For those not in the know, Gnome is one of the most popular GNU/Linux Desktop Environments (available for BSD and others as well), right next to KDE. It's been a bit without an official release for a bit, so it's good news to hear that version 2.12 of the suite is now available. One of the fancier things it is coming with by default now is the 'Clearlooks' theme engine, which looks very suave. A rundown of the new features in 2.12 can be found here, and it goes through some of the most common utilities used with screenshots of each. I'm a KDE man myself but it looks very slick, I'd say nearly as polished as OS X's 'Aqua' theme does. Gnome is heavily based on GTK/GTK+ and is always improving aesthetics by making use of the latest features of newer GTK+ releases, which is evident in preview. It doesn't provide a list of bug fixes, but they are available at Gnome's website.