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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."
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.
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!
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.
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.
The 3x speed improvement along would be worth the upgrade. I still am using aterm because Gnome Terminal is SOOOOO SLOW!!!
Try Konsole instead. Not only does the text scroll faster and smoother, but the interface just feels better than Gnome Terminal.
So, does eye candy get any closer to Mac OS looks?
No.
1) You're thinking of the new gl effects in xorg x clients. This is a desktop environment release.
2) Gnome is not attempting to copy os x, but create a new desktop environment. So your metric (closer to Mac OS) is a false one.
My pics.
WTF are you talking about? Im running 2.14 on dapper and I can edit themenu by selecting "edit menu" and I get a cool little window that lets me remove current applications or add an application to a categoriy.
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!
Wait - I'm being handed a message Parent must be trolling as a menu editor has been included since Gnome 2.12
Oh - and that page includes the line:
My pics.
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.
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?
And I'm hoping that biannual OS reinstalls aren't the price of a feature-complete OS, as Microsoft would have me believe.
From the Ubuntu website:
"The installer may not be GUI, but you only ever need to use it once, because we support ongoing upgrades via the network, from version to version. You never need to reinstall the operating system, just upgrade from each released version to the next when you want to."
At the most you should only have to reboot biannually... to use the new kernel that comes with each new Ubuntu release.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
You don't have to use the Metacity window manager - you can use a WM that still does this. This is why Linux and BSD is different to Windows - you aren't stuck with a one size fits all desktop. You don't even have to use Gnome if you don't want to.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
wow the new gedit looks fantastic
it seems to be able to do almost everything that anjuta can do now.
You didn't address my comment on the Spotlight rip off. Pursuade me that Gnome coders didn't see Spotlight and think, "That's great - we should reimplement it in Gnome".
*sighs*
I think it would have been obvious from my previous comment what I think about "x is ripping off x" in GUI design. It just doens't happen.
Anyway, hard Drive indexing is not new. Web-style search interfaces are not new. Spotlight was not the first to combine the two. I think the gnome coders have been exposed to a hell of alot more software ideas & concepts then you have - just because os x is the first place you saw a particular concept doesn't mean its the first place that concept appeared.
At least Gnome is taking ideas from OS X, and not being a total clone of Windows like KDE is.
Uh huh. KDE is not a total (or even partial) clone of Windows. It is tremendously more useful.
You're thinking of xpde I think (note that project does not use anything copyrighted so isn't 'ripping off' either)
My pics.
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.
There's also a wnck bug that prevents the application icons from showing up in the pager unless the window is maximized. I can't believe people can work just seeing empty windows in each pager!!! I'm not necessarily going to have my Web browser in the desktop labeled "web", having the application icon in there allwos one to immediately see which app is where, and is a much easier way to work than searching the taskbar all the time.
enlightenment 17's desktop pager does this -- why can't gnome's?
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
"Beware the Ides of March..." in case you did not know, is from Julius Caesar by Shakespeare.
Check out gnomebaker. It's easy to use and has all the features I use in a cd burning program.
GnomeBaker
Time makes more converts than reason