Looking to GNOME 2.4 and Beyond

The popularity of the GNOME 2.0 developer platform, and our quick release cycle for GNOME 2.2 have stimulated great interest not only in GNOME 2.2 but in the next release of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform.

Over the last couple of months, there has been a huge amount of activity at the application level. GNOME 2.4 will continue to benefit from this activity, as we merge many of these newly developed and ported applications together. You can find many of these applications at the 5th Toe website. Major software releases based on the GNOME 2.2 Developer Platform are expected in the next several months, including Ximian's powerful Evolution personal information manager, the popular Galeon web browser, and Gnumeric and Abiword, two of the leading Free Software office tools. In addition, a large number of smaller apps will continue to provide a rich and usable environment for GNOME users.

GNOME 2.4 will continue GNOME 2.2's movement towards a more tightly integrated desktop, making it a real competitor at the enterprise level. This next release - expected in the late (northern) summer of 2003 - should offer several mature productivity applications, utilities and accessories so that a GNOME user will never have to leave a simple, clean, powerful GNOME application.

Six months after GNOME 2.4, we anticipate that GNOME 2.6 will feature the next release of GTK+, introducing new file selector and "combo" widgets, powerful menu and toolbar widgets and further advances in accessibility, usability and internationalization.