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!
----
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?
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.
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
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.
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!
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.