Review of GNOME 2.26 and GTK+ 2.16 140
devg writes "The GNOME development community recently announced the official release GNOME 2.26, the latest version of the open source desktop environment for Linux. It adds the Brasero disc burning software, UPnP support in the Totem media player, and basic support for video chat in the Empathy instant messaging client. GNOME 2.26 will be shipped in upcoming Linux distributions, including Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04. Some early reviews show that it is an incremental improvement with some good additions. GNOME 2.26 is accompanied by the release of GTK+ 2.16, a new version of the widget toolkit that is used to build the desktop environment. Ars Technica has published a detailed programming tutorial with code examples that demonstrate how developers can use the new features of GTK+ 2.16 in their own applications. Users can test GNOME 2.26 by downloading one of the official Foresight-based VM or ISO images via BitTorrent."
New Audio - Major Win (Score:5, Informative)
Per application volume control is a MAJOR feature. Listening to music, while not having web pages blast out your ear drums is a major win. This is my favorite feature of Vista, and I am happy to see it integrated into Gnome.
Re:New Audio - Major Win (Score:3, Informative)
Windows has this. It's a cool feature. But this one is not provided by Gnome as far as I know, but by PulseAudio, correct me if I am wrong.
Re:New Audio - Major Win (Score:3, Informative)
It's a cool feature. But this one is not provided by Gnome as far as I know, but by PulseAudio, correct me if I am wrong.
It's a PulseAudio feature, but this latest version of GNOME integrates support for it. So, you can set the volumes using the standard GNOME volume control applet.
Re:Exchange support? (Score:4, Informative)
Not well at all.
The official 2.26.0 "release" of evolution-mapi had a small bug whereby it would crash immediately upon trying to connect to anything.
2.26.0.1 fixes one of the various issues contributing to that, but there are other changes needed in other libraries and Ubuntu has yet to pick those changes up.
It's quite amusing to see this trumpeted everywhere though given that anyone who actually tries to use it is in for a world of hurt.
Re:different wallpaper on different desktops (Score:1, Informative)
Re:New Audio - Major Win (Score:4, Informative)
Pulse only eats up a 'shitload' of CPU if you have it set up to resample (hint... use your card's native rate and don't resample)... especially if you use a CPU intensive resample algorithm.
Re:awesome bar (Score:5, Informative)
You likely wouldn't notice it unless you use it as your fulltime browser. It searches the history and displays results, but in a more indepth manner (searches page titles AND urls and doesn't just search from the front) than a "normal" address bar. It also sorts said results "smartly" based on usage. (lots of people hate it for this reason).
It really has a love-it-or-hate-it quality. I personally liked it once I got used to it (and vice versa).
Re:different wallpaper on different desktops (Score:2, Informative)
Can I put a different wallpaper on different desktops yet? That's the main feature I miss from KDE when I use Gnome (I tend to have different versions of the same code open on different desktops, so a visual queue as to which one I'm looking at really helps).
What I've done (just yesterday) is concatenate 2 pictures together using GIMP. To do this I doubled the horizontal canvas size, offset the 1st picture to the right and pasted in the picture on the left. Takes about half a minute, although I do see why it would be better to have it done properly.
As a related aside -- shouldn't GNOME support transparent backgrounds by now for wallpaper with icons, so that other programs can make use of the background as well?
I'll try not to make a habit of replying to my own posts, but I was talking about a multi-monitor setup whilst the GP was probably refering to virtual desktops.
Compiz's wallpaper plugin can put different wallpapers on different virtual desktops, but currently needs nautilus to not draw the background. However, this means that you won't have any icons on the desktop! All that need be done by GNOME developers (specifically nautilus/eel people) is add an alpha channel to the background wallpaper pixmap -- which they may one day do.
Could some elaborate on the multimon fix? (Score:3, Informative)
I had to edit config files to get my laptop to recognize and bring up the second screen after docking. Editing config files should not be required for one of the core mobility scenarios.
Does this release fix the issue? I.e. if I just connect the monitor, will it get recognized automatically?
Re:Can someone tell me why Gnome has such huge ico (Score:2, Informative)