The Notable Improvements of GNOME 2.22

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."

Epiphany? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone even use this (instead of Firefox) in GNOME?

Sounds like a bunch of very modest improvements.

gtkhtml

[LizardKing]

I wonder if the move to WebKit for the rendering engine used by Epiphany will prompt other GNOME projects to transition from the various gtkhtml versions that are currently used. The maintenance of gtkhtml seems to be sporadic, and the API changes drastically between versions. For example, on a Fedora 8 install at work there's two versions of the gtkhtml library required by different apps in the basic GNOME desktop ...

Re:am I missing something here?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you expect Gnome to be just a "fast window manager with a low cruft index", what about its CORBA server on which the whole beast is based? Gnome, as far as I can recall, has always strived to be a full-blown desktop environment. I think it works quite nicely in this role (even though I like KDE much more, I find it much more resource-efficent on older machines, and not that spartan, from the POV of a power user - oh, and being a friend of some of its developers, I don't want to make them upset :D), but if you want to use just a window manager, you should probably start using just Metacity (although I'd prefer Fluxbox in such case).

Re:gtkhtml

[scorp1us]

By using WebKit, and with KDE/Qt switching to WebKit, and Apple already using WebKit, GNOME gets to use a very popular web core. This effectively divides the internet either as I.E., WebKit or Mozilla. By being part of the WebKit crowd, you get to ride the wave of Safari compatibility. I see the consolidation as good as eventually we should have the internet divided into I.E. or WebKit. I do expect some grumbling from Mozilla peeps, which have their own top-notch core. But the fewer cores the web devs need to support, the better.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME used to be, and still is, my preferred Linux desktop - mainly for its look and feel, to be honest. But with "who cares?"-releases like these, I really wonder how long it's going to stay that way. Seriously - those list items are supposed to be "improvements"? Who cares about epiphany's rendering engine? FWIW, Gecko renders pages just fine. And transition effects in evince? Did anyone need that? A release of a big software package such as GNOME where such a minor change with questionable utility is actually notable really can't impress me. I haven't used KDE in quite a while, but recently saw it running on a machine with a recent SuSE version. It seemed quite polished and made me eager to test 4.0 or 4.1. Seems to me the problem of choosing a linux desktop converges more and more towards "You want something full-featured? Use KDE. Want something that keeps things simple? Use blackbox / xterm / screen".

Re:am I missing something here?

[samkass]

I assume you're with the crowd that are (mis)using Slashdot's tagging feature to make editorial comments about window transitions not being a "feature". It's kind of ironic, because some of those same people will, at times, talk about Linux's viability as a desktop operating system, where utility of transitions are immense. In fact, transitions are probably one of the more valuable HCI movements lately, and give users great feedback as to what happened to their data/windows and where they went. All the way back to the Newton's "crumpling paper" when things were thrown away, Apple has been using them to great effect. When minimizing something to the dock in MacOS X, it's an extremely good way of showing the user where they can find it later.

Considering my 6-year-old PowerPC-based Mac can do them just fine, I think keeping things "lean" for lean's sake is counterproductive. All the visual aspects should be analyzed from a consistency and return-on-performance factor, and while transitions may have been too expensive to performance at some point, nowadays they're virtually free and a great tool.

Re:epiphany?

[h4rm0ny]

Epiphany is a good browser. I started using it a while ago because I found that it didn't lock up when browsing Slashdot whilst Firefox 2 did (both on Ubuntu platform). I've recently ended up using Konqueror as I have a Kubuntu install this time round and I find it similarly faster than Firefox.The odd thing is, I didn't have any extensions in Firefox at the time, either. Anyway - Epiphany is very good and I suspect quite a lot of Gnome users use it.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[sayfawa]

I have to agree. I don't like to diss open source products, but man, out of several years of using Gnome I just haven't ever had a good thing to say about Totem.

But an interesting anecdote is that my flatmate recently converted to Linux. He was a Windows "power user", not afraid of getting into any aspect of the system, and he's the same now with Linux. And he is actually completely satisfied by Totem. "But don't you find that it never plays anything properly, ever?" I asked him. "Nope, it plays everything I throw at it" he tells me. I've seen it too. Weird how experiences can vary so much.

Re:gtkhtml

[UtucXul]

But the fewer cores the web devs need to support, the better.

I really have to disagree there. Web devs should not support any rendering engine. It may makes sense to test against more than one engine, but a website should never be written for a given rendering engine. We've seen the mess that gets us. Website should be written to standards and the people who write the rendering engines should then try to write their engines to that. Some of them do. No one gets that perfect, but with one exception, they all do at least an okay job. And supposedly even IE is doing better although I really have no way of testing that myself.

Switching to WebKit?

[daemonc]

"In order to use the WebKit backend, Epiphany must be built with the --with-engine=webkit argument."

That sounds more like WebKit is available, as an option, if you are compiling from source, than "switching" to me...

Re:epiphany?

[ksheff]

That's what I originally liked about galeon. I haven't tried either versions after one of the galeon developers left and started epiphany.

Re:epiphany?

[Anonymous Coward]

I kept using galeon for a while after the switch, but slowly moved over to epiphany once it settled down. I suggest that you try it out again.

A long time ago, I discovered that using a light, responsive GTK theme makes all GTK apps more responsive, and shows off the true speed of apps like epiphany. I am using epiphany on a 266mhz box, and although it is a bit slow as expected, the interface is still fairly responsive. And disabling anti-aliasing in the GNOME font settings increases speed drastically, but usually I don't have to bother with that. GNOME can be tuned to be incredibly fast.

Epiphany + Fast GNOME Settings + Fluxbox == Happiness.

Re:am I missing something here?

[mandelbr0t]

I have a powerful enough machine that the eye-candy doesn't slow things down. Compiz+GNOME can be configured to look very sharp indeed. It's not OSX, it's definitely not Windows, but I'd have no problem convincing someone that it's a very useable desktop environment. There's alternatives for people who don't like GNOME. As one who likes the look and feel and has had very few problems, I'm most looking forward to improved PSP support in Rhythmbox and MythTV support in Totem. Moving to libswfdec seems to be a good idea. I had GNASH installed, but I switched since seeing the article, and other than a missing symlink, no problems with FLASH support. The Flash-block behavior is ideal for me, who hates "Punch-the-Monkey" popping up all over the place.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[jetxee]

I use epiphany daily and find it much better designed than FF2 or even FF3 betas.

The killer feature in Epiphany for me is its tag-based bookmarking system. They really got it right. Places in FF3 is an attempt to catch-up, but it still has a long way to go.

I also like that URL and search box are the same thing in Epiphany. When I remember URL, I enter URL, when I want to search, I enter search request. Creating a "Smart bookmark" in Epiphany is much faster and easier than packing search engine plugin in FF. Thanks to this feature, my Epiphany is much better integrated with the sites I use.

What else? Epiphany starts faster and is more resonsive, its fonts are OK by default like in all GNOME applications (no need to tweak them like in FF), it respects GNOME settings. It is not bloated. Punto.

Earlier I lacked good adblocking extension for Epiphany. Nowdays it covers my needs. I know not all FF greasemonkey scripts work in Epiphany, but the only one I use on Flickr works well.

P.S. I still use gecko engine. I tried webkit-based engine, but found it not-ready-for-daily-use-yet. Probably it's gotten better today. Fortunately, switching rendering engines in modern Epiphany is easy for the end-user.