The web at your fingertips (GNOME 3.4 banner)

One year ago, the release of GNOME 3.0 was laying solid foundations for the new design of our software. Fast forward to this week: our project is reaching the 3.4 milestone. It comes with a new flow of improvements for our users, and I believe it highlights our commitment to the GNOME 3 vision to offer a modern and innovative environment: revamped look of applications, the application menus, the many small annoyances we fixed, etc. But this is not all: the community is also preparing for the next level with behind the scenes work such as smooth scrolling and support for touch events.

Now that 3.4 is out, I know a lot of people are looking forward to the 3.6 release! Cool stuff is coming in the next six months, and there will an amazing opportunity before September to share what you believe will matter: GUADEC at the end of July!

So now that you're all done with the 3.4 release, it's time to go read again the GUADEC CfP and submit your awesome talk!

Port of A Coruña, where you will join us for GUADEC 2012!

Oh, and I cannot avoid a mention about GNOME 3.4 in the openSUSE land :-) The openSUSE GNOME team quickly got 3.4.0 packaged: it was in GNOME:Factory on Wednesday already, and the late tarballs were integrated yesterday. All of this has been submitted to Factory so it will be in the next 12.2 milestone. And some people are starting to look at building GNOME 3.4 for openSUSE 12.1 too, if you prefer to stay on a stable distribution.

At the end of last week, we unleashed RC1 of our next openSUSE release (12.1, scheduled for November 16th), and it comes with GNOME 3.2.1, which went out only a couple of days before RC1. Go grab a live image if you want to play with either openSUSE or GNOME 3 :-) There are still a few bugs here and there to iron out, but overall, the experience is very solid!

"I upgraded to openSUSE 12.1, and this dramatically improved my life!" — Anonymous

It really feels good to have this openSUSE release nearing, as we missed the GNOME 3.0 boat (openSUSE 11.4 was released one month before GNOME 3.0): I, and I assume a few others, felt that we were stuck in the past with GNOME 2 in our world for so long. Sure, the work on backporting GNOME 3.0 and then 3.2 to openSUSE 11.4 helped, but we really wanted to share what was in Factory... Especially as there was really a lot of work to properly integrate this new GNOME.

I'm obviously really glad to see the GNOME 3 love in openSUSE, but looking back at the last few months, what is even greater to me is that we got many amazing people contribute to the GNOME team through-out this cycle. I'm sure I'll forget some of them (apologies for that, let me know so I add your name!), but here's a quick list:

• Atri Bhattacharya
• Bjørn Lie
• Casual J. Programmer
• Dominique Leuenberger
• Frédéric Crozat
• Gary Lin
• Guido Berhörster
• Joey Zheng
• Kirill Kirillov
• Malcolm Lewis
• Nelson Marques
• Richard Brown
• Sankar P
• Scott Reeves
• Stephen Shaw

Their various contributions include updating packages, fixing bugs, testing, polishing the experience, supporting users, providing ideas, and more! Go ahead and thank those people when you meet them (virtually or in the real life): they all make the GNOME team rock! And who knows, maybe next time you'll also be one of those rock stars?