GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha

xer.xes writes: "The first public testing release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe,' is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface."

Comments

For you non-Swedes

[Theodore Logan]

"Rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish and translates to "Funny little hat-man" (yes, it sounds ridiculous in my language too).

Re:Post a screenshot somebody!

[dead_penguin]

There's a few up on the dotplan website:
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/.

There doesn't seem to be an excessive amount of new eyecandy, but that's no surprise since Gnome 2 is supposed to be more a change to the libraries and backend. I'm sure new and updated apps that take advantage of this will follow soon after the actual release.

ALPHA Release, still plenty of bugs in builds

[chabotc]

Please all keep in mind, that this is a very much alpha style release.

This means a couple of base packages don't compile without any manual labor, and a few packages won't compile unless you become a leet gnome hacker and fix the source on the fly ;-)

It's a great way to get a first preview of the platform,but for general consumption or testing, this platform just int it yet.

If you prefer not hacking to much source, it might be worth wile to wait for the .rpm's of the packages, before you jump into the deep and start testing. The Gnome Packaging project is working hard on these, so i'm sure they will be along soon.

Re:Gnome is very cool but...

[damiam]

Feet are generally ugly, but GNOME's foot is pretty. And you can always change the icon. Just right-click on the foot and goto Properties and the Icon tab.

My biggest complaint about Gnome/Gtk+

[i_am_nitrogen]

Note: this is not a troll.

My one big complaint about Gtk+/Gnome applications is with the file select dialog. When I click on a directory, it erases the filename that was already typed in! This is lame. If they can improve the file selection dialog, I will be happy.

That said, if my biggest complaint is something so small, I think things are going quite well. Oh, and it needs to be faster too :). I want to be able to run Gnome and KDE on my 266MHz Cyrix as well, not just my 800MHz Duron. Until that time there's Blackbox I guess, which screams on anything.

Re:My biggest complaint about Gnome/Gtk+

[i_am_nitrogen]

Actually, I was annoyed by that for a long time, but I realized that Gtk+ has command line completion. Try hitting TAB instead of Enter -- it will navigate to the directory. If you have a filename typed in with part of a directory name like this:
(pipe indicates cursor position)

direc|filename.tar.gz

becomes

directory/|filename.tar.gz

and then it goes into the directory and becomes

filename.tar.gz

Not as good as being able to hit enter and not lose your filename and all that, but Windows doesn't do that now does it? It also does TAB completion for filenames.

Note: I had pretty ASCII-art line graphics drawn, but the lameness filter wouldn't have anything to do with it ;p.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[be-fan]

OS-X fonts look good to some people because, in general, Quartz renders the desktop quite softly. In reality, OS-X's font subsystem is rather low tech, it lacks hinting, gamma correction, etc. You can read all about it on the XRender mailing list. Personally, I don't like OS-X's fonts, but that's just me.

Linux fonts are great! If you take the high quality TrueType fonts from your Windows partition, Freetype2 renders the text extremely sharply. The only renderer I've seen that is better than FT2 is BitStream's FontFusion (found in QNX RtP) and the only reason I like it better is because it is less heavy-handed with the anti-aliasing. Certainly, FT2 blows away Windows' font rendering. Compare Arial in FT2 to Arial in XP, and you'll notice that FT2 renders the text visibly more clearly.

Re:Unfortunate trend..

[Havoc Pennington]

We've thought about this in detail, that's why GNOME does compat exactly like Windows; instead of breaking old libs, we make new libs with a different name that install next to the old libs. See http://pobox.com/~hp/parallel.html. So no app has to port until they feel like it.