Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.30, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment and of its developer platform. Released on schedule, to the day, GNOME 2.30 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 this latest release, which is probably the best compliment the project can receive.

GNOME 2.30 also marks the last major release in the GNOME 2.x era. There will be maintenance releases for 2.30, but the community now focuses its efforts on GNOME 3.0!

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 2.30 in our release notes:

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.30/

Most distributions have already started integrating GNOME 2.30 in their development version, or as package updates to their stable version.

To celebrate this release, a GNOME Store has been created. A selection of t-shirts and mugs is available on this store, that is powered by Zazzle:

http://www.zazzle.com/gnome

You can also support the GNOME Project by becoming a Friend of GNOME:

http://www.gnome.org/friends/

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, 2010.

Enjoy! And be proud of this release!

- The GNOME Release Team