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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?
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.
... it also does KDE(!) ... kudos to jeff and the other gnome hackers.
Garnome makes it braindead easy to have a GNOME2 desktop
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!
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
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
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.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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 17
[1]http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84
IAAL,BIANLY
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.
Well, since KDE is up to version 3 and Gnome is only at version 2, obviously KDE is 50% better.
wipe your drool!
I want 2D games back.
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.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
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.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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?
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!
...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...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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.
Shouldn't causing a /.ing incur negative karma?
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
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...
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
The release candidate was postponed, the release team is still confident that the final release will be on time.
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)
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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
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.
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
rage, rage against the dying of the light
> 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.
> 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.
By the looks of this screenshot, somebody is taking a course in "Ethical Crap".
(Unfortunately, its a fairly old screenshot.)
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
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.