Download Gnome 2.28

The developers behind GNOME released version 2.28 of this desktop environment on Wednesday. Gnome is a comprehensive, easy-to-use open source desktop environment for operating systems belonging to the Unix family, such as GNU/Linux and BSD. The name is short for GNU Network Object Model Environment. Gnome consists of a desktop environment plus a development platform that allows the creation of other applications that can be integrated into the desktop environment. It is similar to KDE in that regard. Many changes and improvements have been made in version 2.28, the most important of which can be found below:

What’s New for Users

The GNOME Project’s focus on users and usability continues in GNOME 2.28 with its hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements. The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made, but these notes aim to highlight some of the more exciting, user-oriented features in this release.

• Become Unwired
• Track Your Time Better
• Empathy Instant Messenger
• Epiphany Web Browser
• Media Player Improvements
• Smile for the Camera
• Annotate Your PDFs
• Fade In and Out
• But Wait, There’s More…

What’s New in Accessibility

GNOME has a passion for making software available to everyone, including users and developers with impairments that can make it harder to use their computers. To help, GNOME created the GNOME Accessibility Project and an accessibility framework that is now a standard on libre desktops.

GNOME 2.28 continues to build on its prior accessibility credentials with several improvements.

• Orca Screen Reader
• WebKit Accessibility Support

What’s New for Developers

The following changes are important for developers using the GNOME 2.28 developer platform. If you’re not interested in changes for developers, you can skip forward to Section 6 ? Internationalization†

As well as the GNOME Desktop, GNOME 2.28 is the latest release of the GNOME Developer Platform, a set of API- and ABI-stable libraries available under the GNU LGPL which can be used for the development of cross-platform applications.

• Platform Cleanup
• GTK+ 2.18
• Glib
• GNOME Documentation
• GNOME Bluetooth
• Epiphany Web Browser
• Time Tracker Applet
• GNOME Media
• Totem
• Vinagre
• brasero