GNOME 2.12 will be released to the world on September 7th, 2005, culminating 6 months of very exciting work by members of the project. A number of exciting technologies come together in GNOME 2.12 that will set the standard for free software desktops to come. Here is a sample (by no means an exhaustive list) of some of the outstanding work that has gone into GNOME thanks to its many contributors.

Highlights of Gnome 2.12 include improvements and add-ons:

• New Default Theme - Clearlooks
• Core Technology
  - GTK+ 2.8
  - Clipboard Management
  - Hardware Abstraction Layer - improved integration with HAL
  
• Core Applications
  - Nautilus
  - Epiphany - improved
  - Keyring Manager
  - Epiphany - new features; more extensions
  - Evolution - cleaner interface & improved
  - Control Center - newly configured
  - System Tools - control services
  - Panel & Applets - minor improvements
  
• Multimedia
  - Totem Player - impvoed
  - Sound Juicer - improved
  - Nautilus - more tightly integrated & new features
  
• Extra Applications
  - Search Tool - file previews
  
• New Applications
  - Evince - document reader
  - Keyring Manager - manage keyrings

This is the first desktop with enough slick features to give Windblows a run for it's money.

Seems to have better interprocess communication than the current KDE release, with all the benefits of the Windows GUI.

Go GNOME team!