Gnome 2.0 RC1

lurgyman writes "The GNOME Desktop 2.0 release candidate 1 has been released! It looks like it's finally on schedule for its projected June 21 release." The release notes have some good information.

Comments

time to ditch Microserf XP?

[WillSeattle]

Well, if we have a GNOME 2.0 release candidate, maybe it's time to finally ditch XP. What do you think, is there any reason for anyone to still own that anti-privacy OS anymore, or should we just make do with Win2K so we can play some games?

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Tyler Eaves]

Or just buy a Dreamcast...

A real steal...typically $50 for the system, and a controller. Games run $10-$20. Of course, if you can find theme, there are always the loki ports.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[phong3d]

Check out Best Buy and GameStop - they're clearing out their Dreamcast inventory, and if you do some scouring, you can pick up lots of stuff. I've picked up 5 games so far for $5 apiece, and some extra controllers to bank for when my current ones die. The only games I've seen that are still in the $40 - $50 range are recent sports titles.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[kingkade]

Yeah, I thought gnome 1 was pretty nice -- except for the time i logged in and my gnome panel refused to start -- kinda annoying. But i'm *sure* they fixed such things by now.

PS: Just wondering if someone can actually try this before saying it is better than windows XP or just leave god damn windows out of the discussion. Don't praise something by defecating on something else.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[GoatPigSheep]

With warcraft3 comming out in a couple of weeks, I won't be ditching windows for a while.

The audio production I do also makes me stick with windows, as well as IE.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Afrosheen]

The audio production I do also makes me stick with windows, as well as IE.

Since when does Warcraft III and audio production require IE? IE sucks and you could be using Opera or Mozilla on windows at the very least.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Fnord]

Well, warcraft 3 hasn't even been released yet but it works perfectly in WineX (or at least the betas did).

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a tool if you think IE sucks. Anyone who uses something other than IE on windows is forcing himself out of ideology or something, not because it's better.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[BradSVSi]

Or maybe someone uses something other that IE on windows because they need CSS1 to render properly in their browser. The only release of IE that I've seen come close to getting CSS1 right is IE 5 for the Mac.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[PunchMonkey]

While I think IE is a great browser and have used it for years, I recently started using Mozilla and love it. The main reasons I'm using it are:

1) I find it faster.
2) I like the tabbed browsing.

I highly recommend giving it a go. And even if you don't like it, realize that it has benefits and some people (not all) choose it not because it's Non-Microsoft, but because they find it provides a better browsing experience.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[rgmoore]

Gee, and I thought that I was using Mozilla on Windows because:

1. That way I can use the exact same browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux. (And yes, I do use all three routinely).
2. IE still doesn't support tabbed browsing, while Mozilla does.
3. IE has large numbers of known security holes.
4. Mozilla kills popups dead.

Any one is plenty of reason to use Mozilla. The combination is evidence that nobody should be using IE.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Gordonjcp]

I'd switch back to IE on my Win2K machine if I had tabbed browsing....

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[ealar dlanvuli]

Other than tabbed browsing, a superior rendering engine, faster page loads, http pipelining, popupkilling. Of course ignoring all of those features, and ignoring the recent slew of 'undocumented' security holes that were known to hackers for several months before the patch, I'm guessing IE is the better browser to use...

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're the tool. Mozilla is better in that it does what it's designed to do *BETTER* than IE. Web browsers are supposed to display the page as the author intended. Mozilla renders the page more accurately according to the HTML specifications, so it is better at doing the one thing that a web browser has to do.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE sucks

Well more slashdot users are using IE than any other browser. Now just imagine if that had been a real world poll. All of the other browsers combined and multiplied by ten still wouldn't add up to the number of IE users.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Enahs]

Sorry, the most common OS that GNOME runs on is not Free, and further, is developed on the non-Free OS Linux. Further, many GNOME developers use Debian, which should be boycotted due to its blatant disregard for the non-Free nature of the Linux kernel, and its violation of its own DFSG. Even if the Debian project were to discontinue the GNU/Linux distribution, and the GNOME project were to move to a Free system such as Hurd (but not Debian GNU/Hurd, due to the Debian project's blatant disregard for GPL violations) or FreeBSD, we should still hold both GNOME and Debian accountable for past transgressions.

Boycott Linux and GNOME today!

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[packeteer]

if your happy with what you have now and suddenly IE gets tabs you would CHANGE?... is there something else about IE u like?

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you even used Mozilla 1.0? Its really really good.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[jcenters]

*tugs at Enahs chin, ripping off a mask*

Richard Stallman! I knew it all along!

Nah, Stallman isn't nearly that headstrong.

Good idea, encouraging a boycott of Linux, which is the THE open source success story, and about the only real threat to the Microsoft empire.

While we're at it, let's boycott the C programming language, PS/2 ports, and blow off our feet with a shotgun.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[zootread]

That poll is too old to be relevant. I'd like to see a new poll now that Mozilla 1.0 is out.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[norweigiantroll]

Sure, it's better than Windoze. That isn't saying much though.

I tried a beta, and I'd one of say the biggest pluses is that it looks better than Gnome 1. GTK2 has support for anti-aliased fonts without gdkxft or anything, and the icons and stuff look better. Gotta love the Metacity WM, too. There's other minor stuff, like Meta-themes, but there didn't seem to be very many major improvements over 1.4.

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

ITs called opera! It ain't free but man is it good

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[spongman]

and which pages are those that are so important and that don't render correctly on IE?

Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?

[Gordonjcp]

Laziness, mainly... Since I do a fair bit of web development, I use IE6 quite a bit to check for compatibility (although my development box runs Linux, so I use Galeon there). I really miss tabs when I'm using IE6.

Actually, what would be handy, and something I'd actually *pay* Microsoft for, would be the ability to switch between "compatibility levels" in IE - so I could see the differences between IE4, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6 at the twiddle of a mousewheel...

Release Notes for /.

[FireChipmunk]

GNOME 2.0 Desktop Release Candidate 1: "Fever Pitch"

The GNOME 2.0 Desktop Release Candidate 1, "Fever Pitch", is ready for your
bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download
here:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/releases / nome-2.0-desktop-rc1/

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.

Progress

The following tarballs have been updated since last week's snapshot release:

at-spi, eel, eog, esound, gail, GConf, gdm, gedit2, gnome-applets,
gnome-desktop, gnome-games, gnome-media, gnome-mime-data, gnome-panel,
gnome-session, gnome-system-monitor, gnome-terminal, gnome-utils,
gnome-vfs, libgail-gnome, libgnome, libgnomecanvas, libgnomeui, libgtop,
librep, libwnck, libzvt, nautilus, rep-gtk, sawfish, yelp

Testing the GNOME 2.0 Desktop

Binary packages and build scripts have been contributed to make installation
and testing of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop simpler.

Debian:

The following sources.list line will allow you to install the latest
experimental packages. Please see the debian-gtk-gnome list for more
information about these releases.

deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian ../project/experimenta l main

GARNOME: http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome/

GARNOME downloads and builds from released tarballs. It includes a
number of ported applications and utilities, and is designed to be a
distribution of GNOME rather than an updater.

jhbuild: http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/jhbuild/README

jhbuild builds directly from CVS, and includes required developer tools.
It handles dependencies and errors gracefully, to minimise build time
and frustration.

vicious-build-scripts: http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/vicious-build-scri pts/README

v-b-s builds directly from CVS, and includes required developer tools
such as autoconf, gettext, etc.

Ximian Red Carpet Snapshots: (See the GMOME2 Snapshots Channel in Red Carpet.)

Binary packages for Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 are available from Ximian's Red
Carpet. These are built nightly from CVS snapshots.

Build Requirements

- The tarballs included in the release. :-)

- Some very basic packages not distributed with this release, such as
image libraries, popt and freetype. These should all be included with or
available for your distribution.

- Python 2 with expat xml modules for libglade (some modules still require
the libglade-convert script, however we do plan to ship glade2 files).

- Docbook DTD 4.1.2, Docbook XSL stylesheets and a valid system catalogue
file for scrollkeeper (which in turn is required by many desktop
components for documentation).

- You need recent GNOME 1.4 developer platform packages if you plan to
install the GNOME 2.0 platform libraries alongside 1.4.

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

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

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 release is made for you!

When reporting bugs, use http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ or bug-buddy. Make sure
you choose the correct version number, as reports against particular
versions are easier to triage reports against unspecified releases.

Before submitting a bug report, try running the software from your terminal
to see if it provides extra information, and please make sure that you build
everything with full debugging support.

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 -
Thursday is always bug-busting day!

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-bugsq uad/

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!
Have a look through bugzilla or the TODO file included with many modules,
and make sure to send your patches to the maintainers via the appropriate
mailing list, or bugzilla.

Happy testing!

- The GNOME 2.0 Release Team

Re:Release Notes for /.

[TheLoneCabbage]

Karma Hoe...
shoot. Let's try again..

Kram War

darn it!

Sheesh, it's one think to whore when the server is getting /.'d but it's not even close!

Now, posting mirror sights for the packages that may be something.

Screenshots?

[IronTek]

Does anyone have any screenshots they can post (of this release, not the older v2 test releases)?

Thanks!

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure! here's some: http://www.puttyworld.com/lib/puttyworld/contest-m onitor.jpg http://www.dspguide.com/monitor.jpg

Re:Screenshots?

[sfraggle]

Heres one. This isnt actually RC1 but I installed it a few days ago so it should be fairly close.

Re:Screenshots?

[sfraggle]

I took another two screenshots:

EoG and xbill

The new terminal program, yelp (help system) and the sound recorder. You can see the anti aliasing support at work in the yelp window.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

here's some pics

Re:Screenshots?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Looking good, but I wonder...

1) Is that the default theme for Gnome 2.0?

and

2) What's up with the 2 (X) buttons on each window?

Re:Screenshots?

[sfraggle]

Its using the default Gtk theme, but I'm using metacity as the window manager. The default window manager is sawfish. I dont know why it has 2 X buttons :)

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking stupid mods. Do you even know the meaning of "redundant?"

As this was the first post deal with/asking for screen shots, how the fuck can it be redundant?!

...Slashdot really needs a better moderation system.

redundant Pronunciation Key (r-dndnt)
adj.

1. Exceeding what is necessary or natural; superfluous.
2. Needlessly wordy or repetitive in expression: a student paper filled with redundant phrases.
3. Of or relating to linguistic redundancy.
4. Chiefly British. Dismissed or laid off from work, as for being no longer needed.
5. Electronics. Of or involving redundancy in electronic equipment.
6. Of or involving redundancy in the transmission of messages.

dolt Pronunciation Key (dlt)
n.

1. A stupid person; a dunce.
2. The average Slashdot moderator.

Re:Screenshots?

[King of the World]

Damn - are those back/foward history links new? They need to be far closer to the icon they're beside. Don't make me think.

Re:Screenshots?

[rifter]

Some people like to have two distinct buttons, one which closes the window, and one which closes the program. perhaps this is teh source of your two buttons?

Another possibility is that you (or someone) had the one button, and wanted the three on the right, but after editing the config so you had that, did not get rid of the one on the left for whatever reason. Not being familiar with your window manager, I could not be sure...

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. But they'll eat it in M2.

michael!

[Jucius Maximus]

I never knew you felt that way about Gnomes.

Oh no.....

[PepsiProgrammer]

Its times like this, when I really *HATE* having Dial-Up,

alas there is no alternative out here in the stix.

Re:Oh no.....

[ozzmosis]

Whats about Satellite internet?

Sure its not the best but it's better than dial up.

Re:Oh no.....

[PepsiProgrammer]

Its expensive, and has a minimum of 2 seconds of lag. Also I will be attending NC State starting next fall, all the bandwidth i could ever desire.

Re:Oh no.....

[Anonymous Coward]

NC State? I went there for a semester (1986). Ended up transferring to ECU 'cause I hated Raleigh. Gradutated with a CS degree in 1991. Currently living in Wilmington, programming at the beach. NC is a great place to live - especially when you're at the beach! :)

Re:Oh no.....

[GigsVT]

The lag is more like a minimum of 600ms. Just FYI from an actual user of Satellite Internet.

Re:Oh no.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its time to rev up the old chainsaw to hack out some LOS. Unfortunately at northern latitudes you have to hack out a line of trees nearly a quarter mile long to make it work.

Re:Oh no.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you part of freelinuxCD? I've got RH 6.0 if you guys want it.

Re:Oh no.....

[Anonymous Coward]

why not put it up in a tree?

Re:Oh no.....

[dgb2n]

Its times like this, when I really *HATE* having Dial-Up,

You mean every time you turn your computer on?

Re:Oh no.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they be making CDs available? Funds for the cause etc.

Can it compete with KDE?

[PhilJackson]

KDE seems to have matured really quickly from version 2 to version 3. I feel it the most productive desktop I have used on any system.

I always though of gnome as 'middle-level' (as in kde is 'high-level' and open/black box as 'low-level') and so the new flux of ex-Windows users never really notice it.

Is Gnome2 gonna change this?

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[Drachemorder]

I don't really know. I'm really looking forward to Gnome2 since I've been quite happy with the current release. My perceptions have usually been the opposite from yours: after using both desktops extensively, I usually find Gnome to be smoother, more responsive, less resource-intensive, and more intuitive than KDE. Of course, that's all just my personal opinion. I'd really have to say that they're both shaping up quite nicely and they're both "high-level" desktops.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[IamTheRealMike]

Asking .... will KDE vanquish GNOME, or "which will win the desktop environment wars" is the wrong question. It's like asking "Which will win, Ford or Vauxhall?". I wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now, KDE and GNOME are still around, still with plenty of happy users. I think KDE will be loved more by those who came from Windows and are most happy with a Windows style desktop environment (which is in fact quite a good design, MS bashing aside).

I think GNOME should start to differentiate itself in some way, and I expect we'll start seeing them diverge somewhat as GNOME realise they can't out-KDE KDE, and instead try and do their own thing.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

flaimbait?? It was a serious question and people have answered seriously! I'm fed up of finding good posts on slash that have been modded down by trigger happy moderators.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[march]

Having used both window systems quite heavily, I tend to thing that they were designed from (with?) different points of view.

It seems that gnome is far more configurable from the front end than KDE, but kde has better app integration and tools.

I like them for different reasons and fortunately, I can get 90% of the functionality I want from either system.

Kind of like the difference between Mercedes and BMW...

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[Wolfier]

Kind of like the difference between Mercedes and BMW...

Hold it right there!! Which one is Mercedes, and which one is BMW? (I'd say KDE is Mercedes and GNOME is BMW)

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[march]

Heh! I'm not answering that one!

I mean, if I were to agree with you, we could start a flame war here. :-)

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[nsushkin]

I prefer a Mercedes with Gnome to BMW with iDrive... ;)

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tend to say neither Mercedes or BMW...to me the desktops aren't to that caliber yet. Maybe, let's say, Honda and Mitsubishi.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[jonathan_ingram]

Just out of interest, what parts of KDE do you feel are lacking in configuration? I can't think of a single area where I haven't been able to configure KDE to do precisely what I want. Particularly in the 'look and feel' department, it is *far* more configurable than Gnome.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[noda132]

KDE seems, to me, like a "single product". It's huge, I can see why it's nice for some people and how newbies can benefit since everybody has the same programs... but it's big, clunky and slow. I view GNOME as a collection of libraries and tools. GTK and GLib are much, much, much faster than QT, and so most GNOME apps are faster than their KDE counterparts. The downside is, of course, that they aren't as consistent as KDE apps (which, in my eyes, are even more consistent in design than Microsoft programs). I like KDE. I think it's great. But I'm not going to install it on my computer. I'd uninstall QT if it weren't for one program. Heck, I don't use the GNOME desktop either (I use blackbox) but I use plenty of GNOME tools (i.e., Galeon) since they're the best stuff out there. Though some GNOME developers wouldn't agree, I'd say KDE and GNOME don't compete... nor should they.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[coldfish]

It cannot at the moment. I used gnome from version 1.0 to 2.0 beta 5. The 2.0 beta5 version made me switch to KDE 3. I was really disappointed when I saw that the "beta" version of gnome 2.0 was worse than 1.4. Long ago I chose Gnome because of some good reviews I read about the Gnome design opposed to the kde design. When I first installed KDE3 I was surprised to the richness of the environment and the ease of use. KDE has still bugs and is indeed too much "windowish", but is far superior to gnome.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

i confirm this. i recently left gnome for kde myself. now i use kde 99% whereas i use gnome 2 for the rest 1% (only compile it every day, laugh my ass off and delete it again)

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[march]

Just out of interest, what parts of KDE do you feel are lacking in configuration?

Now, it may be me, or it may be kde, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to make a window be ignored by ALT-TAB.

Similarly, I can't figure out how to have frameless windows.

And... where is the KDE version of red-carpet?! (I know - that's Ximian, not Gnome, but still...)

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[fault0]

> Now, it may be me, or it may be kde, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to make a window be ignored by ALT-TAB.

It works for me (i'm using sawfish+kde)

> Similarly, I can't figure out how to have frameless windows.

It works for me (i'm using sawfish+kde)

> And... where is the KDE version of red-carpet?! (I know - that's Ximian, not Gnome, but still...)

There will never be a KDE-version of red-carpet. This is because generally, red-carpet is a POS, imho. Get a real installation software from your distro maker. I use Gentoo, and emerge is great. Apt-get is also wonderful for installing such things.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

>but it's big, clunky and slow.

Slow on what?

>GTK and GLib are much, much, much faster than QT,

No way. Just look at the speed of something like opera compared to mozilla.

> and so most GNOME apps are faster than their KDE counterparts.

I can't think of any. Most GNOME apps are slow as shit.

> The downside is, of course, that they aren't as consistent as KDE apps (which, in my eyes, are even more consistent in design than Microsoft programs). I like KDE.

KDE apps are as consistant as GNOME apps, in my opinion.

> I think it's great. But I'm not going to install it on my computer. I'd uninstall QT if it weren't for one program.

And I'd uninstall Gtk+ if it were not for Mozilla.

> Heck, I don't use the GNOME desktop either (I use blackbox) but I use plenty of GNOME tools (i.e., Galeon)

I don't use either GNOME or KDE (I use fvwm2) , but I use a lot of KDE apps, especially kmail.

> since they're the best stuff out there.

Um, mozilla is a lot better than Galeon now. And it's not tied to GNOME.

> Though some GNOME developers wouldn't agree, I'd say KDE and GNOME don't compete... nor should they.

They are pretty much the same thing. KDE apps are slower to launch and faster to run. I personally like Qt apps because they draw a lot faster over X11 on a network.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[jonathan_ingram]

Ah... advanced window manager issues.

As the previous respondant has indicated, you can quite easily use Sawfish as KDE's window manager -- it's probably the most configurable wm out there. You'll find similar issues with Gnome 2.2, which is going to move from Sawfish to Metacity as the wm (basically because no one understands Rep well enough to pick up the code).

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[march]

I'm sorry, but I don't think sawfish is the standard window manger for kde. Hence, we run into the same issue as with all OSS - Oh yeah, it works, you just have to do this and this...

Sorry folks, that doesn't work in the main stream...

And, red-carpet works just fine. Is there better? Sure. Is there worse? You betcha.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?

[fault0]

> I'm sorry, but I don't think sawfish is the standard window manger for kde.

Well, you can't do the above things with Metacity either (pretty much the GNOME version of kwin).

Anyways, you can use any _NET_WM compliant window manager with either GNOME or KDE. This is the whole point of freedesktop.org, btw, and more.

> Hence, we run into the same issue as with all OSS. Sorry folks, that doesn't work in the main stream...

I doubt the average user wants to remove the frame from their window anyways.

again??

[RealisticWeb.com]

great, now all the big distros are going to scramble to put out another release to include this. *sigh*

oh for a stable desktop!

Re:again??

[Cid Highwind]

Who holds a gun to your head and forces you to upgrade?
If you think it's too unstable, don't download it!

Re:again??

[ArsonSmith]

Nobody is holding a gun to anyone over this, but it does look bad when distrobutions are releaseing versions constantly.

By stable I don't the the original poster ment how often things crash but more likely how much things change from version to version. I would agree with him/her entirely with that idea. The problem with current open source desktop software is that it is playing a lot of catchup. People are use to all the "features" of MS software and don't think that open source is quality utill it gets all of them.

This is putting major strees on the desktop developers that the older OS projects didn't have (ie Linux kernel, Apache, Perl, etc...) The all developed slow because the could so everything was over anylized and implemented in near to the best way possible. Desktop software on the other hand has been pumped out as fast as possible with little attention to doing it right. This will work its way out on its own over time, but it is giveing us changeing standards on an almost daily basis.

I still stand behind my assumption that Linux will be 100% ready to compete with MS software on the desktop in 2005. Maybe not till the end but it will be there. Things at that point will not change as much. 90% of everything will work out of the box. projects like Mozilla and Openoffice will be HUGE players in desktop role out.

I thikn Linux is ready for the desktop now. Actuall I think it was ready in 1998 when I first started useing it as a full time desktop. I do think that it takes a lot of work that people not interested in doing shouldn't have to do, witch is why I think it will still be ~3 years before it is ready.

Just my take on the situation.

Re:again??

[MullerMn]

In my opinion by 2005 Linux will have buried MS from the software perspective. I'm basing this opinion on the rate at which Open Source software develops. I've been a 100% Linux person for a year or two now and I'm still constantly amazed at how fast the projects evolve.

An example would be KDE - I don't use KDE (I prefer FVWM2), but I do occasionally check it out to see how it's progressing and the advances that it's made since v2 are impressive to say the least. What I particularly enjoy is the way that OSS seems to get more efficient and faster with successive releases when MS stuff traditionally gets slower and heavier with successive releases (compare Mozilla 0.96 with 1.1a, or KDE 2 with KDE 3).

Whether having superior software will be enough to help Linux displace MS in the short-medium term is debatable, but if you're prepared to wait a few years I think the difference in quality is going to become so extreme that short of purchased legislation or major adaptaion on their part MS is doomed to lose it's dominance.

--
Andy

Re:again??

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that it is improving rapidly, but I suspect it would improve even faster if there was only one desktop. If Linux was to gain a significant userbase, as you suggest could happen, it seems obvious that the majority would prefer not to have a choice between desktops. Can we agree that a lot of users just want it to work and feel distracted by 'unnecessary' choices? I do not think the majority has the typical GNU guru "choice is always good" attitude.

Not to mention that it would be easier to get a consistent desktop. As it is now, I do not run any GNOME applications at all, except for GIMP which I use only reluctantly. I used to have an Amiga, I now use Linux for desktop work without dual booting, and I expect a pretty GUI. Using two desktop libraries simultaneously really ruins the look and feel.

It would also be easier on developers, those who want to reach a broad userbase. If I develop a program for GNOME, I imagine some people would only use it reluctantly if they, like me, prefer KDE. I would have to develop a version for both desktops. It is not double work but it sure is extra work.

Re:again??

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion by 2005 Linux will have buried MS from the software perspective. I'm basing this opinion on the rate at which Open Source software develops

Yes, but how many mp3 players and weblog parsers written in perl does anyone really need?

What matters is applications (not applets). Stuff like Word, Photoshop, Illustrator, FireWorks, not wc, and cat.

Re:again??

[ArsonSmith]

I think you are pretty much agreeing with me. Although it will take more than just great software to bury MS. Even if MS doesn't try to adapt to open source methods they will easily be around till 2015+, but I think they will adapt and they will be with us for a really long time to come.

What I did want to point out, because it is makeing a shaky stance for open source, is that in the past, mainly the '80s and '90s, open source was devoloped one feature at a time. For example lets take Apache. First serve static conntent, then serve dynamic content then build a full featured web server. Everything was build slowly and the new was built on the old.

With the current desktops it was a race to get all the features in as fast as they could. The building process was not as well thought out as the older projects and things were excepted because they were done, not because they were done right.

Being open source this is really only a short term problem and is really almost completly fixed already. kde3 and gnome2 are going to be very good desktops and they are an excelent start, but I don't think they are that stable yet. Again, not stable on an aplication level (I have had some gnome apps open and running for more than a month at a time at work with only locking my desktop and not logging out.) but the other development things like UI or API and libs and architectures are going to take a little longer to hammer out.

Although version numbers dont really mean anything and it is completly upto the developers weather it will be or not, but this is my prediction:
somewhere around 2005 there will be kde5 and gnome5. This will be when updates will only come out ever 1-6 months (because everything is already done and there is only cleanup left). This will be a time when third party developers and more open source developers will be programming for open source than closed by far. And the geeks will rule the world (ha as if we don't already)

Re:again??

[fault0]

Gimp isn't a GNOME app, btw. It's gtk-only.

>>> It would also be easier on developers, those who want to reach a broad userbase.

Agreed.. People need to install gnome-libs and kdelibs, at least.

Re:again??

[keiferb]

Yeah... debian's going to scramble, all right. Gnome2 will make it into debian just in time to be deprecated. =)

GNOME on FreeBSD

[jmallett]

Is FreeBSD supported out of the box?

Re:GNOME on FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

what box?

Re:GNOME on FreeBSD

[ozzmosis]

depends on what you mean out of the box.

There is /usr/ports/x11/gnome2, which has not yet been updated yet to rc1.

Re:GNOME on FreeBSD

[L1nUx h4x0r]

BOX?!

Re:GNOME on FreeBSD

[luge]

There has only been one reported, duplicated BSD-specific bug of which I'm aware[1]. That doesn't mean that there aren't bugs there, but if there are, they aren't really being reported. Sun's porting work has helped portability a great deal, so it all 'should' work- we can't really know if no one has tried, though.

[1]http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=841 17

Re:GNOME on FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiousity, if I have gnome1.x installed on my freebsd box, how do I upgrade it to v2? If I do it from the ports tree folder - won't that install gnome2 alongside of gnome1 (or potentially cause bad things to happen).

If I do a "portupgrade -r ORBit\*" I think it will only upgrade gnome1 pieces as well?

Anyway, I love FreeBSD, but use KDE at the momment - but might give gnome2 a shot :)

Thanks!

Re:GNOME on FreeBSD

[jmallett]

I'll just have to get off my ass and set it up here and look for bugs then.

Thanks :)

GARNOME rules....

[reaper20]

The Garnome part of GNOME is such an underrated program. Without it, I definately would not be using GNOME2 today, I'm not that much of a gearhead.

Garnome makes it braindead easy to have a GNOME2 desktop ... it also does KDE(!) ... kudos to jeff and the other gnome hackers.

Re:GARNOME rules....

[Pyrosz]

I don't use GNOME (at the moment, might change with 2) so... what is Garnome?

Re:GARNOME rules....

[BlowCat]

Google is your friend

Please test it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome will not be a good product without testing.
Please don't wait for the final product to come out.
It is you obligation (ok, maybe not) as a user of "software libre" to contribute something. If you cannot program, you can at least test the stuff on your hardware.

You would be sureprised at how few tester there are. I have found that if I submit a valid bug, it is fixed quickly. YOUR INPUT COUNTS!

Re:Please test it!

[Tyreth]

Thanks to your inspiration I have downloaded Gnome 2 RC1, to help with development. And I'm glad I did :) Nautilus is fast, a joy to use now :)

And I owe it all to Gentoo.

screenshots

[jglow]

here are some gnome 2.0 (beta) screenshots:

http://www.gnomedesktop.com/scr/gdb3-1.jpg
http://www.gnomedesktop.com/scr/gdb3-2.jpg
http://www.gnomedesktop.com/scr/gdb3-3.jpg
http://www.gnomedesktop.com/scr/gdb3-4.jpg
http://www.gnomedesktop.com/scr/gdb3.jpg
http://gnomedesktop.com/scr/limebubble.jpg
http://gnomedesktop.com/scr/beta2-8.jpg

Re:screenshots

[Chemicalscum]

They look foul - what have they done to gnumeric - it is all giant toolbars and no spreadsheet. Where is the pager? I am a gnome user - I hope you can customize it to something better than this.

Re:screenshots

[jglow]

remember, these are beta screenshots... so it the final release might look different.

Re:screenshots

[markov_chain]

It seems slow, here is a mirror:

• gdb3-1.jpg
• gdb3-2.jpg
• gdb3-3.jpg
• gdb3-4.jpg
• gdb3.jpg
• limebubble.jpg
• beta2-8.jpg

Re:screenshots

[Pierre]

The changes in GNOME2 must be deeper than screenshots can show. Those look rather like enlightenment wanna be shots (to me).

I think that screenshots have become less and less important as Gnome and KDE have grown. It all looks pretty much the same (or very different with themes). But it really doesn't tell much of the story as far as speed and useability.

Re:screenshots

[phantomlord]

Where is the pager? I am a gnome user - I hope you can customize it to something better than this.

If you want to use gnome 1.x style viewports, don't switch to gnome 2. Their "usability experts" decided it was too complicated to have both viewports and workspaces so they ripped viewports out, stating tht "we can do the same thing with workspaces". Well, after that, the programmer(s) responsible for that portion of gnome decided that the functionality provided by viewports was extra cruft that they wouldn't implement and everyone would just have to get used to doing things the way they liked it. Gone are the days when gnome offered ultimate flexibility because some usability pinheads know what's best for all of us.

Not trolling... I've been using gnome for years and downloaded/compiled/installed new gnome 2 tarballs up until the end of april when I got completely frustrated with the lack of progress. Yeah... it's open source so put up my code. I'm just a gnome user - I do have more things to do than work on gnome 2 when gnome 1 does everything that I want already. Alas, as much as I wanted to stay bleeding edge, I'm going to have to wait until the developers start listening to real users rather than "experts" again.

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelievable. I was wondering how many more options they'd removed from the configuration tool in this misguided attempt to keep it "simple".

I never imagined they'd remove window viewports. That's pretty sad. I like them much better than workspaces.

Not that UI simplicity is bad as such, but removing configuration options entirely is the worst possible way to achieve it. It alienates existing users (like me) and gives potential new users that many less reasons to use it.

Admittedly, maintaining options that most people won't use costs a bit of maintenance effort, but the oft-stated reason of simplifying the UI makes no sense. Shit, if you don't want things cluttering up the UI, move them to a hidden menu that can only be accessed by pressing shift-meta-umlaut in the third page of the help menu for solitaire... just like the DVD player manufacturers do it. That'd be fine with me.

Re:screenshots

[Tack]

If you're looking for GNOME 2 screenshots that don't look like barf (and I agree, the ones posted here look hideous), then try these images from Jimmac's site:

• One
• Two
• Three (sexy)
• Four
• and Five.

Jason.

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but you seem to have your words mixed. Correction here:

Here, it seems is a slow mirror:

Re:screenshots

[markov_chain]

I do not have my words mixed. I did not promise the mirror to be any faster than the original.

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Worthless it is to put a mirror on a mediaone cable modem, you've only got 256Kbps upload speed. Sucktastic.

Re:screenshots

[epukinsk]

The following was posted on desktop-devel-list@gnome.org:

From: Rui Miguel Silva Seabra
To: GNOME Desktop Hackers
Subject: Re: GNOME 2.0.0 Desktop Release Notes Contributions
Date: 14 Jun 2002 12:37:21 +0100

A sawfish known issue that people might pointout: viewports are
''gone''.
Suggest adding the following to ~/.sawfishrc
;; Get viewports back
(setq customize-command-classes '(default viewport))

;; (setq viewport-dimensions '(NUMBER_OF_COLS . NUMBER_OF_ROWS))
(setq viewport-dimensions '(6 . 1)) ;; example

Not only do GNOME developers know this is an issue, there are GNOME developers who want the functionality viewports offer to be a part of GNOME. I wouldn't be surprised to see there be a GConf key that enables viewports in 2.0.1, BUT...

GNOME 2 developers can't listen to GNOME 2 users unless the users speak directly to them. File a bug in bugzilla.gnome.org. That's the best way to put this request on the developers' plate. And don't just say "RE-ENABLE VIEWPORTS," explain exactly what it is about viewports that you miss... is it that windows can straddle viewports? Is it navigation?

It's my understanding (after lurking on the gnome lists for a while) that the intention is not to leave viewport users in the dust, but to try to allow viewport users to use workspaces in the same way they used to used viewports. I.e. put a checkbox somewhere that says "allow windows to straddle workspaces" etc.

But this functionality won't be implemented unless the GNOME developers know people want it. So file a bug. File several bugs, one for each bit of functionality you miss that viewports had.

-Erik

Re:screenshots

[I_redwolf]

I agree with the parent. Just being vocal about it =)

Re:screenshots

[bogie]

Are those default or compiled special like the liquid kde theme? I was rather disappointed that Mosfet liquid isn't standard with KDE. I would hope based on how good your shots look, gnome would use that as default. Considering how nicy/candyish OSX and XP are I think people will want the same thing when they try linux.

Re:screenshots

[poulbailey]

Is this the default out-of-the-box look? I must admit that it looks quite good.

Re:screenshots

[GauteL]

No... but it is themes found on http://sunshineinabag.co.uk

Re:screenshots

[93 Escort Wagon]

I filed a bug against this some time ago. :-) But unfortunately during the discussion of the bug report, it became apparent that the developers really didn't care about this. It bothered me because one thing was being said on the public lists, while something rather contrary was being said in bugzilla.

My "fix" for this is to use Enlightenment 16.5 as one's window/session manager, and run Gnome apps from there. Enlightenment seems quite a bit speedier than Gnome/Sawfish/Metacity anyway - the bad part is it can take a bit of work to configure it to one's liking (I imagine the E developers consider that a "feature" though).

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW those look fugly. Worse than KDE 1.x did.

Re:screenshots

[Strepsil]

Their "usability experts" decided it was too complicated to have both viewports and workspaces so they ripped viewports out, stating tht "we can do the same thing with workspaces".

I must be close to being the target audience for this change. Could someone actually offer me an explanation of why I would want "viewports" and "workspaces"? I've been really confused by this for ages. All I've ever tried to do was have four virtual desktops and each time I've tried to configure GNOME in the past, I've always ended up at some point with 8 or 16 desktops or something like that.

With enough fiddling, I get what I want, but I have no idea if I have "viewports", "workspaces", "desktops" or "smurfs". I think the issue might be that someone needs to come up with a decent way of presenting the configuration dialogs, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's all that the feature needs to be put back in. I'd guess the functionality is all still there, it's just the configuration application that's been simplified.

I have to say that if dropping viewports makes it easier for me to just give myself four or however many desktops, I'm all for it. I have no problem with advanced functionality in software I use, but if including it makes it harder to do something basic, then a re-think is needed at some point.

Re:screenshots

[phantomlord]

But unfortunately during the discussion of the bug report, it became apparent that the developers really didn't care about this. It bothered me because one thing was being said on the public lists, while something rather contrary was being said in bugzilla.

If you look at the thread I started entitled "Viewports and gnome 2" in the desktop-devel archives, you'll see that not only were developers not really interested in doing anything about it, they were downright belligerant to anyone who questioned what they did... to the point where in trying to discuss the problem, I wasn't allowed to call viewports "viewports". I specifically pointed out at length what I found to be deficient about having only workspaces in gnome2 and I kept being told to tell them what I thought the deficiencies were as if they just gave me a kneejerk reaction instead of reading what I wrote. The gnome2 developers really turned me sour on the whole project and I could really care less about the future of gnome2 now. I'll use gnome1 until something better comes along.

Re:screenshots

[phantomlord]

I have to say that if dropping viewports makes it easier for me to just give myself four or however many desktops, I'm all for it. I have no problem with advanced functionality in software I use, but if including it makes it harder to do something basic, then a re-think is needed at some point.

If you want 4 virtual desktops that are all connected to each other (ie, drag a window to the bottom of the screen and it flips to the desktop below it on a 2D grid), you want viewports. If you want to straddle a window and see half on one desktop and half on the other, you want viewports.

Viewports are essentially one huge 2D desktop that you move around on and see parts of at a time. Workspaces are like having a bunch of tables stacked on top of each other that you have to search through linearly to find what you want.

If anything, viewports seem more intuitive to me (being two dimensional instead of 1). I wouldn't be complaining if they disabled the functionality of one to dumb down the interface for users who couldn't grasp it if there was still a configuration option to enable the functionality found in gnome1. Instead, they entirely nuked one choice because a couple core developers preferred the other, telling the end users who complained to "get used to it because KDE/Windows/etc don't support viewports either".

Re:screenshots

[rice_burners_suck]

These are seriously the best screenshots of GNOME that I've ever seen. Honestly, most screenshots out there do look like barf, all cluttered up, with colors that don't match. It's no wonder that a lot of folks out there hiss at GNOME. I think someone should submit a bug report telling the GNOME folks that their default screen should look like these screenshots. I'm not kidding!

Re:screenshots

[spudnic]

These shots are very nice, but the window close buttons in the top right hand corner illustrate a personal frustration of mine. I like my close button to be all the way in the corner of the window, up to the last pixel, so when I have a window maximized and decide I want to close it I can move the mouse to the top right edge of the screen and click without looking at it. Why would I want to aim at a little round button? I know I could use the keyboard shortcuts, and I do, but sometimes I've got that mouse in hand and...

Re:screenshots

[Tack]

I haven't tried Gnome2 yet, but I don't believe the gtk+ theme used there comes with it. (I think the theme is Interface-Psion-Flat and Jimmac hacked the gtkrc for colors.) I don't think that would make a great default theme (default themes should be neutral [shades of grey] IMO, and focus on usability), but I do definitely think it should be a meta-theme included in Gnome2. It looks great. :)

Re:screenshots

[Tack]

Unfortunately, no. The out-of-the-box look is closer to the screenshots posted by the original poster.

With any luck, Jimmac will release that look as a meta-theme, probably called 'Gorilla.'

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'll use gnome1 until something better comes along."

Here you go.

I mean, fuck, they even listen to users!

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurrah for stealing Gorillaz lyrics woo!

I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad,
I got sunshine in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on

Not at all a bad description of GNOME, really.

Re:screenshots

[mrbnsn]

And should we be surprised that the GNU desktop's fonts still look like shit? You can't make a shitty font beautiful by adding anti-aliasing any more than you can make an ugly actress beautiful by using soft focus.

It seems the Free Software crowd has the same view towards fonts as women; any they can find that are willing to get in bed with them are beautiful enough. Debian (which still has the ugliest out-of-the-box font settings) is now in the process of kicking out perfectly good (but ideologically impure) fonts from their X 4.2 package.

Out in the real world, they spend all day looking at beautiful fonts (Microsoft, despite being purely evil and only halfway competent, has excellent screen fonts; and Apple, of course). So do I (what's so hard about "apt-get install msttcorefonts"?). So should you.

"Beauty" isn't any less a principle than "Freedom".

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

The Gnome2 developers do not listen to the users; with this release I think we'll see alot less activity from any future gnome programmers. Infact only major projects will be ported over, otherwise I don't expect much outta gnome anymore except from ximian. It's not really about the users anymore.

Re:screenshots

[valkadesh]

Actually, I was a little pissed at first that the GNOME hackers had decided to remove viewports, but after using GNOME 2.0 snapshots for a while, I think that they were right in removing them.

The GNOME guys had realized that most people were using either viewports or workspaces, not both. They decided to remove such a code duplication, unifying the two things. They could have called them viewports, but maybe they thought that more people would have bitched for that :-).

So please don't file a bug asking for viewports return before having tried the GNOME 2 desktop. Try it first, and if you think that something is still missing, then, and only then, file a report.

The GNOME 2 guys have made great strides in term of usability and simplicity. Give them a little trust.

Re:screenshots

[szap]

Aye. I don't use Gnome, but I can relate. It took me a while to get used WindowMaker's workspaces after getting used to Afterstep's viewports. This is waaaay back when WM first came out, and when every window manager has a pager, and _this_ one doesn't.

I finally realized that the pagers are just eye candy and eating valuable screen real estate, and workspaces are just plain BETTER and more efficient. Besides, no one complained (don't start :) )that the text-mode virtual Linux consoles has no pagers nor viewports, but people can use it just fine. Ditto for this.

Slashdot's transformation

[Torgo's Pizza]

Slashdot is ever so slowly becoming more like the Gone Gold of geekware. Only it's with every friggin' point release.

Screenshots

[kalidasa]

I wish Gnome would put up some updated screenshots. I guess I'll have to install it myself and make the screenshots myself [isn't that what Open Source is all about? the good angel whispers on my right shoulder].

Late feature request

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that GNOME will now remember the positions of my GNOME terminals when I restart? Or will it be like usual, and randomly resize and place them?

Re:Late feature request

[kb3hag]

Hmm, interesting question. i have not tried the new "beta" or whatever but i will atempt to install it. I think that a project like this starting to come on scedule is amazing in the open source community. truly amazing. from what i saw from the screen shots i think it will leave the terminals where they are. i am not sure but i hope i can help in any way. please email me for any assistance you may require

On schedule?

[GrenDel Fuego]

I'm glad to see the release candidate available, but it's actually a week overdue, not ontime.

Re:On schedule?

[rob-fu]

I'm glad to see the release candidate available, but it's actually a week overdue, not ontime.

But isn't that the deal with a lot of software anyways?

Better late than never, I say. And RC2 was only late by a week.

At least it's not like that nightmare of a beta test for Windows XP, where you had to pay for it.

Re:On schedule?

[GauteL]

The release candidate was postponed, the release team is still confident that the final release will be on time.

Re:On schedule?

[Anonymous Coward]

The release candidate was postponed, the release team is still confident that the final release will be on time.

Oops?

On schedule?

[cow_licker]

According to this (from the dot.plan):

June 07 RELEASE - Gnome 2.0 Desktop Release Candidate 1

They are are a week behind schedule.

Re:Please post rpms

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, here you go:

<< File: gnome-base-2.0-1.i386.rpm >> << File: gnome-desktop-2.0-1.i386.rpm >> << File: gnome-tools-2.0-1.i386.rpm >> << File: gnome-games-2.0-1.i386.rpm >>

Enjoy!

How does this compare...

[cow_licker]

Can anyone tell me how Gnome 2 will compare with KDE 3? It seems like KDE has been 'ahead' for a while now and if this will even things up for some more.

Re:How does this compare...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Gnome is a whole version behind (KDE is on 3 and they are on 2). Expect better anti-aliasing, smoother transitional effects, and highe megapixel resolution from KDE.

Re:How does this compare...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since KDE is up to version 3 and Gnome is only at version 2, obviously KDE is 50% better.

Re:How does this compare...

[Anonymous Coward]

well people say gnome is 1 version behind kde but i redefine it differently..

once gnome started 1 year after kde but now gnome lost 5 years because of that unusable shit named gnome 2.

i tried it and its useless. only eyecandy but nothing i can use for daily work. no apps. nothing. no integration.

gnome 1.4 was nice but gnome 2 plainly sucks.

Re:How does this compare...

[Anonymous Coward]

You joke but there's a terrifying number of people who really do think like that!

Re:How does this compare...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right.. GNOME is 90% behind KDE.

Awwwww yeahhhh. . .where da Karma Ho's at?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I get a what-what?

Huh?

[bogie]

I don't know what distro you use, but as far as Redhat or Debian goes, they pretty much release whenever they feel the product is ready, not when a new desktop comes out. In fact ever time a new Redhat Desktop comes out, everyone whines "why are they realeasing now and not including X with it?". If your distro puts out a new release the day Gnome 2 comes out, I suggest you find a new distro.

Re:Huh?

[Afrosheen]

I know exactly what you mean. When Mandrake 8.2 was released a few months ago it came with KDE2.2.2 and Gnome 1.whatever. Alot of people were crying about it because SuSE was promising a later release date so they could include KDE3. Mandrake users are still whining about the lack of KDE3 in the distro. Personally I think it was wise on Mandrake's part. They've been criticized many times for being a little too bleeding edge, and including KDE3.0 would've meant adding an unstable default desktop environment to a new, slicker distro. Big huge mistake.

Everyone knows that KDE doesn't get good and stable until the dotted releases hit. 3.01 was for bugfixes and 3.1 is coming soon with some extra features. Gnome is the same way AFAIK.

When maintaining a distro with new stuff coming out daily, I think the hardest decision to make is 'where do you draw the line'. What do you wait for to include or what do you exclude? Tough.

Re:Gnome hasn't surrendered yet?

[ASyndicate]

I whole heartedly agree, GNOME looks just horrible. The widgets dont go together, there are 100 dependencies... wtf.

KDE is the future, indeed.

the only real windowmanager

[paradesign]

Aqua

wipe your drool!

Re:the only real windowmanager

[Anonymous Coward]

its not free.

Re:the only real windowmanager

[Anonymous Coward]

Try out liquid! It makes kde the REAL WM! And not some shitty motif clone like gnome is!

Re:the only real windowmanager

[slide-rule]

"AquaGraphite" themes (now that themes.org site has returned) for gtk and sawfish get a similar overall look. I have slightly hacked versions of both running on my desktop. Very slick appearance. Can probably find the WM theme for your WM if you look. [shrug]

Re:the only real windowmanager

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with all the drag queen pics on that site?

Re:the only real windowmanager

[__past__]

Funny thing is: Even if you don't insist on an Aqua-like look, there's a reason to use them. Aqua-Themes are avaible for about every Toolkit/Desktop/skinnable app now, so it seems to be the best way to get some consitency on your Desktop.

Good luck with your noble task!

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source those closed-source pictures for us so we can edit them with the "1000s of eyes" method!!

PROPS TO ACs EVERYWHERE
THE CLIT IS WORTHLESS

is it just me...

[paradesign]

or does Gnome look too much like mac OS9
and KDE too much like Win xx?

it could be just me.

Slashdotted already?

[IamTheRealMike]

I think they need to boost their bandwidth on that site somewhat..

Re:Slashdotted already?

[jglow]

wow! I caused a slashdotting. :/

I didn't figure THAT many people would check them out. sorry gnomedesktop.com :(

Re:Slashdotted already?

[Anonymous Coward]

at least you got the good karma :)

Re:Slashdotted already?

[jred]

Shouldn't causing a /.ing incur negative karma?

Gnome Forever

[theEdgeSMAK]

Mabey it'll beat duke nukem forever!

Re:Gnome Forever

[theEdgeSMAK]

uh oh... gnome fan with mod points got me.

Finally on Schedule?

[qurob]

It looks like it's finally on schedule for its projected June 21 release.

Looks like they are doing a good job in creating a Microsoft-like UI

Re:Finally on Schedule?

[sheepab]

Who cares if its a Microsoft like UI, its still Linux and its still stable isnt it? One of the things that helped Microsoft become such a standard WAS their UI. I say if Gnome makes their UI like Microsoft, more power to them. It will only help bring more of the mases away from MS and closer to Linux. In fact, anyone that comes up with a clone of the MS UI for Linux will quickly gain a user base.

Re:Finally on Schedule?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it's still linux. But stable? Only a person who has never worked on any other OS or desktop would say something like that. You obviously have no idea what stable is or means.

Not to mention that you would probably be the first in line to bash MS for copying a mac GUI item all the while praising Gnome for stealing all of Windows. Hyper-hypocrasy, we are slashdot.

Re:Finally on Schedule?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please! Its making me sick to my stomach to hear all this credit that MS created the GUI of today. Havent you ever watched "pirates of silicon valley"? ;)

Re:Finally on Schedule?

[sheepab]

Hmmm, have you compared today's MS gui to Apple's gui? I dont know about you, but the Windows GUI today is alot easier to use than the Apple one.

Differences appear minor

[Outland Traveller]

I'm not sure what you mean when you ask "Can Gnome compete with KDE"?

I've installed both KDE-based systems and Gnome-Based systems and shown them to Linux newbies- everyone from relatives to co-workers (caveat: I work in an engineering dept.)

After spending a few hours playing around with each one, my personal experience is that Gnome is their preferred choice, apparently because the icons and screen widgets look better, the interface appears simpler, and most of the engineers like the graphical virtual desktop manager on the gnome panel as opposed to the KDE version.

Granted, I use Gnome a lot and there are some deficiencies.. Nautilus is very slow. Sawfish has focus problems. The panel can behave in unexpected ways. The library dependencies for applications like Evolution are scary, but it generally works well and many people use Gnome as their full time desktop.

It looks to me like KDE may be slightly more stable, and may be easier to program for. Still, the differences between gnome and KDE from a user's point of view do not seem so great that you can call one "high level" and the other "mid level". They both look high level to me.

So, does someone want to try to explain the qualitative user-experience differences between KDE and Gnome, or is it as I suspect very minor?

Re:Differences appear minor

[lorian69]

I suspect it's a conglomeration of very minor things. I prefer KDE, a close friend o' mine prefers Gnome. Both of us for very simple reasons- we just happen to like our choice better.

KDE does seem slightly easier to get working (depency-wise), but both are pretty damn easy to setup... especially if using a distro's update tools.

Re:Differences appear minor

[MAXOMENOS]

After spending a few hours playing around with each one, my personal experience is that Gnome is their preferred choice, apparently because the icons and screen widgets look better, the interface appears simpler, and most of the engineers like the graphical virtual desktop manager on the gnome panel as opposed to the KDE version.

You've hit on something here. From a development standpoint, GNOME is ugly as sin. From a user standpoint, GNOME rocks. Why? Because users like things that are prettier. I would much rather use Qt than everything under the GNOME sun for development, and C++ rather than C, but as a user, I just like GNOME better.

GNOME and Ximian could do many good things for developers and system maintainers by consolidating a lot of those little libs into big lib packages. That would put GNOME more on par with KDE as far as programmability and maintainability go.

Re:Differences appear minor

[pthisis]

From a development standpoint, GNOME is ugly as sin...I would much rather use Qt than everything under the GNOME sun for development, and C++ rather than C

Not meant to be flamebait, but there is a large set of developers out there who greatly prefer C to C++; this is especially true on a Unix-like platform, given the close history of the two. Saying that "from a development standpoint, GNOME is ugly as sin" is _definitely_ an opinion. C++ and Qt are out there if you want to use them. Personally I think that the language difference has had a huge impact on the high-level goals and progress of the two projects, and that sort of diversity is a good thing.

GNOME and Ximian could do many good things for developers and system maintainers by consolidating a lot of those little libs into big lib packages.

Likewise here. On many occasions I've used just one small library from GNOME in a completely non-GNOME (often not graphical at all) project, and I love that it's easy to pull out small pieces (glib, libunicode, parts of the gcal ical implementation) and use them.

Sumner

Re:Differences appear minor

[akeru]

Wow, do I have to disagree about the development standpoint here. Sure the dependencies can be a pain, but that's where the beauty and flexibility of autoconf/automake and pkg-config make life easy again. The additional modularity granted by separating different functions into their own libraries far outweighs the additional overhead of a lot of dependencies. Having watched GNOME and KDE development closely since before the 1.0 KDE and 0.3.0 very unstable "technology preview" GNOME I can say the essential difference between the two projects is that KDE is focused on "doing it now" and GNOME cares more about "doing it right" than they do about timelines. And it shows. KDE has caused me nothing but problems, and, from a systems administration standpoint, is a real PITA. GNOME, on the other hand, has continually tried to integrate and play nice with existing standards and conventions, which means that, among other things, configuration files are in /etc and everything else is where it is "supposed" to be.

And while you may prefer C++ to C (and for good reason too), the decision to use plain old C for GTK2 was, IMHO, a good one. In so doing you enable the maximum flexibility and, when done right (as GTK2 is, for the most part) makes writing language bindings (almost) trivial. I can't say for QT, but GTK/Glib 2 allow for complete run-time introspection of types, parameters, etc. in a very clean manner. By doing the base object-system in C with a clean API, it allows binding authors and programmers in general, a way to write to the underlying library in a way that fits in naturally with the language they are using to write it. Rather than using moc hacks or other ugliness, you get clean, standard, C (which may be, IYHO, ugly, but it is standard C, which most compilers support at this point in history -- excluding C99 -- which cannot be said for either C++ or the C++ derivitive used by Qt/KDE). Say what you will about C the language, but using it to implement the object system was a good idea, the additional complexity involved in coding for it is minimal and a the code, in large part, for creating a GObject subclass is largely boilerplate anyway which can be scripted or wrapped by something like 'gob'
Everytime I've looked at Qt/KDE development I've been struck with just how . . . unwieldy and inflexsible it is.

The differences in attitude ("let's do it now and invent some new, quasi-documented, way of doing it" vs. "is there a standard way to do this and how should we do it RIGHT") are behind most of the differences in toolkit and, more importantly, time line. GTK2 took a long time to get out, because a lot of thought and planning when into it. Whether this was actually the case with KDE2/3 as well or not, I can't tell, but it certainly doesn't look like or feel like it.

--Shahms

Re:Differences appear minor

[jonathan_ingram]

Why? Because users like things that are prettier.

Very true - this is why I use KDE. It's just prettier than Gnome.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Anonymous Coward]

> Granted, I use Gnome a lot and there are some
> deficiencies.. Nautilus is very slow. Sawfish has
> focus problems. The panel can behave in unexpected
> ways. The library dependencies for applications
> like Evolution are scary, but it generally works
> well and many people use Gnome as their full time
> desktop.

Nice examples. I enjoyed the optomistic twist, but
the paragraph should have started:
"I use Gnome a lot, but it is deficient."

"it generally works well", and how about in
"specific". Pretty deficient, as your examples
clearly explain...

Re:Differences appear minor

[Arandir]

which means that, among other things, configuration files are in /etc and everything else is where it is "supposed" to be.

The last thing I want is for Gnome to install a bunch of shit in /etc. /etc doesn't belong to Gnome. It belongs to the system. Geez, don't those guys even have a clue about standards? Put the configs in /usr/local/etc...

By doing the base object-system in C with a clean API

The object system of Gtk-C is anything but clean. Doing OO in C is like doing GP in Pascal.

which cannot be said for either C++ or the C++ derivitive used by Qt/KDE)

The C++ in Qt/KDE is not some derivative C++. It is real genuine C++. To the letter.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Skeezix]

You've hit on something here. From a development standpoint, GNOME is ugly as sin. From a user standpoint, GNOME rocks. Why? Because users like things that are prettier. I would much rather use Qt than everything under the GNOME sun for development, and C++ rather than C, but as a user, I just like GNOME better.

I am a developer and I one of the reasons I chose GNOME over KDE was that I thought its development platform was more elegant so I'm having trouble seeing where you're coming from here. In addition the point on C/C++ seems to indicate you think C++ is more beautiful than C. If that is what you're saying I find that amusing. Also, you can develop GNOME applications in C++ if that strikes your fancy. But as we all know there's much more to a development platform than language choice. That's really where I think GNOME shines and GNOME2 is even better.

GNOME and Ximian could do many good things for developers and system maintainers by consolidating a lot of those little libs into big lib packages. That would put GNOME more on par with KDE as far as programmability and maintainability go.

I strongly disagree here. I guess we're coming from different backgrounds and have pretty different tastes. I prefer having the libraries split out by functionality.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Anonymous Coward]

"gnome does it right" ?

what do they right ? reverted buttons from yes no to no yes, reverted buttons from ok cancel to cancel ok, implemented a windows registry like system on a unix like operating system.

sorry..

Re:Differences appear minor

[Jardine]

Gnome has a way cooler sounding name.

Say it with me:

Guh-nome!

Re:Differences appear minor

[Anonymous Coward]

The MOC parts are about as genuine C++ as MFC is proper C++ design.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Arandir]

The MOC parts are not C++. They are CPP macros. But no one is requiring you to use moc. Code your MOC files by hand.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Anonymous Coward]

> Also, you can develop GNOME applications in C++ if that strikes your fancy.

How so? Inti is dead and gtkmm just flatly _sucks_.

It was better when there was a few competeing gtk+ c++ bindings available (vdk, inti, gtkmm), but since gtkmm has won out, it hasn't even progressed past being half as good as Qt is. It's a real shame, because Inti's design looked very nice.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Greyfox]

You can do C++ in gnome. If all you're doing is base Gtk without the CORBA ORB, you can use gtkmm. gtkmm uses the spiffiest signal system I've ever seen and doesn't require an additional preprocessor step to compile your code. Rolling new widgets is damn easy, as well. If you want to do the ORB stuff, there are C++ bindings for ORBIT, though I've kind of lost touch with that project and don't know how far along it is yet. Last time I checked they seemed to be well on the way to getting most of the issues resolved.

My biggest gripe with gnome when I was doing active development using it was that all the bleeding edge stuff wasn't documented well enough that I could just go out and read the document and get some idea of what was going on with it. That's no biggie though, you just wait a while and eventually you can find a program that demonstrates its usage well enough for you to get a handle on it.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad most people detest the crock of shit known as gtkmm.

Real (tm) developers wrap gtk+ themselves, or use Qt or wxWindows.

Re:Differences appear minor

[jcast]

Absolutely---most of the GNOME libraries are completely useable outside of GNOME, and (often) outside of each other. Consolidating them would be the worst thing that could happen for cmd line developers!

Re:Differences appear minor

[ArchAngelQ]

Plus, just to add a bit here, gtkmm/gnomemm is very good, and kde has to use a horrific cludge to get it's object signal/slot mechanism working. gtkmm does that with standard c++. And, yes, I've used both, before you ask, that's how I know about it. QT has its good points, but it's use of so much non standard code is quite painful.

Re:Differences appear minor

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sure the dependencies can be a pain, but that's where the beauty and flexibility of autoconf/automake and pkg-config make life easy again.

I have to say that I disagree with most of what you said. First of all, while autoconf/automake/libtool may be a decent thing for average user once glued together, but from developer point of view, they are simply terrible. If you *really* have tried to do anything with them, you should know.

> the decision to use plain old C for GTK2 was, IMHO, a good one. In so doing you enable the maximum flexibility and, when done right (as GTK2 is, for the most part) makes writing language bindings (almost) trivial.

Umm; language bindings should be done right by defining proper interfaces (IDL) between components, and not by doing it by lowest common denominator (if extern "C" is what you were after). If mixing linkages of different languages is what you consider a 'right' way of doing it, I have to say that that's what I call hacking.

> Rather than using moc hacks or other ugliness,

Try using any (and i mean any) proper modern IPC and they all require pre-compilation. Gnome does this as well - although using IDL. IDL may be standard way of doing this from CORBA point of view, but as i see it, this is where Gnome folks got it wrong. CORBA was never meant to be used on a desktop. It's just too heavy no matter what you do. That's why there are simple lightweight *alternatives* to it in KDE (of course CORBAs included as well) such as DCOP or MCOP.

> Everytime I've looked at Qt/KDE development I've been struck with just how . . . unwieldy and inflexsible it is.

This seems like a high level abstraction that doesn't come even near to real life in my head. Could you define this a little more ? How is it inflexible ?

Besides, I think from developers perspective that one of the biggest obstacles of using Gnome is their awful documentation. Next-to-everything needs to reverse engineered. Can't really say the same about KDE/Qt documentation..

Some News For You

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't already tried, gnome 2 and all packages are really sweet. If you are using gnome 1.4 definitely switch. I use a Pentium II 450 w/384mb of ram and gnome 2 flies. Even nautilus 2 is snappy on my old clunker. The windows move around much faster, programs load quicker and everything is really futuristic looking. You can really spruce up the desktop with nautilus themes such as those found on ximian's site. Definitely check it out, KDE is just plain ugly to me (it also feels blocky). Let me emphasize IT'S FAST!

Re:Some News For You

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing we can still use gmc and not Nautilus in 2.0, right?

Re:Some News For You

[Quixote]

If you haven't already tried, gnome 2 and all packages are really sweet.

I'm waiting to hear from others who are brave enough to do the upgrade. How painful is it? How many days of downtime are we looking at? :-)

Re:Some News For You

[HowlinMad]

KDE is just plain ugly to me (it also feels blocky).

You may think KDE is ugly (and that doens't bother me a bit), but how can you call it blocky? To me, Gnome it way more blocky. But hey, to each his own. I personally use XFCE.

Re:Some News For You

[CMonk]

I did the upgrade some months ago when Ximian release their first snapshots. For the most part (having not used it in 3 weeks as I moved and have not yet got connected to the net at my new place yet) it's been a VERY positive experience. I've had no down time. Nautilus is actually functional and USEABLE. Gnome now starts up in between 2 and 5 seconds. Everything just seems a little bit "prettier". I haven't had any problems running the older gnome1 apps within gnome2 either. Give it a try, you'll like it.

Re:Some News For You

[Darth Maul]

Agree! I just upgraded to Gnome 2.0 on this old 400 Mhz AMD machine and it's *a lot* faster than old Gnome 1.4. I'm no longer deathly afraid to start up Nautilus!

Good work guys! This release is amazing. I'm still exploring all the new cool features...

Re:Some News For You

[Anonymous Coward]

400Mhz is old?? I still use a 300, and it does it's job damn it.

Re:Phil Jackson is A WHORE A WHORE I TELL YOU!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, this is just a guess mind you, but I take it that you were disappointed with the fact that the Nets didn't win?

It will be time to ditch it when...

[sterno]

...more than just niche companies are writing desktop applications for it. Your video games comment illustrated the point nicely. I personally believe that KDE3 is superior to windows, and with any luck GNOME2 will be as well (downloading it now). Yet I still run a system with windows 2000 on it so I can play video games.

I have, through my years of computer experience felt the pain of using the better product despite it's lack of broad acceptance. I started off with an Atari 800, and then later worked on an Atari 1040ST. For their respective times both of these computers offered exceptional value over what else existed. The only problem was the market share problem; not enough people writing software to make them worth using.

So, expect to be paying the Microsoft tax for some time to come to use certain pieces of software...

Re:It will be time to ditch it when...

[WillSeattle]

...more than just niche companies are writing desktop applications for it.

Um, you mean like IBM and Oracle and ...

Guy, it's the 21st Century. That argument may have worked back in the day, but it's time you woke up and smelled the apps.

WARNING

[Anonymous Coward]

Those pix are of GNOME 1.4 NOT 2.0 RC!! Damn trolls.

Re:Gnome hasn't surrendered yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

But not, apparently, "worser" than your grammar

new distros for GCC 3

[_|()|\|]

now all the big distros are going to scramble to put out another release

Mandrake 8.2 shipped with KDE 2, but now has an update to KDE 3. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to do the same for GNOME 2. I'd give it a couple of months, though, for testing.

I don't know that GNOME 2 will drive up too many distro version numbers. It's pretty safe to assume that Red Hat is already working on 8.0 with GCC 3.

Language supported

[sebol]

What language supported in gnome2?

here is the list


http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/g no me-2.0-core/

Gnome 2.0 debs expected soon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not! Based on KDE3 packaging, it'll be a year before Gnome 2.0 makes it into sid.

You heard it here first!

Re:Gnome 2.0 debs expected soon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Loser, they're already done.

Re:Gnome 2.0 debs expected soon!

[Arandir]

Considering that Gnome is a part of GNU, and Debian bends over backwards to please GNU, I expect there will be debs ready five minutes *before* the final release is announced.

more gnome 2 screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

here you can find some other screenshots of gnome 2, enjoy!
screenshots

pretty, isn't it? ;-)

just in case you are wondering where those wallpapers come from, I guess some of them are from deskmod , or a similar site, but I could be wrong...

Re:more gnome 2 screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty, isn't it? ;-)

Sorry, but NO (in case you were serious). Rate me as a troll, but gtk (and GNOME) is not pretty IMHO.

Re:more gnome 2 screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, GNOME 1.4 looked better than that POS.

GNOME has been in a steady downfall since 1.2.

GMC still rocks nautilus.

xfce and kde3 rock gnome2

UI Features?

[king_]

While I realize this release wasnt supposed to 'look' much different, they still could have taken advantage of new eyecandy availible to x and gtk2. Even kde supports tranparent menus. Besides anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending in widgets, nothing else looks much different. These hackers dont realize the reason why MS and OSX look so professional is for 2 reasons.

1.) consistancy (yes! we have metathemes, but kde and gnome themes are completly incompatible)
2.) cool little features like drop shadows on the menus and windows, alpha blending and animations on mouse over widgets or icons, faded menus, transparency, etc....

As long as there is no inovation, these desktops will never look as good. e17 has the right idea, its a shame that their development process is so slow (no one has enough time to develop on the half written libs they created).

Re:UI Features?

[IamTheRealMike]

While I realize this release wasnt supposed to 'look' much different, they still could have taken advantage of new eyecandy availible to x and gtk2. Even kde supports tranparent menus. Besides anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending in widgets, nothing else looks much different.

Well like you said, this release is about under the hood changes, much like the difference between Windows 95 and 98 - a lot of good changes, but not really in the visuals department.

2.) cool little features like drop shadows on the menus and windows, alpha blending and animations on mouse over widgets or icons, faded menus, transparency, etc....

Drop shadows on menus will have to wait for real transparency, which doesn't rely on taking a screen grab of the underside (which is how current X transparency is implemented, it means once blended it'll get out of date). This doesn't exist in X yet, but will once Keith Packard has finished his transparency server. I wish I knew when this would be.

Animations on mouse over widgets and icons is implemented in KDE3, so I dunno why GNOME doesn't have it either - guess it's just priorities. For faded menus, I guess you mean transparent menus, see above. In fact, that list basically comes down to "transparency". It's coming. Hold tight.

Meanwhile, here is a shot of GNOME that actually looks good. And look - the terminal is transparent. Happy now?

Re:UI Features?

[king_]

Thats a great looking shot, but doesnt XP use alpha blending to animate the fade in the menus. Correct me if im wrong but isnt alpha blending availible with the RENDER extention? If im right i wouldent mind writing a patch to implement this feature, but it seems to simple, am I missing something.

Also, doesnt dropping shadow require similar alpha blending effects to the ones mentioned above. But instead you would draw a black faded border around the window or menu and blend it with the background.

This seems to simple to be excluded, what am I missing

Re:UI Features?

[IamTheRealMike]

XRender is a redesign of the X rendering pipeline to bring it in line with the features we expect today. As part of that, hardware accelerated alpha-blends are implemented, in that you can give X 2 pixmaps and they'll be quickly blended together. The thing that's missing is the ability to easily get hold of a pixmap containing the stuff underneath your window - and keep it up to date. That's what the transparency server will do. Then, and only then, will we have "true" transparency, where you can move a window underneath a semi-transparent menu and see the window change underneath.

Re:UI Features?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is getting very off-topic, but does anyone know where I can find a good code snippet for doing such a screen grab?

Actually, what I want is to write a little daemon which continually updates an SVGALIB visual with a copy of the contents of a certain X window. If the window isn't there it would of course sit around waiting for it to be opened.

Re:UI Features?

[IamTheRealMike]

Try looking at the source for KSnapshot in kde cvs

Re:Gnome hasn't surrendered yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh right, I forgot, that gnome is a homosexual desktop environment.

Desktop for the visually impaired

[Osty]

I really hope those screenshots are from desktops from people with visual impairments, because otherwise everything is way too damn big. The fonts are huge, the toolbars are even bigger. People talk about XP's Luna interface wasting screen space, but it's nowhere near as bad as those screenshots.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's all adjustable (well, the fonts anyway. the toolbars probably aren't so adjustable), but even so, I'd hope GNOME doesn't want to put itself forward as a huge screen real estate hog. Most people prefer a lean, trim, unobtrusive interface when trying to actually get some work done, which those screenshots definitely are not.

It's about flexibility

[jonadab]

> Looks like they are doing a good job in creating a Microsoft-like UI

Only with the default settings. Here's a screenshot showing (an
older version of) Gnome looking a little different...

http://adminsystem.galion.lib.oh.us/2002_06_14_1 54 824_shot.png

(That's on my workstation, so it'll become unreachable when
I power down for the evening, sometime around 5:30pm EDT. Just
as well; we're only on a T1 here...)

Re:It's about flexibility

[suicidal]

http://adminsystem.galion.lib.oh.us/2002_06_14_154 824_shot.png
That's should make it a little easier for all the kids at home... :)
Then again, the link didn't work for me when I tried it.....Maybe /. hammered it and it needs some time...

Re:It's about flexibility

[jonadab]

> Maybe /. hammered it and it needs some time...

No, but the computer was turned off for the weekend a few hours
ago. It's a workstation, not a server per se, so it doesn't stay
on all the time.

I looked at the logs before we closed shop, and it _did_ get
hit more than I expected, but not enough to wipe out a T1.
(It was, after all, nested a couple of levels into a thread,
and the comment clearly stated that it was an older version
of Gnome.)

Re:FP For the CLIT Founder!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a new troll here on Slashdot (always read at a +1 threshhold). Which troll organization should I join? AC's or CLIT?

Win2k? Xbox?

[yerricde]

Yet I still run a system with windows 2000 on it so I can play video games.

Is that windows 2000 the full retail version, or is it the cut-down version in the Xbox BIOS?

Re:Win2k? Xbox?

[Anonymous Coward]

ps2 - 199
dvd controler - 20
being able to play great games, and watch dvds on ur 50" tv screen. priceless.

Re:Win2k? Xbox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I keep seeing this stuff about needing to buy a dvd controller to watch dvd's on the ps2? You don't.

Correction to the debian package line

[Fembot]

deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian ../project/experimenta l main

Re:Correction to the debian package line

[Fembot]

hmm how odd... there is supposed to be a space in experimental basicaly, and I swear I just corrected it in the previous post

Re:Correction to the debian package line

[rifter]

slashdot purposefully mangles any url you present in cleartext (e.g. any url you don't set up an href for). It is supposed to have something to do with the lameness filter. I think it is lame and pointless, but oh well..

How fast is GNOME 2.0 compare to KDE2/3?

[antdude]

I noticed KDE2/3 is faster than GNOME v1.4 on my old Pentium II 300 Mhz with Red Hat Linux 7.1 and 384 MB of RAM. How much faster/slower is GNOME v2.0?

This faster speed than v1.4 is great news for me. I don't use Nautlius in GNOME because of the slowness.

Thank you in advance. :)

umm wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

war3 works perfect on winex, i have war3beta and play it all the time using opengl.

Library reuse- PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Likewise here. On many occasions I've used just one small library from GNOME in a completely non-GNOME (often not graphical at all) project, and I love that it's easy to pull out small pieces (glib, libunicode, parts of the gcal ical implementation) and use them.

The subject says it all. I appreciate that the Gnome libs are apparently quite useful, and I think this sort of code reuse would rule, were I using a single-UI platform like an Amiga or Windows.

However, I don't. I use *NIX, and I happen to use Windowmaker, because it's the least ugly thing I can fit on my disk- and yeah, I know someone will technically find a use for GNUStep someday, and then Windowmaker will be causing all the same problems as well.

But really, if all you need from a library is one function, or ten functions, and the code works, and the project has no bearing on Gnome- take the code, as the license allows you, stick it in your header file, and be done with it. If you want to be fancy, you can later rewrite your build process to use the library versions *if they're already installed.* (Heck, automating that would be a great boon to Gnome users and non-Gnome users alike, anyone want to start a project?)

Really, I appreciate Gnome, the code, the effort, whatever, but I can't deal with maintaining 50 libs on my box just to run a decent Napster client..

Re:Library reuse- PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP!

[pthisis]

But really, if all you need from a library is one function, or ten functions, and the code works, and the project has no bearing on Gnome- take the code, as the license allows you, stick it in your header file, and be done with it.

And then all of a sudden every application has a copy, so memory use is up. New bug fixes aren't picked up or need to be applied many times.

Cut and paste coding is evil. You can mitigate maintenance hassles by linking statically (you'll still have multiple copies in RAM, but that's often okay), but duplicating code is a major programming sin.

Sumner

Re:Can it compete with KDE?--better question:

[smittyoneeach]

Should it compete with KDE?
How much further would OS software be without all of the effort duplication?
If your office is in Redmond, you really have to like all the fragmentation in the OS world. You can sip that latte in comfort, knowing that the competition's lack of focus is your own best friend.
Diversity is swell, but not priceless, unfortunately...
My vote is that the two efforts drift together, with the paint-and-powder aspects turned into themes. The desktop switcher both Gnome and KDE contain is welcome evidence of this trend.
Someday I'll be skilled enough to put a few hours in, instead of trash talk...

gnome's time is not yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

hi,

i am using gnome 2 for a while and want to show you people another side of it. not everything is that fine with gnome. there are many, many problems comming along with it.

gnome 2 has still graphical inconsitences, like menues with inconsistent entries, look at the reverted pushbuttons, once we had (and many of us are still used to) [ok cancel] and now they swapped it to [cancel ok]. this also affects a lot of other stuff. look at the button pixel correct placement in gnome, every tool in the core gnome has them placed differently (the layout). also continued the look of the preferences, a lot of preferences has been hidden with gconf (a windows registry like system) people need to dig with gconf-editor and waste hours to get some minor things changed.

nautilus, its still slow, if you measure the times of konqueror vs. nautilus then nautilus looses, also impossible for nautilus is to play nicely with the environment like konqueror does.

problem gnome 2 is no applications you are forced to install gnome 1 libraries for it to get some applications like evolution running.

gnome doesnt support a native webbrowser, you need to use either mozilla with its ugly XUL that doesnt fit correctly into the environment (drag&drop linked files from it to your desktop or into nautilus folders) or you need to run galeon, which is no real webbrowser after all.

nautilus and galeon doesnt share bookmarks, nor can i share my contacts with other gnome applications.

gnome doesnt offer a real office suite, the reason why gnome is adopting openoffice and sell that one as their office alternative. gnumeric is cool but gnumeric 2 still requires some time to mature, abiword for example is no real gnome product its made by some different company.

nautilus still doesnt offer to align icons to the border, if you clean up then it aligns all the shit from topleft to bottomright.

gnome 2 is still nothing for the enduser, more for the pc-freak or hacker but not for the customer etc. you cant sell eyecandy to someone who may deal with billions of dollars every day.

i dont want to flame around but kde 3 is definately the better coice for people its integration and implementation is nearly perfect. you get a round complete system, webbrowser, filemanager, emailer etc..

gnome may become good one day but not right now, its still to early to HYPE the whole situation. i really recommend you people to check up the situation clearly right now before doing any hyped decissions. gnome is not that good after all. they spent a lot of time into the routines and libraries but i wouldnt want to use it in my business oriented environment. i deal with big money every day and i need something serious to work. either i use windows or i try using kde3 (only because of the oop'ed implementation)

i cant sell my customers another mp3 player or some shit i need to have serious applications that really shares data with other apps. AND i need them NOW and not maybe in 1-2 years.

even some sun employees recently mentioned that they doubt that gnome 2 will be the successor for their customers, it may take a while e.g. gnome 3 or maybe gnome 4 (wherever it ends)

moz owns

[Anonymous Coward]

i like the rendering engine better, and it can do css properly ;)

gnome 2 is faster.

[mr.e]

Personally i found that kde2.x was generally slower than gnome 1.4, but if you used nautilus then that made gnome1.4 a bit slower than kde. Then i upgraded to redhat 7.3, kde3 feels far slower than kde2.x and gnome1.x, and gnome2 (from the ximian snapshots on redcarpet) is significantly faster than the previous versions of gnome (probably because nautilus2 is really fast) and any version of kde (especially kde3). This is most obvious on my slowest machine, a P2 266 where kde3 is basically unusable, but gnome2 feels pretty responsive - fast enough to use happily.

Re:gnome 2 is faster.

[antdude]

How odd. My Pentium III 600 Mhz was happy with KDE3. However, I turned a few effects off because they were annoying.

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[Anonymous Coward]

i recently dropped gnome and switched to kde 3. i installed gnome 2 and needed to puke. sad but true kde 3 is definately the desktop of choice for the future. even the development under kde is faster. they commit in one day what gnome commits in one month.

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[StarHeart]

I agree with you on some points. Gnome2 seems to mostly a worthless upgrade to me. I never liked Nautilus in Gnome1 and have tried the Gnome2 version. While the Gnome2 version is alot faster the Gnome2 version still royally sucks. As for KDE3 being any better, there I disagree. As for overall power and usablibility I think Gnome 1.4 defeats Gnome2 and KDE3. I think part of the problem with Gnome2 is it is trying to be a little too much like KDE3. KDE3 did have more to show from the upgrade, but overall was just as uneventful as I see Gnome2 being. Also KDE3 still has stability issues that I didn't have in KDE 2.2. mcop seems to randomly decide to crash when closing Konqueror. I was hoping it was fixed in KDE 3.01, but doesn't seem to be. I have tried 3-4 ideas of how I might workaround the bug(cleaning out config files, etc). I am hoping KDE 3.1 will be better. I am still waiting for viewports in KDE.

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[FooBarWidget]

That's good for you. But I still prefer GNOME. They both have bright futures.

gnome developer internals

[Anonymous Coward]

here some information that i aquired over the time. the gnome developers are not working together correctly. it's more a competition and hate vs. love process than teamwork.

there are people working inside of gnome that can't stand each other. owen can't stand hadess, hadess can't stand boc, boc can't stand miles, frb can't stand snorp, ettore can't stand jdub, miguel de icaza is hated by everyone else.

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[Anonymous Coward]

even the development under kde is faster. they commit in one day what gnome commits in one month

Ahhh.... right. That explains why KDE crashes with horrifying regularity, and why ILM uses GNOME for its Linux clients!

Thanks

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh, complete opposite for me. And virtually anyone else I've talked to or have seen posted on /. What color is the sky in your world? ILM made a mistake and they are going to have to live with it. They are not gods. In fact they are more like idiot savants.

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

Guh-nome guh-sucks guh-cock. That is all.

Re:Can it compete with KDE?--better question:

[Anonymous Coward]

competition is good, have you so soon forgot the plight of netscape and os/2?

And Slashdot...

[Lethyos]

...will be sure to report every single one.

And you...

[alienmole]

...will be back here six times a day to read about them.

Re:Gnome hasn't surrendered yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but I heard that Miguel De Icaza has homosexual relations with Bill H. Gates. This is how he got Mono.

I am still doing intenstive research on this, but I assure you that when I have finished with this breaking story, I will put it on my website. I will also perhaps link it to this website, slashdot.org.

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad most distros ship KDE as default.

I can only think of three that ever shipped GNOME by default. They are Redhat, linuxppc, and progeny. The last two are out of buisness now, guess why?

Which box am I?

[WillSeattle]

ps2 - 199
dvd controler - 20
being able to play great games, and watch dvds on ur 50" tv screen. priceless.

Good point. I'm looking at that actually, so I can play The Sims on my tube, while my son plays Warcraft III on his iMac.

GNOME?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this all we get? That's what we have been waiting for so long?

GNOME the project that started one year after KDE and now look like it's beeing three years behind KDE.

GNOME 2 can't even keep up with 10% of the functionality and usabillity that KDE 2.0 had.

my 0.2?

subject?

[Anonymous Coward]

another proof how much opensource fails. gnome is a perfect example besides mozilla. but mozilla has a purpose gnome not.

Is it live or is it slow as IE?

[WillSeattle]

1) I find it faster.
2) I like the tabbed browsing.

Well, good arguments. I've noticed that most of the reviews say that Mozilla is a lot faster than IE, and much more secure, so I'll be loading the recent build on one of my Linux boxen this weekend to compare.

-

Thanks Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to the Gnome Developer Team....

....They brought KDE new users and developers.

look closely

[SkulkCU]

By the looks of this screenshot, somebody is taking a course in "Ethical Crap".

(Unfortunately, its a fairly old screenshot.)

Here's a good screenshot of Gnome 1.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at this guys desktop of Gnome 1.4 without AAFonts. It looks really good and not much different to Gnome2.

[Click Here]

Tech details and attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Some low level details will never make things work the same, it will end having hacks, and we all know hacks are not good, they break.

Another thing, some people like having both, workspace and viewports, for example workspaces to group tasks and viewports for subtasks. It seems "experts" also think that allowing users their own mental organization is bad, or that some guys are mad (in any case, the same result, thing removed or hidden).

So instead of planning and keeping things open, they are limiting, and leting things be fixed afterwards, or even forcing users to go the "non friendly way", poking config files (I have my doubts about this, sometimes config files are firendlier cos the people arround share them, including lots of good comments that never appear in so called "intuitive" GUIs).

Re:Can it compete with KDE?--better question:

[Anonymous Coward]

Should it compete with KDE?

Yes! I enjoy switching between the two and having to re-evaluate my choice each time one or the other comes out with a new release or improvements.

mocom--

Dude.

[Anitelu]

A bunch of recent GNOME2 packages are available right now (and have been for ages!) in unstable, and just about every new package makes it into experimental about as soon as it's released. Christian Marillat, Takuo Kitame et al kick all kinds of ass, and you do 'em disrespect by not checking your facts before mouthing off.

That is...

[Lethyos]

...absolutely correct.

I can tell you what i do

[Anonymous Coward]

I use workspaces for global things (internet, images, coding...) and viewports for more concrete things (sub tasks). So for example, where is the letter I am writing? In the workspace I always use for documents, but not in the same place other doc I can be writing. It is a way to order things, my way, thanks computers can give me lot of "physical" space.

Somewhere I read that workspaces where like pages of a really big book, and viewports areas of each page that you can read wihtout moving your eyes much. Since then I think that keeping some order was a good idea, and it is paying off, I can jump arround quite fast. And having workspaces or viewports empty do not cost me anything (OK, some bytes for the structures) but I do not have to reconfigure my mind each time, things are always the same place, waiting to be used.

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am still waiting for viewports in KDE."

You realise that viewports are not in GNOME2, don't you?

How's THAT for innovative!

Mandrake Gnome versions

[BrokenHalo]

The version of Gnome released with mdk 8.2 is 1.4.0, with few updates for the desktop apart from a few apps from their previous release. I'm perfectly willing to accept that their focus is on KDE, but I happen to be one of those people who don't really like it. I found so many things broken in mdk 8.2 that worked fine in 8.1 that I threw it out in favour of Slackware which works like a charm.

No Launch Feedback!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 2 is very nice, but if you launch something like open office, you have no idea it is loading.
It's fine for things like Pan that load very fast.

Gnome 2 needs application launch feedback!!!!!!!

Re:No Launch Feedback!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

why openoffice ? can't you start gnomeoffice ? errm ahh sorry, forget... there is'nt such a thing like gnome office....

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[StarHeart]

Uh, viewports are a function of the window manager. I know KDE's tightly integrated window manager doesn't support them, but they have been talked about as a possible feature in future versions. As for not being it know to, I don't know where you get that idea. Metacity doesn't have them, but Metacity isn't Gnome2. There is a port of sawfish to Gnome2 in the works, as far as I know it will have viewports. Personally I think the author of Metacity is on crack, tho he seems to think everyone else is. If you really want to get down to the point it is more a matter of how well replacing the window manager works between Gnome and KDE. There are just more window managers that play nice with Gnome than there are that do with KDE, mostly because of how tightly KDE intregrates it's window manager.

Personally I can't stand any of the standard Gnome window managers with their totally clunky method of moving windows between desktops and viewports by the Send to X. I much prefer grab window and hot key. Enlighenment provides this functionality and many other very useful features I haven't found in any other window manager. I have in the past tried to get Enlightenment to work with KDE and found they don't work well together. I also found when I first tried Enlightenment and Gnome2 that they didn't work well together, but if I remember right last time I tried a Gnome2 beta they did work well together. I would have probably totally abandoned Gnome as a desktop except for two things. Mainly because of applets. They provide useful information and on panels can almost complete stay out of the way. Speaking of which, that is one nice thing about KDE, you can now have the panels totally hidden. Which I would use for my main panel. Though I would still require the option panels that showed a few pixels. The second thing, which I could probably live without, is the tasklist on the panel. There are other of getting similar functionality, but I really like the hiding ability, quick accessability, and all they provide. This is especially an issue because I like to maximize windows. I don't think I will give up that habit till monitors are Alot bigger.

It is all about the applications

[gnugnugnu]

It is all about the applications. Give me choice. I rate the chances of survival of an open source program that only provides binaries for an awkward Gnome configuration very very low indeed (some users are lazy like me, others have neither the time nor ability to figure how to use new software let alone a whole new operating system or having to compile and/or install their own software). Cross platform closed source proprietary program with a reasonabley sized userbase has more market share giving it potential to adapt and survive.

If developers really value market share they will develop applications that are either use a portable toolkit (pure gtk/qt) or program in cross platform way. You may not like Windows and certainly it may not be your choice of operating systems but what is your primary motivation, do you want people to use your application or your operating system?
Dont underestimate the importance of being able to try out software like the Gimp, StarOffice, Mozilla, Abiword, without the need to install a whole new operating system.

Many Gtk projects understand this and provide a basic solid working gtk only version with easy to install statically compiled binaries for a variety of common systems that let the user get the job done. And the projects that really want to promote Gnome also provide a lovely Gnome or Gnome 2 version with lots of nice addons and extra polish to give users as many incentives as possible to use the Gnome Desktop.

I guess the core arguement i am making that - irrespective of whether the source code is available or not - a larger more diverse developer/stakeholder/userbase/ecosystem the better a projects chance of not just surviving but flourishing.

Re:Here's the long and short of it:

[Anonymous Coward]

My method for getting enlightenment and gnome2 to co-operate is to use startx and a .xinitrc file as follows:

enlightenment &
exec gnome-panel

However, when I do something bad (ie, anything that has anything to do with nautilus) it (nautilus) takes over my background.