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GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
Kethinov writes "I just read this article reviewing GNOME 2.6 via the 2.5 development version. Many screenshots, plus extensive discussion on the new direction Nautilus is taking among other things. Worth a read. (A mirror would be nice ;)" Sorry - I duped this. Mea culpa.
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Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6
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Sayamindu Dasgupta
The boring intro...
As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD branch a spin - in order to find out what's new, as well as to get an estimate of how much we would have to translate (I hate that part of the job) to attain supported status. The last time I did this, I also wrote an article about what I saw, but unfortunately, I never learn from my mistakes - so here I go again....
However, before jumping in into this guided tour, please remember that I have been involved with the GNOME community for the past few months as a helper in the GNOME Summaries, and I may not be able totally impartial towards GNOME. Feel free to consider me biased.
The Vital Statistics
Before going into the real stuff, let me give me a brief overview of my system, so that when I mention something as fast or as slow, you would be able to guess how it would crawl in your system.
* Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
* RAM: 512 MB of PC 2700 DDR RAM (with 875 MB swap)
* Motherboard: Nforce 2 based mobo from Leadtek
* Storage: A 40 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
* Distro: Mandrake 9.2
* Kernel: 2.6.2
The Installation
I had gone through (successfully) the GNOME dependency maze before, and to avoid losing my sanity, I decided to use jhbuild (one can also use GARNOME or cvsGNOME - maybe I'll test one of those with GNOME 2.8)
Using jhbuild is quite easy - just set some variables in ~/.jhbuildrc, and you are ready to roll. Jhbuild grabs the latest source code from CVS (taking care of the dependencies), compiles them, and installs them in whatever $prefix you want them to be in. OK - there was one major problem - but that was at a later stage, and it got fixed really quickly.
First Impressions
Fig 1. The default GNOME 2.6 desktop
Jhbuild took around 6 hours to get a bare bones GNOME system up and running, and surprisingly, there were very few errors, and I had to manually intervene only thrice.
I logged in as root the first time (yaya - I know security risk and other stuff..), to be greeted by a clean and polished looking GNOME desktop (Fig. 1) . (Note that I am running the Freedesktop.org Xserver here - so don't expect a stock GNOME 2.6 install to have panel shadows).
Seeing an icon named "Computer" right on the desktop - my first reaction was to click on it, expecting Nautilus to pop up with my "/" directory or something like that.
Nautilus goes spatial
However, as soon as I clicked on that icon - my reaction was "Yikes!! What have they done to Nautilus ??". Gone was the old and familiar explorer like interface. In it's place was a really minimalistic window, with no toolbar, just a plain menubar. I was quite confused - I even clicked on "Help" -> "About" to verify that the "thing" was indeed Nautilus. After some head scratching I remembered a post at FootNotes, in which the Nautilus developers announced something about going "Spatial". People had been pretty much excited about this - though I personally had no idea about what this stuff was all about. Now I thought I understood.
Fig 2. Spatial Nautilus - Showing "Computer"
All my disks had been correctly identified by Nautilus, and was showing up in the "Computer" window (Fig. 2). But that was not very important at that point - all my attention was riveted on the new UI. After some Googling and RTFM sessions, I figured out that Nautilus was following a "Object Oriented" metaphor, instead of the normally used "Navigational" metaphor. The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time - i.e, the next time it will pop up in the same position. This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht
I have done a little review of my own and wasnt impressed with GNOME 2.5-dev, not that it lacked anything, it is more that it had TOO MUCH of everything. AA fonts, sounds effects pretty menus and icons, window shading and whatnot do not make a productive work environment. I mean, this is unix we are talking about, bring on the lightweight tools that run on a P100, gnome 1.x sort of had it right, but with the switch to GTK2 everything has done down the drain, well, sort of. I guess it is nice if you have a P4 and a gig of ram, but not everyone does. OTOH, I like the new file selector. One day it will be as good as the KDE one.
http://www.xml-dev.com/xml/gnome/GNOME_2_6.html with images and everything.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
i must say. i've been using gnome 2.6 since first release candidate and although there aren't an overwhelming number of new features i do find it to be a big improvement over 2.4
the new file selector for one is very nice, although it still has a few rough edges.
personally i'm not too fond of the new 'spatial' nautilus even though i've been a mac user for many years. i miss (or missed) a shortcut to close all open windows for example. nautilus *is* blazingly fast though. also, browsing samba networks works very nicely.
i'm very curious as to the final release. with it's shortcomings gnome remains my most used desktop environment.
great going guys, keep up the good work.
GStreamer is not a part of GNOME D&DP. It has been proposed for inclusion, but was never actualy added. And the GStreamer Homepage states clearly that the GStreamer API ist nowhere stable.
:)
The Gnome API on the other side has been stable since 2.0 (the change from gtk1.2 to gtk2.0).
I admint, though, tat gui programming in C is non-trivial, but there exist multiple bindings for Gtk/Gnome. Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, Java and C#. Pick your favourite language.
I don't think that the (as you called) gnome-ification of OOo is a failure. I don't see where I leads to code-duplication; indeed OOo on Linux is using gnome-vfs now. Code sharing.
The fileselector is another thing.
When the fileselector in gtk changes, it changes everywhere, just like in KDE. But the old API, still from the early days, proved to be very unflexible, thus the "new" fileselector API. The old one is deprechated - a simple API translation.
I like the new design.
The same goes for nautilus.
Your comment has some points though, especialy the gnome-vfs bits. But since gnome-vfs gets some major love right now, this will change soon.
Love.
From my own experience, GNOME 2.x needs about 128MB of memory(256 if you want to run OOo too), and a 233mhz PII processor. That's hardly demanding these days, even in poorer countries. Those are the scraps we're throwing away here in the U.S. and elsewhere, afterall.
But that's not even considering that you can still use non-AA fonts with GTK2. Use the fonts that come with X, and don't set GDK_USE_XFT. Enjoy some nice jaggy fonts :)
I REALLY wish people would stop overstating the hardware requirements for GNOME 2, as they've done a hell of a lot of work to keep them sane.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
As for that fileselector - I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to be able to type the full path name in so I can open the directory or file I want. That is a MAJOR obstruction.
Press CTRL+L in the file chooser.
You know that Shift-Ctrl-W will close all the parent windows, and that double middle clicking a directory will open the directory and close the parent, right?
Slow, buggy, and lacking features?
:-)
Well, coming from Fedora Core 2 test 2, I can tell you this about Nautilus:
1) It's not slow anymore - Nautilus 2.6 is damn fast (finally!
2) I haven't really come across any bugs yet - not that they aren't there, but there are no big ones that I can see
3) This is the best Nautilus yet for features, too, though some people insist on a file manager they can tweak the hell out of. If that's what you want, stop using Nautilus immediately, because it will never be what you're looking for. That said, there are some groovy new features in Nautilus now, like the nice removable device handling, better network drive support, etc... Oh, and breaking with the slashbots, I like spatial mode, dammit.. Yeah, it's different, but it makes sense after you use it for a bit. I wouldn't go back now.
The Free desktop that Just Works
This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop.
Absolutely, 100% wrong.
Instead of completely tearing apart your idea that spatial is a "step backwards," I'll let a better-written article say it for me.