GNOME 3 not ready yet, release pushed back to 2011

The developers behind the GNOME project have gathered in the Netherlands this week for the annual GUADEC conference. During a meeting that took place at the event, the GNOME release team made the difficult decision to delay the launch of GNOME 3, the next major version of the popular open source desktop environment.

The new version has been deemed unready for mass consumption and will need another round of refinements before it can achieve the level of maturity and robustness that is expected by the software's users. Although the news will likely disappoint some enthusiasts, it is consistent with the GNOME development community's conservative approach to release management and strong emphasis on predictability.

GNOME consists of open source applications and development frameworks that form a complete desktop computing stack. It provides a number of the core components that make up the default user experience in many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. GNOME is developed on a time-based six-month release cycle, which means that there are two incremental releases every year.

Original GNOME 3 release schedule

The predictability of the consistent release cycle is one of the major factors that has driven GNOME adoption among commercial desktop Linux distributors, but the incremental development model has largely precluded radical changes. The idea of a major 3.0 update had been discussed for quite some time, but did not initially attract much support from key decision makers.

Some GNOME developers, however, feared that the project's reduction in forward momentum was leading to a decline in innovation and a state of "decadence." These concerns prompted a renewal of interest in overhauling the GNOME user experience, a movement that culminated in 2008 with the formation of a GNOME 3 roadmap and development plan.

GNOME 3 was originally intended to launch in March of 2010, but the developers prepared for the possibility that it would not be ready in time. They decided to move forward with their plans to release a new major version, but with the understanding that they would release a normal incremental update instead if 3.0 wasn't sufficiently mature.

That is exactly what happened when the release team assessed the suitability of 3.0 in preparation for the March release. They decided to push it up another cycle and aim for a September launch. This week at GUADEC, they have once again concluded that version 3 is not yet ready. We will see another standard incremental update in September and the GNOME 3 release will be pushed back another cycle, with the aim of getting it out the door in March 2011.

A sensible release management strategy

The continued delays are not particularly troubling and a lot of progress has been made on the new GNOME 3.0 technologies over the past six months. The GNOME Shell, a new desktop user interface that is built with JavaScript and the Clutter framework, has seen an especially rapid pace of evolution and many improvements during the current development cycle. A lot of the transitional work that is taking place under the hood, such as the shift from the legacy GConf configuration system to the modern GSettings framework, is also proceeding faster than some observers anticipated.

Many Linux enthusiasts likely remember the problems that plagued the competing KDE desktop environment when its fourth major version was released in 2008. KDE 4 was launched prematurely in a partially completed state because its developers hoped that users would help identify weaknesses and accelerate the completion of the software. The plan backfired, partly because mixed messages from KDE's developers broadly distorted the expectations of the software's users.