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GNOME in the Year of the Monkey
An anonymous reader writes "GNOME Foundation's Tim Ney describes some of
the project's efforts marking the Lunar New
Year of the Monkey with a tip, "Never sit with your back to a lobbyist for proprietary software." GNOME is rapidly becoming popular
in developing countries and you can donate to
help."
Strictly, the Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, not a lunar calendar. I believe that lunisolar calendars have leap years whenever 12 months won't fit easily into one year. Hopefully this means Gnome will enjoy many leaps;)
This is where the serious fun begins.
Programming in c is error prone is too low level for building guis. An object-oriented language is more adapted for this (ocaml, c++, java..). Fortunately bindings for those languages are provided (lablgtk, gtkshap, gtkmm ..).
Dropline is great! If you have fast connection, then installation is painless - just start the instaler, select few options, go outside (gasp!) and when you are back you new gnome is waiting for you.
:) I use Serbian Cyrillic trnaslations, and I'm glad that they included everyting, and it works out of box.
I've been using it for some time now, and I haven't found anything missing (besides win32 video codec drivers
Also they update packages fairly often (stuff like mozilla); they even provide an applet for panel that checks for updates.
Overall, strongly recomended for any slacker outhere!
Yeah - I use GNOME. Why you ask?
1. More consistentcy between apps due to the Human Interface Guidelines
2. Nicer interface layout. Better spacing, and I like the OS 9 style menu up the top, feels less like a windows clone, taking the best from both worlds. Also less flashly, more standard than KDE.
3. Options. Apart from Gconf, GNOME comes with far less options. KDE is nice, but trying to locate an option in the KDE Control Center is hell. GConf is a far better way to go.
4. Apps. GNOME/GTK2+ has all the apps I want. Gems like Rhythmbox and the GIMP when there is nothing that compares on KDE. Also the old standbys like Abiword, Bluefish and Gnumeric.
5. Lastly, the GNOME community! Sites like planet.gnome.org and gnomedesktop.org help GNOME rock just that much more.
1. More consistentcy between apps due to the Human Interface Guidelines
:)
This used to be a point in favor of KDE didn't it?
2. Nicer interface layout. Better spacing, and I like the OS 9 style menu up the top, feels less like a windows clone, taking the best from both worlds. Also less flashly, more standard than KDE.
The menubar isn't OS 9 style. KDE can do an OS9 style menubar up the top, GTK can't. OS9 style menubars are per-application, not for the desktop. The two are incomparible because they create a different user intereface style, one that focusses on the application more than the file.
(Disclaimer: I prefer Gnome-apps to KDE apps, but run ROX.)
Look out!
Note that desktop environment usability should not be judged on its similarity to another. If you've only ever used Windows, and you like the Windows interface, and you judge everything against Windows, KDE may seem more appealing. But that doesn't mean KDE (or GNOME) is better.
For many of us, the Windows interface is not ideal. I might also question the quality of the SuSE GNOME environment, too, since they have long been a KDE based desktop (confession: I've never tried it). Try a GNOME-centric distribution (like Fedora) and try GNOME, you might find it more appealing.
Finally, GNOME's widgets can all be themed, did you only use the default? art.gnome.org hosts tons of widget, window and icon themes with which I could nearly convince you your environment was any number of other OSs.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Also does anyone use Macs these days? I just got an Amiga and it is shhweeet. Decent pre-emptive multitasking and a real command line, not like a Mac where you have to install the Multifinder just to have more than one app running at once. Command line? Ha.
Come on, an Amiga? If I see one more damned "Guru Meditation" screen I'm gonna barf. Talk about non-standard. About the only thing the Amiga can do that the Atari ST can't is some decent graphics. But the Atari ST is faster and its monochrome screen is the clearest thing you'll ever see. Man, the Amiga looks like a toy. And that keyboard really sucks. The AtariST was made for business people. That's why it has built in DEC VT52 emulation. That's why it's built on an industry standard GEM interface.
KDE 3.2 have made some real improvements in their RAM usage and speed. You should try it when it comes out. OpenOffice.org are trying very hard to reduce their speed too. OpenOffice 1.1 was impressive, but the latest developer snapshots are even faster! KDE is designed to be modular, and with the minimal packages it is really fast!
Here are the instructions for the most common distros.
/opt/gnome
Generic
rm -rf
Debian.
apt-get remove gnome
Mandrake
Menu > Configuration > Packaging > Remove software then search for gnome and tick all instances off
Red hat
Just uninstall red hat altogether, it is closely interwined with Gnome that is better getting a gnome hostile distribution.
Sun Java Desktop.
Get SuSE 8.2, its the same thing but without gnome installed
Gnome free distributions. These distributions dont contain gnome.
Arklinux
Xandros
Lindows
Lycoris
TurboLinux
Knoppix the K in it stands for KDE!
Well for my tastes gnome is a little too bloated, sure this is fine if you want all the menus and (ugh) nautilus. But I prefer a desktop based on the nice light gtk based XFCE4 and replace it's desktop module with the sweet gtk based rox desktop/filer. But I guess it's all about personal taste.
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
> I hope at some point KDE and GNOME developers really make
> headway into the bloat and performance
This point would be right now. As of version 3.2, KDE apps are routinely faster and lighter than equivalent third-party apps (mostly because of their strong policy of code reuse, I think, up to 80% of any given app's logic is exported to libs that are shared with all the other KDE apps, and only need to be loaded once). I've successfully run it on a Pentium-class computer. It works completely fine.
And GNOME seems on their way to significant performance increase as well, with the replacement of their slow and heavy CORBA infrastructure with the much lighter D-BUS system.
Erm... Galeon and Evolution _definitely_ require GNOME (libs etc.). They're not vanilla GTK apps. If you like a GTK desktop, go with XFce -- it's sooo much faster and lighter, and a joy to use.
Yikes, ya should've read the emacs/vi civil war we had on nmlug.org last week. It was one for the ages (whatever that phrase means)!
Hmm, what is the origin of this particular piece of flamebait? Seems quite old. Apple System Software and Multifinder died quite some time ago. MacOS cooperative multitasking and no-CLI died with OS 9.
Besides, we all know we can't run EMACS on Amiga... yet.
I'm from a developing country: We don't mind about performance, but price.
.NET) $1,000
You can't complain about performance if you *never* touch a PC, right? You can't have a reference frame when you can't simply use a computer.
I need pretty much the same hardware to run Win 2000/Office/MS Development tools, and still pay a few thousand bucks to MS if I want to perform any other action than play solitaire (is solitaire still in XP?). And it's that or use pirated versions...
For being productive as a developer in Windows you need:
- Office Suite: $400
- Programming Suite (VS
- Server/Server Edition (at least HTTP server): $650.
- Probably a non-toy DB (SQL Server + 5 licences): $1,200
So even 1 GB RAM (About $100 here), a fast processor and a LICENSED distro become peanuts against those licensing prices and I still need decent hardware.
I make a living using an old PII@350 MHz / 256 MB RAM with all of aforementioned software and have some hacking, business and leisure for less than I'd pay for a *single* MS application by only adding RAM and a non-sucking video card.
Performance is a small price tag where a decent programmer hourly rate is around $3. Anyway we can brew some coffee while OOO opens or have time off when compiling Nautilus and still be on the cheap side.
So, no... we don't mind if *anything* is slow on GNOME.
Nothing in Gnome is based on Mono.
.NET development framework and I don't see anything wrong with that.
.NET are all pretty cool if you can get past the basic aversion to anything that comes out of Redmond.
Besides, Mono is a GPL implementation of the
I don't like Microsoft's business practices and I can't stand Windows, MS Office, etc. but Mono, C#, the CLR and, by inference,
Now wash your hands.