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GNOME 2.12 Previewed
An anonymous reader writes "Davyd Madeley has completed his Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12. Scheduled for release on September 7th, 2005, GNOME 2.12 has picked up a new theme, some features popularised by Apple's System 7, some new multimedia tools and plenty of bug-fixes."
Is this mature enough to include it as standard? Desktop search is key missing feature in Linux...
This Is Not a Sig
Gnome is great at turning a fast computer into a sluggish one. Just because you have all of those CPU cycles doesn't mean that they have to use them, especially when lots of them seem to be wasted.
For instance: if you look (strace) at a typical gnome program when it starts up, it stats zillions of files; many of them more than once. This is why startup is so sloooooow.
Oh, I am trolling am I ? We all have fast computers so why am I making a fuss ? Think about: being able to save power (improve battery life) with a slower CPU laptop; people in the third world who cannot afford the super computers that we, in the 1st world, have on out desktops; think about sharing a server between many people (eg LTSP).
It would be nice to see a gnome release that just concentrated on making the code faster.
Looky here! Nobody wants a file browser that forces you into that evil humungo-icon-size style or that horrid tea-towel stripy look. Give me a file browser that is as cut-down, yet lightening fast, as explorer.exe (but without the lock-ups :-) and maybe, just maybe, this Gnome behemoth might be worth a look. I'll bet that the entire width of the left column is highlighted when you click on a file, even if it's only named "1.txt"!!!!! Old, people! That's old! Get with it!
well to start gnome is written mostly in C and KDE is mostly in C++
so right there is a major difference in both coding style and what not...You couldn't exactly "integrate" them.
I also prefer the looks of gnome but I know just as many people who like the look of KDE better. It's very subjective.
My biggest concern is my programs not matching. Seeing as I like GTK themes better then most KDE themes, and nothing exists to match GTK themes on KDE (just the other way around) I'm stuck with just attempting to match my colors...Sure this is all apperance and doesn't say much about function but it's still pretty annoying...
Little annoying things like that are my main issue, and that's mostly just GTK/QT differences, not really kde/gnome....I don't actually use a DE, though I use a few gnome programs and thus have gnome installed, well partially anyway. I have konqueror installed so I can test my webpages with KHTML as well, plus I have a few apps which are QT only...etc..
so yes it's daunting but I don't see anything happening any time soon
and that's not to mention XFCE which is written in c++ but uses GTK libraries through it's own wrappers or something like that....
but in the end the question is, who do you really want using linux anyway? Do we really want your average joe on linux? Or trying to install/configure it? In the work place that's not so important, someone can set it up, put some big firefox/word processor icons on the desktop, and that's the end of it...
so what's really going on here? trying to dumb linux down enough to home users who don't want to take the effort to learn it?
I just don't see that happening.
and please note that gnome and kde are not window managers, they just include one. You can use any window manager you want with gnome or kde. Gnome uses metacity by default, and used to use sawfish before that. KDE uses kwin. There's a pretty big difference between toolkits like GTK or QT and window managers like *box,windowmaker,metacity,etc...Your comment makes me think you have no idea what a window manager does.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
Write congress and tell them to reform patent legislation so that the Xorg folks can use the same techniques that Apple and MS does. It's not gnome's fault that the patent system is broken.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Er. You don't have to "choose", for the most part. GNOME applications typically run just fine on a mostly-KDE desktop and vice-versa.
It's mainly the fanboys who don't STFU. Under the auspices of the http://freedesktop.org/ organisation, KDE and GNOME (and other minority desktop!) developers regularly work together, standardising interaction protocols and whatnot. KDE and GNOME have different design philosophies, and I happen to prefer KDE (though I wish it wasn't written in Qt-extended-C++). I don't WANT to see one or the other go away, though, because friendly competition drives innovation in the linux desktop.
The same reason that you have to choose between Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and *BSD. The developers all have a different perspective on what defines good software, different project goals, different target audiences, and these differences are irreconcilable for the purposes of a single project.
I have to admit, I fail to see what is so utterly difficult about this concept that causes people to be so blind to the answer, despite the fact that they accept it on faith for everything else: why we have competing cars, fast food restaurants, colas, and so on.
No comment.
> I dont know of any company that puts money into
> KDE
SUSE/Novell, Trolltech, Mandriva and Linspire all pay people to work on KDE directly, to name just four companies you probably know by name. i could also name a bunch of small you companies you don't know who each fund part of a developer to several developers, ranging from co's like kitty hooch who funds quanta developers to KDAB who does a ton of work with KDE and groupware..
I've never heard a newbie complaining about the variety of linux desktops. They may have problems installing software, and of course headaches with hardware drivers and kernel compilation. They also say things such as "does do not this thing run Half-life 2?". But I don't remamber any user moaning about the fact that there are two different desktops. In fact, they usually just use the one their distribution uses by default, and don't try the other until they are not newbies anymore.
Why are there two major windows manager projects? Not like lots of other smaller projects like IceWM. It seems that so much time is put in KDE and Gnome, that if the two teams worked together, they might make something superior to what they made on their own. Does KDE and Gnome have the same goals, or are they very different?
I'm no expert by any means on either KDE or GNOME; this is all from what I've gathered as a KDE user, so don't quote me on any of this. I personally wouldn't want the two to become one because they do seem to go into different directions. A perfect example is their file browsers. I've always loved Konqueror, especially since it means I get to use tabbed file browsing. Nautilus, on the other hand, decided to use a "spatial browsing" interface, which opens a new window for each folder you open. Personally I can't stand this, but it was decided on after much deliberation by the GNOME people, so apparently some people like it. KDE also behaves a lot more like Windows than GNOME does. Some people dislike the Windows interface, but for newcomers to the Unix world it is useful to have this to ease the transition. So long as you can use KDE apps in GNOME and GNOME apps in KDE, I think there's no problem keeping the two projects separate.
This is my guess, correct me if I am wrong. KDE has more developers and money. Gnome has fewer people, but more creative people. KDE will give you everything and the kitchen sink. Gnome will find ways put a twist into things, to make it fun.
I'm not sure if GNOME or KDE has more people; I've always been under the impression that they have about the same number. As far as corporate sponsorship goes, though, companies like Novell are going for KDE, whereas Red Hat has poured a whole bunch of resources into GNOME. As far as putting a new "twist" into software, yeah I'd say that's true of GNOME. The difference is that, IMHO, the twists just make the software harder to use. But again, this is all in the eye of the beholder. Different people like different features, and that's why I'm fine with two different desktops.
For me, the difference boils down to this. GNOME does what it's supposed to do very well, and it's lighter-weight and cleaner. But what GNOME is supposed to do isn't what I want (like spatial browsing). KDE is supposed to do what I want, but it feels slower and there are weird bugs that can be annoying (example: my desktop icons magically rearrange themselves sometimes).
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
There are currently C++ and Python bindings, but the desktop itself is all written in C.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
... s/icons/wrinkles
Bring on the spat of posts telling me I can change the icon theme, as of course I do, but I'll say it again: Gnome needs a new default icon set.
The icons in most of those screens are sadly still as dull, muddied, venerable and depressing as they were 6 years ago, when I first tried Gnome.
The forward and back arrows in Nautilus seem to have absoutely no graphical correllation with the rest of Gnome's visual landscape (except the Refresh icon). The ~/ icon still looks like a little squashy mushroom house from a childrens novel and the icons in the menu editor (for menu groups) have no internal correlation other than they exhibit a tongue-and-cheek dig at futurism. Who actually thinks of a typewriter when looking for 'office', let alone a bricklayers tool when thinking about development?. Is this theme targeting a 50+ demographic? For icons so small, that aliasing really eats into their form and lastly the colour space of the icons seems all over the place, as though to solve the lack of a common palette they have simply mixed Khaki greeen into everything. This one thing KDE has really sorted out.
From what I have seen of Gnome desktops over the years, these default icons have a life expectancy of about 2 weeks (especially that home icon). Why not finally lay them to rest - or just move them down the theme list, far away from 'Default'?
Live with it, it isn't a monoculture anywhere, not even with Macs.
On linux at least you have the advantage that the tech support person could ask you to run switchdesk - or more likely they can get you to put something in a shell window (bash, csh, ksh whatever they are used to) or get you to let them ssh in to solve the problem.
But on the other hand, not having access to those techniques forces the X.org people to come up with innovative solutions to the same problems.
That's what patents are supposed to do. In practice there are two problems with this. Firstly what happens if the provably best algorithm is patented? (think: compression - eventually someone will come up with an algorithm which is provably optimal, and patent it). Secondly what happens if you need to implement the algorithm to interoperate? That's the case with these fonts: the fonts include hinting programs, so in order to display the fonts as intended you simply have to be able to run those programs. Unfortunately there is a patent on running those programs. No amount of "innovation" is going to help you here.Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I see it the exact opposite way. Fonts on linux are so much nicer than on Windows. The anti-aliasing on two gentoo boxes, one a dell laptop and the other with a dell lcd looks a lot sharper than on windows. Whenever I reboot into windows xp, the fonts look fuzzy and I end up disabling Cleartype because it's hard to read.
I also just put windows vista beta 1 on the computer with the dell lcd and the fonts still look bad. Maybe it's just preference or maybe it's because I'm used to the fonts in xorg, but it looks a lot sharper to me.
Fonts are funny things. Everyone seems to like different ones. I dispise Cleartype on Windows (it's better without anything). And Mac fonts I find to be ugly, too. The fonts in my GTK+ 2 environment, though, I find to be absolutely supurb. If you gave me Windows-like rending of fonts on my GNU/Linux box, I'd punch you in the face.
(However, I consider Times New Roman to be godawful no matter how it's rendered, or even in print, so I almost always use only Bitstream Vera Sans/Serif/Sans Mono, the TeX Computer Modern series, and a handful others like Gentium for special characters. I even have my web browser configure to use my fonts and only my fonts, to the best of its ability.)
Look out!
Implement it? You'd have to un-implement it instead. You're talking about the X11 primary selection. Which is a different thing to the highlight - explicit copy - explicit paste of the clipboard. Its pretty orthogonal really, if you do the "usual" copy/paste you won't be using it, you won't even see it. In your case, its biting you because of your mouse's errant clicks after having something highlighted in another application.
/etc/X11/xorg.conf for ZAxisMapping.
Remember that you're still using X and its a very standard way of interoperability between X apps.
So in summary, I see where you're coming from, but the problem really sounds like your middle mouse button going off when scrolling. That would also be a problem in other applications that use that mouse button for other things. Or in another OS if you dual boot for example.
Now, assuming you don't mind that naughty mouse - theres a trick you could do. X, that thing whose primary selection you dislike and a lot of us love, could ironically save your butt. Its an odd fact that mouse buttons 4 and 5 are used for up/down scrolling. Odd because when those side buttons came along they ended up generating 4 and 5 and the wheel gets 6 and 7. Have a look at
Now to make this sane, theres a configuration tweak using xmodmap swapping 4,5 and 6,7 so the wheel movements are back to what apps expect and any side buttons work again. Find that, change it so your middle button (3) gets moved to some other button - 1, maybe, or an unused one, and you should be saved. You could even emulate middle button using left and right together to still have it when you need it.
Where the mapping is done is distro specific, and you might need to add a section to xorg.conf to say you have more buttons than you do to get a spare one to map it to. Google is your friend.
Not really. MacOS Classic was pretty much the height of UI design. OS X is catching back up to where they used to be, but they aren't there yet.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Antialiasing in the color picker? The edges are smoother, but the colors are wrong. It's bad enough they used that feature in that app, but to use that terrible example to show off the feature?
--
make install -not war
(1) The free-software movement (of which GNOME claims to be a part) has the goal of giving users freedom to do with software what they want or need. Mac and Windows, while being fine systems in many respects, do not. Why do "freedom" and "don't have to be an uebergeek to use it" have to be mutually exclusive?
So yes, I think your position is a bit selfish: freedom should not simply be for the technological elite!
(2) Making things easy for the toughest group to do this for, tends to make things easier for *everybody*.
Even if we never do get a significant share of Joes to use GNOME, we'll have made things much better for people who are not average Joes.
Make it work, make it right, make it fast.
"think of it as evolution in action"