OStatic

Typical Linux desktop options like KDE and GNOME? limit the way computer users interact with the applications and programs on their systems. There's not much to do beyond opening and closing an app, and moving or resizing a window. The development team behind ?toil? is building a desktop interface that aims to stand that idea on its head and let users create workflows that work best for them.

The GNUstep-based environment is built with lightweight and modular components that allow users to combine project- and document-oriented activities (or, services, as the ?toil? team calls them) more easily.

Churning out an x.0 software release must be akin to becoming a new parent -- the event exudes promise, joy, and hope, yet is simultaneously humbling, exhausting, and terror-inducing. While it isn't realistically possible to plan out detailed roadmaps for your children's long-term future, it's crucial to do so for a software project. While whether the presence of a carefully planned roadmap makes progress more or less stressful depends largely on who you ask and at what point you're asking, a project with clearly outlined goals and direction has a much better shot at sustained developer interest and solid releases.

Many projects grapple with this, and as GNOME pushes towards its 3.0 milestone, the GNOME Release Team talks about the voyage to this point -- and how best to travel forward from where it currently stands.

Yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced that Sugar Labs is coming onboard as part of GNOME's Advisory Board. Sugar Labs will be represented on the board by executive director Walter Bender.

The GNOME and KDE projects recently decided that their upcoming developer events -- GUADEC and Akademy, respectively -- will be held simultaneously in the same location. Both projects hope this will foster communication and collaboration between their developer pools, and ultimately strengthen open source desktops.

The joint event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009, will be held July 3-11, 2009, in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), and will be hosted by Cabildo, Gran Canaria's local government.