GNOME 2.26 has been released. Here the release announcement:

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.26, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment and of its developer platform. Released on schedule, to the day, GNOME 2.26 builds on top of a long series of successful six months releases to offer the best experience to users and developers.

For more than 10 years now, the project has been seeing a tremendous amount of work. And as usual, it's hard to come back to a previous version of GNOME once you've tried GNOME 2.26, which is probably the best compliment the project can receive.

This six months effort wouldn't have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors from all around the world: hackers, documentors, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, sysadmins, companies, artists, users and testers. GNOME would not exist without all those people. Thanks very much to every one of them!

You'll find detailed information about GNOME 2.26 in our release notes:

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.26/

Most distributions have already started integrating GNOME 2.26 in their development version, or as package updates to their stable version.

Some parties are already happening in various places to celebrate this release. But tomorrow morning, you can be sure that GNOME contributors will already be working on their plans for the next version of GNOME, due in September, 2009.

Enjoy! And be proud of this release!

- The GNOME Release Team