Developer(s) | GNOME Project |
---|---|
Initial release | June 26, 2002 |
Final release | 2.32 / September 29, 2010 |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Unix-like |
Platform | GTK |
Predecessor | GNOME 1 |
Successor | GNOME 3, MATE |
Type | Desktop environment |
License | GPL-2.0-only |
Website | gnome.org (archived at Wayback Machine) |
GNOME 2 is the second major release of the GNOME desktop environment. Building upon the release of GNOME 1, development of GNOME 2 focused on a greater design-oriented approach that simplified and standardized elements of the environment. It also introduced modern font and image rendering, with improved accessibility and internationalization, and improved performance. It was released on June 26, 2002 at the Linux Symposium.
Although officially superseded by GNOME 3, and no longer actively maintained, GNOME 2 became the basis for the MATE desktop environment, which actively continues development. It also helped to inspire the Cinnamon desktop environment, and the GNOME Flashback shell session, which both largely retain a similar user experience to GNOME 2, but with modern components.
GNOME 2's initial release was largely an evolution of the final release of GNOME 1, that had introduced both Nautilus (today known as GNOME Files) as its file manager, and Sawfish as its window manager. However, in an effort to simplify its implementation, by the second release of GNOME 2, the Metacity window manager had been adopted. With that, it also included an official look and feel, as it adopted the Clearlooks theme. For the first time, the GNOME human interface guidelines were published, which attempted to improve overall usability. Tearable (detachable) menus were discontinued by default.
GNOME 2 continued with the general desktop metaphor paradigm that GNOME 1 started. An evolved GNOME Panel remained as its shell. Users saw the addition of font anti-aliasing, which gave the desktop environment a more refined look in its text rendering.
As GNOME 2's release cycle spanned the course of over eight years, many component libraries and core applications were introduced and replaced at various points. GStreamer, a multimedia framework, was introduced in 2.2, which later allowed for the inclusion of the Totem multimedia player (known today as GNOME Videos). Epiphany (known today as GNOME Web) was introduced in 2.4. Evince (also known today as GNOME Document Viewer) replaced both GPdf and GGV in version 2.12.
GNOME 1 had implemented the CORBA-compliant object request broker known as ORBit to serve as its message-oriented middleware. In version 2.2, this middleware was deprecated in favor of the more environment-agnostic D-Bus. As a result, Bonobo, a software framework for object-linking in compound documents that had been built-upon ORBit, was also phased-out.
Although greater overall standardization was a major goal of GNOME 2, it also provided increased functionality in customization, as version 2.2 supported the ability for full icon themes to be applied for the first time.
Discussion around GNOME 2 began as early as 1999, following the initial release of GNOME 1, when Federico Mena published an early draft roadmap. [1] Gathering from other project leaders Miguel de Icaza and Havoc Pennington, the roadmap roughly detailed overall goals, their dependencies, and time to completion. As early as February 2000, the GNOME Project publicly outlined a plan to have an SDK available by the end of the calendar year. [2] During the first GUADEC which took place the following month, a non-authoritative GNOME 2.0 steering committee was formed, and an updated timeline was created. [3]
On February 13, 2001, the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors met for a special meeting and discussed the launch of GNOME 2. [4] Project co-founder Miguel de Icaza also outlined key points, including which technologies should be adopted via a public document. [5] It was agreed that GNOME 2 should be based-on GTK 2 widget toolkit.
Spearheaded by the GNOME Human Computer Interaction team of Sun Microsystems led by Calum Benson, a study was conducted in March 2001, to survey usability of GNOME 1.0. [6] Following, Havoc Pennington, then published an essay titled "Free software and good user interfaces", which advocated for improvement in user interface design, and noted efforts in the upcoming GNOME 2 release. [7] This culminated in the creation of the GNOME Usability Project, which handled publishing of an accompanying set of human interface guidelines. This helped to standardize interface elements in the desktop environment.
GNOME 2 was released on June 26, 2002 at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa. [8] Starting with GNOME 2.4, a timed release cadence was adopted, which called for a new version to be released roughly every six months. This effectively resulted in new stable GNOME versions being released every September and March of any given year. This practice is still continued in the modern GNOME release cadence.
Version | Release date | Notes |
---|---|---|
2.0 | June 26, 2002 [8] | Initial release |
2.2 | February 5, 2003 [9] | |
2.4 | September 10, 2003 [10] | |
2.6 | March 31, 2004 [11] | |
2.8 | September 15, 2004 [12] | |
2.10 | March 9, 2005 [13] | |
2.12 | September 7, 2005 [14] | |
2.14 | April 15, 2006 [15] | |
2.16 | September 6, 2006 [16] | |
2.18 | March 14, 2007 [17] | |
2.20 | September 19, 2007 [18] | |
2.22 | March 12, 2008 [19] | |
2.24 | September 24, 2008 [20] | |
2.26 | March 18, 2009 [21] | |
2.28 | September 23, 2009 [22] | |
2.30 | March 31, 2010 [23] | |
2.32 | September 29, 2010 [24] | |
Minimum | Recommended | |
---|---|---|
Unix-like | ||
Operating system | BSD, Darwin, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris | |
CPU | Pentium, 166 MHz | Pentium, 400 MHz |
Memory | 64 MB | 128 MB |
Free space | 341 MB |
In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile computing. Desktop GUIs help the user to easily access and edit files, while they usually do not provide access to all of the features found in the underlying operating system. Instead, the traditional command-line interface (CLI) is still used when full control over the operating system is required.
GNOME Web, called Epiphany until 2012 and still known by that code name, is a free and open-source web browser based on the GTK port of Apple's WebKit rendering engine, called WebKitGTK. It is developed by the GNOME project for Unix-like systems. It is the default and official web browser of GNOME, and part of the GNOME Core Applications.
GNOME Terminal is a terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop environment written by Havoc Pennington and others. Terminal emulators allow users to access a UNIX shell while remaining on their graphical desktop.
HAL is a software subsystem for UNIX-like operating systems providing hardware abstraction.
Linux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, bundled with a variety of free and open-source applications. It can provide full out-of-the-box multimedia support for those who choose to include proprietary software such as multimedia codecs. Compared to Ubuntu, it uses the Cinnamon interface in the most popular edition, using a different, more traditional layout that can be customized by dragging the applets and creating panels. New applets can also be downloaded.
MonoDevelop was an open-source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono and .NET Framework. MonoDevelop integrates features similar to those of NetBeans and Microsoft Visual Studio, such as automatic code completion, source control, a graphical user interface (GUI) and Web designer. MonoDevelop integrates a Gtk# GUI designer called Stetic. It supports Boo, C, C++, C#, CIL, D, F#, Java, Oxygene, Vala, JavaScript, TypeScript and Visual Basic.NET. Although there is no word from the developers that it has been discontinued, nonetheless it hasn't been updated in 4 years and is no longer installable on major operating systems, such as Ubuntu 22.04 and above. Its parent Microsoft, seems to have shifted focus to Visual Studio Code and the .NET Framework, which runs on many operating systems, including Linux.
Empathy was an instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) client which supported text, voice, video, file transfers, and inter-application communication over various IM communication protocols.
Moblin, short for 'mobile Linux', is a discontinued open source operating system and application stack for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), netbooks, nettops and embedded devices.
Ubuntu releases are made semiannually by Canonical Ltd, its developers, using the year and month of the release as a version number. The first Ubuntu release, for example, was Ubuntu 4.10 and was released on 20 October 2004. Consequently, version numbers for future versions are provisional; if the release is delayed until a different month than planned, the version number will change accordingly.
GNOME 3 is the third major release of the GNOME desktop environment. A major departure from technologies implemented by its predecessors, GNOME 3 introduced a dramatically different user interface. It was the first GNOME release to utilize a unified graphical shell known as GNOME Shell. It also introduced support for the Wayland display protocol and added integration with other key technologies such as Flatpak during its development lifecycle.
GNOME Activity Journal is a semantic desktop browser-like application for the GNOME desktop environment. Instead of providing direct access to the hierarchical file system like most file managers, GNOME Activity Journal uses the Zeitgeist framework to classify files according to metadata. This includes time and date of previous accesses, location of use, file type, tagging and more. In addition to local files, GNOME Activity Journal also organizes web browsing history, email and other data sources.
GNOME, originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10. Since 2017, its development was taken over by the Unity7 Maintainers (Unity7) and UBports.
Ubuntu Unity is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, using the Unity interface in place of Ubuntu's GNOME Shell. The first release was 20.04 LTS on 7 May 2020. Prior to the initial release it had the working names of Unubuntu and Ubuntu Unity Remix.
Cinnamon is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, which was originally based on GNOME 3, but follows traditional desktop metaphor conventions.
Mir is a computer display server and, recently, a Wayland compositor for the Linux operating system that is under development by Canonical Ltd. It was planned to replace the currently used X Window System for Ubuntu; however, the plan changed and Mutter was adopted as part of GNOME Shell.
Zorin OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. It uses a GNOME 3 and XFCE 4 desktop environment by default, although the desktop is heavily customized in order to help users transition from Windows and macOS easily. Wine and PlayOnLinux are supported, allowing users to run compatible Windows software, like Microsoft Office. Its creators maintain three free editions of the operating system, and sell a professional edition.
Pop!_OS is a free and open-source Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu, and featuring a customized GNOME desktop environment known as COSMIC. The distribution is developed by American Linux computer manufacturer System76. Pop!_OS is primarily built to be bundled with the computers built by System76, but can also be downloaded and installed on most computers.
Adwaita is the design language of the GNOME desktop environment. As an implementation, it exists as the default theme and icon set of the GNOME Shell and Phosh, and as widgets for applications targeting usage in GNOME. Adwaita first appeared in 2011 with the release of GNOME 3.0 as a replacement for the design principles used in Clearlooks, and with incremental modernization and refinements, continues with current version releases.
GNOME 1 is the first major release of the GNOME desktop environment. Its primary goal was to provide a consistent user-friendly environment in conjunction with the X Window System. It was also a modern and free and open source software alternative to older desktop environments such as the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), but also to the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Each desktop environment was built-upon then proprietary-licensed widget toolkits, whereas GNOME's goal from the onset, was to be freely-licensed, and utilize the GTK toolkit instead.