GNOME 3.16 Released

kthreadd writes Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released. Some major new features in this release include a overhauled notification system, an updated design of the calendar drop down and support for overlay scrollbars. Also, the grid view in Files has been improved with bigger thumbnail icons, making the appearance more attractive and the rows easier to read. A video is available which demonstrates the new version.

Comments

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Skeezix]

Ummm, something tells me the GNOME guys would be better off spending their time making the desktop more marketplace-friendly and user-friendly versus adding yet more and more crap no one will ever use into the API.

People are using the API's. Much of the improvements to Gtk+ and GNOME for version 2 involve making the platform and desktop accessible to more users. This includes better internationalization and rendering of text, accessibility (a major project being headed up by Sun Microsystems). This has been a very important emphasis of this release. Other improvement in the configuration system, component model, etc. allow developers to write more powerful applications quicker. And these are being used.

Making the GUI easier for first-time Linux users, which was the whole point of GNOME in the first place, wasnt it?

This has been a major focus of the GNOME Project for GNOME 2 and beyond. Check out the GNOME Usability Project and the GNOME Usability mailing list.

Well, GNOME is the GNU project's primary desktop

[ciaran2014]

The GNU project has two desktop environments: GNUstep and GNOME. Of the two, GNOME is the primary one.

For the history: in the late 90s, the KDE desktop was getting popular but it required people to install non-free Qt libraries. Two GNU projects were launched to counter this problem. One was Harmony, which aimed to be a Qt replacement, to allow KDE be run without installing non-free software. The other was GNOME.

Years later, when GNOME was successful, the Qt libraries were released as free software.

There was a third GNU project which aimed to make a graphical desktop, but they decided to first focus on a Scheme scripting engine. This effort produced GNU Guile, but no graphical desktop got made.

I think there was even a fourth project, but I can't think of it right now.