Just to make it clear, Gnome OS is considered the consistent and complete experience that Gnome tries to offer, from the very first time we boot our box, till we shutting it down. As far as I know there isn’t really a plan for a Gnome OS distro release, although some people inside Gnome fancy the idea.
The most important goal of Gnome OS is to port all the “core” functionality to system wide, including the text handling.
how much please?
Just some funny info from ohloh.net. In case that you want to buy Gnome, it will cost you about $130m (tax free), which is a real bargain as it invokes around 8m lines of code and one single developer would need around 2400 years to build it. This is based on 134 repositories (including gstreamer – I had to register to exclude repos and I didn’t), where actually Gnome repos are 129.
If you just have one million you can buy Gnome Shell which cost $1.1m and includes 80k lines of code and 20 years effort for a single developer. Gtk costs $11m and its codebase size is 730k lines.
The numbers above include all the repos, since the day one but the point is that Gnome is a huge project that consist of a lot technologies and frameworks. The goal is: to define a set of standard technologies and provide documentation for them (SDK), reduce the cost of the project, make rapid development a reality and have more people involved with us.
A kinda similar situation also applies for the actual user interface, the Gnome Desktop as a user sees it. So far we have (or will in 3.8) the “content” applications, (Videos, Documents, Music, Photos) which semantically belong to Files, the Notifications that supports all the Gnome Apps (3rd parties?), GOA than connects the Apps with Cloud (Calendar, Contacts and also the “content” Apps) an integrated system search (3.8) with Gnome Shell.
And much more are going to come. Everything works and looks similar each other.
Text Handing
Text handling involves common every day tasks, Search, Insert, Select, Auto-Completion and Spell Checking. The goal here is to make all this functionality available for all Gnome Apps. That will also help 3rd party developers (if they choose to support Gnome) to distribute better Apps.
Auto-completion
With the help of the integrated to the system IBus -a framework that allows the user to select and switch between multiple Input Methods.
[1] Installing a new Input Method
[2] Enable Suggestions
Just select the method.. and Voila!
Source: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Completion
Spell Checking
This shares a lot with Completion, but at the same time is a different functionality and will be enabled by default.
What it works for Empathy should also works system wide. Functionality remains, but the design will be different.
Goals
- On screen keyboard – provide word suggestions for quicker entry
- Highlight misspelled words
- Provide spelling suggestions for misspelled words
- Settings for enabling/disabling spell checking and suggestions
Source: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/SpellChecking
Selections
This is the most impressive part, redesigned and improved selections for manipulating content with better support for touchscreens and mouse -at the same time!
Goals
- Make selection and insertion actions more discoverable
- Have contextual actions closer to the object on which they act
- Be easier to use on touch devices
Secondary Goals
- improve mouse interaction (adjusting selection)
- better context action definition (work on selection, not the container pobject)
Select the text (above) and manipulating it (bellow)
Spell Checking will probably fit in here.
Source: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections
Gnome is getting serious in every aspect but still keeps this “cartoon-ish” style it had from the early days! Because I had Gnome since v1.4, (I think), I can say for sure that Gnome after release 3 goes really fast (with the exception of 3.4 -bad release), no matter the bugs and the complains.
Note: That all the above are currently early designs!