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

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....

[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!

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

[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

[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

[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: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.

the only real windowmanager

[paradesign]

Aqua

wipe your drool!

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.

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

[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: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: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).

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...

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...

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?

[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:On schedule?

[GauteL]

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

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...