The Notable Improvements of GNOME 2.22 265
Michael Larabel writes "Phoronix has up a list compiling eight of the most interesting improvements on track for GNOME 2.22. These improvements include the Epiphany browser switching to the WebKit back-end, transition effects inside the Evince document viewer, a new GNOME application for taking photos and recording videos from web cameras followed by applying special effects, a mouse tweaking module for improved accessibility, and a new GNOME VNC client. On the multimedia end, GNOME 2.22 has a few new features appended to the Totem movie player and the Rhythmbox player. Totem can now search and play YouTube videos and connect to a MythTV server and watch past recordings or view live TV. Rhythmbox now can utilize FM radio tuners, integration with new lyric sites, improved Podcast feed support, and even has support for communicating with newer Sony PSPs. There will also be a standalone Flash player and flash previewing support from the file browser in this release."
I just want to say one thing... (Score:1, Insightful)
(Disclaimer: I am an avid KDE user - living on beta)
am I missing something here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is all this new stuff going to slow it down, that's the thing that interests me. If the team have too many things to maintain, just how good a job can they do?
Re:am I missing something here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:am I missing something here? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very good point. Linux is so flexible because each project has a different agenda and a different set of design criteria it is trying to satisfy.
I think that Gnome should not try to be a direct competitor to KDE. KDE is huge, has tonnes of software included with it and tries to be everything to everyone.
We need a desktop environment that does that.
However, this doesn't mean that Gnome should try to be this too. If it tries to, it will lose. KDE's software base is absolutely huge, and it's all controlled from a series of close-nit projects. Gnome would struggle to match that style of development.
Gnome's advantage is that is simpler and less complex. It is my view, Gnome should be a like a good text-book; it is complete not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.
Free software is about choice. You don't have a real choice when both options put before you are the same. The differences between open-source projects are not weakness but strengths. Being different allows you to choose your software according to your needs; it allows you to adapt.
Simon.
Transition effects = good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:epiphany? (Score:2, Insightful)
Removed .NET yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Yes, I know you can manually remove bits of the Gnome environment to get rid of Mono; but the Gnome environment by default includes Mono.)
Re:gtkhtml (Score:3, Insightful)
There is also the idea that html is supposed to degrade fairly gracefully, so unlike say a C compiler, even if a browser doesn't fully support the standard, things may (and very often are) still okay. That is where testing comes in. XML based things mess up this graceful degrading a bit, but that is a whole other discussion.
Re:Epiphany? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
But the thing is, I don't think either Epiphany/Gecko 1.9 or Epiphany/Webkit will be That much of a difference to existing Epiphany. It will render more sites better, and with less resource use. I don't feel very excited. I mentioned a bunch of advantages of Firefox 3 in the GP post.
The thing is, Firefox 2 is quite crap, Epiphany 2.20 is mostly great, and Firefox 3 is quite good. Fancy extensions can't turn crap into something great. Fancy extensions can turn something good into something great, though. The only reason I started using Firefox again was because I wrote webpages and needed to access Firebug, and eventually, I just didn't feel like restarting the browser anymore. I could probably code that search engine extension myself - I've played a bit with creating Firefox extensions, and it's quite easy to rewrite the entire UI. On the other hand, I still haven't found a way to make Epiphany's tabs shrink, which annoys the hell out of me.
Firefox 3 is, in my opinion, simply Good Enough to make Epiphany pointless. But I'm probably, and hopefully, wrong.
Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem.. (Score:3, Insightful)
This aggravates me to no end. Quicktime on my Mac gets it right. Windows Media Player even gets it right (though I instead use Media Player Classic on Windows, but it does it right too). I'm not even asking for this to be default behaviour - but for all the touted "customizability" of Linux apps, I sure as hell would like a little checkmark to enable this behavior somewhere in the program.
I've STILL not found a media player on Linux that I really like. Media Player Classic is the pinnacle of video player for me, but really all I want is a window, plays video, seek bar that goes to the location that I tell it, and I want my controls part of the same window as the video (I'll go full screen if I want to hide them). Get me that packaged into a program that doesn't crash when I play videos (a la VLC playing any WMV video on Mac
Rant off
Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:filechooser ? (Score:2, Insightful)
The gnome one is awful, but so are the rest. I mean for fucks sake, in windows you double-click too slow and suddenly you're renaming files! Who wants to rename a file when opening it?
Re:am I missing something here? (Score:2, Insightful)
That sounds like a packaging bug to me, honestly. Even if your KDE- or QT-based torrent client did mark dependencies on all of KDE, certainly having your package manager download all of the dependencies correctly is a huge advantage over almost all software installation I've seen on other platforms.
Re:Different designs (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe because he's used them. As somebody who was written (and maintained) large programs in both PyGTK and PyQt, I must say that these projects are a great argument in favor of using plain C.
The PyGTK project, for the past several years, has released an update to its bindings within a month of the corresponding GTK+ library. PyQt's last version lagged by about a year. (Not a good sign.) Long after the Qt people had gone to Qt 4.0, we were stuck with PyQt for Qt 3.3, because that's the latest stable release. (It was even hard to get PyQt fixes, because the few PyQt developers spent almost all of their time trying to get PyQt 4 out the door.)
PyGTK has always done just what I expected it to. In PyQt, we always seemed to have trouble with object lifetimes. Qt tried to be just a bit too clever with C++ destructors and object lifetimes and such, and it just didn't translate into HLLs. Between this, and needing to pass C++ method signatures (as a string!) to signal handlers, you really had to write C++-in-Python. It's not really possible to write PyQt code without constantly thinking about the C++ layer. In GTK, I never thought about C: I just wrote Python with a Python GUI library.
I also find the phrase "quirky C required for Gtk+" funny. The C used by GTK+ has always seemed perfectly normal to me. If you want quirky, take a look at the "meta-object compiler" (yet another preprocessor!) that Qt's C++ uses.
Re:am I missing something here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, the world does want eye candy (see OSX or the IPhone). Gnome is competing with OSX, Vista, KDE 4, and others. In comparison, Gnome is behind in the eye candy department.
I know I've converted more people to Linux by showing them Compiz/Beryl/Compiz Fusion than anything else, by far. When I show them Avant Window Navigator and Compiz in the same desktop, they are snatching the live CD from my fingers. Like it or not shell huggers, eye candy sells.
When you say "do we need more eye candy", I guess you are referring to the "we" that is 0.8% of the browsing public using Linux. In that case, I guess "we" don't need eye candy. But "I" would like to see more people interested in open source and free(dom) software, and eye candy in Linux is one of the best ways to make that happen.
Re:am I missing something here? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have never ever seen a single "windows transition" or any other animation which does not look boring when you it the second time and annoying when you see it third time. BTW Compiz is the worst, the wobbly windows makes me want to puke.