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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."
Sounds like a euphamism for gnomes to me, which would be appropriate.
At the risk of starting a monster flamewar:
I find that I prefer the Gnome apps (Evolution, Galeon), but I prefer KDE as whole more. They are both pretty slow IMO. Konqueror is a great filemanager and that alone keeps me in KDE.
So I just plop the Gnome app icon in my KDE taskbar and let 'er rip. The only problem is a consistent cut and paste between Mozilla, Konq, and everything else, so I usually use the middle mouse button to copy and paste.
It's just a question of taste.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Upgrading is not worth it! Note that this release is labeled as "Alpha", which is developer-speak means "not feature complete and will crash on you all the time".
If you want to live on the bleeding edge, you can install this in addition to your working desktop, i.e. by using the vicious build scripts from Gnome CVS.
"Highly regarded user interface" = "Considered by 6 our of 10 users to be 'the least crappy one on Linux' "
:D
says who? i'll admit that i've turned off AA on my KDE desktop because it, umm, sucks. but in winxp (don't ask) i've got AA with cleartype turned on, and it's used everywhere, including controls, and it looks great.
I run RedHat on my main workstation and BSD on a bunch of my servers. I also have a PC running Win2K, a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Solaris boxen.
I by far prefer the working environment of linux to all of the others, aside from the Mac. Sorry, Mac OS 10.1 is absolutely fabulous.
The only thing about the unix environment, especially the linux environment, that really gets to me is the complete lack of good fonts.
Windows, love it or loathe it, has very nice true-type, well-hinted fonts. They are very easy to read, even when small. They have serif, they have sans-serif, and both are beautiful.
Mac OS 10.1 has even better fonts, I think, although many might disagree. Regardless, not far removed in quality from that of windows, whether better or worse.
However, what no will will disagree about is that the fonts in linux suck. They are ugly. They are unreadable when small. They are badly aliased. They need to be put out of their misery.
Some may think this is inconsiquential, but I feel otherwise. I believe that until linux can produce some wonderful fonts of it's own, and use them by default without having to install anything, and have every program use them, even old ones that were written before the fonts were around, linux will never be able to touch windows or mac on the desktop.
But, hey, I'm just talking here...
Justin Dubs
I am glad they modded you up as funny...
;)). The important thing is that you are installing the libraries for each one so that well written applications can be run in any X environment of your choosing...
But here is my experience which will no doubt get both sides flaming me, so I guess this is about as unbiased as you can get.
It depends on how you are going to use your box. I assume that you are planning on using it as a graphical workstation, and so the extra bloat of KDE and GNOME are not a real problem. Also I am assuming a relatively large hard drive since you specify that your computer is new.
I think that you will find yourself to be far less limited in how you use your system if you install both desktops on your system. Most (but not all) KDE applications run fine in GNOME and vice versa-- case in point, I am writing this on Konqueror within GNOME). In essence, you will have more flexibility and redundency if you install both and use whichever one you like more (you can even run WindowMaker, BlackBox, or a simple TWM if you really really want to
My advice is simple. Run them both if you can afford the additional hard drive space. For higher-end workstations, I much prefer GNUOME, but for that old Dev server, KDE was pretty good.
But then, I suppose both sides will see this as heresy...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
So because gnome hasn't up'd it's version number fast enought it's not as good as KDE? (I remember everyone complaining about them bumping it up too fast back around the 1.0 release).
Gnome 2 is internationalized, has antialiased text, has a very configurable interface. The control center has been just about completely rewritten and is very slick.
If there is a UI difference between apps, complain to the app writer. But, gtk2 will make it much easier to write apps with a common look and feel and has made some nice improvements to the theme system.
Kmail is nice, Evolution is nicer, IMHO and Pan is just as good or better than KNode (again, IMHO). Glade and libglade couldn't make writing apps easier and Anjuta (especially with the work they're doing on Anjuta 2) is a very nice IDE.
If you want to think you are that much better than me for using KDE, please go ahead and do so. But your comment shows that you really are not aware of the capabilities of the current Gnome or of the huge advances that Gnome 2 has made. Things like the Pango font render, Bonobo, etc. are at the cutting edge of Linux desktop technology.
Well, for starters, vi is way smaller than Emacs, and it starts up
much faster. But then, my cat is housebroken, and I've never met a
dog that was smart enough to shit in a box. Don't forget also that
the Amiga has a MUCH broader selection of games to choose from than
the ST, and while the GNU people seem to think that their indentation
style is superior, it has been proved that K&R is much easier to read.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled religious war.
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
There is an unfortunate trend in most open-source projects that really needs to slow down. Gnome 2.x will be API incompatible with 1.x, and they are already planning a 3.x that will break 2.x compatibility. Sure, this sort of change means the available APIs can be very nice and slick and not have to suffer the clunkiness of older API design concepts, but it also means that people, organizations, and companies have a harder time maintaining products through time. As much as Windows irks me, they did keep backward compatibility right, similar to the x86 family. Not only are the latest Windows releases API compatible, but also ABI compatible with previous versions dating back to win16 and DOS days. Sure, your API is messy just as x86 assembly is messy, but I think that a lot of open source projects are getting to the point where they should decide on an ABI/API that is "good enough" to keep supporting through future versions. Sure, additions can be made, but breaking exisiting applications in the name of progress isn't popular among businesses that don't want to spend extra development time and money just to keep up with extreme API changes...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.