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GNOME 2.20 Released
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Sep 19, 2007 06:18 PM
from the new-version dept.
from the new-version dept.
Gimli writes "GNOME 2.20 has been officially released. There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them. The timing is impeccable, too: 'This release coincides with the tenth anniversary of GNOME's existence. The project has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation and has become a global phenomenon. Used as the default environment in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME is widely used by Linux desktop users and is supported by a growing community of companies and independent developers. GNOME 2.20 will be included in the next major releases of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10, which is scheduled for release next month. Users who wish to try it now can use the latest Ubuntu 7.10 live CD images, or the latest build of Foresight Linux. You can also check out the release notes."
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I have to ask... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Funny)
From the release notes page for 2.20. On can only assume this means they've gutted the whole thing and you now have the option to choose between 2 lovely colorschemes, everything else has been set at the factory.
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
And then again, there are many cases in which it's perfectly acceptable to leave them out altogether.
Simplicity is a beautiful thing. One of the core fundamentals of Unix is that an application does a single job, does it well, and provides output such that it can easily be piped into another application. Gnome and KDE have routinely shat upon this paradigm, and it's only been recently that we're finally starting to return to it.
I've used Xfce quite a bit as well, and despite the lack of advanced configuration options, I must say that everything more or less works the way I expect it to, and it's all rather intuitive. The fact that it's ridiculously snappy is a very nice bonus (remember how "snappy" Windows 95 or Mac OS Classic were? Xfce is sort of like that, but with a real operating system underneath, and a full complement of modern features). The configuration options were sparse, and in one or two cases there were things I'd change, but as far as the whole package goes, I'm a big big fan.
If I want to do something tricky, I'll go to the command line. GUIs simply aren't elegant for every function imaginable, and it's sort of assumed that you know at least a few basic unix commands if you're going to be using something as obscure as Xfce. Besides... how many normal users have to pipe their routing table into grep on a daily basis?
KDE's a prime example of feature bloat. From a technical standpoint, it's probably the better of the top two desktops, but from a usability standpoint, I find it horribly unintuitive. Lots of toolbars full of tiny similar-looking blue icons don't help either. If Microsoft did Unix, it'd look something like KDE.
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that you're looking back with Pentium-III colored glasses. On a shiny new Pentium I machine of the day, Win95 performance was acceptable but not great. On a typical installed-base 16MB 486/33 machine, Windows 95 was a pig.
The situation was probably comparable to KDE and Vista's performance today on common machines. Unfortunately for these new desktop environments, however, the widening lag of memory and disk bandwidth behind CPU speed means that they probably won't feel "snappy" in the foreseeable future just from hardware improvements.
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with xfce or gnome is not the choice they made per se, but the fact that you can't actually get out of them. If you happen to be a person that don't fit what they see as a regular user and what is good for you, you just can't have a good experience with their desktop.
So yes, the KDE control center is crammed with features, but I only know and use those that I need and I have turned the desktop into a wonderfull, simple and sane experience for me. A thing that I can't do with GNOME, XFCE or any Windows.
And before you actually dismisses me as a KDE fanboy: I was a GNOME user prior to their stance on "forced down your throat" usability. I had also all "regular users" I knows of try the GNOME desktop so that I don't force my choice on them and they all prefer KDE. So this is not a representative panel, it's just a familym but they are supposedly the target of this usability choice, but either because its defaults are windows like (wife used windows at work before they switched to Linux), either because they can turn it into a strange unbearable carnival of colors (youngsters), either because they can drag and drop all their heart between applications (grand parents) or because I can heavily customise it to suit my day to day work, everybody chose to use KDE.
I'm sorry, but when I use the console it doesnt force me to use that command to another because it's "THE right way to do it", I can choose whichever I see fit for the job and pipe them into an unthought of combination.
That's the part I like about the unix philosophy.
To me the GNOME usability choice were not made to suit the users, but to suit the helpdesks. Users are versatile, I dislike and I'm even worried by this computer behavior which asks the user to fits the system and not the other way around.
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default. They do this not by removing random features just to spite people, but by conducting usability studies to find out what actually works and doesn't work for people then doing the former by default and fixing the latter.
The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place. Now, this could be because you prefer to have double-clicking on a window's title bar start a ytalk session using a regex over the window's text, or because you prefer to rebind the enter key to double-backspace-n, which is fine - go for your life. But if that's the case you're an outlier (no offence - rejoice in your point of difference!) and you probably shouldn't be making broad judgements about the usability of desktop environments for anyone other than yourself.
-mike
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I also have the flexibility to customise it to be productive for me.
KDE is also more functional than Gnome. Genuinely useful panel applets, preview, tabbing and split window functionality in Konqueror, etc. are actually very useful.
I like the elegance of Gnome, so I have tried it several times. I find it less functional, and a lot of functionality works less well (compare opening a directory over sftp in Konqueror and Nautilus, for example).
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
By that rationelle, in my case neither KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows, OSX, BeOS, OS/2, Fluxbox or indeed any other windowing system I have ever seen has "got it right" out of the box. Every "power user" has their own little bunch of tweaks that help them work better - for instance, I find windows unusable without X-mouse from TweakUI. This doesn't mean that windows is shit - I'm perfectly happy to accept I'm not a default user.
The OP's point was that, with DE's like KDE, actually give you the OPTION to change the default behaviour in a reasonably simple manner. Yes, there's alot of buttons to press, and 99% of users will never need to bother setting up a special rule that opens all Konsole windows on virtual desktop 4, xinerama screen 2 - but for the users who DO desire that functionality it's an absolute godsend. Last time I set up a GNOME desktop for myself I couldn't find a way of doing this, but when you know what you want KDE makes it pretty simple.
What *would* be good is if both KDE and GNOME adopted "beginner/advanced" toggle buttons in their configuration dialogues. To a novice user, KDE has too many options, to a power user GNOME has too few.
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Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the Gnome "market department" wants to go mainstream (excellent long term target). And thus they need to "make things simple".There is a clash between their current clients and the target they've got in mind. They can't satisfy both with an unique interface IMHO. Read Geeks posting on slashdot. A lot have stated that they have migrated from Gnome to KDE. It became even "trendy" since the Linus comment.
I guess they should deal with two profiles: simple and advanced. You hide/simplify features in the UI for simple users and keep them for the advanced profiles.
Parent
Here we go again... (Score:4, Insightful)
And that is why Gnome, XFCE and especially Apple (hatesit!hatesit!hatesit!) completely fail to make a decent GUI. There is no default user. It might come as a surprise, but people are not the same. What's fine and intuitive for me is a hell for someone else. Really. Users should be able adjust the GUI to their wishes, not the other way around. Defaults are for people who don't care enough to change it. Which is a reasonable choice by the way, and should be supported by the system. KDE is the only GUI i ever used that gave me the possibilities to adjust it's behaviour exactly to fit my intuition. The holy grail of THE perfect GUI that fits THE intuition of THE user is a fiction. It seems only KDE understands this.
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Power Management? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Power Management? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Power Management? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Power Management? (Score:5, Informative)
Supply some form of UI for the user. I understand that GNOME would have to give some details, to either the kernel, or some module about user activity,
and that's exactly what it does. It lets the user control the power management features better. There is a nice power history graph too...
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Re:Power Management? (Score:5, Informative)
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In related news (Score:4, Funny)
While Miguel de Icaza wasn't very specific about the improvements in the new version, Novell stockholders are anticipating record profits.
Oh, great (Score:5, Funny)
tomboy (Score:4, Interesting)
Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand. It's the only part of Gnome proper which uses mono -- so why do they bother shipping it?
Of course, asking whether major annoyances like new windows opening on whatever workspace you're currently on instead of the one they were started have been fixed is kind of pointless...
Re:tomboy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mono isn't part of GNOME (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can even run a completely mixed environment. For example you could theoretically run GDM (the Gnome session/logon manager) with Nautilus (Gnome) to handle the Desktop, use the Fluxbox window manager (not Gnome or KDE), have Kicker running (KDE Panel/Menu bar) and use Konqueror (KDE) for the file manager. Or just about any other weird combo you could think of.
Gnome may have more users than
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's bullshit. Every gnome applet or application on my machine has an RSS between 5 Mbytes and 15 Mbytes, and there are dozens of them. Tomboy has an RSS size of 26 Mbytes, which is more, but not a lot more.
But unlike all those other applets and tools, you would only need a single Mono VM to run all applets and most applications safely together. If it were fully
Feisty (Score:3, Informative)
just do an apt-get update and then an apt-get dist-upgrade
Re:Feisty (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Unix Gnome (Score:4, Interesting)
GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is a petition [marutan.net] to open source CDE that looks like it may be successful. I, for one, sincerely hope so; I know that CDE is well outdated, but I got used to using it on our school's Sun boxes during my grad studie
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unix Gnome (Score:5, Informative)
SGI is still around, but they no longer sell systems that run Unix. Their flavor of Unix was IRIX, which only ever ran on MIPS, and that CPU is no longer cost-competitive for big iron. So SGI sells Itanium and x64 systems running Linux. FWIW, their default desktop is GNOME.
Dell is also a Unix vendor of sorts, since they sell a fair number of servers running Solaris. Guess what the default desktop for Solaris is?
It's silly to call Apple a "Unix vendor". Yes, MacOS is built on top of Unix. But they're not part of the Unix marketplace. Almost nobody buys them to run Unix software, by which I mean software that's coded against traditional Unix APIs. Almost all Mac software is coded against Apple's proprietary APIs, and isn't available on "other" Unixes. The fact that Apple found it convenient to code those APIs on top of Unix APIs is an implementation detail that matters not at all to 99% of Apple's customers.
BSD has no vendors. Just a few enthusiasts.
That leaves SCO. Do we really want to talk about SCO?
Parent
Congrats! (Score:4, Interesting)
performance? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:performance? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them.
Sure, and meanwhile, Program Manager (Windows 9x) and Presentation Manager (OS/2) did more with less memory (Two Meg), back in 1995.
Whats really sad is that Presentation Manager was OOP/Class aware which is what both KDE and Gnome are still striving for.
Congrats to the Gnome team. Hardware companies everywhere salute you.
If I bitch about system requirements for Windows, then I can bitch about system requirements for Gnome/KDE.
I won't be downloading Gnome. XFce4 is everything Gnome was suppose to be. How many Gnome programmers use XUbuntu for development?
And where in the hell is the new Enlightenment Ebuntu distribution?
Enjoy,
Arr! (Score:5, Funny)
It be an enhanced GNOME. Didn't ye get the email?
Enahnce your GNOME, stay up longer, get better performance from your GNOME, have great timing and more control over your power! contact XXXXX@yahoo.co.uk.
scupper me, all we were t'were pirates!
Parent
Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ (Score:5, Funny)
Why the long face? Or am I missing something?
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Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're worried about patents then you should fix your country's patent system, as it is likely that any software more trivial than "hello world" infringes on dozens of patents.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't trust our car; check the engine and see for yourself!
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Sorry you forgot that part; no hard feelings.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a hardcore Gnome user (it's prettier, more "solid", and I like how simple they make configuration, even though I've been a programmer, sysadmin, have used Linux exclusively for about 5 years and am by all accounts a "power-user") but man it bugs me that they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore. If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Or
Re:Lameness (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, so you're not a programmer.
"...they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore."
It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).
"If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!"
Glade isn't necessary anymore; GtkBuilder replaces Glade from a programmer's POV, Glade the UI designer tool just outputs an XML file that you can read in your App and generate a perfectly functional UI, which to me is just plain elegance. No more having to programatically design and update UIs. Pango is not a code generator either, it's a Font Layout system that supports complex font layouts. Orbit is a deprecated piece of hold-over bullshit the GNOME people haven't gotten around to officially deprecate yet, and shouldn't be used with new code (use D-Bus instead).
"I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia. Of course, most of the C++ that comes out of the OSS community makes me want to take up trepanning, so maybe that's not such a bad thing..."
Which is exactly why the OSS community is C++-phobic. Not only is most community-generated C++ terrible, it's very hard to make build across all of the dozens of "standard library" implementations. GLib was invented and written in C to give the OSS community a truly standard library that they could control across platforms, and because GLib is written in C, most follow suit and write their applications in C. Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.
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Re:Lameness (Score:5, Interesting)
See, that's why I put the parenthetical in there, I am a programmer, but I'd prefer 2 features that both work right to 1,000 that half work. To me, the latter is morally equivalent to lying. Although Gnome absolutely has its share of problems, it's well ahead of KDE as far as actually working. I keep an updated KDE installed on my desktop and check it out at least every 6 months--mostly because Gnome isn't good enough either, but it's the best I can find. The thing is, I jump into KDE, and within a half hour I've found four things that don't work, cause crashes, silently fail, or just suck (by just suck I mean unresponsiveness, the crappy menu transparency and shadows that are off by a couple pixels that's completely different from the crappy window transparency, which isn't even consistent in itself!).
As for the list of junk I rattled off for Gnome, yeah, you got me, that's just what I remember from when I was going to help out with the project a few years ago. After realizing that I'd have to learn 40 different, sometimes incompatible, often redundant frameworks, I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere. And yeah, I do have something that will be coming out Real Soon Now (had to take a break from programming due to tendinitis in the wrist that's still bothering me to this day) but the point is, Gnome looks like it does not because all that crap actually helps out, but because 50 different people had a Great Idea.
No, wait, there is no point. Oh! Here's one: A project as big as a desktop environment that needs to be extremely consistent throughout, needs a Linus. It needs one guy to be the benevolent dictator, because right now it looks like anyone can get any old thing in there. Tomboy a C# app? wtf? It's not complicated, it's an applet, a couple borderless windows, and a simple WebDAV client, all of which I'd bet lots of money Gnome already has libraries for. It could be just as easily implemented in C, and a halfway experienced Gnome developer could implement it, with all of its current features, in probably a week or less. I'm halfway tempted to take a week of vacation and do it myself just to prove a point.
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Re:Lameness (Score:5, Insightful)
Like how? Look at how much code reuse goes on in KDE vs Gnome. Every KDE app has the same spellchecking engine, every KDE app has the same text editor component, the same menu structure, the same shortcut configuration, the same widgets, dcop, etc, etc. Kontact, the KDE equivalent to Evolution, is just a small shell around all the individual components. KDE4 extends this even further, by making more powerful components available to developers. In a Gnome changelog, on the other hand, you see changes like "gedit gets editable toolbars" or "somegnomeapp gets gnomevfs support". You will never find something like that in a KDE changelog, because all the apps get all those features for free with the framework. I find it absolutely mindboggling that Gedit would have to manually add support for editable toolbars on gnomevfs, and then even find it worth mentioning in the release notes. It really shows that the libraries are not nearly as simple to use, or there is some kind of impediment to using them.
This kind of thing is evident when you look at resource usage between the desktops too. Why is it that KDE and Gnome use similar ammounts of memory when Gnome has so many less features (I'm not saying more features are better, but you can't deny that KDE has more features than Gnome). I'd be happy with a simple desktop like Gnome (it is much prettier after all) if it also was lighter on resources, but it isn't.
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Re:power management? (Score:5, Informative)
Gnome mixer asks: "Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes?"
It would distrub me; as it would disturb your laptop.
Like somebody sleeping next to you repetitively asking: "Are you already asleep?".
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=302979&cid=20675217 [slashdot.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I may be biased since I've been using KDE for years and have never known it to crash, but I have to ask - what proportion of Ubuntu users would you trust to correctly differentiate between a KDE crash, an X Server crash or a kernel panic/Oops? Also, if you're putt