GNOME 2.12 Released

Moderator writes "At long last, Gnome 2.12 has been released! Among the many new features are clipboard management, a menu editor, an improved search tool, and a spatial-tree view in Nautilus. Check out the start page for more info."

Comments

Hot off the presses

[Doc Ruby]

Since I moved from Debian to Ubuntu on some workstations, I now get to whine "but how long will it take Ubuntu to release the debs?" Or at least whine about GNOME app upgrades that depend on upgrading a new libc, which then forces upgrading all kinds of other apps (like Evolution v2.3.7 does). It's a whole new dependency hell, slightly less hot.

Have to try it out

[stoolpigeon]

There is a lot I like about gnome- but last time I did try it, the lack of a menu editor drove me nuts. I dug around trying to find out how to do it manually for days. Even wrote up a journal entry or two on it. I ended up giving up and went back to KDE. I'll check this out and see how it goes.

What Gnome needs

[andrewman327]

If the GUI could match the sheer attractivness of Tiger or Vista, there would be many more converts. Although it is billed as "an intuitive and attractive desktop for end-users" on GNOME's website, it still has a way to go. Say what you will about the other named OSes, but real progress is being made on the GUI front, and I'm afraid that GNOME is falling behind.

Re:What Gnome needs

[cortana]

Better yet: set /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir to True.

"If set to true, then Nautilus will use the user's home folder as the desktop. If it is false, then it will use ~/Desktop as the desktop."

This makes so much sense. It's great!

Nice

[e_xworm]

Gnome is getting better and better but KDE is still eye-candier (ermm is that proper? candier?)

About gtk-2.8... What are those new "features not currently available in any other toolkit" that the article is talking about?

Evince looks useful

[dankelley]

The 'evince' app looks useful, letting you see PDF or some other formats, sort of like the 'preview' app in OSX. But, wait, there's more! As I read the webpage, Evince will now (or will one day) also handle presentation formats (openoffice "impress" and Powerpoint). This last thing is more than just a copy of non-free software, and that in itself is notable. But I think it's more important than that ... I think it would be very helpful to have just one interface for viewing many types of files. Of course, they will have had to make a comfortable and powerful interface; once this gets into Ubuntu or Fedora, I'll have to check it out!

Re:Evince looks useful

[Kristoffer Lunden]

I've been trying the Evince in Breezy and it's a really neat application. Up till just recently I was defending Acrobat Reader as the only useful PDF reader, because no other reader handled thumbs, ToCs and were generally bug free enough for general consumtion. Actually, I still think Acrobat is ok, as long as you don't install the plugins package - that's what is taking all the resources. Drawback is that you can't click external links anymore and some other minor things.

And then: enter Evince. Does everything I need, has good support for thumbs, ToC, search and it is is really fast too. I can even click those links, both external and internal, very very nice. It also provides thumbnails to Nautilus, further strengthening preview. More formats will be nice, but I mainly do and will use it for PDF. Acrobat's a goner!

The only thing I'm missing is multiple documents, preferably in tabs. Acrobat has this via the "Windows" menu, and most other apps use this as a great way to collect multiple relevant whatevers in the same window instead of cluttering the task bar. Browsers, IMs, editors, well just about anything does this. Sadly it seems the makers of Evince disagree: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306060 - I think they misunderstand the issue though, it's not about interlinking and "remembering to read". Hope it will be reopened at some point as it is both consistent with other apps (like Epiphany) and extremely useful.

A few steps back?

[SumDog]

I've been disappointed with many of the Gnome release, however for some reason I keep on using it. I will never like Ephanie as I think Galleon was much superior, however it hasn't really been maintained in a while.

Anyone using the Gentoo unstable tree has seen some of the more recent Gnome features including stability in Nautilus. Going from Nautilus 2.8 to 2.10 I noticed it was a lot faster, however it crashed every 10 minutes (I'm not exaggerating). However in several of the point releases since then, I've noticed improved stability and even the cool tree view thing in the browser.

I am hopeful for Gnome 2.12. Hopefully it won't suck anywhere near as bad as the initial release of the other Gnome versions.

SumDog

First impressions:

[jdclucidly]

I just downloaded from the torrent and booted it up and it's another disappointment.

First of all, congrats to the Ubuntu folks on a fine Live CD system. It's rather nice and very intelligently makes use of the Debian Installer system for hardware probing. Also, props to the Gnome guys for their hard work on this release.

Now, having said all that, I don't get it. I try every single Gnome release because so many people in the Linux community whom I respect seem to think the world of Gnome. And I just tried it again and yet again I'm left thinking that there's some fundamentally philosophical misunderstanding between myself and the Gnome developers.

The first thing I checked was how well Gnome and KDE integrate in a hybrid environment. Sure enough, Gnome still insists on ignoring the X Windowing system's DPI information and overriding it (and all other applications started after gnome-settings-daemon) with it's favorite 96 DPI. Without a copy of KDE on the Live CD I wasn't able to see if Gnome has adopted the Freedesktop.org MIME standard in this release so that downloads in Epiphany and Firefox will default to the same applications that Konqueror does (it doesn't in 2.10).

Moving on, three failings on the Live CD itself: First, the video and audio samples that are supposed to be used to show off Totem don't work at all. Totem declares that "Cannot play: the resource file:/// isn't writable". Second, Abiword, the word processor defaulted to handle the Gnome philosophical documents on the CD has several problems rendering glyphs on its page. For instance, a lower-case "g" will have the bottom of it cut off because Abiword hasn't correctly set the line-height of the font in question. This is an example of font rendering problems all over Gnome 2.12 apps. Third, the network browser application correctly found my local browse master but instead of listing any server or desktop which responded to its smbtree requests, it requested a username and password to connect to my local browse master. When I rejected it because I didn't want to log in, it failed to show my network entirely rendering the entire network browser system useless (no information of any kind displayed).

Usability: my two pet peeves are still there. Window snapping can only be activated by an undocumented holding of the ALT key while dragging. The file open/save dialog boxes STILL don't have a URL field. One can only access this field by hitting an undocumented CTRL+L (that's usability!?).

I didn't have time to check to see if this version of Evolution has working support for Maildir's that doesn't crash the system when moving large numbers of messages around.

Other things I noticed: a couple of new Gnome apps (Tom Boy, Minue) are moving to Mono/(Linux's .NET implementation). This means that these apps are less prone to memory leaks, buffer overflows, etc. Meanwhile Gecko and Evolution seem (as recently as Gnome 2.10) to be gaining memory leaks which ultimately result in these programs crashing. Is Gnome going to go all .NET? If so, in the mean time are they going to do something about this legacy code that is leaking? Also, gnome-settings-daemon, STILL doesn't play nice with other WM's. If you want to load up Gnome themes, you'll still have to resort to editing .gtkrc-2.0 files in your home directory. gnome-settings-daemon will start Nautilus and XScreensaver from your session profile gnome-session-restore even if you're using another WM resulting in your root window being clobbered and two screensaver daemons running.

And feel free to flame me. But these are my experiences.

GNOME lags behind

[ardor]

Someone wrote that GNOME is an OSX killer before.
Well yeah, maybe in 2020.

You see, Nautilus alone is vastly inferior to Finder (the new one). Of all gnome components, nautilus is the one that sucks most. Try browsing a large directory with thousands of files with nautilus, konqueror and windows explorer. The latter ones scan the directory MUCH faster. Nautilus takes about 1-2 MINUTES - unacceptable.

The main point of new gnome bugfix releases should be to improve nautilus. Speed it up, say, to about 100 times its current "speed".

Also, it is evident that once an ORDINARY USER (no hacker, no power user, no admin, no dev) has to edit a config file, the whole design has failed. Of course, this is not gnomes problem alone, but to a great deal the underlying OS; however, we are talking about an OSX killer, right? If you aren't lucky, and the hardware doesn't fit 1:1 with the distro, you have to dig through obscure manpages.

I also read that anyone that is not able to edit configfiles is an idiot and everyone MUST learn how to do this. See, I doubt a biologist that made some photos about a weird plant and want to download them from his cam to his PC is interested in editing config files just to get this to work - he JUST WANTS TO DO HIS JOB and is certainly not interested in learning sh and all about the Unix architecture. Config files per se are ok, as long as editing them is optional. Unfortunately, it still is mandatory sometimes (fortunately, the camera issue is resolved automatically by modern distros - but still, simple samba shares have to be edited by hand for example).

What they should do next

[Omega Blue]

What the Gnome developers should do next is to concentrate on the basic elements. Making the code cleaner and faster. Make the interface more customizable. Make the file manager more functional and friendlier.

Right now, they are just doing too many things at once. Sure, there are Evolution users, but most people use Firefox and Thunderbird nowadays. Who needs yet another video player or CD ripper? It's more important to have a good CD burner - right now I still need to resort to the command line to blank a CD-RW. I sometimes have problems connecting to Samaba servers via Nautilus, the use of the mount command is required.

So, focus on the basics and make them better. Don't reinvent the wheel.