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GNOME 2.8 Released

Posted by timothy on from the it's-slippery-and-cute dept.

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."

2 of 506 comments (clear)

  1. Memory usage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This isn't flamebait, as I appreciate the work the GNOME team is doing, but when are they going to concentrate on performance and memory usage? Right now it's _terrible_ - just as bad as Windows XP. And if we want to convert Windows users over to Linux, we need to provide incentives. There's no use telling a newcomer to run Lynx and Blackbox to get a fast desktop; they want the integration, the flexibility and the features.

    This seems to be a problem afflicting many open source projects now. OpenOffice.org is slower and heavier than MS Office. Firefox is slower and heaver than IE (not by a great deal, and it's still a superb browser). GNOME/KDE are slower and heavier than WinXP. I mean, I can run Office, IE and Outlook together SMOOTHLY on a WinXP box with 128M RAM.

    Try running OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Evolution and GNOME on the same system - it slows to a crawl. There are LOADS of people with 64 and 128M boxes out there who can't run a modern, desktop Linux effectively because it's getting so large and sluggish, and there are endless posts around the Net from newcomers who're puzzled as to why Linux is 'so slow'.

    This really needs to be sorted out. It makes Linux look half-baked, when we know how powerful it is. I supposed we have to look at open source in another way: it may lead to secure code, and it may lead to bugfixed code, but it doesn't lead to efficient, clean and elegantly-written code. Otherwise we'd have the speed advantage, and Linux's flagship products wouldn't be heavier and slower than Microsoft's.

    Just a thought. Good luck to the GNOMErs, but if Linux is going to really take off, it needs to offer some kind of speed advantage over Windows. Fewer users will switch if they just have to follow the upgrade treadmill.

  2. hope they finally got rid of some annoyances ... by drmancini · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... like:

    - gui option to switch off spatial nautilus
    - improved gdm which doesn't cause random system hangs on logout (with a dual display GeForce setup)
    - faster nautilus
    - fixed constantly non-functional (without necessary tweaking) file preview (audio and video)
    - more keyboard mapping options (I mean only having a gui option to toggle Alt click or Ctrl click to move windows sucks ... even an option to turn it off would help)

    ... i know that you can cope with most of these with enough forum hunting, GConf editing and XML hacking ... I did ... but come on gnome, you're soon gonna be 3.x ... these things should work out-of-the-box

    and I hope the new MIME implementation will finally be usable ...

    all in all ... can't wait to get home and ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge gnome ... ebuild anyone? :-P

    --

    Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups