In a release that marks the fruit of six months of hard work from our hackers, maintainers, translators, testers, usability team and accessibility team, the GNOME community has done it again: GNOME 2.6.0 continues the high standards in the areas of usability, accessibility and internationalisation that our users expect from the world's Free Software desktop.

This release cycle has been a painful one. During it the GNOME community lost three close members: Chema Celorio, Mark Finlay and Ettore Perazzoli were valued members of the community and will be sorely missed. It is fitting, therefore, that this release is dedicated to their memories.

Extensive information about GNOME 2.6 is in our release notes, linked from the 2.6 start page. There's also a huge gallery of cool screenshots from our intrepid beta-testers!

Our time-based release philosophy means there's never long before a new major release. The GNOME development team has already started working on GNOME 2.8, which will be seeing the light of day in only six months time. We are looking forward to bringing our users new and exciting developments then...