Is Ruby ready to embrace new Linux face and UI realities?

I may be utterly out of line expecting sympathy for my concerns about
Ruby's readiness to move on to the new and upcoming GNOME-3
environments, but I need to point out that after I embarked on
completing the Ruby/GTK2 Tutorial, I grew increasingly unhappy with the
the GUI solutions currently available in Ruby on Linux platforms. Do not
understand me wrong, there is an abundance of available GUIs one can use
in Ruby, the most prominent are FXRuby, or Tk that should supposedly run
on "any" platform, however, it would be absolutely vital for Linux to
make Ruby feel at home in its native Gtk-x and GNOME-x environments, the
issue which is at the moment far too much neglected! Also perhaps only
due to its rather incomplete documentation, the Cairo graphic interface
is rather poorly represented, and does not seem to be a working as an
integral part of Ruby GUI experience on Linux platforms.

The messy installation procedures and fixes required on Ubuntu in order
to synchronise Ruby 1.9.1 and the GNOME-2 haunt us persistently to this
day. The promises,  such as  GTK-OSX  of GTK+2 on MacOSX, or a even
RubyCocoa which became outdated in the shadows of a superior MacRuby
almost before it saw the light of the day, nevertheless, convinced me
more than a year ago, that I should have perhaps started thinking to
prepare for departure from my favourable Linux platforms towards more
"reliable" commercial ones. Apple's famed reputation for their superior
OO technologies inherited from another of his babies the NeXT, on which
Steve Jobs modelled and rebuilt all modern  Mac OS X platforms, made it
easy for me to decide what should be my path away from Ruby on Linux.

This move, however, turned out to be not only a miserable mistake, but
also futile and a complete waste of almost a year of my time. As I was
encouraged at the beginning, by authors of many Cocoa books and almost
universally, by their blissfully misleading and contradictory
statements, convincing a reader that transitioning to objective-C and
Cocoa should be a snap, on one hand, but on the other, amazed by
brainless clich辿s telling me "that programming is hard", and that Cocoa
could never be mastered due to its verbosity similar to human languages
and its enormity that "comes to a total of several tens of thousands of
pages of material" [name one language that has a dictionary of this
size;^(].

So a year ago, when I ventured into Mac's developer world, I ignorantly
dismissed and brushed these "metaphorical claims" aside, until after the
course of studying this over thirty years old and almost "idiotically"
verbose OO monstrosity, I started to realize, how backward "old state of
the art  Cocoa" became today, and that Apple would do itself an
incalculably large favour had it moved to  MacRuby, which in turn would
most likely destroy it, because nobody wold give a damn about their
geriatric objective-C and outdated, fossilized and unnecessarily verbose
Cocoa UI or API. That is perhaps why MacRuby for years can not move away
from its 0.x release numbers.

Again this is not to say, that Cocoa as an OT, and particularly from the
OO/D perspective is in any way a bad product - far from it, it is still
superior to anything I have seen so far, however, its implementation is
totally out of date.

Related to the above, I have two questions:

(1)
Does anybody know what is the status of Ruby 1.9.1, Ruby/Gtk and GNOME-2
in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and what are the plans for integration with
future releases of GNOME 3.x. I guess, we still have a year before that
happens, but that does not make me any less concerned, since there
continued to be rather unpleasant surprises for some of us, who wanted
to work with Ruby/Gtk on Ubuntu?

(2)
Will the shift to  GNOME 3.0 shell in future Linux releases effect
Ruby/Gtk and Ruby/Cairo?
-- 
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