Chief among them are compositing extensions to Metacity, GNOME’s default window manager. You can read more about these at the GNOME website on a page entertainingly (and maybe cynically) called Preparing For The Eye Candy Age. Power management has been boosted in the new release, and the Alacarte menu editor makes it into this release, after first seeing light of day within Ubuntu’s current release. Evolution gets a handful of feature updates, including the ability to split the window into three vertical panes like Outlook. There are several other application and usability updates too, including an improved icon theme more in-line with Tango.
While the new GNOME has no-doubt already been added to package repositories all over the world, it will be the star of the show in Ubuntu and Fedora Core’s next releases in October, followed soon-after by openSUSE 10.2 in December. The testing releases of each of these distros will give you a chance to try-out 2.16 before then, although you can always use the GARNOME application and build it yourself on any distro.
