As mentioned on the Gnome-announce mailing list, Gnome 2.2 Release Candidate 1 has been released. Like the Linux kernel, odd version numbers are used for betas and development builds, so this release is officially 2.1.90.
If you’re a big fan of GNOME, but haven’t had the courage to install one of the 2.1.x unstable releases, now is the time to give it a try! This release candidate is very stable for daily use, with no horrible, time-wasting bugs to distract you (though it does have its fair share of niggles). We're very keen to see more testers play with the new code before we give it the big “Two Point Two Final” rubber stamp.
Bottom line: If you have children, RC1 won’t hurt them; and if you don’t, it won’t make you pregnant. Have fun! […]
Looking over the description and screenshots, it seems promising so far. In particular, Gnome 2.0 brought anti-aliased text to Gnome, and that support should be maturing now:
One of the great new features in GNOME 2.2 is desktop-wide support for fontconfig and Xft2, giving us enhanced font configuration and rendering on screen (and, in the future, on paper). […]
As I’m just someone that would be using a distribution for Linux, I’m curious as to which of the major distributions will be including Gnome 2.2 first.