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:For you non-Swedes

[grazzy]

why have they named it like that?

Re:For you non-Swedes

[ajs]

Sounds like a euphamism for gnomes to me, which would be appropriate.

Re:For you non-Swedes

[Theodore Logan]

Sounds like a euphamism for gnomes to me, which would be appropriate.

This is a good observation, and you are propably correct. However, it is still a bizarre name - long and very difficult (I suppose, but cannot tell for sure, since I am a Swede myself) - for non-Swedes. Why is this? Are there unproportionally many Swedes working on this? Are these people in love with the Swedish language? What is going on here?

This might seem seriously off topic, but I'm honestly quite interested.

Re:For you non-Swedes

[jonask]

At a guess they're referring to this:

http://user.tninet.se/~prv247p/hatt/

It's a turkish song with parts of it that sounds like swedish, so someone had a bit of fun making a mock video for it and adding 'swedish' subtitles. Quite funny. (At least if you speak swedish. ;-)

(The same people also made this one:
http://www.lindqvist.com/externsajt.php?external Si te=http://www.kramgo.se/ansiktsburk&extName=Kramgo
)

Re:For you non-Swedes

[CPIMatt]

Sounds good to me:

Step 1: Create Linux Distribution.
Step 2:
Step 3: Profits!

-Matt

Re:For you non-Swedes

[Wizy]

Since no one has replied, I highly doubt anyone even caught the underpants gnome reference.

Re:For you non-Swedes

[awa]

It could be Norwegian, too. The translation would change a bit: "Quiet little [old] hat-man".

Re:For you non-Swedes

[GauteL]

Actually, the whole sentence makes perfect sense in norwegian as well, but translates to something like "calm little old, fat and unimaginative man", which may or may not be more suited for Gnome 2 ;-).

I've always found it funny how swedish and norwegian are VERY similiar, but sometimes the same words have different meaning.

Personally, I like Gnome.

Re:For you non-Swedes

[Hatechall]

I will take the karma hit to say: That is pretty damn funny. Doesn't deserve the flamebait mod.

Re:For you non-Swedes

[mike_sucks]

Here's a few questions to ask yourself:

- Are you ever going to use it?
- How long until the next release (with it's own code name) comes out?

But most importantly:

- Does it matter what the code name for an alpha release is?

Hoonestly? Does it?

Re:For you non-Swedes

[jdub!]

First reason: Codenames don't generally mean anything. They're fairly random, chosen by the people on the release team who are present at the time.

Second reason: Sweden is the backbone of GNOME.

Re:For you non-Swedes

[Choose Wisely]

I find this to be extremely funny, partly due to the South Park reference, and partly because it's true. You can't make money giving away a product for free, plain and simple.

Re:For you non-Swedes

[jonask]

Well, you can find a translation to english here:

http://www.geocities.com/pommesrotweissx/

Re:For you non-Swedes

[amentia]

It's quite strange that rolig in swedish means funny (funny haha, not funny weird) but the meaning of the negation, orolig, means worried or restless just like in norway.

Who is the Funny Little Hat Guy?

[joshua42]

"Rolig Liten Hattgubbe" and "Lagom". There is a lot of Swedish on Slashdot these days! "Rolig Liten Hattgubbe" means "Funny Little Hat Guy". Who is the Funny Little Hat Guy?

Post a screenshot somebody!

[Da Masta]

I'm too much of a pansy to disturb my prefectly configured Debian system, so can someone else install this and post screenshots?

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.

Farsi!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yea!!!!

Persian poetry on GNOME.

Re:Farsi!

[erotus]

Wow... someone who likes persian poetry? Which poet do you like best - Hafez, Rumi, Omar Khayam? I personally like Hafez and Rumi. Some of my Persian friends have introduced me to some of the more avant-garde/modern stuff as well. Pretty deep poetry, IMHO.

Cheers

Re:Farsi!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Gosh, I was at the 50 karma cap, then two Genii mod me down as "off topic" for celebrating the new improved BiDi support in Gnome... Not like the long, relevant threads speculating about Swedish etymology! :-)

For your question: It's hard to find a better technical poet than Hafez among the mystics. He's nearly impenatrable for me in Persian, and I envy the classically fluent who can enjoy him. Maulana (Rumi) is the most immediate and enjoyable for me - at least selections from Diwan-e Shams. I am an amatuer, and stumble with broken Farsi and translations. Friends with more mastery than myself weep over verses of Maghrebi.

Az sedoy-e sokhaane eshq, nadidam khoshtar...
-Hafez Shirazi

Re:Just a note..

[Oswald]

Well, thanks for that, but unfortunately the literal translation is gibberish in English. Anyone know what it really means?

Re:Just a note..

[k98sven]

Whups, someone beat me to it on that one..
Too many Swedish-speakers on ./ -we're taking over!

Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[Sierpinski]

I use GNOME for only what I have to... it was installed as the only window manager on the webserver that I administer before it came to me, and for what I use it for, it works just fine. I've heard stories from past coworkers that upgrading or replacing a window manager is quite complicated, and if not done exactly right can cause major problems.

I personally am of the opinion, that unless it concerns security or (used) functionality, don't fix it if it's not broken.

I guess I'll wait until the other folks here install 2.0 to see 1) what (if any) problems they had, and 2) was it really worth it.

There is something to be said for using software that is a bit older and has been around for a while. Just look at XP and all the holes they found in the first couple months. I doubt any new exploits will be found for my Windows 98 SE I'm running at home...

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[xer.xes]

Okay, I'll tell you before anyone else will.. GNOME is not a windowmanager, nor does it include one (although they recommend Sawfish)..

GNOME is a desktop-environment..

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[Anonymous DWord]

No new exploits? Like UPnP or something, you mean?

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[QuickFox]

I doubt any new exploits will be found for my Windows 98 SE I'm running at home...

I admire your extraordinary courage and stamina, daring to admit here, at this the greatest of Linux temples, that you are using Windows at home. Using it at home seems to imply that you are using Windows of your own free will!

I am awestruck seeing such courage. I would never dare reveal here what system I'm using at home.

Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[kin_korn_karn]

I use xfce on my old P266 laptop. It works pretty well for something that's intended to be lightweight.

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[Sierpinski]

I originally wasn't going to dignify this post with a response, but your ignorance finally convinced me.

As much as I like Linux, and as much as I use Linux, the reality of the matter is that there are some applicatons which (hopefully only yet) do not exist for Linux. For you people who do nothing but play the Xgames and look at porn, sure, Linux will work just fine. However, for those of us who actually do work on our computers sometimes require applications that are (unfortunately) only available for Windows at the moment.

For you to post a comment like that, only shows your ignorance. Do you think I would even bother to read or acknowledge any flame posts about how Windows sucks? Having and using Windows 98 at home has provided me with tools that I have used as a consultant to make myself thousands of dollars. What have you done with your computer lately?

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[mangu]

Using it at home seems to imply that you are using Windows of your own free will!

That's exactly what I do. I use Windows98 at home, of my own free will, to play exactly two games: Grand Prix Legends and Need For Speed - Porsche Unleashed.

At work, I install Linux wherever I get a chance to. Having recently lowered the cost in a project from the $750k that a Windows2000 system would cost to less than $200k in Linux, the Company Management wisely applauds and encourages my attitude.

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[QuickFox]

My attempt at humorous irony (apparently completely unsuccessful) wasn't directed at you. Quite the opposite, it was directed at certain attitudes here at /. that I think are greatly exaggerated.

Maybe my humor is too far-fetched. I thought if I say that I dare not reveal what I'm using, this would reveal in a funny way that I'm using something horribly "controversial".

Well, I can never judge myself if my humor will work or not.

It was just irony. I'm typing this at home on a machine which at this moment is running Win2K.

Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[lunatik17]

As much as I like Linux, and as much as I use Linux, the reality of the matter is that there are some applicatons which (hopefully only yet) do not exist for Linux.

All true. And yet, that still doesn't make the experience of using Windows any less painful.

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[dewke]

I'm sure this will get modded down but...

I originally wasn't going to dignify this post with a response, but your ignorance finally convinced me.

ditto...

I would be embarassed if I worked with a consultant who expounded win98 as consultant's tool. FOr god's sake man at least use nt, win2k or winxp pro

For you people who do nothing but play the Xgames and look at porn, sure, Linux will work just fine. However, for those of us who actually do work on our computers sometimes require applications that are (unfortunately) only available for Windows at the moment.

Such as? I WORK on computers every day, as a security consultant. The only applications I can't use in linux are the crappy ones my company forces me to use to record my timecard, submit expenses, and the ubitquous Outlook... At home I choose to use Linux for most things. Sure there are apps I like on winxp. Lets see.... Ghost Recon, NFS, MOH....

For your information there are also commercial games for linux. Quake 3, RTCW and even Ultima Online etc....

Having and using Windows 98 at home has provided me with tools that I have used as a consultant to make myself thousands of dollars. What have you done with your computer lately?

Again what tools? I can do all my consulting work from linux or another unix if I want to. I can program in Linux if I want to in a gui even. Just today I worked on a clients site and spent most of the day in linux. Yes I booted the laptop into win2k so I could run l0phtcrack3 since I was too lazy to install john the ripper, and I made my company several thousand dollars in 2 days of onsite work.

dewke

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[WWWWolf]

I use GNOME for only what I have to... it was installed as the only window manager on the webserver that I administer before it came to me, and for what I use it for, it works just fine. I've heard stories from past coworkers that upgrading or replacing a window manager is quite complicated, and if not done exactly right can cause major problems.

(GNOME on the web server? most people I know don't run X11 on a web server =)

Actually, changing the desktop environment or window manager isn't that hard - I've upgraded and changed window managers several times with no problems.

That been said, 2.0 probably isn't worth getting now - it's alpha. And, you know, having - back in the day - lived with the 0.x alphas of GNOME, I don't want to see the Pain again =)

(Though I have to admit 0.20 was better than 1.0 in many respects, but it has got better since. Just don't try to use the bundled session management system with Window Maker in Debian.)

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it?

[Sierpinski]

By all means, if you have a means to run VC++, VB, MS SQL Server 7.0, MTS for COM and DCOM objects, etc etc. on Linux, I would LOVE to hear about it.

But until that day comes, my consulting work will be done on Windows machines. I use both Win2k and Win98 at work, and haven't yet found a reason to subject my system to the increased hardware requirements and HD overhead (Win2k, from my experience, takes much more HD space than 98 for the modules that I have to install) of Win2k. One of these days when I finally take the time to update my system, Win2k might be an option. XP isn't even on the list yet, mostly due to the lack of testing on Microsoft's part, but also because not a lot of the things I use support it yet.

I'm also well aware of the games that are available for Linux, and have probably most of them. As a matter of fact, the local computer store here sells many linux games that were originally designed for windows machines for between $5 and $10. No reason not to buy them then.

Maybe if I was a unix programmer then I would be able to use Linux more often, but just because you consult using linux doesn't mean that everyone else does. I make a nice living off windows, and until a better paying job comes along, I will continue to make a nice living off windows.

save ya some time

[mark_lybarger]

5 posts about what a great job the gnome folks are doing

8 posts about how much better and more advanced kde is than gnome

7 posts about how you shouldn't do OO programming in C

9 posts about how OO is a method not a language :)

50 posts from people who don't give a rat's arse about different desktops and like their gnome

and finally... 4 posts summarizing the number of other posts for the topic

Re:save ya some time

[mrpotato]

You forgot the 12 posts saying that "rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish, and it means "Funny little hat guy."

Re:save ya some time

[Theodore Logan]

you forgot:

10 posts from people translating "Rolig liten hattgubbe" (I'm one of them)

Re:save ya some time

[buckminster]

And 2 posts reminding you that you forgot the 10 posts from people translating "Rolig liten hattgubbe".

Re:save ya some time

[MeNeXT]

One post on how people will post.

Re:save ya some time

[adlam.bor]

You forgot about the 10 replies telling you things that you forgot to post.

Re:save ya some time

[Tattva]

Wow, this is the most "Meta-Posts" I've ever seen on slashdot. I guess that my comment is a meta-meta post. And the previous sentence is a meta-meta-meta post, and...

screw it, time for beer

Re:save ya some time

[QuickFox]

And 1 post pointing out that this is getting out of hand.

Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

Re:save ya some time

[greenfly]

And 2 posts from the fairly new phenomena of posts where people attempt a +1 Funny by saying how they misread a word or phrase in the story. Like:

"Heh, when I first read that, I thought it said 'save Yah some time', and I was about to say, Yahweh has all the time he needs..."

or something like that.

Re:save ya some time

[ArsonSmith]

and one post in a pear tree

Re:save ya some time

[QuickFox]

• 1 post to rule them all
• 1 post to find them
• 1 post to bring them all
• and in the darkness bind them

Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

Re:save ya some time

[edrugtrader]

one post by a guy that didn't read the last line in the parents post...

Re:save ya some time

[mandolin]

You forgot the 12 posts saying that "rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish, and it means "Funny little hat guy."

You both forgot the posts detailing what the parent posts forgot.. ooh! self-referential humor!

Re:save ya some time

[cyberkreiger]

Ash post durbatulûk.
Ash post gimbatul.
Ash post thrakatulûk,
agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

Re:save ya some time

[joe-cecil]

Hey Mark,
Speaking of off-topic posts..
Are you from Cambridge MA?

Digging the new Gnome Control Center

[reaper20]

Looks good in the screenshots. I absolutely abhor the current gnomecc, this looks like a step in the right direction.

Can't wait to try it.

Re:Digging the new Gnome Control Center

[Kourino]

Indeed ^_^ The new gnomecc, interestingly enough, reminds me (but only vaguely) of screens I've seen of the OS X System Preferences box. I like the dual-pane nature of the new gnomecc more, though. It's definitely an improvement!Now, to figure out how I fscked up my file-types ... (which is almost definitely my fault though)

Screenshots...

[Drunken_Jackass]

...are available here

http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/

mmmmmmmm pretty.

Re:Screenshots...

[Khalid]

While a apreciate what the Gnome people are doing, the AA fonts are really butt ugly ! I only hope this will change in the final version.

Re:Screenshots...

[LordNimon]

I agree, AA fonts are not supposed to be used on controls.

It looks like 2.0 is overall ugly. Everything is still very grey and box-like. They need to get a REAL graphic designer on board. *sigh*

Re:Screenshots...

[damiam]

I believe you can adjust your /etc/X11/Xftconfig to only use AA on large (header-sized) fonts, leaving your normal text readable.

Re:Screenshots...

[RossyB]

I challenge anyone to make a GUI which is not box-like (Kai tried that with KPT...). Grey is, well, just a colour. Change it.

Re:Screenshots...

[WildBeast]

Aha, so I'm not the only one complaining about the grey stuff. Their's a whole lot of grey in GNOME and KDE.

Re:Screenshots...

[damiam]

Ummm... OS X? KDE with appropriate themes? Even Gnome can have rounded widgets with the right theme.

Re:Screenshots...

[kurowski]

I agree, AA fonts are not supposed to be used on controls.

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.

Re:Screenshots...

[ywwg]

those are quite old alpha screenshots. You know it's people like you that cause developers to say, "screw this, no screenshots till it's done." The focus of GNOME 2 hasn't been all on the look and feel, a lot of the work has been about the underlying libraries. For instance those antialiased foreign fonts in the first shot. That's a big big deal, but it's not fruity colors so you overlook it.

Re:Screenshots...

[[rDJ]]

Because you are not the most important thing in their lives...

Re:Screenshots...

[Anthony Boyd]

For instance those antialiased foreign fonts in the first shot. That's a big big deal, but it's not fruity colors so you overlook it.

Hmmm. Well, if we're going for the little things, I will say that the new scrollbars are waaaaayyy better. I'd like to see if they got the new scrollbars onto popup lists and such too. But the scrollbars still could use some tweaking: for example, in MacOS and KDE, you can have both scroll arrows at the bottom or top of the scroll bar. In other words, at the bottom scroll bar, I have buttons to scroll down and up. I love love love that, and even if the Gnome developers don't, it'd be a nice 2.0 option for me to toggle. It'd also be nice if I could select how big/wide scroll bars get -- on a 120 dpi monitor, the scroll bar is fairly narrow. In Windows, I can go into the config and make 40-pixel-wide scrollbars if I need to.

I haven't seen all the screenshots, but I hope that checkboxes and radio buttons will be more visually obvious, too. Sometimes in Gnome I cannot tell at all what the heck is checked and what is not checked. Here's hoping that Gnome 2.0 is the result of some serious rethinking of the widgets.

Re:Screenshots...

[RossyB]

They make _look_ rounded, but thats just drawing curves inside a rectangular bounding box.

Re:Just a note..

[k98sven]

.. It's not like it makes a lot of sense in Swedish either!!

Although hat-man could be translated as
'man with a hat'.
(German (dutch?) and the scandinavian languages
allow joining words together very liberally)

GNOME 2.0 faster?

[jonestor]

Is it any faster than the last version of GNOME?

Re:GNOME 2.0 faster?

[rainwalker]

Have you used Mozilla 0.9.7? I use it exclusively on my Win2K boxes because it is much, much faster than IE5.5SP2, or, god forbit, IE6...plus it looks better, IMHO.

Oh well.

[rice_burners_suck]

Congratulations to the GNOME folks for making 2.0 a reality.

Now if only the number of shared libraries could be reduced... GNOME is currently a huge monster of a system, and I'm sure its size (and performance) could be improved for the next release.

Re:Just a note..

[QuickFox]

It really means exactly that. It's pure gibberish also in Swedish. Does anyone know why it got such a strange name?

Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

hmm fair comparision?

[VAXGeek]

I'm considering which Desktop Enviornment to install on my new Slackware box, and I'm wondering if someone could post a non-biased comparision between KDE and GNOME. Which do you think is better in terms of speed, efficiency, usability, etc?

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[reaper20]

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.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[MeNeXT]

Install them both and make up your own mind.

It's just a question of taste.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[mark_lybarger]

non biased comparison? you obviously haven't been around the linux desktop much, eh? spending too much time lately on a vax machine writing com files and using set default when you could be cd'ing all over the place ;)

they're both for "newer" machines and probably perform about the same. they both use a lot of memory (but a few years back we were all screaming about the 26MB that X11 was using). install them both and give them a whirl. play around with them and see which one sticks on you.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[lunenburg]

I was a bigger fan of the Gnome system for a while, but lately have gravitated toward KDE. The reason for that is that KDE provides a more "complete package", IMHO, with all the parts fitting together better for me. Konqueror is a fine web browser/file manager, too.

That being said, KDE 2.2 is slow on my notebook, so I run blackbox there in most cases.

As always, personal tastes and needs will end up dictating what people use.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[damiam]

I personally think GNOME is prettier and has better apps (Evolution > KMail, Galeon > Konqueror, Gnumeric > KSpread, etc.), but Konqueror, ugly as it is, kicks Nautilus's ass in speed and features. So if you're used to graphical file management, I'd go with KDE. Otherwise, I'd choose GNOME. However, both KDE 3 and GNOME 2 are coming up soon, so you may want to wait and see.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[mjrKong]

try enlightenment.
some of the themese are awesome. i use the hacker purple one, which is really nothing at all just a tiny frame around the windows.. no damn icons on the desk, just a nicely put together menu when you click anywhere on the desktop with the stuff that i use.

i use slack too, and with kde, gnome, and enlightenment installed, i am able to run any app i could dream off.

gets even better on OpenBSD.

cheers

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Eloquence]

Non-biased -- well, that can hardly be done by a single person. But I've tried both to some extent and am very happy with KDE. True, it is overall significantly slower than GNOME, and if you're on a low-end machine you will probably want to run GNOME or WindowMaker or somesuch (I like ion for productivity tasks, a nice window manager .. "apt-get install ion" and give it a try). If you turn off all the gimmicks in KDE it gets reasonably fast, but it still seems to run a lot more processes, and swap/access the disk more than other DEs/WMs. (The performance differences reported by KDE users on CPU-wise similar machines may relate to different effects of disk access: A high-end SCSI system will probably not mind the frequent accesses, whereas some IDE hard drives / controllers do not regard your CPU with much respect.) Upgrading my memory to 640 MB has made little/no performance difference other than for the obvious memory-intesive tasks (Mozilla etc.).

KDE is very nice for people who migrate from Windows (or keep using Windows) because after installation it lets you choose a Windows-like theme and keybindings (without losing any of its functionality, of course). GNOME, OTOH, takes a while to get into, especially with sawfish as a WM, but can be set up in a Windows-like fashion, too -- so if you're planning to set something up for lots of end users it doesn't make much of a difference. Overall, I think KDE makes optimal use of existing Windows knowledge, whereas GNOME mostly requires you to learn from scratch -- if it's your first PC ;-) it will likely not make much of a difference.

Otherwise the differences are not so big. Konqueror is a nice browser, especially with anti-aliasing (which is not really satisfying on Linux, but that's not KDE's fault -- at least you can get ClearType-like subpixel antialiasing on LCDs, which is almost as good as Windows'), but apps are interoperable. The KDE task bar and GNOME task bar are similar, both support little applets, but those are not interoperable AFAIK. I found the GNOME taskbar somewhat more intuitive, but I'm not really happy with either one (yes, I try to submit bugs and suggestions, thank you).

As regards productivity, it should not really make much of a difference once you've gotten into it. GNOME may be the obvious choice on lower-end machines, although my university has some quite snappy low-end machines running KDE, so with tuning you can probably achieve a lot. Hopefully, KDE performance will improve over time. I think both GTK and Qt are versatile interface toolkits, of which Qt is, by default, more Windows-like, but you can probably create an almost exactly Windows-like look & feel with GTK as well. But I liked the KDE default settings a lot more.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[cvd6262]

I can share my experience.

I loved Gnome two years ago when I first got into Linux. I run it on my RedHat file server at home, but otherwise, I was stuck in windows world. It just wasn't ready for full time desktop use. I tried KDE, but found it felt clunky.

Fast forward two years to last month, and I set up a new server at work. I talked the boss into giving Linux a try, and installed SuSE after a recommendation of a friend.

Well, having not seen anything in two years, I was blown away by the strides made by both Gnome and KDE. However, it is apparent that KDE has lapped Gnome in (desktop) usability. The themes are cool (my Mac buddy even thinks so), Nautalis rocks, and the whole thing is extremely configurable, even for a non-CS major.

I even placed SuSE with KDE 2.0 on my laptop. There are still times I need to boot to windows (Flash, QuickTime, etc.), but I hate doing it.

I sincerely hope that Gnome 2.0 will be the light-year jump that KDE 2.0 was because competition is a good thing(tm).

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[ThatComputerGuy]

/me wonders how many people got the joke

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Wolfkin]

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.

Why would you ever use anything else? When I use Windows machines, lack of mouse-only copy and paste is the single biggest usability problem I have.

Randall.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[nosferatu-man]

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)

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[lunatik17]

There are still times I need to boot to windows (Flash, QuickTime, etc.)

Flash for Linux can be found here

You can use Quicktime and other windows plugins with Codeweavers' Crossover plugin here, well worth the $20--and don't take my word for it, theres a downloadable demo.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[lunatik17]

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.

Um, that is consistent cut-and-paste!

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[MintSlice]

I'm a Gnome user so I'm biased to some degree ;-]

A recent article with Sun (I can't find) on why they chose Gnome (and I've heard this from other places as well) seemed to suggest that KDE was more polished on the surface, but that Gnome was more polished in the back-end. The Sun developers suggested that the Gnome Hackers had done a fantastic job getting all the libraries right, and that whilst the GUI needed some improvement this was easy enough to do. They didn't say that KDE was the opposite to this, but it seemed to be implied.

I like Gnome, and it works. Others like KDE and it works for them. Give both a try. Keep your mind open, and your sure to find a Desktop that you like.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[frantzdb]

KDE it gets reasonably fast, but it still seems to run a lot more processes, and swap/access the disk more than other DEs/WMs.

Keep in mind (both for KDE programs and for Gnome programs) that with top, Linux reports each thread as a separate process, even though they share their address space.

--Ben

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Guillaume Laurent]

The Sun developers suggested that the Gnome Hackers had done a fantastic job getting all the libraries right

As someone who's spent considerable time wrapping a few Gnome libraries in C++ when I was involved in Gtk--, and who finally switched to KDE for my development platform, I can assure you this is not the case. Far from it.

Both desktops may look similar in features from the user's point of view, but as a development environment there's simply no comparison.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[kervel]

kde is not multithreaded but multiprocess. KDE
3 will be multithreaded a bit , but still
mostly multiprocess.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[timmyd]

i use fvwm2 by itself if that helps.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Ghyl]

Not everyone likes C++. With GNOME you have much greater choice. Just compare the language bindings available for each. The number available for GNOME absolutely dwarfs those for KDE. See for yourself at:

http://erik.bagfors.nu/gnome/languages.html
http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/

This is why it makes sense to write the Desktop Environment in C. Of course, apps are a different story.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Guillaume Laurent]

Not everyone likes C++

No, but unfortunately it's currently the best solution for programming large desktop application.

Just compare the language bindings available for each. The number available for GNOME absolutely dwarfs those for KDE.

Yes, I know, each time this subject is brought up someone comes up with this argument. But how many of these bindings are actually complete, or even used ? How many applications are based on them ?

The point here is to develop useful working applications, not to herd wrappers for the sake of it. It's better to have a limited set of viable options than a large set of bad ones.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Rinikusu]

Personally, I'm really eager to see Enlightenment 0.17. I mean, shit, if i want Eye Candy, might as well go all the way. But, 0.17 looks pretty nifty, and you get to avoid all these nasty GNOME vs. KDE threads... :)

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[dam]

Hi, do not know what sort of user you are. Within our (rather large) company we did a usability study. We had a mix of users (mosty windows people) try both systems (KDE 2.2, Gnome 1.4) for a week. All ended up using Gnome at the end of the week, this was a "clean room" study. The analysis brought about that people considereed KDE more feature rich and complete but that Gnome was friendlier, much less cluttered (easier to navigate menues, etc). We also believe that the similarity between KDE and Windows actually turned off the users because it did not work like windows, while gnome did not look too much like windows so users expected things to be different. Disclaimer: I prefer the console to KDE and Gnome ;-), this is independant of prodoctivity toos (that was a different study), most Linux users prefered KDE before the test, the test was intended for regular Office workers not your typical slash-dot reader... Cheers...

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[jonathan_ingram]

Exactly -- there's no point having a language binding where the API changes every day and a half, or where only 10% of the original functions are bound.

Look at how long it took to get half way decent Gnome C++ wrappers.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Ghyl]

>Not everyone likes C++

No, but unfortunately it's currently the best solution for programming large desktop application.

Really? What about Java and C#? They seem to be capturing all the mind share lately.

When language fashions change, where does that leave QT? It's whole reason for existance is basically C++.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[murrayc]

>> Not everyone likes C++

> No, but unfortunately it's currently the best
> solution for programming large desktop
> application.

Everybody's heard me say it before but I like to repeat it for the record: Many of those who _really_ like C++ _really_ dislike QT because of it's lousy use of C++. See the gtkmm FAQ for particulars.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Guillaume Laurent]

Hi Murray,

I also know quite a few C++ lovers who very much like Qt, and who honestly think it uses C++ very well.

But there's nothing to like or dislike here. This is only a tool. I don't use C++ or Qt because I like them but because they're the best tool for my purpose.

Anyway, we've had this conversation before :-).

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Guillaume Laurent]

Really? What about Java and C#?

I should have been more precise : C++ is currently the best solution on Unix. Java is arguably gaining grounds on the Windows desktop, but AFAIK, except in some high end apps it's virtually non existent on the Unix desktop. As for C#, well, in its current state it's not a solution at all.

When language fashions change, where does that leave QT?

Not much I guess. But you seem to think that a C toolkit can magically turn into a good Java or C# toolkit just by "wrapping it". It's simply not the case. The result you get is quite sub-par compared to a library directly written in Java or C#, because C is so limited.

Plus both Java and C# come with a standard graphic toolkit (and most probably so will all forthcoming languages), so there's not much point in wrapping a C graphic toolkit with those.

GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha: "Rolig Liten Hattgubbe"

[Anonymous Coward]

[Desktop Environment] Posted by Jeff Waugh on Thursday January 17, @01:56PM
from the brought-to-you-by-tsing-tao dept.

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 (ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/releases /gnome-2.0-desktop-alpha/). Please read the release notes in the body of this article.

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.

Build Requirements

* The tarballs included in the release. :-)
* Some very basic packages not distributed with this release, such as image libraries, freetype and mozilla. These should all be included with or available for your distribution.
* autoconf 2.52, automake 1.4-p4, libtool 1.4.2, pkgconfig 0.8.0
* If you are installing GNOME 2.0 alongside 1.4, you *need* recent GNOME 1.4 library / developer platform packages.

A dia format dependency graph for the developer platform and desktop release is available on the dot.plan website.

Testers

If you have incredible talents at breaking GNOME, perhaps even to rival Telsa's infamous path of destruction (and excellent bug reporting of said path), this alpha release is made for you!

When reporting bugs, use bugzilla.gnome.org or bug-buddy. Make sure you choose the correct version number, as reports against versions included with the alpha will be given higher priority than reports against unspecified releases.

Note that by default, the software is built with debugging turned on, and most programs spit plenty of output to your terminal as they run. This means that whilst programs may run somewhat slower, the information supplied with bug reports will be far more helpful to the maintainers. Before submitting a bug report, try running the software from your terminal to see if it provides extra information.

We'll answer this one before it becomes a FAQ: If you want to test anti-aliasing, you need to set the GDK_USE_XFT environment variable, eg: export GDK_USE_XFT=1

Bug Squad

Whether you're testing GNOME 2.0 or not, you can still help out with the bug busting efforts by triaging and tracking bugs in bugzilla. Join the bugsquad mailing list, and hang out on #bugs (on irc.gnome.org) to get involved.

For help with bugzilla accounts, email bugmaster@gnome.org.

Distributors

This release is not intended for inclusion in distributions. However, binary packages for bleeding edge testers on your platform are very welcome. Please email the release team if you have built packages for your platform.

Hackers

When reporting bugs is simply not enough, and you'd prefer to make your own (or, indeed, fix the ones you find), this release is also made for you! The best places to send your patches are to the module maintainers, bugzilla or the relevant mailing list.

Most modules include a TODO list file, and you can find a lengthy release wide todo list on the dot.plan site (this will migrate over to bugzilla soon). The modules most in need of attention are nautilus, gnome-media, and sawfish.

Happy testing!

- The GNOME 2.0 Release Team

Gnome help please

[Anonymous Coward]

I quit using Gnome (1.4 IIRC?) since they added Nautilus. It's really pretty, but unbelievably and unusably slow on a 1.4GHz/DDR Athlon, 512M RAM, Mandrake 7.1. Oh yeah, GMC's MIME association editor is now broken, so I can't use it with any app it isn't already configured for. Does anyone know how to fix that? Or better yet, can anyone speed up Nautilus?

Will 2.0 fix this?

Re:Gnome help please

[nam37]

Anyone ever notice how the phrase "unbelievably and unusably slow" is so relative.... is ANYTHING actually "unbelievably and unusably slow" on a 1.4GHz/DDR Athlon, 512M RAM???

Re:Gnome help please

[denjin]

If it's that slow on their system, something is wrong. One of the Linux boxen I run it on is a K6-2 500 w/160mb of RAM and it runs acceptably, imho.

Re:Gnome help please

[pyros]

I was having problems with GMC's MIME associations since RedHat 6.1 (I know Red Hat tweaks their packages, but I like sticking with packages from the distro vendor since they tend to work better). Submitted bug reports too. Nothing ever happened though. They just kept reassigning the tickets. I gave up when I found Nautilus took care of it better. But you're right about Nautilus being slow.

Re:Gnome help please

[Mulletroll]

I'd say it's relative. I've used Nautilus on an install of RedHat 7.2 at school on a 330 MHz Pentium, and I thought it was a bit slow, but usable.

Although sometimes it wants to just sit there for a second or two rendering a directory... (I'd rather use a terminal anyway)

Re:Gnome help please

[glwtta]

Nautilus has made great strides speed-wise since 1.0 days - give the newest one a try.

(Not that I am pushing Gnome here, I use KDE myself.)

Re:Gnome help please

[Kourino]

As for the actual "edit mime types" menu link, it calls an old name of the capplet that handles file types. But yeah, my GMC associations are screwed and I'll be visiting GNOME IRC channels to (try to) fix it once I have my main computer back on the Internet. I'm kind of wary of trying Nautilus again, I didn't like the feel of it ^_^;

Re:Gnome help please

[VP]

is ANYTHING actually "unbelievably and unusably slow" on a 1.4GHz/DDR Athlon, 512M RAM???
It could be, if you don't have your hard disk optimized. Once I hdparm'ed my hard disk, everything is now flying both under GNOME and KDE...

Re:Gnome help please

[nanotron]

Yes, you can still edit your gmc mimetypes in /usr/share/mime-info/mc.keys

Restart gmc and you'll be cool...

Re:Gnome help please

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"is ANYTHING actually "unbelievably and unusably slow" on a 1.4GHz/DDR Athlon, 512M RAM???"

Start with your Windows or Linux PC
Install Bochs
Install Windows in Bochs
Install a playstation emulator in it
Play Tekken 3 on it

graspee

you got it backwards

[Xiphoid Process]

The fact there is a lot of code shared reduces memory usage and increases stability and speed becuase there is less code to optimise and maintain.

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it? NO!

[havardw]

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.

Re:put on the fire suit...

[demaria]

by the article submitter, slashdot editors, and moderators of course. Who else is there? :D

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[Bullschmidt]

Have you tried opera? No, its not open source, and the free version is ad ware, but I personally love their interface (pop up windows can't get out of control!) and the gestures are great! Small things, like the ability to turn off popup windows directly from the menu, are nice! Its really coming along!

Re:Am I that much of a geek ?

[Joe the Lesser]

Yes, I'm afraid, the counsel of the geeks has reviewed your case and sent the following decree:

'Let it be known that the above poster is indeed that much of a geek. We are glad to have him in our noble brotherhood.'

If I were you, I'd put that on my resume, it's quite an honor.

Re:Screen shots?

[xer.xes]

You want screenshots? Screenshots being served for you, sir!

http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/

Re:Just a note..

[aulendil]

It's gibberish in swedish too, but it's quiet obviously a description of what a gnome (you know one of those disgusting 'statues' kept in gardens all around britain)is, or for you swedes, en tomte.

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[ekrout]

I prefer Netscape because it enables users to really take advantage of the "blink" support...

Re:Swedish invasion

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, we know the porn will get better. Do swedes do anything else?

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[havardw]

Obviously you haven't tried a recent release of Galeon!

Re:Just a note..

[El Prebso]

We actually join pretty much everything, it saves spaces :-)

Re:Am I that much of a geek ?

[damiam]

Binary and source compatibility with GNOME 1.4 is broken in GNOME/GTK 2.0. It's compatible with earlier GNOME releases in the sense that you can have it installed on a system at the same time as an earlier version and it won't mess up the earlier version.

Gnome is very cool but...

[Mr_Perl]

I just can't get past clicking on an ugly foot to "start" my computing adventure.

Feet are smelly and nasty. I just don't want a foot on my desktop.

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.

Re:Gnome is very cool but...

[BigMeanBear]

then change it... mine is a tiger.

Re:Gnome is very cool but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Feet are for going places! You should feel lucky that you have them, unless...

Re:Gnome is very cool but...

[kigrwik]

> I just can't get past clicking on an ugly foot to "start" my computing adventure.

"experience", not "adventure".

Sorry, you failed Buzzwords101....

Who is he? Here's a hint:

[ArcticChicken]

Bork bork bork!

;-)

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:ALPHA Release, still plenty of bugs in builds

[grazzy]

i dont consider myself 'leet' but, uehm.. when i run into trouble with gnome/general window-apps '//' is a very good friend.. often its more efficient to comment out failing code than too try to fix it for us mere mortals. I've even commented out whole functions ( not the header, just the code and kept the return, hehe ) without breaking any obvious things..

Ofcourse, I wouldn't recommend this method since it might blow in your face anytime... but it works sometimes :)

wth?

[Ender Ryan]

What the hell are you talking about man?

Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon, Opera...

What's not to like about any of those? I especially like Galeon, as I use Gnome and I really like the tabbed browsing. Konq is also really good.

Mozilla is absolutely outstanding if you have a decent machine, 500MHZ (or thereabouts), and Opera is pretty good too.

Is it any faster though?

[gmplague]

My favorite window manager combination had always been Gnome/Enlightenment. That is, of course, until nautilus came into the picture and messed everything up. Now it's horribly slow, slow to load programs, doesn't match up well with enlightenment (unless of course you set Enlightenment's background to Nautilus', and don't care about seeing icons in your translucent terminals) I just want to know if this is any faster and if it resolves some of those issues. (P.S. I've since been using windowmaker, which i'm pretty happy with until E18)

Re:Is it any faster though?

[xer.xes]

Uhmmm... I'll tell you before anyone else will.. You don't have to use Nautilus... Just use the rest of GNOME and drop Nautilus if you don't like it...

Re:Is it any faster though?

[koekepeer]

hehe E18, as if that will happen in the forseeable future. E17 is still very much in the works, and still lacks a lot of features. it will be nice though.

mod me & parent down: off topic :-P

Re:put on the fire suit...

[WiPEOUT]

Eyecandy?!? From the screenshots posted elsewhere, it doesn't even come close to MacOS X and Windows XP. GNOME still has quite a way to go.

Good on the GNOME team for getting as far as it has in the time it has taken.

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[damiam]

and the gestures are great!

Note that the Galeon has allowed turning off popups forever, and the most recent development version has gesture support too.

Meanies?

[Liquid(TJ)]

...and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly retarded user interface.

Geez, they don't have to be so hard on themselves...

Re:GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha: "Rolig Liten Hattgubbe

[xer.xes]

This is just a copy&paste of the article to which the slashdot story links.. Thanks for wasting my bandwidth...

Mirror of the dot.plan site (includes screenshots)

[Turmio]

To relieve the stress on GNOME web server, I've mirrored the whole dot.plan site here:
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/gnome2-alpha1/
Also the screenshots can be found there.

Show me the slashdot effect :)

Re:put on the fire suit...

[4of12]

highly regarded user interface? by whom?

Well, by any of us that have been suffering under CDE, GNOME represents an improvement.

OTOH, if your talking about other user interfaces such as KDE, WinXP, MacOS 9,X, then you might get only one raised eyebrow instead of two at the prospect of GNOME.

Re:Swedish invasion

[QuickFox]

Well, we know the porn will get better.

Well, the porn here at /. could use some improvement. I hope I'm not hurting anyone's feelings here, but, to put it bluntly, I don't really find the goatse image very exciting.

Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

Swedish - Norwegian translation

[xmda]

"Rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish and translates to "Funny little hat-man"

And as a side-note, it translates *almost* pefectly to the Norwegian phrase "Calm little hat-man"... :) See how much difference a little word can do.

Highly Regarded User Interface

[Y-Crate]

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

:D

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[maddman75]

Yes, but my philosophy is why bother to load up a GUI if its not going to look good. IMO, GNOME simply has a better look and feel than KDE - I currently run Mandrake 8.0, with Gnome, Nautilus, and Sawfish. Very slick interface. It is a bit slow because of all the bells and whistles, but it looks good. If I just want speed I'll drop to a console.

As far as apps, I have KDE installed and can use them if need be. I look forward to the stable release of GNOME 2.0.

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+

[xer.xes]

There's a whole new file selection widget in Gnome/GTK 2.0.. It's very nice, and looks much like the Win32 file selection dialog (but of course, it's better because it's open source and all that :))

Re:My biggest complaint about Gnome/Gtk+

[nrc]

Hmm. I just tried this and it preserved the file name as I switched directories. I'm running Ximian Gnome and I think they replaced the normal file selector with their own, somewhat improved version.

Re:My biggest complaint about Gnome/Gtk+

[PlaysWithMatches]

I have a similar complaint. I'm not sure if this is a problem with GNOME/GTK+ or if it's a matter of bad coding, but a lot of GTK+ apps I've used have a really annoying flaw in file open/save dialogs. If I enter a path in the file text box (such as /tmp/ or ~/docs/), it tries to open that directory as if it were a regular file. Of course, it fails, and the resulting error/crash depends on the program.

It may seem trivial, but honestly, I don't want to point and click my way through multiple levels of directories in a file dialog box. It's much quicker for me to type ~/docs/ than to click around to /home, then to thochman, then to docs, and then double-click on a file.

Again, I don't know if this is a flaw in GTK+ or simply a matter of sloppy programming, but I still think it's pretty annoying. The GTK+ file dialog should be smart enough to simply change to a given directory when one is typed in, and not try to return it as a filename. Seemingly minor UI irritations like this can really add up, and make for a less than pleasant user experience.

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:My biggest complaint about Gnome/Gtk+

[bshuttleworth]

What is more, there is a new file-select dialog coming thanks to Chris at Ximian (at some point) - Michael Meeks has the screenshot

BARF !

[Augusto]

Sorry, but GNOME just look butt ugly on it's default install, and default installs are what matter (so please, spare me the themes, color changes, etc.)

The only visual improvement I see is the icons on the Gnome Control Center, they look kind of nice.

The buttons on the "taskbar" on the bottom on the other hand are such a waste of space. Too big and too much empty space there.

The indicator that a menu or toolbar is draggable is too cluncky and distracting.

And draggable toolbars are a waste of time. Just because Windows does it, doesn't mean it's a good idea. That's probably one of the stupidest UI design decision since the one button mouse !

Re:BARF !

[Mulletroll]

Just some clues:

All of the icons in Gnome/Nautilus look great, but they don't scale down very well (like in menus)

You can resize the icons on the task bar, from really big to really small.

You can disable draggable toolbars/menus (and thus the handle) through the control center for all GNOME apps.

Re:BARF !

[Augusto]

The best setup should be the default setup. It's nice you can disable the draggable menus, but that's not the default option, thus most people won't.

As for the handle, it's not that there shouldn't be one, it's just that's it's a very distracting graphical object just for expressing a "hint" (hey , you can drag this).

When you have a couple of draggable toolbars and menus next to each other, the "handle" looks like some random garbage.

my only question

[nege]

I use Gnome daily at home as my main desktop...i think it works fine right now, my only question is "will it run faster"? it seems pretty slow in comparison with say KDE. I like it more though...

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[benploni]

You'll notice that I didn't mention looks. Both KDE and GNOME are so visually configurable, that anyone can make either look the way they like it. Seriously, neither has a looks advantage, although KDE's "styles" model is more powerful and faster.

I'll leave taste out of it. KDE is just technically waaaay ahead of GNOME.

Re:One Small Step

[mangu]

I have just this last week managed to get my GPL game (that's Grand Prix Legends, not a software licence) to work at a consistent 36 frames per second in my Windows box. Considering the game was released in 1997, and I bought it in 1998, that's a pretty long time to get a software correctly installed. The only reason why Windows installation seems easy is because it's done by someone else at the factory.

By comparison, my first Linux install was in 1995, an Yggdrasil (kernel 1.2.13) on a 386/33MHz/8Mb. It took two hours to have a text console, and two more to learn how to set up the Tseng ET4000 for X-Windows. Later, I learned how to set the Mitsumi CD-ROM parameters before booting, so a full Yggdrasil install would take no more than 20 minutes.

Last time I installed Linux on a server, Conectiva 7 in a Dell PowerEdge 2400 with 10krpm SCSI disks, it took me about five minutes to enter the configuration data and five more minutes to load and install the 900+ packages from the CD. Upgrading to newer versions is even easier: just type "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" at the console. That's much faster than typing your credit card number to get a new version of Windows.

Packages, get your packages

[Nailer]

The GNOME people don't always provide packages when they announce something has been released. So if you're looking for packages, try

* Ximian's Red Carpet - nightly CVS GNOME is avaliable is the GNOME Preview channel. Just grab tonights :). This is for all Linux distros.

* Red Hat's Gnomehide (GIYF), if you're running 7.2. Hopefully Havoc should update it to the Alpha soon, but you can use it now - my work has about 3000 packages for Red Hat 7.2 is our APT repository and GNOMEhide installs just fine.

(u|li)nix fonts

[jtdubs]

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

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:(u|li)nix fonts

[kawaichan]

Although I have never used OS X before, but from all the screehshots I've seen, those Japanese fonts look really good, the best I've seen.

As for Linux, I use KDE and fonts look hidous @ default but after you import all the true type fonts from your Windows installation the AAed fonts looks way better than WinXP's AA.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[hattig]

I fully agree. I am running RH7.2 with KDE and Liquid (fully antialiased everywhere) on my machine and it is wonderful. But if it wasn't for the "Helmet" font that comes with RH7.2, I would be sorely miffed. Especially as KDE seems to want to use the fantasy font "Arioso" for everything half the time without my permission. Argh! Sorted it out now because the problem was an older KDE setup on NFS when I ran it on FreeBSD and directly used the Windows truetype fonts.

Heh, "helmet". Snigger.

But how do I enable subpixel antialiasing in KDE? I have a nice TFT monitor, and it would be nice to make even more use of it!

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[Jagasian]

If Unix has bad fonts, then how can OSX have good fonts? I mean, I thought that OSX was Unix based. If so, then by reductio ad absurdum, the proposition that "Unix has bad fonts" is absurd.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[abe ferlman]

This is true in the general case, but there are exceptions. Try comparing Courier size 36 between MS Word XP and Openoffice. I updated my resume this morning in openoffice, then tried opening it in word at work: and the Courier font at size 36 in Openoffice looked like letters while in word it looked like one of those 50x50 pixel digital photos you used to pay $10 for at the science center in the '80s.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[Webmonger]

Don't be a dink. By the same logic I could say that the existence of tailless dogs makes the statement "dogs have tails" absurd. OSX is a special case of Unix, in every sense of the word "special".

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[statusbar]

That is a very good point. I just used TinkerTool to shut off the font anti-aliasing on my mac osx box, and was very surprised about how bad the standard fonts looked!

One thing though that Mac OSX does very nicely is the multi-level ligatures. I haven't yet seen an app on linux that even has the concept. is there one?

jeffk

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[Sentry21]

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.

I have to say that the rendering in the GNOME screenshots I see is, while better than none in some ways, ass ugly in other ways.

My personal favourite antialiasing engine is the one in the Macintosh shareware control panel SmoothType, which does a great OSX-style job of rendering fonts, and is surprisingly fast too.

before and after screenshots as examples. The FT2 rendering seems similar, but there's just something ugly about it that rubs me the wrong way.

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.

FT2 indeed does have beautiful antialiasing, though I can't say whether XP does or not. Most of the fonts Windows uses (in my experience) are not antialiased (MS Sans Serif for example), nor are the common file sizes (12 pt or something), so unless it's changed big-time in XP (which wouldn't surprise me) you don't gain a whole lot from MS Antialiasing.

On a related note, anyone know of antialising render engine replacements for Windows 98?

--Dan

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[ClosedSource]

Perhaps there are conversion issues invovled. Have you tried Word XP's native Courier new at size 36? It doesn't look bad to me.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[MobyTurbo]

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.

There's a nice little script included in XFree86 4.x tools called fetchmsttfonts (type that in carefully :-) ) that will (legally, believe it or not) download and install MS's true type fonts. Try it out, you'll get good Arial, Times New Roman, etc.

BTW, it sends MS's EULA through your pager, press q to exit it to go to the next step.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[Jagasian]

A proposition with unbound variables implies universal closure (i.e. use of universal quantification over the unbound or unquantified variable). Not quantifying "Unix" in the proposition implies "all implementations of Unix". Basically, in the english language, lack of quantification implies universal quantification, except in specific cases. I mean, english is, however, context sensitive.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[Anonymous Coward]

Fyi your not allowed to "take" the fonts from your windows partition and use it own another OS.

Besides that kinda defeats the purpose doesn't it? Linux out of the box without a lot of fiddling or "borrowing" fonts from another OS has shitty fonts. End of Story. I am not happy about it, but I also don't make lame excuses for linux having a shitty font system.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[epukinsk]

...running Win2K, a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Solaris boxen.

First of all, "boxen" is a ridiculous term. Second of all, if it is too be used, it should be used as a plural. As I understand, it is a play on the -en ending in German (and/or feasably other northern european languages) which is quite common.

Eine Box, zwei Solarisboxen.

One box, two solaris boxen.

-Erik

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[jtdubs]

The problem is that unix-based is not unix. Yes, Mac OS X is unix-based. Which parts of it are unix-based is what you seem to be unclear on.

The kernel is unix-based. The file-system structure and memory-management is unix-based. The networking is unix-based. The GUI is not.

Mac is only partially derived from unix.

Unix DOES have bad fonts. Horrible ones. The Unix GUI is horrible.

The Mac GUI is not the unix gui and DOES have beautiful fonts.

Anyway, my point is, if you are going to go off on a rant about closure and quantification than you should have avoided the phrase unix-based as this phrase indicates not equality but similarity and therefore, I believe, my statements were in fact not contradictory.

By the way, Windows 2000 is also unix-based in some respects. It uses the BSD networking code and other unix-ish things. Therefore, I must also have been indicating that Windows has horrible fonts.

Anyway, have a good night,

Justin Dubs

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[yomegaman]

Ugh, who would use such a large serif font anyway?

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[kilrogg]

Fyi your not allowed to "take" the fonts from your windows partition and use it own another OS.

Because you're supposed go to rpmfind and install the rpm instead?

FYI, the MS eula is in the rpm.

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[Des Herriott]

Read this

(Google is your friend!)

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[jcupitt65]

pango does ligatures and other compound characters very nicely, and it's the thing that does text rendering in gtk2:

http://www.pango.org

ie. every gnome2 application will automatically do this in most places

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[Mr. Quick]

try this: corefonts

and this:
webfonts

Re:(u|li)nix fonts

[be-fan]

Umm, Linux doesn't have a "shitty font system." Most of its older apps are braindead with respect of fonts, because the classic X font system IS shitty, but most apps based on modern versions of GTK+ or Qt can use the excellent Xft font system and its high-quality FT2-baesd renderer. The only thing it lacks is quality free fonts. If you don't want to take fonts from your windows partition, go download the free WebFonts from MS's website (which include all the important ones). If you just plain don't like MS, download QNX RtP or BeOS PE (which have some nice fonts as well) and use those. If you don't want to even do that, bite the bullet and pay the $200 (for 10 fonts) to Monotype to buy some eye-gasmic ESQ typefaces. If you're needs are less intensive than that (although you should buy Arial from Monotype anyway, since you'll be staring at it the most) go to www.buyfonts.com and buy some lower priced ones from EFF.

Parent is indeed funny, but run them both.

[einhverfr]

I am glad they modded you up as funny...

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 ;)). 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...

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...

GNOME 2.0 in March but ...

[stevebhk]

Will we be able to run it on XFree86 4.2 by then? It'd be nice to make the upgrade a REALLY clean one.

Re:GNOME 2.0 in March but ...

[damiam]

Yup.

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[rhavyn]

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.

By someone who hates C++

[mangu]

Any programmer who is proficient at both Gtk and Qt, and who doesn't mind Qt's less than kosher origin (by the FSF standards), will take KDE anytime, just for the added convenience of an IDE that closely mimics the Visual C++ interface where most programmers learned C++. Although Visual C++ may have a few "convenience features" that Kdevelop lacks, Qt has such a nice, practical, and intuitive API that I, being a programmer who sometimes must do GUI stuff, would choose KDE based on that one item.

Re:By someone who hates C++

[EnderWiggnz]

of course Visual C++ doesnt make a habit of eating your projects right before deadline.

its gotten to the point where i jump into KDevelop, slap down some widgets, pray it doesnt eat my project, and then go back into emacs for serious editting.

of course, its SoOOOoOOo much easier to actually to code to than the Gnome monstrosity...

Re:By someone who hates C++

[lunatik17]

closely mimics the Visual C++ interface where most programmers learned C++

Speak for yourself :-P

Re:By someone who hates C++

[anthony_dipierro]

How well does QT run on Windows? This isn't meant to be a rhetorical question. I've been using GTK for windows/linux development and haven't run into a platform specific bug yet.

Re:By someone who hates C++

[mangu]

The guy across my cube runs KDE on Cygwin. I haven't heard any oh-shit's from him lately.

Re:By someone who hates C++

[anthony_dipierro]

Is cygwin necessary?

Re:put on the fire suit...

[cbv]

OTOH, if your talking about other user interfaces such as KDE, WinXP, MacOS 9,X, then you might get only one raised eyebrow instead of two at the prospect of GNOME.

You are kidding, right? Or do you really want to imply GNOME's superiority over Mac OS X ?

*rotfl* Thanks, you made my day ...

Stop the nonsense, and think for a minute...

[Adrian Voinea]

I hate all these dumb posts that say: "this pointless competition between GNOME and KDE is only holding LINUX back."

Funny, because competition between GNOME and KDE is *EXACTLY* what has made both GNOME and KDE so mature and stable.

Why don't you send this kind of messages to gnome-devel-list or kde-devel-list?
I'm sure you'll hear a lot of things you don't expect (such as that the GNOME vs KDE war does not exist).

Re:Stop the nonsense, and think for a minute...

[JamesKPolk]

No, GNOME really hasn't improved KDE much, except for where certain formats got standardized for cooperationg with GNOME. I doubt KDE has influenced GNOME much either, especially since they're using Gecko now instead of the khtmlw-based html renderer.

KDE developers, and probably GNOME developers, don't care about the other environment usually. It's not a positive influence, it's not a negative one. It's not an influence *at all*.

If you send GNOME-related stuff to kde-devel you're just going to get told to go elsewhere, or ignored.

Re:Stop the nonsense, and think for a minute...

[ambrosius27]

I'm not so sure you're right on this one. I don't keep up with KDE so much, so I can't speak fo them, but KDE comes up not infrequently on the GNOME lists. Sometimes, the comments are, "hey, KDE does it this way, which is kind of neat! Maybe we should think about this." Sometimes, the comments are "hey, KDE does it this way, which kind of sucks. We should avoid this." Having a point of comparison on Unix/BSD/Linux desktops is a good thing. The GNOMErs do care about KDE, believe it or not. From what I gather, KDE cares about GNOME too.

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[einhverfr]

I assume you are trolling if you mention emacs and smooth user interface in the same breath (I am not that biased, I would say the same to you if you mentioned vi instead). Vi and emacs amy be industrial-strength code and text editors, but paring that with a smooth user interface just is not possible due to the complexity of the functions required of the software...

On to web browsers. I am writing this in Konqueror, so be aware of this bias. I think that there are several Really Annoying Things about Internet Explorer which detract not from the user experience of the product but rather the user experience of the internet itself. Konqueror 2.2.2 gets rid of all these, most notibly pop-up windows.

Wait, I am sure you will say-- who worries abotu pop-up windows when you are not surfing for Pr0n? If you ask that question, I will ask you which cave you have been living in for the past few years... Popups are everywhere and they really do detract from the general experience of the web. Right now, I am trying to decide whether to try to get my parents to switch from Mozilla to Konqueror...

Try it and you may find that it amazes you too!

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[glwtta]

I loved Opera on Windows and used in exclusively way back when I was an MS bitch. But on Linux its just lacking for some reason - just isn't "linuxy"

Galleon is probably currently the best browser for Linux, though I personally use Konqueror since it integrates so well with the rest of KDE. Imagine that, choosing one browser over another because it comes with your environment and works well with it... weird eh? ;)

That's an easy bug

[mangu]

Delete the *.kdevses file from your project directory and you get your project back. Or upgrade KDevelop.

Re:That's an easy bug

[EnderWiggnz]

that would imply upgrading versions of QT, too...

cant - too friggin' big.

Re:put on the fire suit...

[garf]

Agreed, it's all chunky...

H&Ks
garf

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[zank]

I use KDE and have always loved Konqueror, checking out Mozilla now and then to see what's happening. My feelings have always been the same: terrible loading times and just a general slowness in just about every aspect.

So when I recently downloaded a nightly build I did not have high hopes, but was I wrong! The startup time was much improved and everything just felt so much smoother, both the interface and the rendering.

I also love the ability to use tabs for all the pages, instead of having windows all over the place.

Saying that there isn't a decent browser for Linux is complete BS IMHO, I can't find anything that IE does better than Mozilla except having support for those damn QT and Shockwave formats and a large userbase of clueless HTML-coders thinking IE is the only browser in existance.

Looking forward to the 1.0 release.

Re:put on the fire suit...

[friedmud]

Actually he was saying that Gnome wouldn't be very welcome to people who use things like OSX, WinXP, and KDE.

I take "One eye-brow" to be a "whatever" kind of look - and "two eye-brows" to be an excited kind of look that only someone using CDE on Solaris would give to the prospect of using Gnome.

Personally - I don't see how Gnome has a chance in all of this. KDE just has too much eye-candy (Especially with the Mosfet liquid engine) and is way more usable, I know I know the whole damned QT thing. But you know what? I like coding in QT, and I think Trolltech is a fine company. It is certainly better than using a non-object oriented C API.

Derek

What? No Mastercard posts?

[mangu]

Computer: $1000

Window$XP: $300

Linux CD: $10

Dual-booting Linux and using M$ only for the Intellimouse and SideWinder joystick: priceless.

Re:What? No Mastercard posts?

[richie2000]

consider it worth every penny I spent.

Pirate! :-)

it's not just how they look ...

[timothy]

it's that the entire fonts system on *nix machines is esoteric enough that all the fiddling with suitcases etc on the Mac (as of several years ago at least -- I really haven't played with the fonts on my iBook) is nothing in comparison.

The fonts available to AbiWord are not the same ones available to the GIMP, for instance, and I'm not sure -- though I haven't pursued -- how to change this. (KWord seems to find the same fonts as the GIMP, though.)

If I could earmark money toward a useability project for either or both (or any, depending on who's counting) of the Big Desktops, it would be a prettier / friendlier / easier font-control mechanism. Drag and drop, dammit! :) It's nice that both KDE and GNOME now have antialiasing, but I really wish there was a single spot I could drag a downloaded font and know it would then be available to every application which uses fonts ...

The *next* thing I'd like to earmark money for is an easy to use and freely licensed font-creation tool :) Even if it could be used mostly to create ugly fonts, as long as the capability to creat new / better / improved ones existed, I bet a few nice ones would soon float to the top ...

Perhaps there really is a nice free font-creation program under Linux / UNIX, I just don't know about it if so.

In short, I agree and then some!

timothy

Re:it's not just how they look ...

[90XDoubleSide]

it's that the entire fonts system on *nix machines is esoteric enough that all the fiddling with suitcases etc on the Mac (as of several years ago at least -- I really haven't played with the fonts on my iBook) is nothing in comparison.

Apple has further simplified fonts in OS X by using data-fork TrueType font files (.dfont) instead of suitcases, although old suitcase TrueType fonts, bitmap fonts, and PostScript fonts are still supported (Note also that Mac OS X comes with 100s of dollars of fonts, and they aren't exaggerating, those suckers are expensive! Mmmm, Copperplate Gothic:). They also have drastically increased the max number of fonts to save you from having to make sets, and OS X automatically loads fonts in the OS 9 system folder as well as those in the OS X font library and the user's font library, so you will automatically have every font in either format from either version of the OS available to every application.

Abiword also ...

[Kourino]

... has hit its pre-major-release alpha/beta cycle. AbiWord 0.99.1 is available for download from their SourceForge project page, although it hasn't been announced on abisource.com yet, oddly enough. You can even get $(SYSTEM_PACKAGE_FILE_FORMAT)s for it.

Konqueror is the smoothest browser.

[mangu]

Having the ability to forbid javascript to pop-up tons of ads and having the ability to define the size of the smallest fonts, without magnifying the largest fonts, is pretty much my definition of a "smooth user experience" in a web browser. After I learned how to set up macromerdia flash to display on Konqueror, I never used any other browser.

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[aardvarkjoe]

I second this. I, for one, absolutely cannot understand why there is not a single functional, stable, semi-standards-compliant browser in existance. (For Linux, Windows, or any other OS. IE is relatively decent, although it fails on the last two.)

Hey, I'd even settle for just stable. In fact, I use lynx a lot, because I've only managed to crash it once or twice, but it seems rather silly to me that I'm stuck using a text browser in this day and age, because none of the graphical browsers work correctly. Can someone explain to me exactly why stable browsers just don't exist?

(For the record, I'm using Opera now. It's somewhat more reliable than Mozilla & friends, and is faster and works with more pages. However, it's not good by a long shot.)

What about Galeon?

[Kourino]

And I'm not mentioning this just for the generic "smaller footprint than Mozilla", "it's Mozilla Lite", etc etc etc stuff that gets repeated everywhere.Since Galeon 1.0 released, I've used it extensively and said to myself, "This is kind of like Internet Explorer ... only better."Fullscreen is bound to the same key even (although i hacked it to F10 since I use F11 for windows list), it has a similar feel to the app windows (suitably translated to the GNOME look/feel du theme). Its preferences window is IMO prettier than IE's (for me, a system not only has to be usable and powerful but aesthetically pleasing :), and international support is just as good (eg, Japanese fonts load/display correctly, and I've only seen Korean displayed under Galeon). Add to that the tabbed browsing (I do prefer the Galeon version, even though it's not all THAT different) and you've got a really nice product. And yes, there ARE plugins :)I started out with Mozilla and kind of tolerated it (since my FIRST browser was Netscape), but Galeon is (for me) the nicest browser I've used. Certainly it can compete with IE, and I'd bet it's more secure :) You also have other good choices ... old Netscape and Emacs users will like Mozilla for the "kitchen-sink" perspective ( -_^ ), you've got official Netscape 6 releases for Unix (well, at least for Solaris, probably not Linux-based systems), Konqueror (which is REALLY popular among KDE users and said to be a very high quality product), and Opera (which is also a Win32 product, or at least was). Certainly we have good browsers, at least IMO.

Re:What about Galeon?

[osu-neko]

Galeon is definately the best browser I've ever used, and I've used quite a few since the NCSA Mosaic days... I have to admit, though, when I pull up the same page in Konqueror and compare side by side, Galeon is butt-ugly. On those occasions when Konqueror manages to render the page correctly, it's quite a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as usable as Galeon -- hopefully with GNOME 2.0 bringing anti-aliasing, we can finally get the best of both worlds...

Re:What about Galeon?

[shaji]

Here is why I use galeon

1. Galeon can be antialiased even if you do not have GNOME 2.0, see http://gdkxft.sf.net. Also see the screenshot http://users.starpower.net/shaji/galeon.jpg
2. You can disable popups windows.
3. You can disable banner ads. ( Block images from this site, try it on ads.doubleclick.net etc..)
4. Excellent full screen, you can configure what you want to see(menubar, toolbar etc.) in fullscreen. (Internet Explorer - it is time to learn from galeon.)
5. Faster start up, like mozilla quick launch on Windows. (Start galeon with "galeon -s", when you startup the window manager or gnome session. Galeon will now be launched faster than ever).
6. Cool search boxes can be added to your toolbar. Look at the above screenshot for "google" search and debian package search.
7. Can set up shockwave, real, java and pdf plugins.
8. SSL support.
9. Tabbed browsing.
10. Easily change short cut keys. Select the menu option with the mouse and press the desired key.
11. Excellent cookie, password and form management.
12. Autocompletion using TAB.
13. Last but not least, it is faster than light.

Re:What about Galeon?

[draxil]

Yes galeon IS amazing. This is what can happen when you can use oneanothers source code, the mozilla team write a fantastic rendering engine which leaves the galeon people to engineer an amazing UI. Long live the revolution :)

And if anyone mentions IE around here then pah! I have to use IE at work and at home I have Moz & Galeon & lynx & links and I think that the first two have definatly surpassed IE and the second two don't have to becuase they do their own thing. Oh and Konquorer is quite impressive as well. Basically with a choice like this why does anybody bother to ty and tell (linux, bsd etc) users that IE somekind of wonder product, when I think it's being left far beind. IMO. Sorry this has got horrably off topic and ranty, I am going to go have a coffee........

KDE or Gnome on Solaris?

[GarryOwen]

I was just wondering if anyone had any experience with KDE or Gnome on Solaris 8 for Sparc? Which did you feel is a better interface for a Sparc and why? Thanks in advance.

Re:KDE or Gnome on Solaris?

[jmorris42]

Downloaded Gnome to a Sparc20 (9GB HDD, 224MB Ram, SX & CG6 framebuffers) planning to try it out. It offers the choice on the login screen but if I pick GNOME it thinks a bit and returns to the login screen.

So my review is "Sucks". :)

Gnome runs fine on my Thinkpad+RH7.2 though.

Re:KDE or Gnome on Solaris?

[penguin_nipple]

I am running gnome 1.4 on a Solaris Ultra Sparc 5 and had that same problem for a few minutes until I realized that the path for the gnome libs wasn't being added to my library path properly. You might want to echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH when logging into an alternate wm. If the path to your gnome libs isn't there (ie /opt/gnome-1.4/lib), you might wanna make sure it is exporting properly. If you're using Solaris, then simply add the addtional export to your .profile in your home and gnome will boot fine.

Anyhow hope this helps you out as your description is exactly what my Ultra Sparc 5 was doing. And IMHO, GNOME on Solaris rocks...FINALLY a modern environment for the beauty that is a Sun Machine!

Re:Swedish invasion

[scorcherer]

Mr. Torvalds is one of the Swedish-speaking minority of the Finnish.

Shockwave, at least ...

[Kourino]

Shockwave support can be achieved through use of Macromedia's plugin if your browser supports Netscape-style plugins. From personal experience, it's quite good ... it plays the Glove on Fight movies flawlessly. It used to have timing issues with that Zero Wing thing, but under Galeon 1.x it seems to be fine.I haven't tried KDE yet, so I don't know much about Konqueror ...

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[phajek]

Allright? Who mod'ed this clown to 2 with his unsubstantiated "KDE is just technically waaaay ahead of GNOME"????

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[praedor]

The numbers/version game is NOT a good indicator of how good/nice/developed the two desktop systems are. I am a KDE user - I LIKE KDE and eagerly await KDE 3.0 but I certainly do not consider the still pending release of Gnome 2.0 to mean that Gnome is automatically behind KDE 2.0.

The version numbers are meaningful mainly within the development tree, not external to it. Gnome 2.x is not equivalent to KDE 2.x, it is simply a full version beyond Gnome 1.0 and thus it should include bug fixes, improvements, and new features relative to the previous version, that's all.

Most learned in Visual C++?

[DrCode]

It's possible, but not for us old-timers. I learned C using Emacs on a VAX, C++ using Emacs on a SparcStation.

And I learned to build GUI's using the GEM Resource Editor on an AtariST. Maybe that's why I prefer the GTK-Glade-LibGlade-Emacs combination to any IDE.

Re:Most learned in Visual C++?

[Graspee_Leemoor]

Ok so I am not a real old-timer- I learned C with djgpp for DOS (and later a somewhat less than legal version of Watcom (hey- I was unemployed)). The thing is I remember struggling with my first GUI program; why the hell was it so difficult to bring up a window with a text box in it? The reason is that despite the fact that I had done lots of work with interrupts under DOS, the whole event-driven programming model threw me through a hoop.

Also the speed of gui programs disappointed me since I had been writing games (there was no directx yet).

Slightly offtopic- just another programmer's fond memories of their first c environment. (I liked reading about other people's).

graspee

copy and paste in kde3 /gnome 2

[johanneswilm]

does anybody know wheter normal copy and paste will work between kde 3 and gnome 2. i can copy out of gnome and into any kde app, but not the other way round...

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[DrXym]

Konq is okay for browsing but if you want something to render just about anything you can throw at it then mozilla wins hands down. It is a great browser. I haven't noticed it being any slower at all. As long as you have the memory to load it up it renders extremely quickly.

Aside from that I also happen to like Mozilla because of the integrated mail & news, and the powerful bookmarking features - drag and drop & edit in-place, aliases etc. much better than any other browser I've seen.

Unfortunate trend..

[Junta]

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...

Re:Unfortunate trend..

[Sentry21]

Backwards compatibility and the code required is one of the things that has screwed Windows up so badly. That being said, Windows had backwards compatibility in the same way GTK/GNOME will.

Not only do they have to support Win32 in Win95, but they also have to support Win16, which was different, and DOS, which was radically different. How did they do it? New libraries. 32-bit libs, 16-bit libs, and the DOS crud. 16-bit apps don't load the 32-bit libs Win95/98/etc. use.

Thus, it is similar to GNOME/GTK. You can't compile a GTK1.2 app against the GTK2.0 libs, but you can compile it against GTK1.2, and they can coexist (or at least, they did on my box when I was testing GTK1.3, the GTK2 test version).

All it means is that you will have to have GTK1.x libs installed, and GTK2.x libs installed if you want to use both. GTK3.x will require a new set of libs.

Maintaining source/binary compatibility would cause too many problems, since the GLib/GDK/GTK/Pango/blahblah scenario is being totally redone. It's easier to let old apps use old libs, and write new apps (or rewrite old apps) with new libs.

--Dan

Re:Unfortunate trend..

[levinas]

That is the bigest load of bs. One of the advantages of open source is that you are able to chuck out ideas which do not work in hind sight since the older version can still be supported. For example, usb support was back ported to the 2.2 series of kernels even though it was in the 2.4 series, The nature of open source allows this advantage. Try getting usb to work on windows 95 or NT and you will see what I mean.

If you wish to use the old api, just download and compile the old version of gtk+ and use any application that uses this libaray. you will find thay they work fine side by side.

I think that it is impossible to compare how things work on a closed system and how they work on an open system the way that you have. sorry

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.

in the current release of slackware...

[pixel fairy]

disclaimer: i change interfaces on a whim, or by project. sometimes even aewm or 9wm...

the kde that ships with the current slackware is dated, but solid. kde 2.2.2 compiles and installs out of the box (except the kdeaddons package) this takes a very long time, so script the process and let it run overnight or over the weekend. i installed it over the kde 2.1 that it came with, which was probably not a good idea, but hasnt given me any trouble.

gnome is not as dated and the only parts thats given me any problems was nautilus. its not a well featured as ximian gnome.

since its a new computer, you can easily just install everything except that youll probably want reiserfs (press F1 and F2 at the lilo (boot) prompt for the 2.4.5 kernel, then it gives the option when you format, then when you install, dont select "just install everything" because that will install the 2.2 kernel which will kernel panic)

for speed, efficiency, etc, you may want to look at something more lightwieght, like xfce or just a window manager. (wmaker, fvwm2, enlightnement(depending on theme/settings) etc) it all depends on what your used to and what your doing.

gnome-terminal / Eterm work well in KDE, the konqueror in 2.2.2 is nice no non-sense browser when you want that. and/or download the latest mozilla or netscape, they work much better than the versions provided.

overall kde has been more "complete" but its nothing you cant fix yourself just by toying with it.

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[Thurn und Taxis]

The version numbers are meaningful mainly within the development tree, not external to it. Gnome 2.x is not equivalent to KDE 2.x, it is simply a full version beyond Gnome 1.0

Yeah, right. Next you'll be trying to tell me that Windows 2000 isn't 833.33 times better than Linux 2.4!

Gtk? No thanks

[crivens]

You know, I really hate the Gtk toolkit; I find it so clumsy to look at, and so clunky.

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[rhavyn]

Tell me what it is you're referring about and perhaps I can respond. As far as I've seen, the biggest difference between KDE 2.2 and 3 is they're using Qt 3 now. And I can't really say that Qt 3 impresses me very much. OK, they added database aware widgets, I'll use Gnome-db.

rep-gtk-gnome2 building

[Hagmonk]

rep-gtk-gnome2 seems to be screwed when I try and build it. There are PKG_CHECK_MODULES tokens in the configure script which make it barf.

Any suggestions to fix this? Removing the tokens makes the problem go away, but the build subsequently fails as well. What's the deal?

Windowmaker compatibility

[Glytch]

Will GNOME 2 be as broken with Windowmaker as KDE 2 is?

Windows cut-and-paste

[Civil_Disobedient]

When I use Windows machines, lack of mouse-only copy and paste is the single biggest usability problem I have.

What? Windows has mouse-only cut-and-paste. In fact, I used it when quoting from your original post. Just highlight the text you want, click the right mouse button, choose cut, then go to where you'd like to paste it, click the right mouse button again, and choose paste.

If your post was meant as a joke, I'm sorry for not getting it, but I just wanted to set the record straight for those <sarcasm>occasional Linux users that come here</sarcasm> who might not be familiar with the Windows OS.

Re:Windows cut-and-paste

[Wolfkin]

Actually, you're right. I'd forgotten about that. Nevertheless, if you are used, as I am, to simply highlighting and middle clicking, it's a process of "highlight, click, 'Damn.', re-highlight, right-click or Ctrl-C, pulldown menu to 'Copy', right-click or Ctrl-V, pulldown menu to 'Paste', grumble, move on". :) I realize that if you do the Ctrl key thing, you don't have to pull down the menu.

This really is my biggest gripe with the Windows interface, though, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is some third-party tool that allows this out there, though I'm not aware of any.

Randall.

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it? NO!

[Graspee_Leemoor]

'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".'

Ok- this is not meant as flamebait- but I just wondered- do lots of other people find kde apps crash on them a hell of a lot?

I have used various (final) builds of kde on numerous different computers and hell, I do like it- I like the split window function in konqueror and its built-in terminal, I like kdevelop and kate, but god- do they crash!

For me the application which crashes the most is konqueror- probably because I use it the most. It normally goes down now in internet browsing mode (it used to be the file manager mode). Normally in the khtml renderer or the javascript module... We're talking about 5 crashes a day here.

I would be very interested to hear other people's experiences...

graspee

Re:Barely even caught up with KDE

[Anthony Boyd]

Pan is just as good or better than KNode

Well, since you bring it up, let me vent here: I think they both suck, but with just a few improvements, they could be excellent. That's totally frustrating.

Knode visually looks better, although that's mostly a function of KDE's widgets. But things like the Knode frames are great -- I can resize the left frame easily in Knode. In addition, it squishes the newsgroup names sensibly: comp.os.linux becomes c.o.linux when squished. Pan just cuts off the name, so you end up with 10 groups all starting with "comp.os.lin" and no idea what differentiates them. But anyway, what sucks about Knode is the crashing. First it crashes if I pull down too much -- say, 30,000 posts in a single newsgroup. Second, it will sometimes lockup when pulling down headers for a group, and if you try to switch to other groups, it can corrupt the groups list somehow. Last time I did this, the last 4 or 5 groups I subscribe to became permanently inaccessible. Not to mention the slowness, which is just a problem of how it's coded up -- it appears to grab a lot of info when it gets new article counts for each group. With XNews on Windows, this is nearly instantaneous. Oh, and did I mention it can't handle multipart binaries? Try hand-assembling an entire .iso on a newsgroup. Ugh.

Pan is a little faster, although it still seems programmed to do things like grab all the headers when I just want a count of new posts, but also, Pan doesn't seem to lock up ever. And Pan can handle multipart binaries. But the widget you have to click to resize frames is not intuitive, and I hate how the subject line is always a button, even if the subject all fit on the screen. But Pan has some really basic problems. I delete a line of text, think better of it, and try to undo. Whoops. No undo. Okay. I retype some lines, and add/remove some comments. The text won't reflow! Suddenly I've got a 95-character-wide line because I added some words. Manual reflowing -- I haven't had to do that in years. And buttons -- the subject line is a useless button mostly, but useful buttons, such as "followup to newsgroup", don't exist. So I'm memorizing key combos, which is okay, but making the high-traffic commands into buttons would sure be a user-friendly feature.

As you might note, I've been frustrated with these apps lately. I'm tempted to grab Agent or Xnews and run it in Wine, but I'd rather these Linux native apps get some TLC. Here's to hoping the developers are reading this stuff.

User-visible changes in GNOME 2.0

[soundsop]

For those of us who won't be downloading the development code but still want a sneak peak, here's a page that discusses user-visible changes in GNOME 2.0:

http://www106.pair.com/rhp/gnome-2-new.html

Re:GNOME should be scrapped!

[droolfool]

Man, when I had that obsolete machine like that, KDE took SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much time to load! KDE is VERY heavy too, don't be fooled by some pro-KDE guys. KDE is great, I like it a lot, but it's not even close to a light desktop.

Re:Hasn't anyone tryed rox-filer?

[tal197]

If there were just a little more support for not_really_lovers_of_rox_desktop_and_gnome_users and if it would support desktop backgrounds.

It does allow icons on the background but, unlike gmc, only if you turn the feature on. See the Pinboard Support section of the manual.

Integration with other GNOME apps should be pretty good, although many GNOME apps have hideously broken support for the XDND protocol.

Re:put on the fire suit...

[jonathan_ingram]

Archive browsing. Basic package management. Anything else even the simplest file manager can handle but Nautilus doesn't because the developers are too busy trying to get the HTML display somewhat stable or drawing purty themes.

Agreed. I was really happy when they announced that they'd be working on a replacement for GMC (which was a truly terrible hack of a file manager). However, they seem to have come up with something that has a very pretty shell, with no depth to it. How could they not put archive browsing in, for example? That alone means that I'm going to stick with Konqueror as my file manager.

$30 million developing the damn thing, and they couldn't spend the time to write some virtual filesystem drivers...

(that said - the binary NNTP file view for Nautilus mentioned in the recent Gnome news is pretty nice - but things like this should have been in place when Nautilus 1 was released, not years later).

Re:Upgrading GNOME worth it? NO!

[jonathan_ingram]

I tried out Mandrake 8.1 a while back, and couldn't believe how often everything crashed -- they must compile everything with '--make-unstable'. I switched to Redhat 7.2 (I know, I'm not a true diehard - been there, done that, now I want the easy life :), and with my own compiles of KDE very rarely see anything crash.

In fact (as you say), just about the only things that *do* crash are bits of Konqueror. Javascript in KDE2 is known to be a bit buggy -- it's been cleaned up and extended in KDE3, enough that it'll be enabled by default.

(KDE3's looking good, by the way - I advise you to switch to it when it comes out. Compile it yourself as well, it's just as easy as getting packages.)_

Gtk/Gnome's "OK" Button

[coaxial]

There's only one thing that I want changed, and that's the stock "OK" button. If you haven't noticed by now, the "OK" button has the "return" arrow on it. Why does this matter? It's the exact same image that is on my "enter" key. Everytime I see the that icon, I think, "That button looks just like the 'enter' key on my keyboard. That button must be associated with this key." Which isn't a problem if "OK" is the default, but alot of time it's not. Alot of times the default is "cancel".

But the icon on the keyboard doesn't indicate the default action. Instead a 5 pixel inset the exact same color of the dialog's background is placed around the default button.

Now I ask you, which is more eye catching, I a 20x20 color image, or a 4 thin black lines?

Which conveys a sense of what key is associtated with which button? A picture of what's on the key, or 4 thin black lines?

It's as if, you have a button marked "Q" and when you press it, you get "esc".

Re:put on the fire suit...

[Fillup]

You know what's funny about all the negative modding on this comment?

It started a huge discussion, and actually i don't think anybody disagreed with the original post!!!