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Gnome 2.14 Released
joe_bruin writes "Beware the Ides of March... the Gnome people have announced the release of Gnome 2.14, right on time to meet their 6 month release schedule. See what's new in this release, as well as the release notes. New features include many more searching options, fast user switching, and speed increases to all the apps you know and love." From the release notes: "Just as you would tune your car, our skilled engineers have strived to tune many parts of GNOME to be as fast as possible. Several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster, including text rendering, memory allocation, and numerous individual applications. Faster font rendering and memory allocation benefit all GNOME and GTK+ based applications without the need for recompilation. Some applications have received special attention to make sure they are performing at their peak."
Like the way wnck-applet ties up my system every few days.
Ah well, I guess I could always go back to icewm.
So, does eye candy get any closer to Mac OS looks?
i live on an alternate planet
Yeah, but can I run it under Cygwin on XP on an Intel iMac?
This guy's the limit!
So what's next for the GNOME developers? Gnome 2.16 or Gnome 3.0?
Dude, the Ides of March is, like, so yesterday.
The new Dapper Drake with Gnome 2.4 use 179 MB of RAM (Less than default Win XP) for the default system, which is way better than the previous versions and all the applications seem more responsive too.
Does it still have the menu on top and taskbar on the bottom?
Takes up too much screen real estate.
I'm sure its great for some people, but I've grown used to just having a single taskbar on the bottom. I don't see how splitting things up into two sections helps anyone.
I have really started to take a liking to GNOME. I only wish it would get a bit snappier. Sometimes, it seems that, graphically, it's slower than Windows XP...
Ride the skies
...to install it? Nah, not really.
*waits for gnome 3*
Is to grab an Ubuntu Dapper preview live CD (and best of all, it's not an install CD, so ubuntu won't email your cleartext password to world + dog [joke])
It's pretty nice! I've been using the pre-releases for a while....
My pics.
I really don't understand why people are so obsessed with a 3.0 release.
;-D
As many gnome devs have argued, changing to 3.0 and breaking compatability would only make sense if there are things that can't be done within the current code base.
Frankly, I have yet to see a reason why breaking compatability would be needed.
Oh, and from using gnome2.14 on dapper I'll have to say that this is a great release. Very polished and some exciting new things, like deskbar with beagle integration. Combine that with the new XGL and AIGLX eye-candy and you really have a winner.
A good overview:
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/
If you're running ubuntu dapper, it updated to 2.14 wednesday. It isn't really immediately distinguishable from the previous version but then, if you are also running xgl/compiz, who the hell cares?
http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=916
-rcmiv
HA! HA! I have the cube!
The 3x speed improvement along would be worth the upgrade. I still am using aterm because Gnome Terminal is SOOOOO SLOW!!! Besides that, its always had trouble displaying my mutt sessions.
Gnome's got a great library in GLib. I wrote a tutorial for IBM last year on the GLib collections; there are so many useful utilities and data structures in there. If you're writing a C app on Linux it's definitely worth a look, and if you're already using the GLib collections, take a look at that tutorial to see if you can optimize anything, like using g_list_prepend vs g_list_append.
And if it helps you, please buy my completely unrelated book!
The Army reading list
It looks like the biggest achievement in this release is their speed up of memory allocations. Looking at their charts, it appear that they have even outpace straight mallocs.
That should make things much snappier.
I am so glad to see that Gnome 2.14 has fixed menu editing, so that ordinary users can add applications to the Gnome menu rather than having to clutter up the desktop with icons that will inevitably be hidden by windows.
....
....
....
After all, such a simple feature being missing really made Gnome look bad compared to Windows
Wait, I am being handed a message....
Menu editing *hasn't* been fixed? Users still cannot edit the application menus in a sane, convenient fashion?
Never mind.
www.eFax.com are spammers
When is that going to be approved for Gentoo and be available in Portage?
I just upgraded to 2.12.2. I have to admit that I have noticed a significant performance improvement, especially when compared to KDE.
I look forward to this release.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You have to read this as well.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
I'm glad they fixed some text rendering. Because after the last upgrade, my Ubuntu 5.10 renders text illegibly (some weird garbage font that does display properly after being selected with the cursor) in some apps, including Firefox and Evolution (but not Mozilla). I never even got a response to my discussions in the GNOME bug forums.
I'm hoping a reinstall of Ubuntu's next release, now delayed, will return the lost quality of the previous version with the promised speed of the next version.
And I'm hoping that biannual OS reinstalls aren't the price of a feature-complete OS, as Microsoft would have me believe.
--
make install -not war
but where's the tarball?
Gnome vs KDE flamewar starting in... 5...4...3...2...1...GO!!!
Will the new version move most rendering operations into the GL hardware on my Inspiron8000's GeForce2Go? Without crashing my desktop like CompMgr does?
--
make install -not war
What is so terrible about installing a menu editor like alacarte, which let's you do exactly what you want and is available for about every distribution and is even default in ubuntu?
/.
Really, I fail to see where the problem is and I'm really getting tired of people like you who act like the ability to add applications to the menu by default is really important for most users just to troll on sides like
Boring and irrelevant.
I always had one foot (*pun intended*) in Gnome and one in E17/Openbox/Xfce4 - but recently I've installed Ubuntu Dapper, and then Compwiz/XGL - holy cow! Yes, you need good graphics card, but my nVidia 6600GT is up to the task. The desktop is now totally snappy - even things like Firefox seem faster - feels like the graphics really fly on the screen now. As promised everything is faster, especially the startup of the main desktop. Apps are quicker, and even the menus just pop up (no annoying delay waiting for the icons to catch up on the menus). Oh and all of a sudden Gnome-terminal is just about as fast to launch and respond as Xterm! Woo-hoo! Considering that's what I use the most, this is a welcome improvement.
After reading the review from yesterday I tried out Epipany, and it's come a long way. There are only a couple of more config options I need, but if I get those I'll start running that in place of Firefox. For all of it's percieved 'heavy-ness' it feels nice and snappy now, and I think I'll be sticking more with Gnome for quite some time. Nice job.
fak3r.com
> gxine, which would be sensically pronounced as "gee-zine"
I always thought it was cine except spelt with an X, you know... as in the Windowing system that xine runs on? That would mean that Gxine would be pronounced "Guh-zinny", not simply "zinny" with a silent G as that doesn't distinguish it from the standard GUI application. Besides which, I thought the Gnome media player was called Totem?
GNOME now features an integrated screensaver. GNOME Screensaver is compatible with the "hacks" popular in Xscreensaver, but also has lots of new features unavailable in Xscreensaver, like being essentially unconfigurable by the user, who can't be trusted not to put rude messages in GLtext.
Figure 16. Configuring the few GNOME Screensaver properties we deign to let the user control
Fedora Core 5 was supposed to have been released yesterday as well but for reasons having to do with the 64bit version, it was delayed. Perhaps, then the new GNOME package will be included in the release. Here's to hoping!
There are also a lot of new things with Epiphany.
- should-try-epiphany-as-your-default-browser-with-g nome-214 (lot of screenshots) and http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/2006-03-15/epiphan y-is-hype-get-over-it and http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/avahi-epip hany-2006-02-11-17-50
Read : http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?2006/03/15/100-why-you
Ploum.net.
Go to
http://gnome.org/start/2.14/
in firefox type / Source Tarballs - pick your choice and download
OR
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/xxxxxx/2.14/
Replace xxxxxx with either of:
platform
desktop
bindings
admin
i live on an alternate planet
I think the major problem with Gnome is that it relies on C as a base rather than an object-oriented language like C++ (like KDE). With an OO framework, a single behavioral modification can propagate to all window or widget classes without having to update any other existing code. The ramifications of this are that 1) code reuse is very high so LOC can remain very low and 2) features like skinning become a simple matter of loading an XML config file.
But in a procedural language like C, this kind of action results in reams of code being changed. It's no wonder it's such a difficult project to adapt for release.
While more powerful at a basic functional level than it's successors, C lacks the powerful language features that more mature languages like VC++ and Java provide, which for developers is a double edged sword.
Please do not take me wrong, I like GNOME very much and i see it as a superior Desktop for UNIX Systems and the most important competitor to KDE.
The problem I have is the button order on dialogboxes, which can - AFAIK - not be changed. GNOME adopts the same schema used by Apple. It is based on a study which says that the readers eye starts searching for a information on the lower right corner of the screen (I did not read the study, so my description may not be accurate). As a result, a typical button order looks like this:
(Cancel) (Save)
On KDE, Windows and many other Desktops, a "most important first" scheme is used. The promoters of this scheme state, that people (in the western world) read from left to right and expect the most important information to come first. therefore, the order looks like:
(Save) (Cancel)
In principle, the button order is not a problem, if all of the applications use the same schema. For example, if You use a Mac, you may expect consistent order. And there is no "right" or "wrong" order, there are just different philosophies.
The only problem I see is the consistency. If you are a GNOME user and also use KDE Apps (or vice versa), you may find the different order disturbing. Of course, if You use Firefox and Kate every day, you can get over this. As for me, I work with a swiss/german keyboard in the office and with a US-keyboard at home. After having problems in the first days, I now switch intuitively between the keyboard schemas.
But anyway, it would be nice to see GNOME and KDE apps adopt the sema Interface guidelines or let the user choose which one he likes.
Tha journal entry contains some excellent points that are well made.
But I am in a childish mood so must point out that you seem to be missing the entire raison d'etre of the GNOME desktop.
That is that a user should be able to control their entire computer simply by allowing a large drop of drool to fall from their mouth onto a special pressure sensitive pad. By allowing drool to fall from the left side of their mouth they will have "left drooled" on the selected object. Similarly by allowing drool to fall from the right side of their mouth they will have "right drooled" on the selected object
This will provide all the feature they need to work with the single file held in their home directory (further subdirectories and fiels having been banned as it "breaks the spatial paradigm" and "causes the user confusion")
Can you tell I'm not a fan?
What I noticed is GNOME 2.14 took a lot of features that are already in KDE, or got into one of the recent releases of KDE:
:-p
* the search bars in all applications, like Thunderbird also has.
* viewing man/info pages from the GUI.
* magnetic window borders.
* fast user switching menu.
* switch users from a locked session.
* editor with sftp/ftp/webdav support.
* editor plugins, for running "make" etc..
* preferred application defaults
* sound preferences.
* user lock-down editor for administrators
* terminal speed.. Konsole already knows how to speed up output like "ls -lR". Konsole with a transparent background beats a plain blank xterm.
So much for screaming how KDE suffers from the "not invented here" syndrome..
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
I, too, have been running the Dapper pre-release for some time now and have recently begun having severe problems with Nautilus over an smb connection: when a folder containing videos is open, Nautilus zooms to 100% CPU usage, even though preview is set to ignore remote files over 5MB. It cripples the machine and even logging out often hangs unresponsively, I asume waiting for Nautilus to be killed properly.
Put identity in the browser.
will G-Streamer be finally usable this time? When I tried Ubuntu 5.10 which defaulted to using G-Streamer, it was so horribly broken (skip, random crash, not playing even when plugins were installed) that after fooling around with it for 30 minutes, I just removed it and installed xine-backend instead.
If you read carefully the post talks about 2.13, the development version. The icon theme problem pointed out in that entry, for example, is fixed in 2.14.0.
Great except for gnome-screensaver has NO options at all, you cant disable screensavers that your card does not support, or enable only 2d screensavers
or change the text or change the picture folder, or preview
someone submitted a preview screensaver patch, but the maintainers will not accept it
"Just as you would tune your car, our skilled engineers have strived to tune many parts of GNOME to be as fast as possible. Several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster, including text rendering, memory allocation, and numerous individual applications. Faster font rendering and memory allocation benefit all GNOME and GTK+ based applications without the need for recompilation. Some applications have received special attention to make sure they are performing at their peak."
Give us a break, please. 'Our skilled engineers': leave this kind of selfpraise to the likes of Microsoft.
However, if GNOME is faster, more stable and smaller, that IS good. But I am not too optimistic about the way GNOME has developed so far. They have been going too much for coolness, oversimplification and aping Windows, cutting out useful functionality rather than making those things configurable options. It is all very well trying to appeal to end users, but it has meant pissing us up and down, who are more compentent than the entry level user. And there is no real need for that. Take this small example:
At one point, when you moved or resized a window, you would see a little box with coordinates, which was useful at least to me, because I like to bundle up some of my windows in a script and display them in the same positions every time I start them. This feature has disappeared; no explanation, no good reason, and it is not possible to get it back by setting an option somewhere. Even an obscure option buried in a file deep inside GNOME would have been OK with me, but no. It is of course just a small thing, but it demonstrates an attitude: 'We alone know what is good and right'. Plus they and their software are totally and utterly unapproachable: no documentation (other than the Disney-style end-user stuff), just to mention one thing.
That sort of attitude Microsoft is what pushed me away from Windows years back - in the beginning it was great fun hacking away at DOS, but Microsoft pushed a lot of us away with their attitudes and secrecy. When I first switched to Linux it wasn't because Linux was evidently better, but because I couldn't stand what Microsoft and Windows had become. And the GNOME people seem to be doing the same. This kind of things actually matter to some.
So let's see...
How many options/preferences were cut in this release?
I've been an avid gnome supporter but lately I switched to KDE 3.5, something I would have never imagined doing.
Seems that lately the Gnome people think the fewer options a program has, the better. Something about how testing multiple code paths is difficult and bad for QA. While this may be true to a certain extent, Gnome people take it to ridiculous lengths. I mean, god forbid there be an if statement in the code!
I have actually had a few discussions with the devs on IRC about it and the option philosophy is pretty dang ridiculous.
Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux. They probably know what they are doing. And even to a newbie, an option on window behavior will not do any harm. Yes, the whole 'linux-on-the-desktop' camp will tell you that simplifying programs is a good thing, but radically cutting out options is not the way to do this.
Strange [and totally offtopic], it just dawned on me that while I pronounce 'xine' as 'zeen', I pronounce 'gxine' as 'gee-ex-een'. I have no idea why.
Nothing to see here
oh no! Just when I got compiled Gentoo from stage1 on x86_64 and Gentoo current... 2.12, just my bad luck... Well I have to start compilers again and resolve the depencies... huoh...
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
Bullshit! The DRM plug-in is just that - a plug-in. GStreamer does not contain DRM in itself, you have to install the package to get it. It only gives you the ability to access DRMed files. If you have DRMed music, then install that plugin and listen to the songs you bought. If, like me, you avoid DRM crippled music, dont install the plug-in. Result - a DRM free GStreamer.
The "KDE, on the other hand, cures all diseases, ends war and farts kittens" speech is just the same tired fanboi ranting. KPDF has an option to enable reading DRMed files but I dont hear anyone complaining about that. Facts suck, dont they?
As someone who has been using the latest builds of what is about to be Gnome 2.14, I can say with certainty that it is an awesome upgrade.
At first I wasn't sure if there was much difference, but after using it for an hour I started to realize I was enjoying it much more than ever before, without really being able to put my finger on what was different.
Basic speed increases give it a much more real-time feeling, and some minor graphical enhancements, while hardly noticable at first, make for a more enjoyable experience.
Also noticed alot fewer bugs and annoyances.
Give it a shot!
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
For whatever reason, every time I've tried to get menu editor running on a distro other than Ubuntu, it never works as expected. I've tried with SUSE and FC4. Whoever put together the Ubuntu package clearly has done something right that others have not.
I'm typing this on a powerbook with 1440x960 resolution screen and no mouse, just the trackpad. Trekking all the way across the screen to hit the top bar is a pain in the neck. This Fits guy must have based his work on mouse users on 800x600 screens.
I prefer the X11 apps I've installed via fink, to be honest.
gnome-terminal must have been the most inefficient terminal that has ever been made for Linux. Perhaps maybe that pig of a KDE's konsole might be even slower. I'm more of an icewm + xterm guy. aterm is missing the window title changes and has a really nasty bug, where you can't scroll up and down in vim too well if you set the keyboard repeat to around 90 cps. So I can't use aterm. So is gnome-terminal finally decent now? I'm totally not interested to see how fast it launches, I'm only interested in how fast it works once it's up. Second thing: Gnome's configurability. They kept on taking out feature after feature, in the interested to cater to the most common denominator: the average smuck user, or so it seems. It got stupider and stupider. One thing I totally and utterly hate: I want to move a window using the alt-mouse-button to stick out *above* the screen. But an idiot wouldn't know how to move the window back because then the window's title bar is outside the screen. I absolutely *HATE* this restriction, and I *HATE* to be treated that because the average idiot will get lost, *I* must not have that feature either.
Wow!
So what does the file open dialogue look like this time (shudders)
What sort of hoops will I have to go through to turn off spatial browsing? (yeah, yeah just edit the registry, sorry use gconf-editor)
Will I be able to set file permissions recusrsively using Nautilus? (I bet not)
The whole purpose of GNOME appears to be to endlessly recreate the wheel wrongly whilst everyone else is now busily building the rest of the vechile.
GNOME - endlessly recreating a 1980s MAC - badly.
wow the new gedit looks fantastic
it seems to be able to do almost everything that anjuta can do now.
"I'm glad they fixed some text rendering. Because after the last upgrade, my Ubuntu 5.10 renders text illegibly (some weird garbage font that does display properly after being selected with the cursor) in some apps, including Firefox and Evolution (but not Mozilla). I never even got a response to my discussions in the GNOME bug forums."
Are you using the nvidia drivers by any chance? Try the standard NV driver and see if that makes a difference.
'xine' - I've been pronouncing it z-eye-n. No wonder I have been getting stange looks from the multimedia geeks around here.
I'm looking over the wall; and the're looking at me!
Aaron Seigo, a lead KDE developer, has written extensively on this: DRM + source code = no DRM
Seigo is wrong... as Fluendo know all too well, and are banking on for future business. Trusted Computing hardware in PCs will enforce the use of digital signatures on executables... if you don't have the key to sign the binary, the source means nothing. You can't modify it to remove the DRM... you can't even simply recompile it and have it work.
Christian Schaller, one of the developers at Fluendo, was bragging about this on his blog... claiming that "Linux distros" are working on a solution to stop people recompiling a kernel and saving out played back media that way. He was talking about Red Hat (and others) who are quietly working on Linux equivalents of Microsoft's Protected Media Path (a generalised version of their Secure Audio Path)-- which, as a first requirement, will prevent you from modifying the kernel, and use hardware (TC being one example) to enforce that.
I'm no fan of KDE and consider the licensing for Qt/KDE to be nasty and disingenuous... but what GNOME is allowing to happen with Gstreamer is disgraceful. Linux corporations (and I include IBM/HP in this) are railroading Free software down the Trusted Computing and DRM path with the intent of rendering the source code unimportant, and leaving them the only ones with the keys to make things work.
So given that this is a new release of GNOME, which means that each release has to have less functionality than the previous one, so it can be "easy to use", the obvious question to ask is, "What got left on the cutting room floor this time?"
Now if they would just get around to copying klipper, I would finally no longer miss anything from KDE...
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
If you'd quit spreading the FUD you'd know that konsole is one of the fastest terminals.
You'd be surprised. I certainly was. In fact, I had to test the various terminals I had installed after seeing the report.
/usr/share/dict/words
xterm is actually one of the slowest terminals. At least, when anti-aliased text is used.
(All configured similarly where possible, white text on black, aa'ed Bitstream Vera Sans Mono)
=Terminal Tests=
time cat
xterm 207 - got impatient
real >32s (was at the Ms when I stopped it)
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.048s
Eterm 0.9.3-r4 - unfair, doesn't do aa'ed fonts
real 0m18.319s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.148s
urxvt 5.3
real 0m15.000s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.236s
konsole 3.4.3
real 0m7.967s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.172s
gnome-terminal 2.12.0
real 0m4.222s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.180s
aterm 0.4.2-r11 - unfair, doesn't do aa'ed fonts
real 0m3.594s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.152s
mrxvt 0.4.1
real 0m0.472s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.168s
(I used to use xterm, now I use mrxvt though occassionaly urxvt due to mrxvt's lack of unicode support (which is on the author's TODO list.))
Although, mrxvt kind of cheats a bit. It caches stuff. You can tell by running rain (from bsd-games) with 0 delay. All terms will have the animation spit out really fast, except mrvxt will skip every hundred frames or so. I find the caching good though. It doesn't interfere with anything I run and prevents scrolling-text syndrome that annoys me a lot.
Your assertion that gstreamer is evil because it allows others to make linking proprietary software is zealous anti-user crap. You say the GPL nature of KPDF allows the user to remove the DRM and "be left with a fully-functional PDF viewer." But you miss something obvious to anyone who actually has to use the software: the PDF viewer is no longer "fully functional" when it can't read the DRMed file somebody sent you.
It's great to want everything to be free. But here in the real world, real users want to be able to work with everyone else, and some of those folks aren't willing to open up. Your response is to stoically ignore them and purposefully keep users from being able to properly interact with them. The Gnome team's response has been to do what they can to enable their users to work with the outside world.
You're never going to have a legal and free-as-in-speech mp3 plugin. You and the OSS-religious-crazies would thus force us to break the law or not use mp3s. That strikes me as downright ridiculous.
Oh, and about the FSF warning against the LGPL. Isn't Gnome part of the GNU project, and thus FSF-sponsored?
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
I like Gnome, I like its style, I like its simpliness. But what I don't like, is that it's a bit cluttered. So far, I've noticed that Gnome looks really nice on monitors supporting resolutions higher than 1024x768, but since I'm forced to use the latter, I was always searching for something better. And I've finally found...
Now using XFCE and Gnome hybrid instead. I had really been a Gnome addict till I discovered XFCE. Why do I have to install Evolution when I don't use it and GStreamer which never works?
I'm definitely keeping this thing till I don't buy a better monitor. Or till there are some changes in Gnome itself.
i apt-get install it, try for 10 minutes, conclude that it's still ugly by default and with no easy way to tune the look-n'feel, full of annoying, non-intuitive ways to do things, apt-get remove it and go back to WindowMaker with some KDE stuff thown in.
i hope they fixed that unbelivably stupid file dialog from the previous release. i simply don't know what Seamonkey devels were thinking when they introduced that thing in seamonkey 1.0 for linux.
What ? Me, worry ?
the PDF viewer is no longer "fully functional" when it can't read the DRMed file somebody sent you
:-)
Have you actually tried opening up a DRMed file with KPDF? Of course you can still read it after you've disabled the DRM.
You're never going to have a legal and free-as-in-speech mp3 plugin.
In most of the world it is legal to have a free-as-in-speech mp3 player. As for the US, just wait till some senator's grandkid gets hauled to jail for listening to music on his Linux desktop. Then we'll start seeing the laws change
Oh, and about the FSF warning against the LGPL. Isn't Gnome part of the GNU project, and thus FSF-sponsored?
How long do you think that sponsorship will last, given that the FSF is ready to release GPLv3, which contains anti-DRM provisions? It is the business interests that have taken over GNOME and that are currently advocating DRM and the LGPL. Sooner or later the FSF will have to distance itself from GNOME.
I have a 6800GT and nothing is snappy while runnning at this resolution with my dell 2005fpw. Maybe I can hope since it's just in alpha stages that it will get better with time.
I hope so. It seriously needs some complexity analysis, because if you end up visiting a directory with a few thousand entries, it takes a LONG time, and if it caches anything, it's not obvious from the time it takes.
In 2.14, you *can* alt-drag a window with the titlebar offscreen. Try it.
The reason it took so long to get this was to make sure that alt-drag was the *only* way to get a window off screen... which is true now, thanks to edge snapping and advanced window placement algorithms in Metacity.
Well, that's the end of this discussion....your cognitive dissonance is far too serious for me to attempt to reason with you.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Has anybody else been checking this guy's links? They don't even say what he says they do...like the link to the FSF "warn[ing] against using the LGPL for any project"....it contains this line:
Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation."
Not quite the damning of the LGPL that his link suggests. Not surprising, given that the FSF wrote the LGPL, but whatever. The real point here is that for users to have functionality that they want and need to interact with the rest of the world, we need to allow non-free plugins. The vast majority of users would rather have a system that is useful than one that's idealogically pure but functionally crippled. This religious zealotry that produces the opinion that we should stonewall everything that doesn't think our way and the user be damned is very dangerous to the future of OSS.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
You know, if you want an alternative to GNOME, you should really try KDE. Don't be put off if it doesn't look how you'd prefer it to (although personally, I don't get it when people dislike the looks of KDE 3.4+) -- the looks are configurable, as are the interactions like mouseclicks and hotkeys. The real difference though, is under the hood, in the design: KDE is much more integrated and object-oriented than GNOME, and it shows in how nicely everything works together, and in how much power is available to the user.
Umm... you're forgetting the extra ram for a firewall, decent anti-virus software, anti-spyware, etc. A well-configured windows XP system will barely run on 256 megs without swapping.
I agree. One thing I'd want to know about the GNOME 2.14 speedups (if I wasn't a KDE user) would be whether all the debug messages that are dumped to stdout have been removed as well. Junk like that is bound to slow things down.
"On KDE, Windows and many other Desktops, a "most important first" scheme is used."
This is also the scheme that 96% of the world's GUI users have learned. Maybe I looked to the bottom-right first before I used computers for any appreciable length, but through Win3.1, OS/2 3.x, OS/2 4.x, Win95, Win98, Win2k, WinXP, Gnome 1.x, XFCE 3 and 4, IceWM, KDE 1.x, KDE 2.x, KDE 3.x, only MacOS X is the ugly duckling that acts totally differently -- oh, and Gnome 2.x.
Using a Gnome-friendly application like The Gimp on my KDE desktop is an exercise in frustration as my muscle memory is countered by every dialog. Firefox chooses to follow this now, which is why I still use the old Mozilla suite for my day-to-day webwork.
MacOS is tollerable because they have consistent keyboard shortcuts (*-w, *-s, *-q, *-h, *-tab, etc) which I use instead of the usual dialogs. When I do use dialogs, they don't have redundant buttons like cancel apparent (just save once I've picked a name) since I can just hit escape to clear the dialog if invoked by mistake. Gnome is both keyboard unfriendly and user experience unfriendly. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who has switched away, never to return, because of how things started to go after Gnome 1.2.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If you used a debian-based distro, you'd have had configurable menus in GNOME for years ;)
Not quite the damning of the LGPL that his link suggests.
...If we amass a collection of powerful GPL-covered libraries that have no parallel available to proprietary software, they will provide a range of useful modules to serve as building blocks in new free programs. This will be a significant advantage for further free software development, and some projects will decide to make software free in order to use these libraries.
Good job selectively quoting the FSF site, which is titled: Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library. How much more explicitly can it be stated than that?
To further quote from the Free Software Foundation website:
Proprietary software developers, seeking to deny the free competition an important advantage, will try to convince authors not to contribute libraries to the GPL-covered collection. For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising "more users for this library" if we let them use the code in proprietary software products. Popularity is tempting, and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the community needs above all.
But we should not listen to these temptations, because we can achieve much more if we stand together. We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition.
The GNOME Foundation didn't listen to Richard Stallman or the FSF and started to cater to the business interests that are pushing proprietary software infested with treacherous computing and DRM to handcuff users.
A start-menu-system itself is a huge kluge.
... basically all the things they already built a file manager to do), but it does solve the launching problem. When people realized that they still have most of the problems they did before, instead of solving the original problem, they wrote another program to (get this) edit your list of programs. Uh-huh.
Instead of having first-class applications (like the Mac has had for over 20 years), applications are a seemingly random collection of files scattered around. To let you run them without going insane, they added a "menu" that lists some of your apps.
Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of how to do anything else you want to do with apps (delete, copy, move
I use and love Gnome, but no matter what else they fix, application handling is going to continue to be a wart on Gnome until they're proper first-class objects. I mean, it's neat that their collection of band-aids is fully integrated, but it's not a real solution.
You fucking jackass. The first time around you said:
the Free Software Foundation warns against using the LGPL [gnu.org] for any project.
Now anyone who actually read that article can tell you that the above statement is completely false. I already excerpted a quote from the article that completely contradicted your statement...here it is again:
Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation.
You say always, he says sometimes. But it gets better...I could have quoted this line instead:
Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library.
I mean, how much more black and white do you want it? Here, how about this?
This is why we used the Library GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another--no problem for them, only for us.
He just cited a specific example of a project which he feels should (and is) licensed under the LGPL rather than the GPL. You can't say "you shouldn't use the LGPL for any projects" and then say "the LGPL is a good license for one of our flagship projects." What the fuck is going on in your head?
Not a single word of the quotes you just provided supports your position; neither does the article taken as a whole. It's clear that RMS feels that in some cases it is better to use the GPL than the LGPL. But it is also clear from the article that he feels that in some other cases the LGPL is a better choice. After all, he does explicitly state that severall times.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
What the fuck is going on in your head?
Basically the same thing going thru most anti-gnome trolls. Really, it's incredible.
After all the enterprise help gnome is getting from Sun and Novell, many zealots of other desktops are blinded with rage and flinging FUD around like mad dancing monkeys. Now LGPL is hated by the FSF, that actually wrote it. gstreamer being able to use proprietary DRM plugins is a sign of gnome using DRM and advocating babies being devoured by RIAA members. Nevermind the fact that other desktops are using gstreamer, it's GNOME's (got it?) multimedia backend.
When watched from a distance, it's incredibly funny. On the other hand, it's sad to see people bashing from sheer ignorance the very same way MS marketing drones would.
I stopped using linux years ago because the text widget was removed in the apps i used most: gimp and mozilla. I am disabled, one arm. Before I was deprived of the text widget I got along fine with only the mouse for file transactions. All was one click away.
I copied a filename in gimp, opened file selector in mozilla for a photo upload, and pasted it into the file selector with a middle mouse click. I was happy.
After the text widget was removed, it was made accessible via an (at the time) undocumented ctrl+L key command. But I don't usually work with the keyboard close! And is is awquard to use the keyboard for me, ever more so when I know I didn't use to be forced to.
I mostly use a tablet and a mouse. In windows xp file work is easy. But configuring windows is a nightmare - and expensive!
Please give back the file selector text widget! I must be able to paste to it when I open the selector!
"I'm not one of the HIG elite so take this opinion with a grain of salt."
How about all the "advanced" features result from scripting? That way the KDE wanna-bees can download THAT! Take responsability for THAT! And leave the rest of us in peace!* So we can make the best Gnome desktop ever, instead of a KDE knock-off.
*Fat chance! Gimp's scriptable and so's FF, and look what's come of that.
It's clear that RMS feels that in some cases it is better to use the GPL than the LGPL.
I think RMS would say the GPL is preferable in the vast majority of cases. Else why would he urge developers -- in bold letters -- to release their libraries under the GPL?
But getting back to the topic of this thread: should GNOME's multimedia backend be licensed under the weak LGPL, when we know that the entertainment cartel has been one of the most vocal advocates of Digital Restrictions Management and Treacherous Computing?
Preventing users from skipping computers
Controlling your computer over the internet with rootkits
Instilling fear by suing innocent people
Suing independent competitors out of business
Bullying witnesses into perjury
and the list goes on...
The answer is absolutely no, and I daresay the FSF is of the same opinion, since they will include anti-DRM provisions in the GPLv3.
Developers of Free and Open Source Software should use every legal tool at their disposal to protect the users' freedom. One of the best tools is to license music and video apps under the GPL, so that the entertainment cartel can't poison their hard work with draconian DRM. Otherwise, the developers might as well be working for the RIAA and MPAA!
Open Source developers who care about the users' freedom should help out multimedia projects that are licensed GPL (such as Xine, MPlayer, and VideoLAN).
Rejoice (since 2.12):
Clipboard
GNOME now remembers data that you copy, even when you close the window from which it was copied. This long-standing problem has finally been solved without the performance problems usually associated with clipboard daemons, by allowing applications to explicitly request the use of this feature.
It is based on a study which says that the readers eye starts searching for a information on the lower right corner of the screen (I did not read the study, so my description may not be accurate).
I've never heard of such a study (and I'm a user interaction designer). Where'd you hear this?
The only problem I see is the consistency. If you are a GNOME user and also use KDE Apps (or vice versa), you may find the different order disturbing.
I find the Gnome/Mac way the only consistent one.
In KDE or Windows, you sometimes have this:
(OK) (Cancel)
and you click on the *left* side to go on. Except in "wizards", where you have this:
(Prev) (Next)
and you click on the *right* side to go on. Oh, plus every web page that has multiple steps (ever bought anything online? gone to page 2 of a google search?), you click "next" in the bottom-right.
Yes, the Gnome button order feels inconsistent if you use it with KDE apps. But IME, the KDE button order feels inconsistent with itself! Or with any webpages, if you happen to be one of us who uses a web browser.
The problem I have is the button order on dialogboxes, which can - AFAIK - not be changed.
From a design point of view, about the only thing worse than putting things in the wrong place is making everything infinitely tweakable so that you never know where anything is going to be when you sit down in front of a GNOME computer.
If you want infinite flexibility, there are Turing machine emulators out there. But that's not how to design a user interface.
...blinded with rage and flinging FUD around like mad dancing monkeys.
Heh, funny that you mentioned monkeys flinging FUD. It is the Ximian primates (yes, they call themselves that) who are spreading FUD against KDE and paying Google to display GNOME sites when people are searching for KDE applications.
Nevermind the fact that other desktops are using gstreamer, it's GNOME's (got it?) multimedia backend.
Care to name which? KDE is building a backend-independent multimedia framework called Phonon which will be ready by the release of KDE4. This framework will allow KDE-based multimedia apps:
Kaffeine
AmaroK
KMPlayer
to work well with backends such as Xine, which are GPLed and which have copyleft protection against DRM. GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with DRM-crippled GStreamer.
Since there are infinitely man "next library"s and finitely many libraries already in existence, the Lebesgue measure of the set of libraries for which the FSF indicates approval of using the LGPL is 0. In this technical sense one may therefore legitimately say that the FSF opposes the use of the LGPL in all cases.
The gnome people... ha ha ha... I just got it
Man, you are so fucking ass backwards here it's absurd. The weakness here is KDE's, because it's core libraries' GPL nature means DRM, and licensed, proprietary technology in general, can't be implemented. Gnome gets to have functionality that can't/won't be built into KDE because of legal restrictions and/or the reluctance of the developers/owners of said technology to open up their code. Gstreamer will be able to employ licensed plugins which are non-free, which will benefit all Gnome users. KDE's GPL backend will never be able to play mp3's legally in the US, or DVD's in a much wider area. The mere suggestion that this gives the advantage to KDE is baffling to even consider.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Change the damn foot it's been four years! PLEASE!
It was so unusable I switched to KDE. I've not missed guhnome.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Run this then tell me how much memory it uses and how responsive it is.
/*printf("Comparing stored value to 1\n");
#include stdio.h
#include stdlib.h
#include unistd.h
#include sys/types.h
#include sys/stat.h
#include fcntl.h
#include math.h
long long int *x;
int main()
{
long long int i;
long long int *p;
long long int *q;
int bignum=1024+256;
p=x;
printf("mallocing alot\n");
p=malloc(1024*1024*bignum);
if(p == NULL) {
printf("error no more memory.\n");
exit(1);
}
printf("entering loop\n");
printf("Filling memory with 1's.\n");
for (i=0; i (1024*1024*bignum)/8; i++){
p[i] = 1;
}
for (i=0; i (1024*1024*bignum)/8; i++){
if (p[i] != 1) {
printf("compare error\n");
}
}*/
printf("exiting loop\n");
printf("malloc'd alot\n");
printf("Done\n");
sleep(5);
printf("freeing memory\n");
free(p);
return(1);
}
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Their file manager, on both gnome and kde, are crap. And integration with tar/rar/zip is crap too.
I'm all excited and everything. GUH-NOME is so great and wonderful. ;) Oh, I jus' love GUH-NOME.
(it's a peace of crap)
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
There's more out there in the world and I'm not just talking about GNUstep or KDE.
GNOME sucks rocks, and you all know it.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Because no one in GNOME can innovate. Christ-sake, it seems like Miguel must love MS, since he seems to simply copy everything they do. From thier sucky look to thier sucky language (C#, in the form of Mono)... and you mindless bunch of sycophants just eat it up and ask for more!!!
Jeez, this community sickens me sometimes. Mod me down, if you like, but in your heart of hearts, you know I'm right you SOB.
Neither xgl nor air are being shipped as the default X server in Dapper (they're simply too experimental). Since you don't say much about your existing (non GL I might add) crash (total lockup? X restart? Any Xids in dmesg? Do you have problem inducing RenderAccel in your xorg.conf?) it's hard to say where the problem lies. It could be in the driver layer in which case your only hope is to contact Nvidia and ask them to look at your problem...
Slashdot really isn't the best place for genuine bugs I'm afraid...
* viewing man/info pages from the GUI.
This was around in gnome 1.x but got removed as "unneccessary" at some point..
* preferred application defaults
I don't really get this, it's been in gnome for several releases now. There has been some improvements but it certainly not new.
* sound preferences.
Same for this one.
Wrong, wrong, wrong....
d ex.html#AEN37
http://zenii.linux.org.uk/~telsa/GDP/gnome-faq/in
There's no need for insults. I never said ANYTHING anti-GNOME in that post, so there's nothing shill-ish or trollish about it.
I use Xubuntu (preferring Xfce to other, slower, DEs) and can't figure out how to edit the menu, either. There seems to be a large system-defined chunk that I can't touch, but that's the part I'd most want to configure.
I wish there were a single, simple menuing standard for all WMs to use. I hate not being able to port my menus from my slower machines running Blackbox to other faster machines where I run IceWM or Xfce or whatever. I want to configure them once and be done.
Constitutionally Correct
* magnetic window borders. Hasn't this just been the default behavior before? In any case this would be more of a metacity feature than a GNOME feature. * switch users from a locked session. This has been around for at least one release, and probably more than that. * preferred application defaults Yeah this isn't new. * sound preferences. Neither is this. * user lock-down editor for administrators This has been around for a while too. * terminal speed.. Konsole already knows how to speed up output like "ls -lR". Konsole with a transparent background beats a plain blank xterm. Konsole wasn't that fast last time I tried it (don't know which version it was... it was running of the latest knoppix cd).
I am using GStreamer right now. You will please show me which file on my computer contains the evil DRM code? Please also tell me what prevents me from removing such a file, and replacing it with a Free alternative.
Such an alternative may be illegal in unfree countries such as the United States of America; however this applies equally to any plugin that would be created for KDE's GPL-only multimedia framework.
Heh, funny that you mentioned monkeys flinging FUD. It is the Ximian primates (yes, they call themselves that) who are spreading FUD against KDE and paying [linuxtoday.com] Google to display GNOME sites when people are searching for KDE applications [kde-apps.org].
You call that FUD? Do you even know what FUD is, even though you're doing it right now? The Ximian ads didn't say KDE eats babies.
But hey, now you've demonstrated you have a clear bias and have no interest on defending freedom in software. You just want to slander a project because a company helping its development paid google ads for search terms related to your beloved desktop.
Get a life.
Care to name which? KDE is building a backend-independent multimedia framework called Phonon which will be ready by the release of KDE4. This framework will allow KDE-based multimedia apps:
Kaffeine
AmaroK
KMPlayer
to work well with backends such as Xine, which are GPLed and which have copyleft protection against DRM. GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with DRM-crippled GStreamer.
Blah, blah, blah. Changelog from Amarok 1.4beta-2:
Equalizer for the GStreamer-0.10 engine
And juk, kaffeine, kiss and more are listed here. Go to their webs and notice they have a GST backend too, it's not an invention on the gstreamer page.
About your wonderful phonon that will save everyone from evil gstreamer, there's no guarantee that it will be used in KDE 4. Hell, it's not even sure it will ever be finished, since it's another product of the NIH syndrome some paranoid KDE hackers seem to suffer ("gstreamer is used in gnome! let's not use it although many KDE apps already proved it's worthy!").
P.S.: Thanks for the link to the gnome google ads news. Read here:
Ximian CEO Defends Google AdWords Campaign, Will Not Create New Ads
Noting the past history of the the KDE and GNOME organizations, Friedman said the ads are "not the first volley over the wall", citing an incident in 1999 where Friedman and Ximian co-founder Miguel de Icaza purchased the "gnome-support.com" domain preparatory to launching a company centered around professional support and services for the GNOME desktop (what eventually became Ximian). According to Friedman, within weeks of purchasing the domain, KDE developer Martin Konold purchased "gnome-support.de" and redirected traffic to the KDE web site. Though Konold still owns the domain, it no longer redirects to KDE's pages.
You know, thanks to zealots and brainless fanboys like you, cases like those two ones are easy to find on the two projects. So let's stop the FUD flinging, huh?
Editing a file in vim in konsole is much slower than in xterm. With a keyboard repeat setting of 90 cps, editing a source file in vim in konsole, scrolls are fairly choppy. In xterm it's completely smooth. In aterm, because of its internal caching scheme, the screen doesn't refresh at all, freezes, until you let go of the cursor key, making aterm totally useless. Simplicity, and matureness, and people not mucking around with xterm wins over the constant tinkering, fooling, poking, peeking, horsing around with KDE. I don't like KDE, I like gnome only slightly better. Someone, somewhere, finally write a *decent* desktop - NO one has done it, so far - really - they all suck or are too primitive.
> I really don't understand why people are so obsessed with a 3.0 release.
Some people take an interest in major version numbers. That is useful and should not be ignored because others do not care about version numbers. Do not underestimate the importance of marketing.
> changing to 3.0 and breaking compatability
Gnome can change to 3.0 without breaking compatability, the two ideas are seperate.
Gnome has changed substantially since 2.0 and GTK has been improved a lot especially with project Ridley on the way. There are many APIs which although still supported are old and not recommended. If there must be a techinical reason for 3.0 then let it be an opportunity to make it clear to Independant software vendors (ISV) and third party developers what the recommended technologies they should building on.