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GNOME 2.12 Previewed

Posted by timothy on from the sweetness dept.

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."

7 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. What about Beagle? by rekrutacja · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is this mature enough to include it as standard? Desktop search is key missing feature in Linux...

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    This Is Not a Sig
    1. Re:What about Beagle? by Korgan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I hope not. I've been playing with Beagle 0.12 and its definitely not ready for prime time. Its a great service and the 'best' front end is very nice (although I personally prefer the web frontend as I usually already have a browser open) but its not anywhere near solid enough.

      Its a mission to get going from source at the moment and even if you run a distro that already includes it, it doesn't take much to break it. Upgrading Firefox/Mozilla is enough in some cases (thanks to best's reliance on the Gecko libs).

      Don't get me wrong. Personally I love the technology, but I really don't think its anywhere near ready for mainstream use. Great if you want to try out bleeding edge tech or help improve the software, but not if you just want a search tech that works.

      The other downside is that beagled has to be run by the individual users when they log in. It refuses to run at boot as part of the init scripts. So its got to be included as either part of the xinit or shell rc scripts. Thus automation is going to be needed on the admins part at the moment. Sure, this can be done as a default part of a distro, but given its not ready yet... ;-)

  2. Efficiency by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The feature that I want is: efficiency.

    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.

    1. Re:Efficiency by jejones · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Amen. When Firefox used its own file browsing dialog, it was kind of slow the first time I saved in a directory with lots of files, but on the second and following times came up immediately.

      On my system at least (Ubuntu; maybe I should uninstall firefox-gnome-support...), Firefox now uses the GNOME file browsing dialog for saving files, and it takes forever for directories with many files, and doesn't seem to cache much, because the second through nth times around are just about as slow as the first.

  3. Re:Still ugly fonts by ocelotbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses

  4. Re:KDE by Phleg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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  5. Re:Still ugly fonts by zsau · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.)

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