A new GNOME

The latest release of the GNOME desktop environment includes a number of significant architectural enhancements and new applications that offer increased power and usability. Released after six months of intensive development, GNOME 2.22 will be included in Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9, which are scheduled for release in April.

GNOME is an open-source desktop environment that emphasizes freedom, reliability, and ease of use. It is developed collaboratively by a global community of volunteer contributors and professional programmers who aim to create a cohesive platform for computer interaction and third-party application development. It is distributed under the GNU's General Public License and Lesser General Public License which broadly protect users' rights to modify, adapt, and redistribute software.

This article will examine many of the new features and programs included in GNOME 2.22 and illuminate how the changes and improvements impact the overall user experience. We will also provide some insight into some of the new architectural features and demonstrate how they can be leveraged by third-party software developers.

We did most of our testing with Foresight 2.0, which was released two weeks ago shortly after the official release of GNOME 2.22. The Foresight Linux distribution is our preferred distro for GNOME reviews because it is very closely aligned with the upstream release and deviates very little from a standard GNOME installation. We have also tested GNOME 2.22 in prereleases of Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.

In this review, we'll look at some of the new applications included in GNOME 2.22. We'll then touch on some of the new features in the latest release, followed by a look under the hood at some of the architectural improvements. We'll conclude with a look ahead at what we can expect in the next version of GNOME.