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Gnome 2.2 Released

Posted by timothy on from the dadburn-that-slippery-gnome dept.

heydrick writes "This message confirms that Gnome 2.2 is officially released. And a month ahead of the originally planned six-month release cycle. Check out the Gnome 2.2 Start Page and use a mirror to download."

8 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. Startup notification by ultrabot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yet again, perfectly in time to be included in the next Red Hat.

    GNOME can now show that an application is starting, so you don't feel the need to click a second time. For instance, if the application supports it, the cursor may change to a clock while the application starts if the application supports startup notification. Unlike some past attempts at UNIX startup notification, the new standard is reliable and robust, in keeping with the GNOME philosophy of things that "just work."

    Does anyone know whether the KDE equivalent is a past attempt they are talking about?

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    1. Re:Startup notification by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Are you lying? Have you last used KDE in 1997? You are wrong. The (configurable) throbber will quit no matter what happens after 30 seconds.

      Not really, I'm just inaccurate. I realised about a minute after I posted it that my wording was sloppy there.

      I have yet to find an application that does not "SUPPORT" KDE startup notification.

      That's because it gave you startup notification regardless of whether the app "supported" it or not. Hence for many apps, the throbber would hang there until it was killed by a timeout (yes, 30 seconds, i remember now).

      Support in this sense means that the app signals the startup notifier when it's done loading (the notification is also cancelled when the first window opens, but that's unreliable iirc). You add the line StartupNotify=true to the .desktop file to signal support.

      Are you telling me that the GNOME startup notification will work only with GNOME apps and that it is more "robust and useful" because of this? I can't believe it.

      No. Again, sloppy wording, the startup notification is a freedesktop.org spec that both KDE and GNOME are using (or will be using), as well as 3rd parties. That means that eventually hopefully all apps will support it. In fact, any app linked with GTK2.2 gets supports for it semi-automatically I think.

      Bit of trivia: so far there have been > 250k hits in the screenshots dir!

  2. Bitstream Fonts? by Kaypro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Looks like the Bitstream Vera font family didn't make it in this release. Anyone know an ETA on it?

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    Eddy.WriteLinux.Com

  3. Re:Honest comparison between Gnome and KDE? by Alan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In general, gnome2 is going for the "minimulistic, things just work" approach, while KDE is going the "ultra configurable, complete user control" approach.

    I'm not up on KDE that much, other than playing with (and quite enjoying so far) 3.1 in the last while, but gnome has been hacking off options and reducing the ability for the user to mess thing up, or reduce the amount of clutter the user has to deal with to get things done, depending on who you talk to :) There have been no end of flame wars within gnome itself about this (see the desktop-devel and galeon-devel list archives for lovely examples of these).

    Personally, well, like the other guy said, it really doesn't matter what I think, there are two different ways of getting things done, two different look and feels, and two different paths for you to try out and see if you like them :)

    (Of course there are more than 2, but that's not the issue here).

  4. Competition works by AirLace · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I really have to congratulate the GNOME team. I'm one of those desktop skeptics who has formerly been sorely unimpressed by the state of GNOME and KDE, but both have been forging ahead. As I've become more involved with GNOME development, I've come to recognise the relationship between the two projects: they do compete but the beautiful thing is that they cover two separate niches. Namely, KDE forges ahead with the latest features (Xft, KHTML) and has a nippier release schedule, while GNOME tends to integrate more external technologies and tends to adopt features when they're more mature.

    GNOME 2.2 has caught up not just visually, but also feature-wise with nifty features like the SSH and SMB backends, but has also been getting rid of visual artefacs leftover from the era of CDE and Motif -- sometimes, a flat look is more appropriate than 3D buttons, for example. I think the 2.2 release puts GNOME back in the game in a big way.

  5. What's Ximian Up To? by alkini · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems to me that I just read that a new Ximian Gnome is going to be based on Gnome 2.2, but I don't recall where I saw that. Is there any truth to that? Is there a published timeline for such a release? The current Ximian Gnome was great when it came out, but it's starting to feel a little stale, especially after looking at Gnome 2.2 screenshots.

  6. Re:Gnome Logo by mindriot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe this one is a little nicer.

  7. Re:Honest comparison between Gnome and KDE? by fredrik70 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    mind you, QT is GPL'ed for GPL'ed apps to use. If Trolltech went down the drain or withdraw their licence you could always fork the latest GPL'ed QT and take over the development of it. From what I know Trolltech the KDE ppl work very closely when it comes to KDE. After all KDE is a proof and a very good showcase for Trolltech of what you can do with QT.

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