Vincent Untz is the uber-geek release manager for Gnome. We catch him at the Gnome Asia Summit in Bangalore for a quick chat on all things Gnome 3 (and some things not).

GNOME release manager Vincent Untz talks to heise open about the projects future plans for the popular desktop manager.

The GNOME release team have confirmed that GNOME 3.0 will be released in September 2010, with a GNOME 2.30 release in March 2010. The announcement came from Vincet Untz and the GNOME release team and is a result of feeedback from the GNOME development community.

Vincent Untz has announced the release of GNOME 2.27.5. This unstable release of GNOME in the road to GNOME 2.28.0 also marks the entering of the feature freeze for this bi-annual update to GNOME.

There’s been some grumbling among the Gnome community about if and when Gnome would have a major overhaul. Well with Gnome 3 we’ll have it in the form of Gnome Shell. It pretty much replaces the panel and window manager in a normal Gnome installation with a fully composited environment with some great new functionality.

You don't have to look at the Gnome 3 desktop with a microscope to see that it's radically different. We manage to trick key members of the design team (Allan Day, Andreas Nilsson, and Vincent Untz) at the Gnome Asia Summit, and make them look up from behind their laptops, to dispel some of the misconceptions about the far-out changes in the milestone release.

The release of GNOME 3.0, the popular desktop's first major release in eight years, promises to be the major free software event in autumn 2010. Where is GNOME now? What can we expect of GNOME 3.0? Of GNOME 3 as a series of releases?

One thing we have learned from KDE4 is that its not a good idea to make drastic change to a desktop environment that the users have been used to for a long time. Hopefully the Gnome developers will keep that in mind as they work on Gnome 3.0 release for next year.

Gnome Shell is the future window manager for UNIX-like operating systems running the Gnome desktop environment. It is slated to be part of the Gnome 3.0, which will probably be released sometime next year. However, this does not mean you cannot try Gnome Shell now and get the first impression of what it ought to be.