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."

Comments

Memory Improvements

[ramrom]

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.

Easiest way to check it out....

[tpgp]

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....

2.16

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't understand why people are so obsessed with a 3.0 release.

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. ;-D

Gnome 2.14

[rcmiv]

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!

GLib == good

[tcopeland]

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!

Main point of this release

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Main point of this release

[Gopal.V]

Malloc() is written for generic memory allocation for all programs with no bias towards larger sizes (or smaller) or allowing fragmentation rates which in the past would've been a kill-all for most applications.

Given a particular usage pattern, for example majority allocation of blocks > 512 bytes with a higher fragmentation ratio than would be acceptable in a server, you could technically outpace the malloc which would waste more time to find a best fit versus an algorithm that just finds you 512 byte blocks when you needed 4 bytes of memory.

Assumptions simplify algorithms, so is it a surprise ?

Re:Eye Candy

[tpgp]

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.

Re:2.14?

[tetromino]

Most of the 2.14 packages are already in the official portage tree (and, at the moment, hardmasked). According to posts by gentoo devs in the forums, gnome-2.14 will be in ~arch by the end of the week.

And if you can't wait for two days and don't mind a few bugs, you could emerge 2.13.92 from the breakmygentoo overlay...

KDE Fanboy misrepresents facts.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:de/up/grade

[AeroIllini]

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.