GNOME 2.30 was originally intended to coincide with GNOME 3.0 -- a massive cleanup and rethinking of the popular desktop. However, GNOME 3.0 is delayed for at least another release, which leaves GNOME 2.30 as most likely the last version in a series stretching back almost a decade.

Released just a few days ago, GNOME 3 is the latest major version of the GNOME desktop environment. If you are currently running a GNOME-based Linux or BSD distribution, you are probably using version 2.30 or 2.32, but that should change in the upcoming release cycle when many of the distributions will be shipping with GNOME 3 as the default.

For those of you who like to keep their installations lean and swift, installing software can be a problem at times. There’s lots of useful software out there, but some can be really bloated and slow, while others are small themselves, but have large or many dependencies. This is especially true for Gnome-Do. When you install Gnome-Do, Evolution get installed along as a dependency.

From my perspective, the worst culprit is GNOME 3. And though I have often criticised the default GNOME 3 interface, with a little bit of tweaking here and there, I have been able to get it to a point where I can actually use it for my daily computing tasks. It is not perfect, but much better than the default configuration.

GNOME 2.30 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop: a popular, multi-platform desktop environment for your computer. GNOME's focus is ease of use, stability, and first-class internationalisation and accessibility support

GNOME 2.26 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop: a popular, multi-platform desktop environment for your computer. GNOME's focus is ease of use, stability, and first class internationalisation and accessibility support.

Today I finally managed to get GNOME Shell installed so I could get a preview of what is to come on the Linux desktop (at least through the eyes of GNOME). GNOME 3 is different. Very different.

Gnome is pretty cool. It’s simple and solid. Unfortunately a default Gnome desktop is not very appealing to the eyes. We all come to the point where we wonder, “Can I make my Gnome desktop look super l33t?”

Regarding the GNOME 3 desktop, I was hoping that the developers will at least make an attempt to customize the default desktop in a manner that makes it more user-friendly, just like that of Linux Deepin or Comice OS. But that is not what you will see if you install a Mageia 2 GNOME 3 desktop. Rather, you get the familiar but so user-unfriendly default GNOME 3 desktop.