GNOME 2.8 Released

damogar writes "The GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Platform release is the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment, out today, with an awesome schedule time. Some pretty cool improvements have been made, specially the Nautilus file manager, the new MIME system and others. Release notes are already available, as well as screenshots and a variety of sources. Enjoy!" jimmy_dean adds a plug for the new GNOME Journal, which is meant to be a source of "good written material surrounding GNOME and the opinions of the community."

Comments

A screenshots mirror...

[tcopeland]

...is right here.

screenshots now mirrorred

[Chuck Bucket]

Ah, the screenshots always kill a webserver don't they ;) Here's a mirror of just the screenies for Gnome 2.8: screenshots. Firefox users remember; center-click is yr friend! ;)

CB_)(^%#

Re:BSD/GNOME!

[damogar]

Not really, I submitted into Linux section, but it was magically edited to BSD.

Re:BSD/GNOME!

[mlg9000]

Because Gnome runs on BSD as well as Linux. They left out Solaris, HP-UX, and Darwin though.

Inofficial Mandrakelinux packages

[G�tz]

GNOME2.8 came too late for Mandrakelinux 10.1 (just as KDE 3.3), that's why I've created my own packages. You can get them from a urpmi repository. Remember to add the Mandrake Cooker (soon to become 10.1) and Contrib repositories as well for some of the dependancies.

Re:xorg

[Nadir]

metacity (the Gnome window manager) can be a compositing manager, but it is disabled by default (a configure switch) so that only users who know what they are doing enable it.

Re:xorg

[polyp2000]

You can get these effects with any desktop running on Xorg6.8

just run
xcompmgr -c

(in an xterm) and that will give you proper dropshadows and compositing (no-more window trails)

and the
transset
(in an xterm)
command will give you a point-and click crosshair to make any window have real transparency.

Here's a screenie of my desktop demonstrating it.

You should be able to get similar results using any WM from TWM upwards, just make sure you have a enough beef to enjoy it fully.

Nick...

Re:xorg

[urmensch]

Watch out - metacity 2.84 has problems with the new stuff, use 2.83

very fast screenshot mirror

[morten poulsen]

... available here

Once you beat the bottlenecks, it's very snappy.

[AntiOrganic]

Right now, there are a two main reasons that GNOME feels so slow in comparison to lighter-weight desktop environments like IceWM and Fluxbox.

• Many users on nVidia graphics cards install the proprietary nVidia drivers without setting

  Option "RenderAccel" "true"

  to enable Render acceleration, which greatly speeds up font rendering, alpha blending, and other tasks by offloading them to the graphics card; GTK+ depends upon this ability greatly. Additionally, the support for this is fairly flaky in nVidia's proprietary drivers and doesn't seem to work without working AGP and AGP Fast Writes. Try opening a large menu without and then with Render acceleration enabled. Go ahead.
  
• Pango, the GTK+ font layout library, has much better Unicode support than Windows' GUI libraries. The downside to this is that it's not optimized for a Latin code path (yet), and the generic code path is somewhat slow. However, on a fast system (2 GHz+), you escape the bottleneck and GNOME is much snappier than Windows XP. I'm not saying "look, it's awesome on fast machines so it's really better and you should just upgrade," but it's important to note that GNOME currently has one single bottleneck killing its performance, and once that's optimized, it will be much better. It's not like the whole environment is much too weighty and slow.