Gnome 3.2 has been released. This time around, the developers have focused on a large number of small improvements rather than big, headline features. That said, there are a couple of interesting new additions in the areas of web integration and personal data management.

Adhering to a six month release schedule, this is the first major Gnome release since version 3.0 debuted in April this year. Rival desktop environments KDE4 (released Jan 2008) and Gnome 3 have something in common in that they were both quite heavily criticized upon release. However, the situation isn’t exactly the same because KDE 4.0 was, arguably, unusable upon release in addition to being a huge departure from the previous series. By contrast, most of the criticism of Gnome 3 has centered on the new user interface and seems to be subject to personal taste. Therefore, it’s not surprising that most of the work seems to have gone into improving refining the new shell.