Q: Why do we need a new versioning scheme?
A: After nearly 10 years of 3.x releases, the minor version number is getting unwieldy. It is also exceedingly clear that we’re not going to bump the major version because of technological changes in the core platform, like we did for GNOME 2 and 3, and then piling on a major UX change on top of that. Radical technological and design changes are too disruptive for maintainers, users, and developers; we have become pretty good at iterating design and technologies, to the point that the current GNOME platform, UI, and UX are fairly different from what was released with GNOME 3.0, while still following the same design tenets.
Q: Why not 4.0?
A: With GTK 4.0 being released during the next development cycle, calling the next version of GNOME “4.0” would have unfortunate/unintended implications about the platform, especially from an engagement and marketing perspective. We want to decouple GNOME from deep changes in the application development platform, so that GTK can be released more often, and provide “long term support” major versions 26, instead of delaying development cycles that inevitably end up into “rewrite the world” events. GNOME is not just a technological platform, but also a set of design guidelines and an ethos 52, and bumping the major version along with GTK does not reflect that.
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