Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Gnome 2.0 Alpha 1 Released

Posted by Hemos on from the coming-out-at-you dept.

Dave H writes "The first pre-release of the GNOME 2 platform is now available! Find it at you can grab it from FTP.gnome.org It is of course a technology preview; note that it can't be installed alongside GNOME 1.x." There's some more information information posted on LinuxToday.

7 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Backward compability. by Lussarn · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Does anybody know about backward compability?


    I know a couple of widgets from gtk1.2 is deprecated, CList is one of them. But will gnome 2 also include gtk1.2 or only gtk2.0.


    And, does deprecated in the gtk2.0 case mean "not there" or "could disapear in the future"?

  2. GNOME, a thought by jd · · Score: 2, Interesting
    GNOME follows a nice concept, but suffers from one fatal flaw. X. X is a good system, in theory. It does many things other OS' GUIs only dream of. But it's over-designed and over-complex. So much so that AFAIK, of all the extensions, window managers, desktop environments, etc, out there, ROX is the only one to use X' own drag-and-drop system.


    There are alternative GUIs out there, for Linux & Unix - Berlin for example - but they're either not compatiable with X applications and/or the X protocol, or they're not mature enough to be usable.


    Most Unix manufacturers go the other way. The sample X implementation may be broken, in many ways, but it's still a good place to start. So they write their own version of X, either from scratch, or using the sample X tapes as a starting point. This certainly produces a faster implementation, but it still doesn't tackle the complexity issue, and none of these are Open Source or Free Software.


    IMHO, what's needed is a GUI that'll do for X what RISC architectures did for processors. Produce a MUCH simpler underlying architecture, using layers to provide more and more complex functionality.


    How does this relate to GNOME, since that's where I started? Easy. Either GNOME or KDE is in a key position to write this "layered X", since they are projects sufficiently wide in scope to understand where bottlenecks and bugs creep in. Nobody else really has that kind of breadth of information.


    Wouldn't it be better to pile effort into Berlin? There are too many problems with the approach taken. CORBA is known for horrible overheads, for example, and the CORBA implementation used is, AFAIK, not the same as the one used by either GNOME or KDE, which means a combined effort will require extensive rewriting.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:GNOME, a thought by rgmoore · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The idea that X is huge is greatly exaggerated. X itself isn't that large, but the total package looks much bigger than what you actually use because of the need for a zillion drivers. Yes, X could have a greatly simplified system that took much less code, but it would come at the expense of not being able to take advantage of the features in advanced graphics cards.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  3. Another thought... by jd · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Now that GNOME 2 is approaching a point where the API (at least) is stable, it would be really interesting if a hardware manufacturer could take GNOME and produce a graphics card with GNOME support.


    "But hardware != software", I hear some cry. Well, sorry to break it to you, but software is simply a simulation of hardware. There is nothing that you can do in software that you can't do in hardware. Faster.


    Picture this - a graphics card that has a pure hardware implementation of XFree86 4.1, Gnome 2, and (just for the hell of it) KDE 2.2 as well. Nothing on the computer, the graphics is done entirely in silicon. This would free up much of the computer's RAM, unload much of the heavier cycle devourers, and produce one of the fastest GUIs on the planet.


    "It wouldn't be free, though!"


    Free as in free beer? No, it wouldn't, but if you want free beer, you're probably in the wrong place, anyway. You want the beer tent.


    Free as in free speech? Why not? The hardware would need to follow GNOME, X and optionally KDE. X is the only non-free component of that. By having a re-implementation of it, you could make the hardware version totally free and totally unencumbered.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:Another thought... by Prince+Caspian · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What you are proposing does not make sense. X is simply for drawing primitives, and the whole point of an optimized X server is that it calls the hardware optimized functions of your graphics card to draw those primitives. I assume when you say that GNOME and KDE should be implemented in hardware you mean Gtk and Qt, since the majority of GNOME and KDE are non-graphical libraries.

      --

      "It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit."
  4. Yuck! by drodver · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Problem is software has bugs, and the tolerence for hardware bugs is exremely low. What happens when a bug screws over said video card? Reboot! How long does it take before that will get old? Oh about 3 times before it goes out the window. Also, implementing these large,complex programs on hardware would be a nightmare, which means it would be expensive due to engineering costs.

  5. My observation of why X sucks by Pope+Slackman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    X is very simple, for a windowing system, it's not complex at all. Plus no one has to see that stuff,
    it's always hidden behind toolkits.

    I think the major flaw with X is not it's excessive resource usage, complexity or speed, but the fact that it has no standard toolkit.

    While a lot of linux kids see the ability to use any toolkit (or even implement their own) as a good thing,
    I see it as a huge hindrance to usability.
    A user has to learn the different behaviours of GTK, Qt, Motif, Athena
    and virtually countless others, all with their own looks, hotkeys and ways of doing things.
    Aside from the "feel" the "look" of X will always be discordant, further slowing the already
    confused or annoyed user down in a quagmire of gradients and chrome.

    IMO, if linux (or any UNIX aside from OSX) is going to have any chance at the desktop market,
    X either has to standardize and enforce a single toolkit, or be replaced by something more modern.

    C-X C-S