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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."
Even changing the GStreamer backend for the Xine backend, Totem still never manages to play half the movies I seem to give it.
I do like the idea of a GStreamer based Mozilla plugin though. It will give users a great choice to drop the ugly Mplayer based plugin.
From the article: More software is taking advantage of the Hardware Abstraction Layer from Project Utopia. HAL-aware applications can display more information to the user, as well as benefit from "it just works" plug and play style hardware support. GNOME-VFS in GNOME 2.12 has improved integration with HAL, and now gives more visual cues about the types and names of media devices.
I am looking forward to this feature, especially - just another step towards making Linux more user-friendly.
In fact, this prerelease tour shows many exciting features for those who want to see a real desktop linux - improvements to Nautilus, a panel with Edit Menu option compliant with Freedesktop.org spec (how long have we been looking for something like this?), and more. Yay
no beagle is only a trojan horse done to justifyg
mono as default platform into gnome.
i've heard that someone are working to produce a beagle replacement in python
http://img185.echo.cx/img185/2971/pybeagle47ya.pn
They do, from time to time. Take a look at the Extended Window Manager Hints Spec (that I was involved in administrating for a bit before it got too technical for me...).
They don't always work together very well, but given the basic design differences in architecture, that's to be expected technically. Personality wise... well, it's my experience that the more intelligent a geek is, the higher probability that they believe that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot. (De Raat, Stallman, etc) That just breeds personality conflicts. (Linus seems to be an exception to that, for the most part.)
Give me font rendering that doesn't suck.
about GNOME is: why can't they fix and polish existing applications, instead of COMPLETELY REPLACING them with new applications like they do now. People do not want to change 1/3 of their desktop applications every year, I know I don't.
P.S: Why is this in the BSD section anyway?
Fortunately, unlike a certain other purveyor of Desktop OS's, the devs are actually fairly committed to making everything faster and less resource hungry (witness the GNOME optimisation bounties, and the efforts of the Ubuntu team). Robert Love gave a very interesting talk on optimisation of the desktop environments (I can't find a link right now, but the talk was called "Optimising GNOME", although some of the library-level changes could be conscripted by KDE and anyone else, really). KDE posted some resource-consumption figures for the (very rough and unoptimised) KDE4 port of Kate, and it already looks significantly better. Add in the upcoming xgl et al, and things should hopefully get to the absolutely perfect state of getting faster and faster while still adding features that every developer yearns for :)
Of course, it's pretty much impossible to continuously increase functionality without paying some price in terms of resource-consumption, so you might be better off going to less featureful DE's like, say, XFCE, if you prefer speed over functionality.
ok, but when will I finally see a list of REMOVED features.
You know - those features that was recognized to be shitty and unusable. Removed default applications that simply don't work(r). Sourcebase size shrinking by megabytes. Abstraction and unification instead of the Linux Way(tm).
Yes, I'm flaming. But honestly - what's new? Desktop theme? Cool rendering approach? And why desktop envorement should ever mention HAL?
(yes, but I really like the fact that now Gnome is copying System7. Actually it's really a progress - all the usability quirks from Microsoft Windows have been copied already, yes?)
TFA didn't seem to mention anything about it. I would hope that 2.12 can utilize X.org's native transparencies that have been present for months now.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
we (KDE) have been getting faster with each release in the KDE3 series. optimization isn't exactly a new thing on our plate, but you are right that KDE4 will likely show additional improvements.
My boss saw this over my shoulder and is almost (but not quite) possibly thinking about maybe trialling Linux on his home machine...
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
New clipboard management, based off the Freedesktop.org specification and tightly integrated with GNOME, allows for objects to persist in the clipboard longer than the lifetime of an application
About time! Closing the application and losing the clipboard contents always annoying me and was a real embarrasment for Gnome. I'm glad it's been fixed but I wonder why it took so long.
Note that there's nothing stopping a company from taking a snapshot of GNOME or KDE (or whatever), and spending a year or two turning it into an average-joe-perfect distribution. IMHO, selling to the teeming masses is more the job of a commercial distro vendor than hackers working on a desktop environment. Let the hackers have their fun (I know I do), and let the businessmen make their money by appealing to the largest customer base.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
I'm terribly impressed - 2.12 looks like it will fix basically every gripe I have with out-of-the-box GNOME. The implementation of a clipboard service and menu editor is long-overdue, and most users have had to find third-party programs like gnome-clipboard-daemon and Smeg; the switch to Clearlooks saves us all a download; the extra configurability of Sound Juicer means I'll be able to switch from Grip; DVD support in GStreamer means I won't have to change the Totem backend to XINE, and a Firefox plugin for it means I don't have to have other players installed. The GNOME project have done really great work here: 2.12 seems to be a big step towards making GNOME a self-contained and complete desktop environment.
Personally, I despise Windows' hinted rendering. I like the heavily anti-aliased look on OS X, especially when dealing with Japanese text.
If you want to emulate OS X's font rendering, that's easy to achieve in Gnome. Just go to Font Preferences, Details..., and set Smoothing to Subpixel (or Greyscale for a TFT) and Hinting to None. Then walk away from the computer for a few minutes, because it looks weird in direct comparison. When you come back, enjoy the smooth text!
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
KDE was influenced by CDE, a desktop environment on Solaris which showed that not everyone wants to have the same desktop environment, but has some nice features. Gnome was originally a backlash against a software licence used by KDE, and originally was some sort of odd mixed KDE (ie. CDE once removed) and MS Windows based on some code taken from the drawing program "the gimp". The project became more popular and less politically driven, breifly included Enlightenment as it's window manager (until the Enlightenment people ran screaming for the hills a few weeks later because gnome broke all of their cross-platform code and didn't care) and eventually became cross-platform and the useful thing you would have seen over the past few years. Now about the only vestige of it's beginnings is stuff like the windows registry style gconf which really is aimed for single user stand-alone systems and not for anything with aspirations beyond being a personal computer (ie. like something on a network!). There is a tool developed this year that allows gconf settings to be exported to other users on the same machine, so it's getting somewhere.
As for the actual window manager, you can use plenty of different ones and still use KDE apps or gnome apps - including the taskbar and menu style things.
The simplest window manager is probably twm. (In that it's nearly the minimum, even if it doesn't do it the now conventional way.) If you want to see what it does, login to a box with a session setting of 'failsafe' (Available on most linux boxes.) Then run 'twm &' (ampersand to put it in the background, so you have a command line free) then type in any favored application's name.
Now, other window managers add upon the simple positioning of twm, toolbars with more useful things, close, maximize, etc. Then you have things like virtual desktops. (Implemented in any GNOME-compatible window manager, such as metacity, KDE's kwin, icewm, fvwm, and most others on X11.) And some options to allow windows to say things like I don't want a border, or request a size. (Run kicker in twm to see the annoyance of borders on apps which should have them.) This all belongs to the window manager.
Now, given that most people don't like just a plain screen, you add a panel. KDE's is Kicker, I think GNOME's is gpanel. This gives you the panel at the bottom, a windows like toolbar. It's not limited to that, I personally have 4 panels per screen, each at the center which auto hides. Something that both GNOME and KDE can do.
Now, add in something to control the appearance. In GNOME's case it used to be a browser, recently replaced. KDE having kdesktop. Both containing the icons on the desktop, and background, etc.
GTK, Qt, FLTK, Motif, etc. are all toolkits, and manage what is drawn into the windows. Essentially you say: Please draw X widget here, and they provide the appropriate messages to the X server. You don't have to use them, as you can call xlib directly, or alternatively OpenGL. However, that's not recommended at all.
X11 works by passing messages to the sever: lots and lots of messages. It's handled in a way that it doesn't matter where the client is provided it's authorized. Thus providing the easy way for display across a network. Windows and Mac OS X use message passing as well, but in a local only method. It might be possible to abstract them similarly, but I personally doubt it will happen. X11 isn't really any slower than Windows or Mac OS X, contrary to what many people wishing to ditch X11 say. Drivers are generally better optimized on Windows (Manuf's drivers) or Mac OS X (very very few cards supported). Windows and Mac OS do not have a distinct window manager, or desktop from the OS, and I don't remember exactly how those are managed internally.
KDE and GNOME are called Desktop Environments, because they provide all the above, as well as other useful programs. KDE pretty much providing anything you'd want to use from one place, GNOME more leveraging already existing GTK programs. However, for the most part you can use programs that only come from the DE. (Example, at the moment, I have all KDE apps open except firefox. and I've got browser, IM, and anything else you'd expect to find.)
There exist a few alternatives, Qt/Embedded (What the Zaurus uses from Sharp) or Opie (opie being a fork of Qt/E, periodically semi-synced see openzaurus.org), GTK's embedded (name escapes me, see openzaurus.org), DirectFB (GTK was/is being ported to it), and svgalib (requires root permission, links is one that support svgalib output). While most of the examples are embedded, X11 is not necessarily heavy. Keith Packard had a server for ipaq which was 600K, kdrive being the name. The Agenda, a nice little linux handheld used X11 on a 66MHz processor.
Hope this helps to give you the brief overview, as well as a starting point for where to look further. More or less all the current systems are fairly similar, the differnce being how they seperate out the different layers, or in a DE/OS's case mash them together.
If they could only add an option to block "middle click pastes" too, it would all be perfect in clipboard land. But browsing the web, evertime someone even thinks this thought it is immideately flamed through the ground by all the people who knows how superior this way of doing things is, and that also knows that there is no chance in hell that anyone could do this by mistake.
Heads up: I'm not proposing to remove it, or even turn it off by default. I just need a way to turn it off manually. It is extremely annoying, and I (and other with me) *do* click middle by mistake - often - and that is a hell when scrolling around code in text editors... Yep, a lot of it probably owes to the mouse I have, it has a tendency to get stuck slightly on scrolling, which results in a click. But really, do I need to buy a new mouse for something as simple?
I don't use, want or need it, and it hinders me in my work. I would really like to see it go. (Maybe it really is a X.org issue in the end, though. Not sure where it would be best to implement it).
Spine World
Ahhh... The joys of passing the "Mom" test.
Look, you Mom isn't going to know that there's another desktop unless you tell her. She will just know her desktop.
My mother-in-law wanted a computer to surf the internet. I built a cheap linux box, indicating that she was getting "cutting edge technology" far superior to Windows. She asked me (proof of how far Microsoft's advertising budget has reached) if it was harder to use than Windows. My response was, "No, but if you learn something and then change, a lot of people focus on the steps being different instead of focusing on the underlying thing they want to do."
Within a few weeks she knew more about KDE than I did. I guess I skimped on actually reading most of the end user documentation.