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!"

Comments

Nice release

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why so modest?

[eln]

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.

Re:Future viability in question?

[rainman_bc]

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

Re:Future viability in question?

[phidipides]

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.

Still no flashing notification

[astralbat]

Looking through the release notes, there is still the problem of missing flashing notification for programs such as instant messenger clients. When minimizing the window, I would expect it to start flashing when a new message arrives (like Microsoft Windows)

Many a time have I minimised a conversation only to realise after forgetting about it that I have several messages unread

Re:Why so modest?

[m50d]

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.

Re:yes!

[Burz]

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.