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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.
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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?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
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!
According to this (from the dot.plan):
June 07 RELEASE - Gnome 2.0 Desktop Release Candidate 1
They are are a week behind schedule.
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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.
...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...
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Not! Based on KDE3 packaging, it'll be a year before Gnome 2.0 makes it into sid.
You heard it here first!
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.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
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
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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).
"Think, It aint illegal.....yet" - George Clinton
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.
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...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear