I'm too exhausted to make a giant blog post about it right now, but I'm proud of what we, the GNOME community, have achieved. It's time to celebrate!

I have never been so proud to be a contributor to GNOME as I am right now. So many people are working so hard to deliver an awesome 3.0 release it would be impossible to name them all. In many cases people are taking time away from their families or personal lives to give our community the best launch experience—on schedule!—that we can possibly achieve. This is going to be the most user-focused release of GNOME, ever.

GNOME Shell (both master and the overview-relayout branch) present the list of launchable applications to us as a large, non-hierarchical, immediately searchable list. We can hit the logo key and start typing a few letters and immediately find what we're looking for. KDE has it. Windows Vista and 7 have it. OS X has it (via Spotlight). And now we have it.

On Debian this is a problem because menu and menu-xdg convert an ancient, Debian, unified menu system that predates the existence of the cross-desktop XDG menu specs in to XDG menus and stores them in /var/lib/menu-xdg duplicating everything that's already in the standard /usr/share/applications.