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

[ajs]

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

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.

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."

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?

[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?

[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: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.

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:Screen shots?

[xer.xes]

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

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

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

[havardw]

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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+

[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.

(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.

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...

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.

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: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: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: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.

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..

[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.