of new feature proposals period for 3.10, which means no Gnome 4.0 after 3.8. Gnome 4.0 would meant some radical changes, like a port of GTK  to Clutter, openGL support, a Gnome SDK maybe?

Another open question here is if GTK 3.8 will support Wayland. Currently GTK 3.6 can run under Wayland and Clutter status is even more ready, but GTK Roadmap for a fully support of Wayland isn’t planned for 3.8 -yet.

By the way, Wayland maintains a nice page with detailed instructions how to make isolated from the rest system builds of GTK and Clutter and run GTK Apps under Weston. Keep on mind that proprietary drivers (AMD / nVidia) don’t support Wayland at the moment.

Gnome 3.8 Apps

Among other things 4 new core Gnome Applications will come in 3.8. Music, Photos, Calendar and Videos. Videos is planned for 3.8, but there isn’t yet a repository to try it.


Gnome Photos under Fedora 18 in Virtual Box, (Git Today)

Gnome Calendar & Gnome Music in Ubuntu Gnome Remix, (Git Today)

Gnome Videos is missing but its design will be similar to the above. All these Apps will be connected to Cloud services (GoaOAuthProvider) that supports OAuth protocol and anonymous tokens. Pretty much every service use OAuth for authentication like Google, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo to name a few. Some services although they are using OAuth have certain restrictions that Gnome doesn’t want to support, like Twitter -but don’t know much about as I have used only Google’s API.

All these App will sync with online services, for example Videos will support YouTube and you will be able to sync your videos and even upload them ..of course videos will remain on Google Servers, and you will be basically streaming them. So it isn’t really a sync.

Gnome Shell

Gnome Shell will be enchants with a better search service that will flexible enough to include results from lots of different applications and list them based on semantic algorithms.


Read more in Gnome Live!

Another feature that will come is the Automatic Extensions Update. That was original planned for 3.6 release, and although the mechanics are ready, Gnome didn’t make a hook into this. Categories removal from Overview is also a possibility and was planned for 3.6 but they dropped it as wasn’t  ready. Anyway I have no clue, if this will or won’t happen in 3.8.

Notifications is another area that Gnome pays a lot of attention. The first thing is the notification filtering, that gives us the option to control from which applications we want to receive notifications and some more details. However this is just for start, as developers plan more cool things like future-events delivery notifications and allowance of cloud services to notify us directly via Gnome Shell.

There are many nice things that happening around Gnome lately, but anyway I won’t risk to talk about them. After all we will know more by next week and the end of new feature proposals period for 3.8.

You can check for yourselves in Gnome Live (which is a bit chaos!) starting from ThreePointSeven page which is the area about everything that will take place in Gnome 3.8 release and GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards which has lots of futuristic things!

Led Zeppelin

Oh! Today “Celebration Day” is out (in USA), a concert documentary of Led Zeppelin’s December 10, 2007 tribute performance for Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun.

Featuring 16 songs!

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  • Guest

    A little question: Some screenshots on Live! show the app icon on top bar smallest (prettier :D). Will they follow this way? I can change that in gnome-shell.css?

    • Ian Brunelli

      Here’s a screenshot. (The comment above is mine)

      • alex285

        I don’t do GS theming, but with LG it is a .panel-button element. So in css, you will find something like .panel-button {icon-clip:} and you can change the height and the start/ending point. But I don’t know if GS supports scaling textures with css.

        I don’t know about any theme change ..actually none knows :)

      • alex285

        I just checked, it goes something like that, I don’t know if you can display the full icon thought. I didn’t check it so much!

        • Ian Brunelli

          Thank you!
          I will try to do something…

  • Marcos V.F.

    The Gnome is getting better, and with incredible speed. The bad thing is that no distro seems to care to invest in a solid (and polished) experience with Gnome. I do not understand this.

    • alex285

      You mean none company doesn’t care to invest in Linux Desktop in general, other than Canonical

    • hellzou

      Even Fedora ?

      • alex285

        Invest, like commercial. Fedora is not a company to make commercial agreements. RH is only enterprise so far.

        • Marcos V.F.

          Actually, Alex, I meant investing to provide a complete experience with Gnome Shell without, therefore, be replacing the Gnome Shell for a Dock , for example. A distro that has a nice theme / icons by default, they think of a GMenu with Software Center, and other things.

          • alex285

            Mageia3 will -maybe- become such a release. UGR also. Fedora is moving to that direction. But still this is not about Gnome, this is a Linux Desktop issue (excluding Ubuntu). Madriva is a commercial company, but I don’t think that their KDE is quite popular outside the enterprise.

          • user

            I guess the problem is that GNOME is not just ready yet. Following this website gives quite good impression how nicely GNOME is actually going forward and what is coming in the future.

            There’s mockups about upcoming GNOME designs as well: https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups

            Personally I think that Fedora has to work for Linux and for upstream – like they are doing.
            To me it looks like RH/Fedora is investing to Linux more than any other distribution at the moment: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions

          • alex285

            Personally I think the biggest issue in Fedora is the distro upgrade. I use fedora since version 15 (so I am a bit new to this) and I never managed to make a proper upgrade to the next version (many people have the same issue -by looking in forums and comments). Sometimes I am wondering if pre-upgrader is really working. In Ubuntu I never ever made a clean install.

          • Wolframium

            That’s weird. I sarted using fedora at 15 also and preupgrade worked like a charm on the 3 machines I tried it. My main machine now runs on arch, but before that the last distro I had intalled was fedora 15 upgraded twice with preupgrade.

            My girlfriend notebook also runs fedora 17 upgraded all the way from 15.

          • user

            Yeah, upgrading seems to cause problems for many users. I have to say I do clean install every time – it takes 15 minutes so it’s not a problem to me – although I did upgrade from F17 to F18 pre-alpha and it worked fine.

            I don’t know what causes usually the problems on upgrading and if Fedora differs to Debian/Ubuntu on upgrading perspective. One reason could be RPMFusion or some other 3rd-party repos users likes to use to get support for proprietary components.

            It would be interesting to hear about what kind of problems you have but I guess it’s a bit out of the topic in this thread :)

          • alex285

            Hello,
            I couldn’t recall what was wrong coz the last time I tried was 6months ago 16->17. I also tried 15->16 unsuccessfully based on Fedora’s docs, with pre-upgrader and manual. Because I had Ubuntu for years, that felt a bit strange to me.

            > although I did upgrade from F17 to F18 pre-alpha and it worked fine
            I didn’t try that, but I am happy to know that pre-upgrader works :)

      • Marcos V.F.

        Fedora objective is the evolution of free software. Although my main distro, I can not install it on the computer of my family for example – due to the short cycle, not to have a intuitive software center and others things.

        See eg Ubuntu with Unity: appearance, theme, other visual tweaks for end-user; See ElementaryOS: really easy for the end user; even Mandriva provides a solid experience with KDE. Already Fedora needs some tweaks for things to be ok. And YUM is a big problem too.

        I’m not criticizing Fedora, anyway Fedora goals always been clear – and these guys have always done a great job within those goals.
        My only criticism of Fedora, anyway, has always been the YUM.

        It would be great if a major distro investing experience with Gnome 3 + Gnome Shell – targeting the end user. It’s really a shame that does not happen …

        Edit: sorry for my bad english, guys.

        • user

          So what’s wrong with the YUM? As far as I know its “slowness” is because of the configuration Fedora is using.
          I think it was Jef Spaleta who had a configuration tips on his web site to get YUM work like apt-get.

          There has been quite interesting discussion about YUM, Zif and DNF/Hawkey already.

          Zif is already in the repos and Fedora 18 will “demo” DNF:
          http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF

          • alex285

            That’s really cool, didn’t know that Zif was in fedora 18 feature list, I had missed that!

  • Bosc

    This 3.6 release did make me really happy, given that is not broken in almost all my systems (apparently gnome doesn’t like dvb boxes).
    But this rate of development makes me doubt we will have a stable gnome before google decide to launch it’s own chromish enterprise linux distro.
    Sometimes i wish that “gnome os” development was more similar to /real life/ os development.

    • alex285

      dvb? Like TV Media boxes?

      • Bosc

        yes, i use xbmc on it, but i was curious if gnome shell could be used on it.
        there was something broken in the gtk py bindings or in the totem dvb plugin, so i gave up;
        the applications are impossible to operate with the remote (obviously) but the shell wasn’t as bad as i thought(sort of)

  • ScionicSpectre

    A lot of exciting stuff around the corner- as always. It will be really interesting to see how the rest of the Linux ecosystem reacts to GNOME, especially people developing applications for desktop Linux. I hope to see more third-party applications that follow GNOME’s new (work in progress) HIG and style.

    • Bosc

      i think that “reactions” to gnome will come from chrome os; seems that the enterprise desktop is going to be a hot place in the next future

  • Pingback: Roadmap de GNOME 3.8

  • cierpliwy

    Anyone knows when Gnome 3.6.x will hit Arch’s Extra repository?

  • Pingback: Roadmap de GNOME 3.8 - Bytes Uruguay

  • Ade Malsasa Akbar

    Sure, I think GNOME really really needs new iconset. Iconset must be hi-res and glossy (like Mac).

  • Craig Wessel

    The New Apps Look GREAT! You finally have your own Music Player (But what’s with this “Videos” app is it totem’s new name or are you ditching totem?) And a calender app will definitely keep me organized. And photos sound cool but I think I’ll continue using shotwell. Overall the only thing holding me back from using Web is youtube. Some videos work other do not. If anyone can get youtube videos running on web 3.6 let me know! I want to watch youtube videos so I can DITCH chrome. Really looking forward to this. Keep up the great work on making a quality desktop.