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Gnome 3.0, the next major release of the Unix and Linux desktop, was one of the conference's main topics. There have been intense discussions whether Gnome is stagnating in recent weeks – the twice yearly updates to the current 2.x series deliver steady, but rarely spectacular, new features and improvements.

Gnome co-founder Frederico Mena-Quintero concentrated on the traditional document-centred desktop. Whilst users have no problems with emails, chat or music, they often have trouble finding their documents. Rather than a folder view, he espouses a journal, which shows documents sorted chronologically. According to Mena-Quintero, the idea is nothing new, but with a sensible GUI and in tandem with functions such as tags, it could offer significant improvements for users.

This long-standing odd/even development model was officially scrapped in 2004 thanks to the success that Linus and Andrew Morton were having working together, and significant "unstable" development began happening between each 2.6.Z release.

Preemption The server kernel has kernel preemption turned off (CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y), while the desktop kernel has it enabled (CONFIG_PREEMPT_BKL=y, CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY=y). Preemption works along with scheduling to fine-tune performance, efficiency and responsiveness. In non-preemptive kernels, kernel code runs until completion; the scheduler can't touch it until it's finished. But the Linux kernel allows tasks to be interrupted at nearly any point (but not when it is unsafe, which is a whole huge fascinating topic all by itself), so that tasks of lesser-priority can jump to the head of the line. This is appropriate for desktop systems because users typically have several things going at once: writing documents, playing music, Web surfing, downloading and so on. Users don't care how responsive background applications are; they care only about the ones they're actively using. So if loading a Web page takes a little longer while the user is writing an e-mail, it's an acceptable trade-off. Overall efficiency and performance are actually reduced but not in a way that annoys the user. On servers you want to minimize any and all performance hits, so turning off preemption is usually the best practice.