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.

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?

[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.

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.

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+

[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.

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: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.