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Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse
A nameless reader submits: "The GNOME Desktop 2.0 release candidate 2 has been released! Gnome 2.0 should be coming out soon! The release notes have some good information."
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Yay!
For those who are not Swedish natives, "Glad Midsommar" means "Happy Midsummer"
We celebrate this every year with tons of eat and drink.
I've been playing with Gnome 2 for a while now, and I must admit it is starting to feel like a stable release.
There are a few things that I have mixed feelings about though. The default WM is switching to Metacity, which doesn't have the power and configurability of Sawfish, and that is symptomatic of the general reduction in configurability.
Someone, somewhere has decided that configurability === complexity, and that a bewildering array of choices is too many for a newbie. This appears to have been translated into a general 'dumbing down' of the interface.
I can no longer tell Sawfish to remember my window sizes. The Gnome Panel can no longer swallow applications, so all of those WM applets are now useless to me. I can't run the Afterstep clock applet!
I guess it is the applications job to remember what window size I last used, and to remember it without me telling the WM to do so, but they don't - not even Nautilus2 remembers it's window sizes - every time it opens a new window which is slightly less than 1/4 of my screen size.
Overall, this is probably a good thing. People should be writing their applications to remember UI things, and having the WM remember those probably makes them lazy, but I can see a bit of pain in my future with Gnome 2, until these issues are solved and Gnome 3 is released, perhaps.
At least Gnome 2 does seem somewhat snappier than Gnome 1.4, and the styling is better, especially with anti-aliasing available throughout.
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.