GNOME 3.4 is here!

11:09 am news, thankyous

I’m so excited that GNOME 3.4 has been released. There is a lot of good information in the press release and the release notes that were published today. GNOME 3.4 is great – it’s much more polished and also fixes a number of small things that make a much better user experience (including some users found annoying in the previous GNOME 3 releases).

Some of the improvements include:

  • Smoother scrolling, better systems settings
  • Document search
  • Video calling added to Empathy
  • More intelligent pop-ups and message tray
  • Better accessibility support
  • Sleek and zippy Epiphany (which is also renamed to “Web”)
  • Better hardware support
  • A lot of small enhancements made through our Every Detail Matters effort

Since version 3.2 six months ago, GNOME received 41,000 contributions made by 1,275 people – incredible! Many thanks to the whole GNOME community for working together on this release, and to Matthias Clasen, Allan Day, Andreas Nilsson and Andre Klapper for working so hard on all of the coordination to get the release out the door.

4 Responses

  1. John (J5) Palmieri Says:

    Congrats to all the GNOME teams for putting out stellar releases. Even though I no longer hack on GNOME it is the enthusiasm and vision of the community that got me into this crazy world of Linux and FOSS software. I think one of the highest praises I can give is that GNOME has become transparent to me. It helps me get my work done without me thinking – this is a cool piece of technology that I need to hack on. Even though there are cool wizbang features being added every release, they are done with a certain air of maturity and thought that was slowly nurtured through GNOME’s history but solidified in the 3.x push. GNOME’s focus on design, stability, simplicity, integration and moving up the software stack has produced a Desktop that I can use, not just a piece of technology that is fun to play with. Kudos again to everyone who was involved, from the person with the tiniest patch attached to bugzilla to the person with the most git commits, and to those who aren’t coders but bring that certain “je ne sais quoi” to the project.

  2. Olivier Says:

    Correction: Video calling wasn’t added to Empathy, we just have a new UI for it. Empathy has supported video calling for a long time.

  3. Tasos Says:

    6 Months ago I was using KDE 4 and I was of those proud people who were using it. I didn’t like GNOME 2 serries at all. After the breakage I did to my system (my fault actually) I made a clean install of Arch and gave GNOME 3 a try to see why people have all this fuss about it. I was amazed by it!

    This simplicity is incredible. I can do tasks a lot faster, switch windows faster, not worry anymore of multiple instances of the same program and don’t worry about every bit whether is customized or not. Users don’t care anymore to customize their DE anymore, they just want their “tool” to get things done with the least effort and GNOME 3 is all about it.

    Now that the 3.4 version is out, I can’t wait to install it through Arch’s officially supported packages. All the others, including Linus, are doing a huge mistake not supporting GNOME project in this great step forward.

    Keep the good work.

  4. Abhishek Says:

    I would +1 and thumbs up the above comment. 😉

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