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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."
So, does eye candy get any closer to Mac OS looks?
i live on an alternate planet
GNOME? Is that still around? Didn't development on it shut down recently? I recall hearing about the use of mono creating legal problems or something.
"no longer relevant"?
Viva XFCE!
Gnome2 was an act of utter contempt against end users, it's still better than KDE but that's not exactly saying much is it? fluxbox, icewm & xfce4 are where it's at.
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.
Ever since a company called Fluendo joined the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board, GNOME is obligated to use GStreamer (a software product sponsored by Fluendo) as its audio and video backend. This wouldn't be bad, if it weren't for the fact that GStreamer uses Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to handcuff users and leave them at the mercy of the entertainment cartel. In order to do this, GStreamer is denying its developers the right to license their constribution under the GPL, so that Fluendo can sell closed-source, proprietary DRM plugins that let the MPAA and RIAA control the users' viewing habits.
GStreamer has hurt the multimedia effort on Linux and the Free Desktop because they stole talented developers from mature mutimedia projects such as Xine, MPlayer, and VideoLAN, all of which were started before GStreamer and all of which have strong copyleft protection by being licensed under the GPL. In other words, GStreamer further fragmented the Linux multimedia developer base purely for the selfish, immoral purpose of ramming DRM down Linux users' throats.
Ximian, a company instrumental in founding GNOME, sold out to big business in 2002 by switching Mono's license from the GPL to the weaker MIT X11 license. Instead of helping out the myriad of established multimedia apps such as Kaffeine, AmaroK, and KMPlayer, Ximian started a whole new app called Banshee, whose only claim to fame is that its license (MIT X11) allows linking to proprietary DRM plugins.
These are just some example of an increasing problem GNOME is experiencing: it is pandering (and in some cases outright selling out) to companies that don't necessarily have the users' best interest in mind. One can say that the whole reason GNOME was started was to allow proprietary software (including draconian DRM) to use the hard work of open source developers.
KDE, on the other hand, is licensed solely under the GPL because the toolkit it is based on (Qt) is also GPL. KDE is also committed to preventing DRM from infesting their user's computers: for KDE4, they are building a multimedia framework called Phonon that does not depend on GStreamer, but which can use any number of backends, including DRM-free ones.
"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.