Slashdot Mirror
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."
So, does eye candy get any closer to Mac OS looks?
i live on an alternate planet
oh piss off wintroll... defaults are defaults... if you don't like them, well at least you can change them... unlike windows where you're stuck with one size fits all
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
"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.
The part about you being a loser.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
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.