Gnome 2.8 RC1

After a long wait, GNOME finally released 2.8 RC1 for public consumption. Note that this is still considered beta release, so don't use it as your production release. This release is a good news for GNOME fans which sometimes jealous with the quick release and good user interface polishing that KDE did on their projects. Both are the well known window manager that runs smoothly on every distro and available on major GNU/Linux's distro. The main difference between both of them are the library that being used. GNOME is using GTK+ while KDE is using library from QT, which i think is better than GTK+ library from the point of view of user interface, while it has the same functions.

The schedule notes that the release of GNOME 2.8 will be 15th of September, but there are no guarantees that they will release in that day, since GNOME, just as KDE is a big project and bugs always there to be fixed. We just hope that there will be more bug fixed and improved performance before the official release.

There will be some changes in core components of GNOME 2.8. Changes to core GNOME modules include things like GNOME VFS (the virtual file layer) and Nautilus (the file manager), ie. things that affect the whole desktop. There will be a new GNOME theme called Indubstrial. It is a modified version of Industrial proprosed as the new default theme for GNOME 2.8. The other theme proposed as the new default theme is a theme called SmoothGNOME or "Simply Smooth", based off the Smooth engine. There are also some proposed modules that people want to be integrated into GNOME 2.8, like Evolution ( groupware client for GNOME), GNOME System Tools (set of tools for configuring the operating system underlying the desktop), VINO (VNC server for the GNOME desktop), GNOME Volume Manager (a daemon designed to handle volume mounting and management under GNOME), GNOME Keyring Manager (a tool for managing secrets stored in the GNOME Keyring daemon that appeared in GNOME 2.6), and GNOME Nettool (an application for giving network information such as IP addresses, traceroutes, whois lookups and almost everything else associated with networks). You can view their screenshots at Davyd Madeley's website.

GNOME runs on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (commonly called Linux), Solaris, HP-UX, BSD and Apple's Darwin. GNOME includes powerful features such as high-quality smooth text rendering and first class internationalization and accessibility support, including support for bi-directional text.

If you are GNOME's fans, your wish will soon come true and in the next two weeks, you will be able to upgrade your GNOME desktop into the latest GNOME version 2.8.