The level of maturity the GNOME desktop has achieved by now, seems to a have a negative effect on innovation. Even for experienced GNOME users it is becoming harder and harder to detect or name the changes that came with the recent GNOME releases. Whether this is a good thing (the learning curve for using a GNOME update is practically non-existent) or a bad thing (boooooring) is still the subject of numerous discussions on Planet GNOME and the GNOME mailing lists.

I am happy to see that GNOME innovation is not dead yet: I just discovered GNOME Do and I am impressed. Obviously I just started using it, so I cannot say whether it will stick, but this tool could severly influence the way I use my GNOME desktop in the future. What it does is actually hard to describe, basically it brings to GNOME what the new location bar brought to Firefox 3. I recommend trying the latest version, which is easy with Ubuntu, with Fedora however you are stuck with the 0.4.0.2 release as even in development the necessary dependencies are not available yet.

Update: Adrian let me know that there is a bug requesting Fedora to update GNOME Do to 0.5.0.1, though it doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolved quickly.