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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.
"Highly regarded user interface" = "Considered by 6 our of 10 users to be 'the least crappy one on Linux' "
:D
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
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.