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Gnome 2.10 Released
Mad_Rain writes "The new version of Gnome (you know, the desktop of many Linux users?) has just been released. You can even try it out with a LiveCD (bittorrent link). There is a video player and CD-ripping utility included, and the all-important new splash screen!"
I always found it somewhat amusing that the same people who will sit and whine about people using the de facto low-quality operating system of new PCs will almost all happily chug away with the de facto window manager of their linux installation.
I always imagined it had something to do with the popularity of the "movement". All the old school guys are still banging around on the CLI or, at most, using one of the lightweight managers while all the kids just need to have their flashy GUI and whatnot on the dual-install box (yea, I'm a FreeBSD CLI snob, get over it).
I guess if Gnome works for you, more power to you, but while the support isn't there for the apps (unless you're paying for WineX or Xver Office or something, which is cool), I fail to see why I should get so worked up everytime a new version is released. I'm still waiting for a reasonable alternative to the underlying X server that isn't completely unheard of in 90% of the OSS world.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
From using the betas and now Gnome-2.10 on Hoary for some time now I have to say that this is indeed a great release. It's probably not so much about new incredible features, like including hal in 2.8, but a lot about small polishes and cleanups.
My only problem is that the Gnome devs thought it was a good idea not to have a menu editor and no other (easy) way to edit the menus. There will be one in 2.12 afaik, but right now I'm stuck without an easy way to edit my menu and that's annoying.
Anyway, great release and a pleasure to use. Thanks to all those involved.
Project GoneME is the first attempt to try moving the GNOME Desktop into a new direction. I got quite unhappy with the new direction that some core decision takers have chosen even if I do see that plenty of things that got changed in GNOME does indeed make sense, I on the otherhand think that some decisions have upset quite a lot of people including me and there was no possibility to bring these problems up on the GNOME Mailinglists or the IRC channel without getting yourself trapped into ugly discussions, slandering, defaming, mobbing or even stalking.
The people that I met and whom I was able to read and talk with, pointed out how much they dislike changes such as Buttonorder, GConf (often declared as Windows Registry), Spatial Nautilus, things like general inconsistencies, no real progress, speed issues, huge dependencies, instant apply without reverting to default, scrollkeeper and many more.
And here starts the Project GoneME. The intention is to create a community of people, who are willing and interested to help fixing these and other issues and make the vision of a usable Desktop in the means of good old Unix fashion become true. No fancy technology, no overhelming bloat and no dumbifying of peoples talent and skills using a computer. The idea is to not directly fork GNOME but to use their CVS modules and write patches that covers these things for the better.
The patches shouldn't be sent to Bugzilla or their GNOME Mailinglists because they most likely won't take them anyways or have them rot forever in the darkest place they have. The patches should temporarely be stored on a place, where people can download and patch them against GNOME CVS. I do feel sorry for these necessarity but I do see interests conflicts between their designmodel and the opinion of some users and developers.
The recent past has proven and shown that attempts like forks are necessary to lead into a better direction. For example there was gcc then egcs as fork which then became main gcc again. Same happens with XFree86 and Kdrive or Xorg at the moment. This could also happen for GNOME and the Project GoneME but depends on the available resources and contributing souls.
I don't have in mind to make Project GoneME become some sort of MacOSX replacement and I am also not in competition with Microsoft or Apple. All I want is a nice good looking Desktop that sits ontop of my Linux box where I control everything, where I feel happy. I don't have the idea to bloat GNOME more than it actually is or pump unnecessary new technology inside it or have them implemented in a half fashion. I am still a follower of good old Unix fashion and I also believe that our audience is important too and not just the Joe average user audience.
As you can see I brought up some points here which of course are a matter of change and a matter of further conversation and thinking. This is surely not targeted for people who like GNOME as it is now. It's more targeted to the audience who feel lost with GNOME at the moment and who are unhappy about the situation as it is now and who feel lost because they are not able to bring these points up in either IRC or the Mailinglists for conversation because of ugly treatment. We need to get in here and start changing the things slowly to become normal again. Please also note that you shouldn't expect changes over night. This idea must first manifest and people need to be found to help doing the work.
Actually I do like GNOME because of the fact that it is written in C (and therefore fits in the UNIX world) and it seamless ways how it fits into the filesystem after installation. That's quite clean in my opinion.
A problem I see is that GNOME itself wants to adopt all types of technology which somehow scares me e.g. a lot of talks about Storage, a lot of talks about MONO and Python and so on. Having different bindings for different languages is indeed a nice thing and people should be allowed to code their applications in what language they like and what they think is t
I know quite a few Linux uses (30 to 40), and they all are GNOME users. So I'm not sure personal experience is a good indicator. I think desktop choice depends heavily on the distro default, most of the people I know are Fedora users, and GNOME is the default on Fedora. GNOME also seems to have somewhat more corperate backing (Sun, IBM, Redhat, Novel) compared to KDE. So, yes GNOME is as active and viable a project as KDE.
I tend to use enlightenment (without all the eye candy effects) specifically because it DOESN'T try to imitate Windows like KDE and Gnome do. Maybe it's because my first real GUI (even before I used Windows) was twm, but I just find the KDE and Gnome default desktops to be far too clunky. I also find they tend to waste a lot of valuable screen real estate on silly things.
But yah, I also see the GUI primarily as a vehicle to more easily handle several concurrent CLI (xterm) instances, so I guess I'm just one of the old school nerds.
Admittedly, the transition to Gnome from Windows is easier, for the icon standards are similar.
KDE pisses me off with how cluttered the icons in the applications look. There appears to be little spacing between icons. It makes for a crammed, cluttered looking appearance.
Gnome pisses me off because its menu editing is so friggin' stupid. FWIW FC3 dropped the Gnome menue editor because it was too buggy.
I like both. However I lean towards Gnome because it's cleaner, and more polished.
If I want performance, I'll use XFce
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I attempted to use KDE on my laptop recently because it felt more refined to me than Gnome. The menus that came up seemed to offer a more intuitive way of doing things, and the system as a whole just felt more polished. I got the sense that someone was working to make sure that the KDE experience had some consistency to it, which was much appreciated.
But I still wasn't as happy with the KDE desktop as I had been with Windows XP, so I figured I'd give Gnome a shot. After all, it had things like Beagle and Dashboard that sounded pretty cool. Plus, Hula and several other new applications were all being announced for Gnome. But I found that for a new user, there wasn't the same consistency to the Gnome experience as there was with KDE. Lots of things seemed (to me) to work differently from app to app. Changing settings could be done lots of different ways, it wasn't always clear what the preferred method of doing something was (true for the file manager, getting help, etc).
Consistency issues aside, my biggest difficulty with each of the desktops was that there wasn't an easy way to install new software. I use Debian, and apt-get is great, but half the time after choosing to install something new I couldn't find it by looking through the menus. I never even tried installing something that didn't have a Debian package, but can imagine it would have been pretty evil. I realize that the LSB and freedesktop.org are working to improve this situation, but at the moment Windows is worlds ahead with its simple software installations.
So in the end I went back to Windows XP for my desktop; I'm comfortable with it, it is stable (I've had fewer crashes/lockups with XP than I did with either Gnome or KDE), and I'm smart enough to be able to deal with the spyware & viruses. I still use Linux on my web server, and will try the Linux desktops again in the future, but for now I'll go with the evil empire simply because I like the product better. True, had I spent more time learning to use the Linux desktops I might have eventually preferred one of them, but for now the comfort factor just wasn't high enough to make me feel it was worth investing the effort.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
Many a time have I minimised a conversation only to realise after forgetting about it that I have several messages unread
As much as I love Gnome and its friendly rival KDE, I dislike how bloated it has become. It seems to tax my machine more than parliament (a little joke). I cried when I found my machine was running better under Win2000 than it was under Mandrake (I personally have switched to DSL ) .
Now, I am hardly advertising that to use a windows manager such as Fluxbox or IceWM would be the most intelligent alternative, since a lot of the 'bloat' in these window managers are features which makes said windows manager easier for those new to linux. But something has to be done; along the lines of a group to go through the source, and throwing-out weight. Removing redundant code, unnecessary code, and getting rid of as many memory-hogging resources as possible.
What I am advocating is a 'slim-fast' project, to try to modify KDE or gnome to the point that it is smaller, faster, and yet still useable by Linux newbies. A true challenge, and just as important as adding features. Remember the Soviet stance in technology - The more complex an object, the more likely it is to fail.
"The best protection for the people is not necessarily to believe everything people tell them"-
I almost wet myself after seeing how easy it was to configure a printer in JDS (based on GNOME). This was after having been absent from GNOME for quite a while, and it just blew me away. Finally, configuring basic printer functionality is easy in UNIX.
And, now, modems! I think a part of my bald head was caused by configuring modems!
Printers and modems have been the worst part of UNIX for ages. Now that's mostly history!
You're right, Microsoft really does have some competition (sarcasm noted). Seriously, with Mac OS X, Sun JDS/JES, the vastly improving Linux Desktops out there (all of the above being cheaper than Microsoft), where does that leave Microsoft's business model?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Personally I've tried the lightweight window managers and found them wanting. I can do more, more easily, in KDE, or Gnome once I've rethemed it, than any of the "old-school" lightweight WMs. And I care about new releases because they usually bring very useful improvements. I haven't tried this release, but I certainly noticed important differences last time I upgraded, and they did make it more efficient for me.
I am trolling
I'm not sure about this being a problem. I just now tried it on this Gnome 2.8 system and it doesn't seem to generate an action until the mouse button is released. I can click drag through any level of menus and across menus just fine.
Hum, well I did ask about it as recently as 2.6 and a dev on #gnome told me that it was indeed intentional. I think it's activated by holding the mouse cursor in a location for more than a set number of seconds. Once the event occurs, the menu entry one was hovering over enters drag-and-drop mode and one must press ESC and renavigate to the place in the menu that one was at. Perhaps it has changed in 2.8 and I didn't notice.
* Gnome terminal lacking ability to rename tabs by interacting with the tab (can be done through menu option somewhere)
Interesting feature gripe. Never thought about it, myself.
Consider the situation where you are working on three customer's boxes over SSH at one time. I love being able to double click the tab and make the tab name reflect the name of the customer I'm working on.
* Gedit lacking features as compared with KEditGedit works fine for me. What features are you missing? For real work I use the Zend IDE. I rarely use the builtins, so unless it were on par with the ZDE (seamless SFTP, code highlighting, yadda yadda) it would be a non-issue.
I use the XML autocompletion and validation available with KEdit as well as the ability to have the text buffer content interact with scripts and terminals and vise-versa. Also the KIO-slaves missing is a gripe but not specific to Gedit.
* Epiphany / Galeon (which is it now?) not as feature complete as FirefoxDid you mean to say that Epiphany/Galeon aren't as complete as Konqueror? Last time I checked, Firefox had nothing specific to do with KDE. (Incidentally, I use FF on Gnome)
I brought it up because the full "integrated" experience is important to me. Firefox uses Gnome's mime handler but naught else. If I were to switch to Gnome I would be more likely to stay if the browser were nicely integrated with the environment. (think consistent UI experience). Konqueror may be lacking in compatibility with web sites but what it lacks it makes up for with gratuitous integration with the KDE environment and libraries.
I have to say - I've had sortof the opposite experience than you in many ways. I try KDE again about once each year, and each time I'm annoyed by the same aspects (over-widgety feel of everything, too many hard angles, the ugly phony-LED clock, etc). I realize alot of this stuff can be changed, but the general flavor of the desktop doesn't match my less-is-more attitude.Feature wise, I was missing the RSS integration, the yellow SSL security indicator on the link bar and some of the FF specific plugins.
I can kinda see where you're coming from. I have openned up a new KDE app on occasion and felt dizzy from the massive array of buttons and widgets thrown at me. Once I spend a little time though, the interface becomes familiar and useful.
Kudos to the gnome team on another fine, timely release.Aye, they are nothing if not timely and well managed.
My sweet little sticky notes applet! I initially wrote it to scratch an itch, and stopped working on it after the Gnome 2.4 release. It's nice to see that it's been maintained well. Hopefully, once I return to the US, I can take care of my baby again. :) And to all of you who sent me mail about it, thanks, and sorry I haven't replied to any of them for so long.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
Apparently it is so modular that many Gnome apps still use custom, ugly and dysfunctional file dialogs. Can't count on the file dialog 'module' being there, can we?
And Gnome is so great that programmers have gotten into the habbit of bypassing it and using only GTK. If I install kde-base and kde-libs, at least I can be certain that they'll see plenty of use.
Have you ever tried to compile GNOME from source?
You start off trying to get GTK+ compiled, which means pango, atk, and glib needs to be installed. In order to get those installed, I need fontconfig, freetype, some XML crap, and a few other programs/libraries which slip me at the moment. Fontconfig (or Freetype? Forget which) is a notorious pain to compile.
After that you got roughly twenty different programs to get a full GNOME system up and running, each with thier own personality quirks and workarounds. I have literally spent multiple weeks trying to get a GNOME system up and running, and even then there were many problems which showed that it was not installed correctly.
Nothing in GNOME works unless the whole bloody thing is installed, and even then you don't quite know what's going wrong when something is going wrong (and something _will_ go wrong). Is that startup error because of X? Misconfiguration of Y? Is there a bug between the versions of X and Z or something?
The compile time is not an issue, GNOME and KDE take roughly the same time to compile. You just do GNOME in stages, whereas KDE is a one time deal.
I don't know where I'm going with this, but GNOME is not easier and more modular than KDE. You just don't notice the fact that you've recompiled all of the GNOME libraries because you do it over time instead of once every 6 months or so.
This is by design. The goal is to make a GNOME app a GTK app, and vice versa, by moving critical/useful stuff for all apps into GTK, and making everything else just "value-added" and "automatically utilized" if extra GNOME libs are present.
Whine to the GCC-guys. KDE does that longer to compile than Gnome does. And the reason for that is that GCC is dog-slow at compiling C++ when compared to compiling C.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.