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."
Exchange support? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the changelog:
Second is support for Microsoft Exchange's MAPI protocol. This is the protocol that Microsoft Outlook uses to communicate with Exchange. Previously, Evolution only supported Exchange's SOAP protocol, which is not available on all Exchange servers. This support significantly improves Evolution's integration with Exchange servers.
That sounds like a big deal. Anyone knows how well it actually works in practice?
awesome bar (Score:4, Interesting)
the gnome file manager also has an awesome bar like firefox now!
Re:New Audio - Major Win (Score:1, Interesting)
Nice feature in theory, but so far like all the other features of the Pulseaudio sound server, it's a bitch to get working right. Pulse eats up a shitload of CPU cycles, and I've not yet been able to configure it to eliminate the ridiculous latency and the ever present snap crackle pop during playback and recording. Whoever had the audacity (pun intended) to describe this software as "glitch free" with the requisite "Perfect Setup" should be subjected to a nut punch. Sound support in linux has always been problematic, but the state of Pulseaudio is just huge regression in that area.
Re:awesome bar (Score:2, Interesting)
different wallpaper on different desktops (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
sound support not always problematic in Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Things went downhill the moment the first sound server became common. The first popular one was "esd" or "esound", the Enlightenment Sound Daemon.
With that came sound libraries by the dozen, because sound was no longer simple for app programmers. This in turn was an enabler for the evils of ALSA, which is totally unusable without the ALSA library. As the years went by, everybody and their dog wrote a sound server. We got sound servers feeding into sound servers. You could even connect them to each other in a loop, something easy to do with all the confusing config problems. We lost the "Just Works" feature long ago.
And for what? I certainly don't want sounds from different apps mixed into an ear-assaulting mess. I want one thing at a time. I'm totally fine with having one thing monopolize the hardware, with my audio stream unmolested by mixers of dubious quality and high latency. If you want to be fancy, a stack-based design that plays the most recent app (going back to the previous one when the recent one finishes) would be kind of nice. That assumes I want stuff interrupted, which is a big maybe.