[ Thanks to Ostracus for this link. ]
“Linux is no longer just a buzzword. Its low cost,
commoditization, rapid rate of development and ample scope for
customization have driven adoption in corporations and homes the
world over. Until now, though, people have largely used Linux for
back-end tasks. It can be found running everything from stock
exchanges to nuclear weapons simulations to TiVos, but it’s rarely
considered for use as a desktop OS. Fortunately for Linux fans (and
we would argue for the industry as a whole), this is finally
beginning to change. Recent months have seen a number of
high-profile desktop Linux deployments which include the City of
Munich, Germany and the regional government in Extremadura, Spain.
These municipal adoptions have been driven largely by the
ever-spiraling licensing costs of proprietary systems, the
increasing availability of Linux support from software and hardware
vendors, and rapidly improving desktop usability, as demonstrated
by a recent rash of new products from the likes of SuSE, Red Hat,
Codeweavers and Ximian.“Today, gnome.org released version 2.4 of the GNOME Desktop and
Developer Platform. This marks the third major release of the GNOME
2 platform, after releases 2.0 and 2.2. (2.1 and 2.3 were
development branches; you could consider them working prototypes of
releases 2.2 and 2.4, respectively.) GNOME 2.4 is the result of
quite a bit of work toward complying with the GNOME Human Interface
Guidelines (HIG), which mainly focus on user interface consistency
and predictability. This release has also undergone some general
polish, and it can finally be said that the GNOME 2 platform has
achieved maturity with this release. The Epiphany web browser, a
major new component of GNOME, also makes its debut with this
release. While we explore the new features of GNOME 2.4, we will
also attempt to cover some of the core GNOME technologies and how
they benefit the user interface, in addition to giving you a tour
of GNOME’s software framework and applications…”