GNOME 2.20 Released 443
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."
Re:tomboy (Score:5, Insightful)
Lameness (Score:1, Insightful)
Personally, trying to shove a square peg into a round role isn't something I am keen to do.
Read about the abomination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GObject [wikipedia.org]
Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger (Score:1, Insightful)
And the Qt/KDE guys are working on Mono bindings as well: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-18.html [tirania.org] So there goes that notion.
Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger (Score:2, Insightful)
http://download.gnome.org/sources/tomboy/0.8/tomboy-0.8.0.tar.gz [gnome.org]
I hope I'm not being a Troll (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Dons the asbestos suit.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Now if only Gnome had a browser that's not Mozilla-based [sourceforge.net] (Epiphany counts as Mozilla based) and actually follows the desktop settings and looks and feels native...
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:Minor Changes (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry you forgot that part; no hard feelings.
Re:Lameness (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, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!
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...
Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't trust our car; check the engine and see for yourself!
Re:Dons the asbestos suit.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh, great (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I have to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
But "fortunately" screensavers remain unconfigurable [wordpress.com]. After all, Billy Jon McCann (the sole developer and rule of the Guuh-Nome screensaver universe) says that screensavers that you can adjust settings on are "inherently broken [gnome.org]".
GNOME screensavers. Crippled for your protection since 2005.
"Please, just tell people to use KDE"
-Linus Torvalds [gnome.org], December 2005.
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
Re:Lameness (Score:2, Insightful)
Dunno what distro you're using, but you should complain, their KDE packages must suck. You do realize that your experience is atypical, don't you?
unresponsiveness
In what way?
the crappy menu transparency
So you dug into the options, enabled a feature that is not enabled by default, and that Gnome doesn't have at all, and then you complain that it's not as good as it should be? Nice.
crappy window transparency, which isn't even consistent in itself
Window transparency works fine here. How can a transparent window be "crappy"? Transparency is transparency. Also another feature that is off by default and Gnome lacks. Why do you go around enabling features that you don't like?
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.
Re:gnome online desktop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:tomboy (Score:3, Insightful)
I was with you until the bold part (my emphasis). Yes, modern desktops (and all complex modern software) should probably be written in modern high-level languages. But why not Python? Python is exactly a good example of a modern language, I would think...
Re:Always been buggy (Score:2, Insightful)
If the window is an ordinary one, that's OK. But if it's a splash screen (or a window that closes itself after some time), if the window closes while is is being dragged, the whole GNOME desktop segfaults.
Re:I have to ask... (Score:1, Insightful)
The parent may miss your point, but this doesn't invalidate his own. Which is that for him Gnome and Xfce fail in this attempt (I'm leaving out OSX because parent didn't comment on it). And they do for many other users as well - if this were not so, KDE would be dead.
Re:Feisty (Score:3, Insightful)
You missed the apt-dist-upgrade comment which would upgrade you from feisty to gutsy then ;)
No it won't do that, unless you edit your sources.list.
Re:Gnome go home (Score:3, Insightful)
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is now an Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product, conforming to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for the C API, Shell Utilities, and Threads. Come October Mac OS X is UNIX®, and it will have a larger market share then Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX combined.
http://www.apple.com/science/ [apple.com]
http://www.macenterprise.org/ [macenterprise.org]
http://www.apple.com/itpro/ [apple.com]
Re:I have to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, he seemed to also be applying this to all users, i.e. that because GNOME doesn't work for him, that it won't for all users - which is what I was taking him to task about.
-mike
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.
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.
File dialog (Score:2, Insightful)
Codec (Score:3, Insightful)
Its only understood by nerd (like us). They should just say: download the files necessary to play this movie?
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.
Re:I have to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct. Some of them just try harder than others.
While some kinds of preferences make total sense, some do not and too many are generally a bad thing. To paraphrase a wise hacker [ometer.com], those extra preferences are just way for lazy developers to avoid making hard decisions.