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although I doubt that Google can index something that got released today

Yeah, it's beta 1. About a month old.

The "mold" is theme. It isn't the default one, either.

Bunch of better screenshots here http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/ and here http://www.gnome.org/start/2.10/notes/rnwhatsnew.h tml

This post is just pure FUD.

Almost all KDE-related programs only require QT and kdelibs (maybe arts) installed. kde-base is not required. Compare that to gtk+, pango, atk, glib, libgnomeui, libgnomecanvas, at-spi... The full list is here. (Note that I did not mention external stuff like font-config, freetype, audio libs, etc. because both platforms have those)

KDE makes it easier for the developer because it bundles all those small libs into one package.

And compile time can hardly be blamed on the KDE guys. This is a gcc thing, c++ takes longer to compile than pure c code.

"That hot chick"?
Is that antisocial-geek-speak for "that female kike looking like a horse"?

Some sad people here are apparently desperate enough to become excited by anything without a Y-chromosome...

Hm OK, but...

More apps that have never been bundled with gnome as official apps: abiword, gnumeric, gnome-db, balsa, xmms, gaim, gimp, inkscape, gthumb, openoffice, gqview..

Some of these apps are listed under http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/. IMO that makes them "official". In the past the GNOME-Office hompepage listed a lot more apps as parts of GNOME-Office (The GIMP was one of them). Now they cut the number down to three apps.

This has been mentioned here before. There's also a memory bounties page on the Gnome site.

I can't help but feel that they're just trying to get someone else to do the non-fun stuff for them. It is more fun to work on new functionality, but it doesn't seem right to do that when there are obviously widely known problems that need to be fixed.

I think I speak for everyone when I say, who's that girl?

Many people hate the new splash screen. No offense to him, but it's my opinion that the selector of the splash has particularly bad taste. There were several better ones.

The Mailbox Monitor has been removed because it was unmaintained and insecure. We hope to have a solution integrated with our Evolution mail client in the future. If you don't use Evolution for your mail, you can use a third party application such as mailnotify.

The Mailbox Monitor has been removed because it was unmaintained and insecure. We hope to have a solution integrated with our Evolution mail client in the future. If you don't use Evolution for your mail, you can use a third party application such as mailnotify.

Of all the hard working people that have mad Gnome 2.10 then why on earth is there a picture of John Flack on the release note page????

Does GnomeMeeting really come with a blonde?!?!
What's new

I'm not normally one for internet acronyms conveying laughter but LOL. They've been using the same shot of that poor girl in every example of gnomemeeting for at least a year now! She must be tired/realdoll.

Yeah hot s3x0r chat with hot sluts!!
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.10/notes/figures/figu re-gnome-meeting.png

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

Now with no new exciting features!

...are here.

7zip? Unmature? It is perfectly usable. I finally deleted my licensed copy of Winzip because 7zip does its work better. 'nuff said.

Soon. But not from Google. Check out Beagle . Beagle is available for testing now.

Hasn't Seth Nickel (interaction designer as Redhat) studied psychology? I seem to remember a lot of his best UI ideas come from applying psychological (or occassionaly sociological) analyses?

Actually, no.

From how I understand it, WinFS will actually be a layer of abstraction above whatever underlying filesystem (FAT32/NTFS) the system is running on. It won't be a new filesystem at all. It holds metadata about each file and makes it easier and faster to find things. Much like the aforementioned Beagle project.

And ext3's journalling is quite different from what WinFS attempts to accomplish. Journalling basically makes it so, like you say, files aren't lost and you don't have to do a time-consuming fsck whenever the partition is not unmounted cleanly like with ext2.

How will that index be maintained and what kind of nightmare will it be to keep it up to date?
Well I doubt it will be using slocate to hammer the HDD, they may do something like inotify used by Beagle But I expect they will use a realtime hashtable and build a ballanced-btree index for the rest when there's a hash match, with some usage statistics to weight the results and caching, or variations there off. It should be a lot quicker than Beagle, be more responsive than locate, not hammer you hdd once a cron job and far faster than a manual search.

That's so true, especially that Firefox isn't even the best browser choice on anything but Windows. There's a plethora of Gecko-based browsers available for Linux: such as Galeon or Epiphany for Gnome, or actually Konqueror for KDE, which I hear can use Gecko as a rendering engine. All these use native toolkits for displaying their user interfaces, thusly they're much faster and more look-and-feel-comformant than Firefox can ever hope to be.

(As a personal opinion: honestly, I can't see why one would want to use Firefox under Linux at all.)

Obviously, your benchmarks aren't anything like the tests in this thread, where rxvt-unicode is MANY times faster than gnome terminal.

The contest rules don't prohibit Novell from getting your code from another publication other than your submission. Of course you can't prohibit them from copying a GPL'd copy on the Net, but you can prohibit them from accepting the copy you submit directly, by requiring they accept it only provided they do not use a copy available elsewhere. OTOH, if you fork the project to include your code upon rejection, why should Novell be different from anyone else in their freedom to use your code, just because they got you to write it?

And your scam is not really free. CompanyA paid to run the fake contest, and even to create the fake winning code. Then they had to wait for DeveloperA to fork the project. Then they had to reevaluate ProjectB, to take the code, and take it.

These bounties are for tiny tasks, which cost less in time and money than the overhead of the scam you describe. DeveloperA is going to fork the project only for code larger than they would risk developing on a no-guarantee bounty. In my original post, I was talking about many losing developers, with a large combined contribution and experience, possibly forking the project.

> Remove all deprecated libraries from the codebase of the Gnome core.

I believe that deprecated libraries tend to be replaced by stubs that backport the new functionality to the old API. Eg, the gnome_sound_play function currently sends a sound file to Esound; when (if) GStreamer becomes part of the platform, the function in libgnome will be replaced with code to do the same thing in GStreamer.

The old APIs can not be removed until the developers decide to make a new release backwards-incompatible--this will be Gnome 3.0 (http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero).

> Remove or replace subsystems which never really were useful

Most people I see using Gnome use GnomeVFS all the time. Being able to access files shared on the network without having to be root to mount them is really nice. Even nicer is the sftp virtual filesystem, used for accessing files over SSH's SFTP. If GnomeVFS is to be replaced by something else, it will be by freedesktop.org's D-VFS.

As for Bonobo: I believe panel applets use it all the time, and I don't think KParts can be a sensible replacement for it: Bonobo isn't just for GUI components. Since it is a Corba implementation, one can use out-of-process components with it, as well as components running accross the network. It's more like DCOM, whereas Kparts are analogous to ActiveX.

Furthermore, I don't see the Gnome developers starting to use C++ any time soon. Besides the matter of taste and familiarity, C++ has problems with ABI stability. It took an age for Debian to recompile every C++ program when GCC 3.2 came out; I believe one of the reasons GCC 3.4 won't be in Sarge is because it breaks ABI compatibility again.

> Make all demons optional

Sounds like you want to duplicate the code from the daemons and copy it into each application. This would only increase memory usage and the number of bugs, while decreasing functinality. The reason GConf is really, really good is because of the signals/notification system. I'm not sure one's desktop would run much faster if every program one used polled its config file for updates every second.

As for Esound, it will go away in the future if GStreamer becomes a part of the Gnome platform. This will be really nice when it happens, because the job of picking which sound server to use (esd/polyp/arts/jack/none), configuring it, etc will be left up to the distributor. But GStreamer has a fair bit of improvement to do before this can happen; and since removing Esound all together is backwards incompatible, it will have to wait for 3.0.

The bounties Novell is offering are too low. They're offering $1-200 for tasks that will take an adequately skilled programmer, already familiar with GNOME, something like 2-4h to complete, including the docs that will let GNOME integrate the code (which will help win the bounty). The programmer doesn't need to spend time testing the code, though that will increase their chances of winning. So they're offering $50:h.

That isn't enough to support a community of coders, even if the range of bounties were scaled up to supply a significant headcount with enough work to keep busy (say, 500-1000 bounties a year). The labor might be fueled by people who are coding GNOME anyway, to prioritize completion/submission of some tasks. But the better, even more productive coders won't be available at those rates. It remains to be seen whether a multitude of mediocre submissions can compensate for too-cheap bounties that can't attract quality coders. Or perhaps this model will merely send all coding offshore, to programmers who can work so cheap that a single $100 bounty won can fund a month of unsuccessful submissions to other bounties they lose.

I was able to use gnome 2.8 on a Celeron 433 with 64Mo of RAM. Though you either need to tweak your configurationhttp://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guid e/2.6/ch09.html/
or to use a dedicated distribution like Beatrix http://www.watsky.net//
which include gnome and use dirty trick with the kernel to improve performance.

If you're a gnome user you should probably check up on Planet Gnome. Here's one blog in particular that may be of interrest.

> I was hoping it would be a GNOME/GTK Calendar

Evolution has a nice calendar interface, and the API is pretty good, too.

I'm working on a Ruby binding for it and it's straightforward as long as you're familiar with the Gnome coding conventions.

> I was hoping it would be a GNOME/GTK Calendar

Evolution has a nice calendar interface, and the API is pretty good, too.

I'm working on a Ruby binding for it and it's straightforward as long as you're familiar with the Gnome coding conventions.

Check out Evince.

Um you should try Gnumeric. It's probably more functional than Corel's spreadsheet and supports far more bigger spreadsheets than 65k by 65k. I'm not sure how many, though. And it works in Windows as of the 1.4 release. It's really a beacon of FOSS office applications and rarely gets the credit it deserves.

Furthermore, Excel (every scientists best friend), is still far and away the best spreadsheet application and to me is Window's so called "killer app"

Dare I mention gnumeric? http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ I've had no problems exchanging files between gnuermic and excel. Best of all I use some pretty big and complex sheets and while gnumeric takes a little while to load them excel takes forever.

I have also heard elsewhere that gnumeric double checks it's caclulations (and that excel doesn't), which would make gnumeric all the more accurate. (I don't have link for you sorry).

I didn't notice it at first, but part of the reason the ClearLooks screenshot is so appealing is the presence of dropshadows. Subtle, but definatly pleasing.

Just get your X server up to snuff and you can enjoy them too....

[May or may not be useful....]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2001 -December/msg00107.html
http://www.xfce.org/gtkmenu-shadow/
http://www.gnome-look.org/

Sorry, but this story is bullshit.

All spelled out here.

• Integrated help browser w/ man and info support
  
• Developer-friendly text editor
  
• Nice GUI for sharing files
  
• Freedesktop.org cross-desktop menu specification
  
• Weather panel applet
  
• Panel and applet transparency
  
• An "new and improved" mixer (looks like kmix now)
  

This news factoid is merely rumour.

Please read this for more information.

There may be an even better way to do this than the button/etc method.

Do you mean, something like this?

What you describe are human interface guidelines, and this has been done in GNOME for quite some time.

You can find these guidelines at gnome.org

I thought the Mandrakelinux graphical package management tools weren't so great UI-wise, but my god, judging from the screenshots, SMART could really use some HIG love!

You have the classic battle between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.
After just Linux and OpenOffice installed, it will be evident the advantages are much greater than using Microsoft products, namely because of the price. If these guys are donating thousands of computers to schools, reducing software price from $200-300 per unit to $0 is going to enable them to construct out quite a bit more labs.

There are quite a few Gnome applications which would help in everyday usability. Of course, Gnome or KDE would probably be your desktop of choice, especially if the organization is coming off of Microsoft Explorer; keep it familiar to effectively show advantages.

You didn't specify what type of educational environment the labs target, but for programming Anjuta is a great alternative to Microsoft Visual C++.

A few other mentionable applications would include Mozilla Firefox (over Microsoft Internet Explorer), and The Gimp (over Photoshop).

For networking with existing Windows labs, Samba is an effective alternative.

I believe moving most of X's computations into the video card's hardware will make it snappier while extending it's capabilities at the same time. I try to regularly follow what Havoc and Seth are up to (which is always something interesting) and this is my understanding of one of the big reasons for hardware acceleration. Regardless of hardware acceleration though, lots of work is going on to make X snappier. It's come a long way like you said. On a slighlty different note, here is another project being worked on at Red Hat, it seems really cool, and really needed if you ever expect to find linux a common desktop in businesses and schools: Sabayon.
Regards,
Steve

Dashboard was really just search, and is largely dead. The bones of Dashboard were used to build the framework for Beagle.

You can do dashboard and so much more with the functionality in Beagle. Any future Dashboard-like app would probably be from-scratch on top of a Beagle back end.

I guess I just want people to understand that we haven't been ill-behaved. We might be stupid, but not evil ;-)

*nod*, I fully agree that dropping the boxed in-stores in-front-of-peoples-eyes version has been detrimental to awareness of RH (and Linux in general). It was profitable because when you have boxes in all the hundreds of thousands of stores, enough people do random buys (to see what all this linux stuff is about, etc) that even though the hit rate is small, you make real money off it.

The problem was all this better-than-free advertising also wasn't resulting in a lot of people using Linux. Home users who buy Linux in the store, by and large, end up running Windows at the end of the day. When you compound this with the versions in stores often being very old (and creating bad impressions of where Linux stands today...)...

I agree we'd be better off still marketing to home / small business users than ignoring them completely. But in terms of moving Linux from "something that sells because people are curious" to "something that sells because its important and useful to people", Linux has a lot more to offer enterprise customers right now. We want to be selling a product because its useful to people, not because its the latest craze!

RH's never been splashy about desktop, but we've always had a dedicated team working on it (from the early days of GNOME on...), and that team is currently fairly large by RH standards, more than 25 engineers. We've been notoriously bad at hyping our work, but we are doing lots of cool stuff ;-) If you're interested in what we're doing, you can checek out my blog. I'm trying to slowly dump out a listing of all the different projects we're involved with. http://www.gnome.org/~seth

-Seth