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Feature Preview of Gnome 2.8
Leonardo writes "The GNOME foundation should release the new version of this desktop environment on the 15th of September. While we waiting for version 2.8, Foot Notes has a link that explains what's new in this release. Improvements include both core parts (like VFS and Nautilus) and UI modules, like a new applet manager, an improved gconf editor and a new theme. In addition there are some proposed modules like new system tools and a new VNC server. Take a look at Davyd Madeley' site (mirror) if you want to view some sweet screenshots."
The GNOME project and all its core features should be independent of what OS is running underneath, relying on a minimum of required components like suitable graphics, sound, pointer and keyboard services.
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umm, did you look at the screenshots, they look beautiful
keanmarine.com
Why do they keep bolting more and more stuff on ? Isn't it big enough already ?
...but how many of them are actually usable ? Mose (like Gnome - and I'm not just picking on Gnome here) are buggy, increasing bloated, slow and memory hungry. ...not that many. And yes, I don't doubt someone will come up with a couple of examples that ARE quite good, but they are the exceptions.
I really wish projects would deal with getting stuff actually working and working well (bug-free and fast) before they start adding even more functionality.
There must be a million and one OS projects out there...
Gnome (like the linux Kernal and loads of other stuff) is getting way t0o bloated to be useful - instead of adding more stuff, they should be slimming it down to core functionaly and the other stuff should be seperate projects.
OK, rant over
It does make sense. Providing a uniform interface through which common configuration tasks can be performed is an excellent idea. If gnome can configure network devices, and you know how to use it's configurator, then you also know that wherever you go, if gnome is installed, you can setup the network. This is superior to having every individual distribution provide it's own custom interface, at least from the perspective of consistency (which is a valuable quality in UIs).
Even though different distros may have different internal solutions to configuration, I see no good reason why a consistent front end can't (or shouldn't) be provided. Furthermore, I'd rather have many hands working together to achieve the best interface once, rather than divering talent toward reinventing a boring wheel to mediocre effect.
No, consistency and simplicity are beautiful. The gray is themeable.
Does it still have the goofy "foot" icon in the taskbar? I know this sounds trivial, but I swear it's the reason I chose KDE years ago (Although the "K" wasn't very attractive either in times past).
I don't think I'm trollin, I honestly want to know if that icon can be user-defined.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
I'm confused as to why VNC has been integrated. Most Linux users (and windows too...?), I would have thought, would be happier with X11.
I hope you can choose not to install the VNC server... it's of utterly no use to me, and seems to smack of copying XP's built in remote desktop functionality.
There are several good VNC client/server packages out there for Linux, if you really want to use it.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Fix gnome-terminal. Any terminal that uses more cpu to display the text from compiling software than is needed for the actual compile is just broken. Miguel complained (and stopped using gnome-terminal) about this more than 2 years ago! This is one of the few reasons that I have stuck with KDE.
(Yes, I know I can run konsole within gnome, but aside from the inconsistent themes, it sucks up a lot of memory to load both the gnome and kde libs at the same time.)
Dan
No offense, but that's spoken exactly like someone who has no idea what a desktop environment is.
Gnome is 90% the application libraries that manage inter-process data, configuration, internationalization, accessibility, theming, common invocation semantics, error reporting, etc, etc.
That 10% that you're thinking of (window management, applet baubles, desktop layout, file management, changing the root background, etc.) is nice, but if you still have to have all of Gnome around for the important parts (the applications that integrate with the desktop), what exactly is the point.
If xfce is a Gnome- (and implicityly ICCCM-) compliant window manager, it will work just fine in the Gnome desktop, but that doesn't make it a Gnome-replacement.
What people love to refer to as bloat in Gnome (and KDE for that matter, I'm not playing favorites here) stop seeming like bloat the moment you a) want to know how to configure 20 different applications at once b) want to change all of your applications to use LCD-friendly font-smoothing c) speak a language that isn't the default (and perhaps has strange rules like being written backwards) d) can't see / hear / type / use a mouse / etc. ; or any other sort of desktop-level strangeness.... then you actually want a suite of tools and libraries that support your needs.
One key point that Gnome has, btw I use Gnome as my one and only WM, are the standards. I think there should be more of this and similiar things in Open Source community. The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines is a great way to let the developers know what's a good way to code the apps so that when you make them those apps don't look off from the rest of the desktop. I believe that if every project at one point had a version that standardized it, we would get much better software at the end of it. I know many people are all about freedom to do whatever the hell they want, and they should have that freedom, but if there are few standards set then the interoperability of Open Source software would be much easier to implement and it would be much easier on a user to use and on a developer to code and write new features for.
grab yourself a copy of fluxbox or FVWM and get back those many megabytes of useful RAM that would otherwise be wasted on irrelevant "features" like themes and icons
And for those who thought the above made sense:
See FVWM themes here and Fluxbox themes here both of which are full of fine icons....
What you're really concerned about isn't memory usage (my task bar, just to use one example, uses a fair amount of memory under Gnome, but most of it is rarely used and often swapped in favor of things like OS file caching, etc.), but FUNCTIONALITY.
For example, a Gnome desktop can universally change the smoothing mode for font rendering across all applications at once to, for example, switch to an LCD display. That (in a generic sense, not just for the one special-case) takes a lot of hooks in a lot of places, and that code and all of its special cases certainly requires my desktop to "think" a lot more about a given chunk of work. Now, there are optimizations to be had, and that kind of thing will get faster over time, but it will never be as fast as back in my fvwm days when I couldn't do that, and the window manager didn't have any real communications path (other than ICCCM) with applications. Then, it was easy... if limited. FVWM didn't have any say in how an application represented data, what direction text was laid out in, what language was being used, what accessibility features were in place, etc., etc. That was back in the good old days when we didn't care about an awful lot of niches. Now we do.
Think of it like stepping up from tokenizing to scanning to parsing to compiling semantics. First you had windows that applications directly managed. Then global window management. Then session management. Gnome is working at a layer above all of that at the "desktop management" level. It's a lot of work, and that can be more cumbersome than just slapping a window up Windows 3.1-style... it also happens to be much more powerful.