Slashdot Mirror
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."
...is right here.
The Army reading list
Let me be the first to say: what the hell does this have to do with BSD, specifically?
Check it out! Scalable Nibbles! I'm in.
I'm still happy with the progress Gnome/KDE keep making even though I've moved on to Openbox and/or XFCE4. We need Gnome/KDE for new adopters, truthfully perhaps very few of them will ever want to move to something simplier (or more complicated in their eyes). WIth the HIG ideas of Gnome I think they're leading the way with a consistant and (somewhat) easy to learn desktop.
When I get my mom on Linux, she'll be in Gnome, as I think it'll be the shortest step from WinXP(ee).
Also, first "BSD?" post? LIkely not.
CVBalkjsfdj$#@$#@
free ipod and free gmail!
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_)(^%#
free ipod and free gmail!
I know xorg 6.8 has only just been released but does this new version of gnome support any of the new features like transparency, damage or shadow?
Either way it's an outstanding feat the gnome team have achieve - will in installing it tonight!
----
Could you explain why you have come to the conclusion that Gnome has lost the desktop war to KDE.
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.
... like:
... 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
...
... can't wait to get home and ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge gnome ... ebuild anyone? :-P
- 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
and I hope the new MIME implementation will finally be usable
all in all
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
I wish they'd test their releases first! .tar file.
I'm having trouble installing it. XP keeps telling me it doesn't know what to do with a
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Because people feel that they should always have to make a point and try to be clever.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Developer Platform Unveiled
Just click here: http://www.mysan.de/article19429.html
Greetings, Jakob
yakobusan
Yes
- improved gdm which doesn't cause random system hangs on logout (with a dual display GeForce setup)
Never heard of that before. Check bugzilla
- faster nautilus
If you use spatial nautilus it's extremely fast. If you don't, then it's not so fast. Pick your poison.
- fixed constantly non-functional (without necessary tweaking) file preview (audio and video)
It always worked for me out of the box on Fedora, though you may have to enable it in the preferences for remote mounts.
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.
Doesn't "good" here refers to "material"? As in "good material that is written"? INANES (I'm not a native English speaker), though.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
If you really want to switch just a window manager, and aren't confusing window managers and desktops, you can do that in KDE too.
I don't get it. I'm not a native speaker, maybe that's why. Care to explain?
a collection of good [written material] is okay.
but a collection of [good written] material is not only gramatically incorrect, it's also ironic, since anyone who would call something "good written" obviously didn't know that the proper phrase would be "well written."
Personally, I used Gnome because the interface was clean and fairly simple. With the 2.8 release, a few of my major concerns have been addressed. Namely, the ability to automatically mount USB and other removable devices, improved file browser/mime support, and so forth (here's a link to the particular page of release notes of interest to me.) The auto-mount removable storage devices feature is more important to my girlfriend than to me.
I never really got into KDE too much because it seemed too cluttered. Granted, it can be reconfigured to remove the clutter, but my first impression with it has been a lasting one.
Unfortunately, for gnome anyway, my desire for unclutter has brought me back to fluxbox, but I will still pick up gnome 2.8, if nothing else, just so I can support any of my gf's questions.
I personally have experienced the problems with gdm. I would have to ssh into the machine and manually kill gdm and restart it before it would work again. And, I was not using a geforce, dual or no. I don't think it was an nvidia-related problem...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm a GNOME user at heart, but I've found modern versions of GNOME way too slow on my Duron 900. GNOME 1.4 was lightning fast, and 2.0 and 2.2 were reasonably fast. 2.4, 2.6, and 2.8 seem to have regressions in speed.
PLEASE focus on speed rather than new features. Comparable modern desktops like Windows XP and KDE 3.3 are very fast on this box. I'm running xfce4, which isn't really comparable to GNOME in features, but is very fast, so I use it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It seems time based releases aren't always a bad thing, the Gnome project has not really missed a projected date by a long range. But is the con to all this that time based releases make only incremental improvements possible and major overhauls impossible? Now that I say it out loud it actually sounds like a good thing that major changes are impossible, or we would end up with a 3-4 year rewrite like mozilla was.
What are the pros and cons?
Ah, I see. Ha ha. ;) Thanks for clearing that up.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I've had plenty of freezes with GDM on logging out - mostly fixable with a ctrl-alt-backspace, but it means session saving rarely works.
Can I use garnome to automagically build, install and test drive this latest Gnome without impacting my default installation or corrupting my ~/.g* files? As a non-root user, too?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yeah, but most of the asshats here wouldn't get that.
./, home of 1337 haXX0rz who can bearly spel.
After all, this is teh
There's talk on the Fedora-devel list of getting Gnome 2.8 final into the already slightly delayed FC3 T2... Here's to hoping....
I'm not sure if Gnome handles this or not, but I was curious if the newest Gnome handles shortcuts properly. In the latest incarnations of Mandrake and SUSE, when you install a program, it simply disappears, with no shortcut anywhere to be found to the newly installed program, making both distributions that I tried completely useless in my opinion. Hell, even when I installed Firefox (what I thought was one of the better known, better made open source apps), I couldn't start the goddamned program after I installed it! But then again, this could be a distribution-level problem that Gnome doesn't have anything to do with... I have no idea.
I don't respond to AC's.
For me it's not "random", in contrast to what drmancini describes.
After having done a su, stopped any daemon with "service SERVICENAME stop", and ctrl-D'd back to my account, then the desktop will mysteriously freeze if I choose Log Off (or whatever it is in the English locale) from the GNOME menu.
It works when I first choose Log Off from the menu, but hit Cancel instead, and then stop the daemon and choose Log Off again.
This doesn't seem to be dependent on what daemon I'm stopping, nor on how long time it's been between me stopping a service and trying to log off.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Well, you can install and run GNOME on most Linux distroes and *BSD flavors...
According to Distrowatch, here are the top-ranked distributions. I've added in their default desktops. "Either" means there is no clear preference.
Your assertion that Gnome is the "default desktop on every major distro" is clearly incorrect.
1. Mandrakelinux - KDE
2. Fedora - Gnome
3. Knoppix - KDE
4. SUSE - KDE
5. Debian - either
6. Slackware - either
7. Gentoo - either
8. MEPIS - KDE
9. PCLinuxOS - KDE
10. Damn Small - Fluxbox
Novell has expressed extreme interest in making Ximian Desktop the default desktop environment in their "unified desktop platform." Whether this will affect SuSE or become a separate Novell Linux distribution remains to be seen, but GNOME's hardly stagnant in this regard.
No, you cant. Stop spreading FUD. If you have a slow CPU it might be usable if you have at least 256MB, but SMOOTHLY is something entirely different.
Hell, that combo runs just fine on my friends machine too. So don't be such a jackass and allow people to have their own opinions ok? Win XP and 2000 both run fine on this machine, but Mandrake is draggy as hell. I've been half-looking for a 'Recycle Computers - Install Linux' distro for a bit now ... but I think Linux's years of being something you could turn to to get more service out of an old box might be over.
Now, this is where one of you guys helps me out by telling me I'm wrong and there *is* such a distro out there and I should've just Googled for it :-P
Kevin
No, its not an anti-gnome post.. But i run kde on a low-end laptop and it does just fine with opening several applications, including Koffice..
Sure its not a speed demon, but it 'feels' faster then the same machine with win98 + MSO on it..
As a disclaimer this is on FBSD, i have noticed that its a bit faster then Linux ( debian ) on the SAME hardware..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Anybody know if thispatch made it in? I just recently switched from KDE to GNOME and switching desktops with the scrollwheel is what I miss the most.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
If you use spatial nautilus it's extremely fast. If you don't, then it's not so fast. Pick your poison.
Why on earth would it be faster using spatial? If that is the case it must be seriously broken!!!Not only that, but my four-year-old G4/400 runs 10.3.5 splendidly, unlike a four-year-old PC with XP or, from what I've heard, Gnome.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I should be able to type in a filename, tab compleation.. If I have a directory, on enter, list the files in that directory. I mean, isnt that how load/save works everywhere else?
Let me begin by saying that I switch back and forth between Enlightenment and Gnome/KDE, so I am familiar with both sides of the argument. For the record, this takes place on a PIII 800 laptop with 256MB of RAM so I am in the middle of the curve. But I never have performance complaints with any of these. They all run better than Windows.
That being said.......
I see the point of wanting something lightweight on underpowered hardware. That is where the the Openbox's and XFCE's of the world come in. But what about those who have a big machine. If it can handle it, why not have something that can take advantage of it. It would seem to me that there should be a niche for that. Hardware specs will keeping increasing, not decreasing. So therefore, why wouldn't a GNOME or KDE take advantage of that.
I see more variance from distro to distro than I do from window manager to window manager. For instance, Gnome on Fedora to me is much slower than Gnome on Gentoo or Debian. But that is just me.
You can drive a Hyundai because it gets you where you want to go and gets great gas mileage, but that Corvette sure is good looking and fun to drive. And quite fast I might add.
... available here
I'm extremely happy because it looks like file type handler has finally been fixed, but I read through the release notes and didn't see a word on my single biggest problem with GNOME 2.6: the damn menu editor. Specifically the fact that there wasn't one, and that adding or removing items was confusing at best.
Not that weather forecasting applets and new themes aren't nice, and not that I have a right to tell people what to work on, but shouldn't the GNOME guys worry more about basic functionality instead of minor things?
the coolest club on
Constructing and rendering a GUI is surprisingly intensive, especially with modern toolkits that support complex layout and text internationalization.
The screenshot is in dutch. Foto's is the only correct spelling here.
Funny I was able to install Suse 9.1 Pro on my Anthon 3000+XP box without a problem. YaST even shrank my XP partition to 50 Gigs for me so I didn't have to get Partition Magic or anything....
I had it up and running in about 1/2 hour.
Perhaps its your distro?
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
I personally switched because I found that most of the apps I liked were GTK based apps. But I had always gone against GNOME because I liked KDE better just because it is more configurable.
But I always thought that all of those GTK apps looked like crap and did not integrate as well as I wanted them too.
So I switched to GNOME and really like it now. Everything is more easily integrated and looks better for things like PAN, GAIM, Evolution, the new RealPlayer, etc.
If it were just the desktop, I like KDE better. But I prefer the Gnome apps.
That is my take.
Again and again, I'm told Linux's fonts are better than Windows. Again and again, when I look at screenshots I see clear and obvious rendering errors that make the whole thing look horribly ugly. I only assume that people purposely ignore these flaws because they don't want to admit them.
For instance, look at the "Xtns" menu in http://support.cougaar.org/gnome28/3.png. The X is wider than the other character. Compare to the characters in the "File" menu, which are for some reason extremely thin!
Over and over, I'm told Linux font rendering is great, and over and over, all I have to do is look at how numerical characters are rendered, or pretty much any capital letter with diagonals and/or curves in it. They always look thicker than the other letters beside them.
You should try it for yourself instead of reiterating hearsay. My four year old PC (Athlon 600 w/256MB) runs snappier than ever before with Mandrakelinux 10.1+GNOME 2.8.
Have you seen the VNC support description? Is this feasable now? Usually, you could not remotely see the desktop of a remote user. You could start a VNC server with no window to a CRT, and have multiple users share it with VNC clients, but to look at the actual X desktop that shows up on the console, this is a feature that never existed before.
Anybody care to comment this? This is a neat feature if it works as described. However, how does this work when I run an accelerated Xorg server?
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Why SSH in?
Just flip to another text terminal, log in, kill it from there.
Netcraft confirms it... GNOME is dying! I couldn't find a single server or otherwise headless machine running it. These are dark days in indeed. In fact the recent release of GNOME 2.8 and the upcoming release of FreeBSD 5 are only more nails in the proverbial coffin.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Is it just me or is gnome having identity problems?
When I view the screenshot 3.png I see an Apple logo in the bottom left corner.
Why advertise for other OS'es if you think you've got the best?
I just tried that a few minutes ago and X froze up on startup requiring a cold boot. I could probably spend a few hours tweaking my xorg.conf file, but this is a clear example of how tweaking in linux to get a little more performance is a pain. It also shows that when someone offers a suggestion for a setting tweak, it won't always work on someone else's computer.
Well, I got back to the console after rapid firing of the ctrl-alt-backspace and I changed the settings back.
Just thought I'd add a quick plug for Epiphany Extensions. We worked on a couple (Page Info and Select Stylesheet) right before the deadline, so now we've got a somewhat reasonable bunch.
Epiphany is still a browser centred around simplicity. But the extensions can give you those features you wish you had from other browsers.
The full list: SSL certificate viewer, dashboard connection, HTML/Javascript error viewer and link checker, mouse gestures, page info dialog, stylesheet selection, "smart bookmarks" (right-click on selection -> search the web), tab grouping (open new tabs directly next to the current one), tabs menu entries.
However, it's not until GNOME 2.10 that there'll be a UI to select extensions.
"1. Mandrakelinux - KDE"
I forgot they were still around, thought they went bankrupt?
"4. SUSE - KDE"
Bought by Novell, KDE will likely be replaced by Ximian Gnome in the next release
"5. Debian - either"
I don't use Debian much myself, but Gnome has been the default desktop on every Debian installation I've ever seen.
6-10: These are major distros?
Where is Sun's Java Desktop system on their list?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Says who? They could easily go 2.10, 2.12, ..., 2.98, 2.100, etc. I'm not advocating it, but it's not like 3.0 is neccessarily right around the corner.
Ian
Sun JDS uses Gnome. They've made some big deals, so I'd put them in the 5-7 range somewhere.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Agree with you, and for people who are running 1995 hardware, they will find that 1995 software like fvwm is already written and debugged, just waiting for their download. I don't want to see today's coders coding against the platform of some welfare case who can't afford a $400 computer.
Mandrake is still one of the biggest Linux desktops. Just because you forgot about them doesn't change this fact.
Debian has no desktop preference.
Novell had a presence at Akademy (KDE conference), and stated they will support KDE.
As for the others, it's Distrowatch - those are the numbers.
Sun's Java Desktop system clearly doesn't register. Sorry.
What ever happened to the Coral P2P cache? The site makes it look like it's still up and running. It doesn't seem to be working for any links I try, however.
Are others seeing the same thing? I'm guessing they are, because no one's included Coral mirrors of the sites, and they're feeling awfully slow.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I use both KDE and Gnome (and XFCE from time to time on older boxes). As a developer, I need to see how my programs will operate on both environments, hence my schizophrenic selection of desktop environments.
Gnome applications work and look just fine under KDE; I use Gnumeric as my spreadsheet, but Kword as my word processor. Since the programs run the same way under both desktops, my preference is largely determined by the set-up of the graphical environment. Gnome feels simpler and less "flashy" -- but on higher-end hardware, I like having my KDE eye candy. After all, why have a powerful machine if you don't use it's capabilities?
I recommend Gnome to general users (my wife), while I run KDE most of the time. Like many matters in life, the choice of desktop environment is very personal, and should be base don what works best for you, and not on emotional rants by zealots.
All about me
why ever not 3.0??? If you're going to have all the nice X.org compositing in it, then it will require X.org not xfree86 and anyway, in all probality, will break a lot of older apps. 2.10 will only serve to confuse the general public... make a fresh start... dump a lot of the old baggage... go on, you know it'll make sense.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I wonder if this is why they delayed test 2 a week (the 20th is when it is scheduled to be available in ISO goodness). They said that the freeze would allow GNOME 2.8 in.... now if I could just find out if xorg6.8 as well as KDE 3.3 will be included.
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/
I always thought the whole CONCEPT of a Windowing system / GUI was to provide a single, stable, cohesive "standard" to which all applications adhere. By doing so you've obligated the end user to learn the functions of a widget and application only once. Each new application learning cycle builds on the knowledge of the previous ones.
Think back to Windows NT 4.0, as it's *maybe* _one of_ the best examples. During that time, most every application used the same look at feel (as in, identically), even Windows Media Player. The launch mechanism for most every application found its home in the Start Menu -> Program Files folder, and so on. OSX, (though my time spent with OSX is limited so far) seems to also build on this paradigm. Clean, but most importantly cohesive.
But as the years have gone by, instead of refining this basic concept, subjecting users to minimal UI enhancements, but rather continually refining the model, the development cycles have gone completely the other way. Its a [geek] feature war and a designer war. Applications (like Media Player on Windows) deviate horrifically from the solid foundation of UI standards with a glowing trainwreck of 3D buttons and glass bevels plastered all over custom window framing. (I love the insanity that ensues when you move between full mode and windowed mode, that spawns another window with just an icon in it, someone get me a revolver.) While a "Media Player" can possibly (barely) be argued for a "custom experience", its spilling over into everything else. DVD ripping software, the entire Office suite, even Macromedia Flash uses a zillion windows with their own fucked up grips and icons.
But now, it's moving into the desktop. The actual UI. Everyone (again, except maybe OSX so far, and based only on what I've seen) is to blame. Windows and Linux both. Longhorn is a god awful nightmare of confusing combinations of task and event driven models. Checkboxes by each filename in Windows Explorer? Redundant clocks and taskbars? Wizards and dummy-versions of everything like the (currently in XP) Control Panel that can be in classic mode or the new re-organized gay-mode. The implications are exponential learning curves and nightmare support models "Click Start -> Control Panel -> Network Settings... you dont have that? Hmm, oh wait you're in gay-mode for the Control Panel, okay well first click Classic Mode on the sidebar, THEN start over." . Linux distros have their craptasic methodology of installing every useless thing they can (X-Eyes anyone?) by default and the "Start Menu" clones of KDE and Gnome are a maze of "Start -> Settings -> System, Start -> System -> Preferences, Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Settings." with redundancy and gray deliniations of whats where.
I dont know, when I see applications putting icons to launch them in
- Start -> Programs -> MyApplication
- Start Menu's commonly used bubbling app list
- Start Menu's Pin-to list
- Icons on the desktop
- Quicklaunch icons on the quicklaunch toolbar
- Mini-icons in the tray
- Icons on taskbars of other apps (like editing a webpage with Word icon inside of IEs toolbar)
- And being able to launch fucking Age of Empires from MSN Messenger (at least you used to be able to, I dont know if you still can, I stopped running it.)
It makes me want to hang everyone thats in charge of this bullshit. Windows needs to quit providing more wizards, carnival buttons, redundant ways to do the same task and per-application custom UIs and Linux needs to stop ripping off everything every other OS does and sticking it all together into a disorganized mess.* Prediction: As soon as Longhorn comes out with its secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets like picture slideshows and analog clocks (like OSX is doing now I believe too), no matter how bad of an idea it is to start with, all major window managers in Linux will have one too. It's the, "What! They have something we don't have?! Who cares if it sucks, IMPLEMENT IT!" mentality.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
GNOME 2.8 will be fabulous running on top of Debian Sarge. We've got the desktop now, when will we get the OS itself? Or is the latest daily build of the RC1 good enough? Maybe we should wait until Sarge has been fully released, by which time GNOME will likely have released a patch to 2.8.1, and the relative haste/prudence of the two releases will be synchronized?
--
make install -not war
Looking for the editorial preview rather than waiting ofr it in the mail...
WHY BOTHER?
I can't be the only geek left that's used Linux for more than 5 years that actually prefers Gnome. But sometimes I feel like it.
That said, for quite a while, I ran KDE on my work desktop and Gnome on my home desktop. I like Gnome's interface. I find the spacial nautilus quite useful. (Less so for directory structures that I don't often use). The only thing I miss is the lack of shading options for desktop backgrounds. [So, I have to open up Gimp and do it myself.]
Frankly, I was always a little annoyed by konquerer, and all the little buttons that I didn't use.
That said... why not Gnome? Even if KDE was the absolute best in _every_ way. What makes Gnome a waste of time? Who said it's a war? If Gnome moves forward in a technology, chances are it will urge the KDE developers to move forward as well (like the expansion of KDE availability onto more non-Linux UNIX systems). There are certainly a number of features that KDE has put out that have effected Gnome. So what?
Basically, choice is an important factor to me. I prefer having a choice over having no choice. Choice is the very thing that got me to install Linux for the first time.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
>INANES (I'm not a native English speaker), though.
Which is why you're more likely to correctly understand it. I've found that non-native speakers tend to speak better English than native speakers.
Log in
Run % startx
And startx, out of the box, runs KDE.
As far a 'supporting' KDE, every distribution supports KDE. a good 30% of default apps require qt/kde widget libraries to run. I actively try to avoid applications that have KDE dependancies, and I can't do it. (The opposite is also true of Gnome, I might add).
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Have they finally improved the crappy file selector that was supposed to be fixed in 2.6?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Either way, the "Xtns" looks just fine to me. It's not a font I would choose to use myself, being a convert to the extremely readable Vera Bitstream series but that's a personal choice.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
On my old P3 850 I went back to using Nautilus. I was using Rox for the longest time because nautilus was too slow. Then came Nautilus 2.6. I'm back using it because it is significantly faster than it used to be, and on par w/ my experiences with Rox (which was a pretty cool file manager btw). So, I will attest to the fact that spatial is way fast.
Yeah, CTRL-F1 is all you needed.
I agree. Hopefully people that do not use spatial Nautilus will not be second class citizens with a slower file browser.
Well ive been running the 2.7.x devel series and I gotta say gnome keeps getting faster and better in my opinion. HAL is amazing and I think that it really will make a nice environment for new linux users to take advantage of. I for one though am very pleased with this release. Instead of trying to do a ton of new features they instead only made a few new features and spent a lot of time on fixing bugs and doing little touches. Even during the code freeze I saw several bug fixes get pushed for outstanding issues in nautilus and eel2 which will make a better user experience. There were a few things I wish that they did do such as work on the menu code, and also to switch over to firefox as the default browser but mayde this will happen for 2.10. On a seperate note one thing that really disapointed me is that gtk2.6.0 isn't released yet. They did a few nice performance improvements in the 2.5.x devel series, specifically with screen window resizing, so as soon as its released I recomend giving it a shot with gnome 2.8 and then post your comments on the performance of gnome.
The auto-mount removable storage devices feature is more important to my girlfriend than to me.
Your just asking for jokes aren't you?
RegardselFarto
Why'd it freeze? Check the logs.
I have a 600MHz PIII/320mb stinkpad running gnome 2.4 (mdk10 default) and a friend - whom I setup with a similar thinkpad (only a 366mhz system w/256mb) just used the mdk10.1 install to "upgrade" hers to 2.6 and even there the improvement in responsiveness could be seen.
Have they fixed Gnome-terminal yet?
It was, as of 2.6, absolutely unusable. Gnome has some really nice features. But I always hear of how nice it is compared to KDE because KDE is bloated.
Why is it then that KDE 3.3 out performs Gnome 2.6? ESPECIALLY when you are in their respective terminals.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
release an updated version of their distro?
I have no idea how to install this when it's not in a debian package, anyone care to tell me how to do it ?
Because XP writes much of the system settings to disk at shutdown to speed up subsequent boots. If you add the XP close down and start up times together and compare them to the equivalents for a Linux box, I think you'll find that Linux wins. The slow shutdown times on XP drive me crazy when I'm in a hurry - you can't leave until it's fully powered down in case it doesn't complete.
That said, my laptop (1.5Ghz) boots in under 45 seconds on FC2. Hardly a massive amount of time. And I've not bothered to streamline it - I could probably knock another 10 seconds off that with a little fiddling and delayed startups.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
A number of posters have commented on the large memory footprint of Gnome (and of KDE). Others have made comments regarding code bloat, configurability, or more sophisticated graphical features such as transparency. Several readers have suggested that Macos X provides a wonderful user experience, one stating that FreeBSD or Linux on the server and Macos X on the desktop is the best approach. (That was moderated as flame bait BTW, which I find unjustified. I considered it merely off-topic since the poster did not elaborate).
KDE and gnome both have Macos X and Windows GUIs in their sights. They are looking for ease of use, and short ramp up time for new users. They are also looking to provide horizontal infrastructure to provide more functionality for developers of applications targeted to their environment. In short, they want to provide more power to developers by enabling them to write less code and provide more functionality. They want to provide more power to end users by providing a more familiar experience (familiar to what they are already used to). They also want to provide more general functionality in ways that are configurable. To do so they have expanded the functionality and scope of their systems dramatically in the past few years. However, to be more useful and valuable to the majority of users in the long run they need to reverse this trend in certain ways. They need to limit developers and users in consistent ways, and provide less flexibility not more in particular aspects.
KDE and Gnome have both improvement dramatically over the past several years. Both the depth and breath of their supporting libraries and the basic graphical expressiveness of their core frameworks have advanced. This has resulted in increasing the potential value of these systems for users and developers. However, the potential value, the potential utility of the software which relies on the framework in the context of how difficult it was to write, is essentially independent of the tangible value accruing to end users through use of applications.
Value is an inherently subjective measure. It is not intrinsic. It is measured person by person in the context of use. I believe that the biggest problem with most open source efforts is the failure to recognize that value is context dependent. The designers and developers fail to account for the inherently subjective nature of their judgments, and thus assess cost and value in ways that differ substantially from their users.
Complaints that memory footprint and CPU utilization are increasing, result mostly from developers' desire to increase the depth and breadth of the graphical toolset. They also result from attempts to broaden the support libraries which application developers can call from their code to provide general services (file system browsing, color choosers, etc.). These both serve to increase the potential power of the system for developers, by increasing the functionality which they may provide to users without writing it from scratch. However, developers tend to have more powerful systems with more memory, thus tend to underestimate the cost of this functionality as measured by more typical users. No wonder many complain of bloat, their experience of the system is qualitatively different.
This broader, deeper core functionality decreases the effort expended by application developers and makes development more enjoyable to them. This is of direct and tangible value to a developer measured in time, and enjoyment. Value as measured by developers or highly technical users, derives both through direct use of the resulting software and their interaction with the source code, other internal features of the software, and the supporting frameworks on which it rests. This often causes them to judge cost and value in significantly different ways than other users. Thus technical users are inherently prone to judgments which different significantly, even diametrically to those other users. After all a user derives no direct
How can I make a new menu? (Just like the "Applications" one, but with my own icon, submenus...)
GTK+ depends upon this ability greatly.
GTK+ depends on the proprietary nvidia driver? That's news to me!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Every non-commercial BSD system is an "either" as well.
I'm not bashing GNOME with this, just stating the facts. Personally I don't think ANY non-newbie system should have a default. People who think an enterprise distro needs a default desktop because enterprise sysadmins are can't handle choice are clearly off their rocker.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Or if they dropped their akward development cycle, the gnomes could rejoice as various Gnome modules could be upgraded such that the simple stuff could be brought out in a few days or weeks. Mind you it took forever for Linux to realise that the even/odd stable/unstable was a bad way to go, I would imagine it would take Gnome developers a fair while as well. Sorry, waiting 6 months for better utilizing X.org is just plain silly.
What feature are you referring to ?
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
The screenshots suck. The bloody thing looks uglier than Windows 95. They need to find some gpraphics artists. In visuals, it does not even comare to the latest KDE.
No, it depends on RenderAccel, which is also supported by the open-source ATI drivers, the binary ATI drivers, the open-source NVidia drivers, and a good deal of other drivers.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I agree with you about big being clumbsy, annoying, and just plain clutter. However, Gnome does make it easy enough to change the size of your toolbars, hell, mine are TINY. In fact, I think that's the size option that I use in the preferences, 'tiny'. I'm at 1280x1024 and my taskbar, I believe is about 24 pixels... and I love it that way :)
-matt
This is pretty much what I say about KDE, to me, It's UNUSABLE. Sure it may look nice and pretty but that's it. Personally, I don't know why people would want to use KDE, Gnome just seems more leaner and more clean.
Sure, I may not understand KDE but I do admit that KDE has its own niche...somewhere.
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
Good for you. This PowerBook G3 266 runs with Debian and GNOME, but OS X doesn't even boot. It did before, though, and ran Panther (installed with XPostFacto) surprisingly well with 192 MB RAM, as long as I didn't use too many apps at the same time.
/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.9.3' under GNOME 2.6, Debian Sid PPC)
Then one of my RAM modules stopped working, and OS X would just grind to a halt before I could even log in. Now I use Debian and WindowMaker most of the time, and it runs better than OS X did, with only 64 MB RAM -- as long as I use even fewer apps. I can't run both Thunderbird and Firefox efficiently at the same time. One of them + Emacs seems to work well, though. Or just OpenOffice.org.
Just face it, OS X is far more demanding than all other popular desktops when it comes to memory usage. And maybe that's why it works so well on old equipment in your fantasy world -- because you've made sure you have enough RAM. But that will help about equally well on all OSes.
(Yes, this message is posted from 'Mozilla
No, it's really more of a clear example of hardware makers not testing or developing their hardware enough on Linux. Render acceleration on their drivers really should be both stable and enabled by default, like it is with pretty much every other video driver ever.
Seem's it still experimental:
"Option "RenderAccel" "boolean" Enable or disable hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension. THIS OPTION IS EXPERIMENTAL. ENABLE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. There is no correctness test suite for the RENDER extension so NVIDIA can not verify that RENDER acceleration works correctly. Default: hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension is disabled."
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-61 11/README.txt
Ok.. maybe some gnome expert can answer this, i have been going crazy for a few days. I have figured out that if you use the applications-all-users:/// you can set the menu items. But now I need to configure that top panel for gnome on solaris so that people get a standard set of apps..
anyone got an answer on this?
thanks
-b
Because the GUI is simpler...
Huh? The GUI is actually more complex with spatial. When you click on a folder icon you end up creating a new window. With non-spatial you're reusing the existing window. That means fewer resources. It also means you don't have to look up where the user last left that window so you can position it spatially.
Constructing and rendering a GUI is surprisingly intensive
Precisely. Which is why spatial should be more intensive than non-spatial, simply because it's constructing more windows. Unless it's doing something really goofy in the non-spatial case then spatial should be slower. Maybe not slow enough to affect the user, but still slower than the simpler case of non-spatial.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Mandrakelinux is more in the "either" category.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
to all the morons out there saying concerntrate on features rather then speed - ITS A DESKTOP ITS SUPPOSED TO HAVE NICE FEATURES TO MAKE LIFE EASIER if i want the ultimate in speed i'll use pine for email and lynx for web, but i dont' want that speed i want nice menus and easy to navigate stuff. THATS why i've been using KDE rather then gnome, it makes my life easier. I'm going to check out gnome 2.8 but it's looks like they might finally be on a par with kde in useablity.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Anyway, I started using Slackware because at the time, it was the easiest to upgrade to Gnome 2.6.
My only complaint now... Just as I'm getting used to 2.6, 2.8 comes out, and now I want to upgrade again!
Besides that... Swaret doesn't track dependancies as well as up2date (in my personal experience, most slacker's experiences vary from mine).
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
even with the apostrophe?
Windows and nibbles on the same screenshot don't have apostrophes - but then again, they're English words....
Advanced users are users too!
When 1.4 came around, easel's crappy half-finished nautilus was integrated and the system ground down to a near halt.
That's incorrect - all of the 1.x series used gmc by default. Eazel's Nautilus could be installed as an alternative, but was never part of Gnome. 2.0 was the first version in which Nautilus (heavily rewritten) was the default file manager.
But you're right about the performance since then - 2.0 wasn't all that great either, but each subsequent release has been better. I happily run 2.6 (via Fedora 2) on my work desktop, a 700MHz Celeron - it could be snappier, but is perfectly adequate.
kde has long been my oe of choice... could however be time to give g a peek again...
All the torrents you could want.
Did you manage to somehow completely miss the next sentence or what?
You are confused, the file selector belongs to GTK, not Gnome (which is made with GTK).
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
I hope what this really means is that someone will fix fink enough so that when I try `fink install gnome` (or anything requiring gnome) I don't get errors compiling pango.
I want my always-on-top clock panel that apps don't avoid on maximize back.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> If it were just the desktop, I like KDE better. But I prefer the Gnome apps.
I prefer some Gnome apps (most notably, gnome-terminal and Gimp), some KDE
apps (e.g., the calculator -- the Gnome calculator sucks), some independent
apps (Emacs/Gnus, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Inkscape).
As far as the actual desktops, the last time I tried KDE it *still* didn't
have panel drawers, which makes it unusable for me. Actually, for the panels,
Gnome 1.4 is still the best and most configurable.
For the window manager, I use sawfish. Metacity is even less configurable
than the Microsoft window management stuff, if that's possible.
The worst thing about Gnome, though, is that it virtually insists on running
Nautilus 24/7. You kill it, and it comes back. You killall -9 it, and it
comes back. It took me nearly an hour to figure out how to remove Nautilus
from my Gnome session. (By the end, my family could hear me muttering, "Die,
already, die, Nautilus, die, die, die".) The worst part about this is,
Nautilus serves no useful purpose, other than to set the desktop background
color and/or wallpaper once at the beginning of the session (which is largely
irrelevant for me, since I almost never *see* the desktop, burried as it
always is behind umpteen windows that I never bother to minimize (much less
close)). I suppose some people use Nautilus for copying and moving files,
but I've done my file management from the commandline since DOS 3.3, because
it was faster and more flexible (think wildcards) than drag-and-drop file
management and the tab completion in *nix shells makes that even *more*
efficient, to say nothing of what you can do with a little Perl one-liner.
Stuff that would take *hours* with Nautilus or the equivalent can be done
in seconds.
Add to this that Nautilus is a system-resource hog. I'm not normally very
critical of resource consumption. I run OpenOffice and six Mozilla windows
(each with 20-30 tabs), several Emacsen, half a dozen terminals... leave
MySQL and Apache running in the background all the time on my desktop even
though I go days without using them, because it's handy to have them there
when I want to test something... I have a lot of RAM and don't mind using
it, because that's what it's there for. But Nautilus uses *way* more of
the system's resources than is anywhere near reasonable for an app that
doesn't actually *do* much. Performance is MUCH better with it removed from
my session.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
According to the GNOME 2.8 release notes, it includes Evolution 2.0. But Novell hasn't released Evolution 2.0 (though we're in its promised "2004Q3" delivery window). Is the Evolution 2.0 included with GNOME 2.8 a stable version? Is there any reason to wait for Novell to release it on their own?
--
make install -not war
I used to run gnome, but a couple of years back nautilus came out. It was a memory hog and cpu hog - that's when I realized that I don't really use a desktop anymore. What I use is a set of apps , almost all of them I know by name , from the commandline . gaim, xchat, galeon, etc..
... it's being watered down for morons - a larger market of morons are there than my kind . It does make sense , but I have my own fluxbox :)
All this got worse as soon as I started working with remote-X, I finally gave up gnome and kde as a desktop. I still use gnome apps and kde apps (kppp's still my dialer, gimp has no equal) , but not the desktop or their wms.
People define "Ease of use" differently - I just don't happen to like the way gnome is going
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Windows != more resources. Constructing a window in X is a lightweight, fast operation. Yes it uses some resources but constructing and laying out a complex toolbar with embedded edit boxes, a tree view, a spinner, a zoom control etc etc *does* take time. A spatial window just has the icon view, a menu bar and a status bar. Much simpler.
XFCE is not a full Desktop Environment. It is a nice compromise between a full DE and a Window Manager. A full DE has a browser, an office suite (though I still don't see what is promising in KDE's office suite, they have one), and a lot of configuration and administration apps which provide a consistent look and feel. XFCE (which I'm using right now) doesn't have this. It has a control panel, yes; a couple applets which are fairly well integrated.
I do find XFCE to be a nice alternative to the Bloated DE's now and again, but I tend to go through phases between UDE, XFCE, and KDE/Gnome depending on how much integration I want. Most of my time is spent in UDE.
However, Gnome does make it easy enough to change the size of your toolbars, hell, mine are TINY.
How? I mean, for example, how to change the toolbar size of Nautilus in browse mode? I didn't find the option, so it probably ain't that easy...
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Because the GUI is simpler, and because it's the default it's more heavily optimized.
Either you're full of it or else something is wrong with Gnome. The GUI isn't simpler, it's the same friggin GUI! How do one optimize especially for spatial support, especially since the browser support both modes?Windows != more resources.
You're not a developer are you? That was so stupid that only the most pointy haired salesperson could have said it! Then again you contradict yourself in the next sentence, which only goes to show...If you are a MandrakeClub member then there has been access to a well packaged version of firefox throughout the 10.0 (the good news is that there is a recent version of firefox in Mandrake 10.1 contribs now). Feodra also had a well packaged version for it over at Fedora Extras. The moral is that if you break away from your distro specific packaging, expect problems...
Just one word - modularity. This way you achieve features, while still being allowed performance. Only you need to be wise in choosing what to include in what module, so you don't need to load them all to get a functional desktop. I know this is being tried right now, but we really need to improve in this area.
Dunno if that was meant to be a joke, but if not then you seriously missed what I was talking about. And yes, I am a developer ...
And yes, I am a developer ...
The horror, the horror!!!Is there any practical reason why, when I run Nautilus, it stomps all over my Enlightenment desktop? I'd love to be able to use Nautilus, but it replaces my background and displays Gnome's desktop icons and task bar without asking me. Pretty obnoxious IMHO... this is why, until E17 comes out, when I want a graphical file manager, I will continue to run Konqueror.
Read my keyboard review.