I read a really enlightening story on bounties in GIMP that didn't end as one would hope. However, it seems to be a big learning experience, something the entire community (and not just developers) can learn from. One can also make the parallel here to proprietary software that throwing money at something doesn't fix it. Things could be a lot worse.
This stuff has me really excited about being a Linux user. There's a whole bunch of stuff be working on and being released that I can't wait to play with. First, the big stuff.
Big Releases
GNOME 2.12
The wonderful
GNOME folks have released
GNOME 2.12. More details can be found in the
Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12 (
local mirror).
Ubuntu Breezy
The Canonical group has released
Breezy Badger Preview. You can download from
one of their mirrors. Check out a (slightly dated)
Ubuntu Breezy Colony 4 screenshot tour or read up on
new Ubuntu Breezy features (
local mirror). Looking really neat. I'd point out what features I think are killer, but in doing so, I'd just end up relisting everything listed.
The
Ubuntu Documentation Team has done some really great work on putting together the information that new users need most. I hope that once this is out, there will be less controversy with respect to the unoffical guide.
Other Cool Stuff
This is just a laundry list of stuff that for the most part isn't ready for mass consumption, but is coming down the pipe that I'm looking forward to:
- Unix power for the desktop
- A push to bring the more Unix-y power tools (such as conversion between formats, cron, crypto, file moving (renaming), MOTD, piping, regular expressions, etc) commonly done at a command prompt to the GNOME desktop. I think this will require heavy Nautilus intergration.
- Nautilus Actions
- Speaking of Nautilus intergration, this looks really cool. (And yes, they run Drupal.)
- gShrooms
- This isn't your normal P2P application. Check out the gShrooms screenshots.
- Tilt
- My laptop harddrive is wonky and doesn't deal well with being moved around. This is just a small applet to display the drive's tilt. Check out the Tilt screenshots.
- iFolder
- Not really something for me to use, but I know every non-power user would find this to be a killer application. Jorge Castro has iFolder working on Ubuntu.
- SIOX
- I'm horrible working with images, ask anyone who knows me, but I think even I could use this with the GIMP.
Really cool stuff.
