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A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.6
unmadindu writes "GNOME 2.6 is just around the corner, and I figured out that many GNOME users would like to know what's in store. So I installed GNOME 2.5 (development version for 2.6) in my box, and came up with a list of the new stuff that are coming up. (and just in case, copies of the article are also available here and here)."
If you want to help Gnome 2.6, then you are in luck! The Beta release is here and it needs testing
More details here
Don't forget to report the bugs!
GNOME ... catches the SVG fever ... quite a few of the games have switched to SVG based graphics, which is a really nice thing, and a move towards the right direction
FYI : SVG = Scalable Vector Graphics
A new GTK file selector. FINALLY. I can't wait to use the new one - the old one was one of the great warts of the free desktop world, IMHO.
But they have decided to remove the text entry box??? Eeep. I guess having the Ctrl-l shortcut to get one is OK (after all, it will most likely be geeks that want direct text on a file open) but thats one they need to document WELL.
On the whole though, it might be a good thing. I guess we'll have to wait and see. But text box or not, it can hardly be worse than the old one.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
"When will we start to see serious performance improvements?"
With GNOME 2.0 and 2.6. Nautilus 2.0 got a huge speed boost compared to 1.x. Nautilus 2.6 is spatial and has because even faster. Windows appear instantly.
"Linux is supposed to get us off the upgrade treadmill, but as far as I can see, GNOME just keeps getting bigger, slower and more complex."
Not true. GNOME (and KDE!) have only gotten faster and faster. The exceptions are KDE 2.0 (which is slower than 1.0; but 3.0 is faster than 2.0 and 3.2 is even faster than 3.0) and GTK (which has become a little slower but also smoother because of extensive double buffering). On this system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz 390 MB RAM) I can definitely say GNOME 2.x is faster than 1.4. And GTK 2 feels smoother than GTK 1.
"When gconfd is eating up 20 megs (resident), just for a configuration back-end, it's evident that we're getting sloppy."
OMG not this again. I will repeat it *again*. Don't trust memory reports! The 20 MB you read includes shared memory! In reality it uses a lot less than 20 MB, somewhere around 6 MB on my system.
People who think software x is bloated by looking at the system monitor's memory report are just deceiving themselves.
And sometimes you need to use more resources in order to make things faster. Low memory usage doesn't always equal fast and high memory usage doesn't always equal slow!
There's quite a bit of inter-operability work going on at freedesktop.org. There's a lot of shared specifications and software there. Plus there are software libraries that both DEs use that aren't listed on FDO, like libxml2.
The KDE folks have also worked on some Qt-GTK toolkit inter-operability stuff. See also:
GTK-Qt
Ditto
Glib/Qt main loop integration
amongst others.