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."

Comments

Totem

[astralbat]

I'll look forward to the day when Totem manages to play DVD's better than Xine.
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.

It Just Works Philosophy

[vectorian798]

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

Re:What about Beagle?

[Anonymous Coward]

no beagle is only a trojan horse done to justify
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.png

Still ugly fonts

[AvantLegion]

Neat features. Yes the font in every screenshot is still ugly and would be laughed out of the room if it were the default look for a GUI on an OS from Microsoft or Apple. They're thin, brittle, and chintzy. Though it's not necessarily the fonts themselves. Even when I copy over the fonts from Windows, they make those fonts look thin, brittle, and chintzy. Why can't, say, Times New Roman be rendered in Linux and match Times New Roman in Windows, without the crappy errors with italicized letters and such? All the tinkering with AA and subpixel rendering settings in the world still can't match what a few clicks to turn on and tune Cleartype does. It saddens me to leave my Linux desktop at home, go to work on a Windows PC, and marvel at how much better websites and such look.

Give me font rendering that doesn't suck.

Re:Efficiency

[ssj_195]

I think both the major desktops are beginning to start the optimisation drive round about now; the thing is that software development usually proceeds in fits and starts, with different parts of the software development process going through the phases of Making It Work, Making It Work Well and Securely, and, finally, Making It Work Fast. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that even though both Desktop Environments have been around before the year 2000, both have undergone more intensive development, or at least had more features added, over the last year or so than ever before in their history (actually, this goes for Desktop Linux in general, from the kernel to X to the toolkits to the DE's to the distros themselves), so there are a lot of rough and unoptimised new additions in there.

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.

True Transparencies?

[xjerky]

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.

Re:Efficiency

[stilborne]

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.

Re:Hidden sinker

[kelnos]

I've always felt that the fact that there are two major free *nix desktops is a real detriment to normal people adopting free OSes.

Why does that have to be the goal? I'd much prefer a wide variety of choices over being friendly to the average-joe user. Am I being selfish? Not really. The average-joes can have Windows and Mac OS X. I'll stick with Linux.

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.

Re:Gnome vs. KDE

[dbIII]

Why are there two major windows manager projects?

As I see it - politics, misunderstanding a software licence and unwillingness to negotiate over a licence. In the end zealots got bored when they realised the first group really wanted the same thing when the first group gave in to the demands, and in gnome developers took over from politics, and we ended up with two decent collections of software, of which the actual window managers are only a minor part.

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.

Block middle click too, please

[Kristoffer Lunden]

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).