Slashdot Mirror
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."
"Rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish and translates to "Funny little hat-man" (yes, it sounds ridiculous in my language too).
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
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...
And they said zombies weren't real!
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
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.
...are available here
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/
mmmmmmmm pretty.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
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.
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?
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
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.
It's only software!
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?
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.
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!
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
You want screenshots? Screenshots being served for you, sir!
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/
xer.xes -- 4181
I prefer Netscape because it enables users to really take advantage of the "blink" support...
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Obviously you haven't tried a recent release of Galeon!
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.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
Please all keep in mind, that this is a very much alpha style release.
;-)
.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.
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
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.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Note that the Galeon has allowed turning off popups forever, and the most recent development version has gesture support too.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Geez, they don't have to be so hard on themselves...
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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" = "Considered by 6 our of 10 users to be 'the least crappy one on Linux' "
:D
Note: this is not a troll.
:). 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.
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
A solution to the problem with music today
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 !
- sigs are for wimps.
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.
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.
The GNOME people don't always provide packages when they announce something has been released. So if you're looking for packages, try
:). This is for all Linux distros.
* Ximian's Red Carpet - nightly CVS GNOME is avaliable is the GNOME Preview channel. Just grab tonights
* 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.
I run RedHat on my main workstation and BSD on a bunch of my servers. I also have a PC running Win2K, a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Solaris boxen.
I by far prefer the working environment of linux to all of the others, aside from the Mac. Sorry, Mac OS 10.1 is absolutely fabulous.
The only thing about the unix environment, especially the linux environment, that really gets to me is the complete lack of good fonts.
Windows, love it or loathe it, has very nice true-type, well-hinted fonts. They are very easy to read, even when small. They have serif, they have sans-serif, and both are beautiful.
Mac OS 10.1 has even better fonts, I think, although many might disagree. Regardless, not far removed in quality from that of windows, whether better or worse.
However, what no will will disagree about is that the fonts in linux suck. They are ugly. They are unreadable when small. They are badly aliased. They need to be put out of their misery.
Some may think this is inconsiquential, but I feel otherwise. I believe that until linux can produce some wonderful fonts of it's own, and use them by default without having to install anything, and have every program use them, even old ones that were written before the fonts were around, linux will never be able to touch windows or mac on the desktop.
But, hey, I'm just talking here...
Justin Dubs
I am glad they modded you up as funny...
;)). The important thing is that you are installing the libraries for each one so that well written applications can be run in any X environment of your choosing...
But here is my experience which will no doubt get both sides flaming me, so I guess this is about as unbiased as you can get.
It depends on how you are going to use your box. I assume that you are planning on using it as a graphical workstation, and so the extra bloat of KDE and GNOME are not a real problem. Also I am assuming a relatively large hard drive since you specify that your computer is new.
I think that you will find yourself to be far less limited in how you use your system if you install both desktops on your system. Most (but not all) KDE applications run fine in GNOME and vice versa-- case in point, I am writing this on Konqueror within GNOME). In essence, you will have more flexibility and redundency if you install both and use whichever one you like more (you can even run WindowMaker, BlackBox, or a simple TWM if you really really want to
My advice is simple. Run them both if you can afford the additional hard drive space. For higher-end workstations, I much prefer GNUOME, but for that old Dev server, KDE was pretty good.
But then, I suppose both sides will see this as heresy...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
Steve Bougerolle, steveb@pacific.net.hk, http://home.pacific.net.hk/~steveb
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.
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
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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).
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!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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? ;)
sic transit gloria mundi
Delete the *.kdevses file from your project directory and you get your project back. Or upgrade KDevelop.
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.
:) 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 ...
:) 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 ...
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!
The *next* thing I'd like to earmark money for is an easy to use and freely licensed font-creation tool
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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
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.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
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.
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.
There is an unfortunate trend in most open-source projects that really needs to slow down. Gnome 2.x will be API incompatible with 1.x, and they are already planning a 3.x that will break 2.x compatibility. Sure, this sort of change means the available APIs can be very nice and slick and not have to suffer the clunkiness of older API design concepts, but it also means that people, organizations, and companies have a harder time maintaining products through time. As much as Windows irks me, they did keep backward compatibility right, similar to the x86 family. Not only are the latest Windows releases API compatible, but also ABI compatible with previous versions dating back to win16 and DOS days. Sure, your API is messy just as x86 assembly is messy, but I think that a lot of open source projects are getting to the point where they should decide on an ABI/API that is "good enough" to keep supporting through future versions. Sure, additions can be made, but breaking exisiting applications in the name of progress isn't popular among businesses that don't want to spend extra development time and money just to keep up with extreme API changes...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
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!
Will GNOME 2 be as broken with Windowmaker as KDE 2 is?
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Pirate! :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
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".