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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!
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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?
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.
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'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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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
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...
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?
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.
Shock! Horror! They're using a proportional width font that makes characters like 'i' and 'l' look narrower than 'X' or 'W'! You might also want to double check that you're looking at the picture at full resolution. If you open it in a Gecko-based browser like Mozilla or Firefox, the image will default to being scaled to your browser window, and scaling a picture of a font tends to make it look awful. I think that the fonts look fine when looking at the image at full scale, though others are obviously free to disagree.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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
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?
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make install -not war
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.
### Actualy, it's perfect.
Not really, far far away from 'perfect' actually. The Ctrl-L hack is really horrible, the window is to small, it easily loses focus, its slow as hell compared to the former dialog, it doesn't provide a view into the current directory, etc. Ctrl-L hack is really not something that should have ever entered into a production release.
The dialog also suffers from the lack of different views onto the files, in Gimp and Co. it would be nice to have a nautilus like thumbnail-preview, in other situations a small-icon view would be better then detail view. There doesn't seem to be a way to rename files either.
That said, if you are just 'mousing around', its better then the former one, but far from perfect, I would prefer the Windows one (for mousing) or the old Gnome one (for keyboarding) any day.
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.
(Apologies for the crappy geocities link.)
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
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.
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
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?
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make install -not war