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."
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
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.
I mean things like "Fast User Switching" - they could at least have called that something different, and the "DeskBar" which is basically look identical to the Spotlight search bar on Mac. Like it or not, Gnome coders are taking the best of Windows and Mac OSX and putting it into Gnome
"Fast User Switching" is a terrible example to use. Microsoft beat OS X to that punch, and itself was only an incremental improvement over linux, where you could run multiple x servers concurrently and switch between them. Micsoft polished up this linux feature (alot) and os x improved on Microsoft's version even more.
there is little original in Gnome, as nice as it is.
There is little original in any windowing environment - if you got out a little more you'd realise that everyone's borrowing from everyone else. The only real innovation I can think of in windowing environments in the last 25 odd years is probably overlapping windows.
Also, don't start on the whole "OS X uses open source software so its OK to the OS X GUI". Open source software specifically grants a license to be used on operating systems. Just because Apple takes them up on that offer, doesn't mean its OK to rip Apple's UI off.
No, I think "It's OK to copy user interface paradigms as they're uncopyrightable."
Apple obviously thinks so too - or they wouldn't have "ripped off" (as you put it) tabbed browsing, fast user switching and a plethora of other features from other GUIs.
My pics.
What? A default Windows XP install uses about 70MB doing nothing. You can easily run Windows XP on a machine with 128MB RAM total - it's just that you're essentially limited to one application before swapping. (And, generally speaking, only one "document" in that application at that...)
The problem is that most Windows programs are giant memory hogs, so when you start installing non-default software (especially things like Office that like to preload) you start pushing the memory usage up and up and up...
I'm loving my Debian Linux install at work if for no reason other than I don't have to run the corporate-required Norton Anti-Virus on it. Things are so much faster without Norton. A basic Windows XP install isn't terribly resource-hungry - it's just that the standard bundle of software that comes with most Windows XP computers, simply put, sucks.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Konsole on Gnome wouldn't make much sense to me....you'd have to have qt installed and I really only want one Graphics library / DE or the other on my drive because of all the space they take up.
I use Eterm and aterm. Both are highly customizable, support fake transparency (except in E17), and give the appearance of speed over konsole and gnome-terminal.
It's worse than that...when I looked at http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero , my first impression was that it was full of terrible ideas. It also looked like people were just reaching for ideas that needed to break 2.x, but maybe that was just because the criteria for being added to that page included breakage (the stuff that sounded more reasonable was mostly moved to other pages for possible inclusion in 2.x). But seriously...here are some of the suggestions:
Make GNOME a standards organization instead of a software development shop
Does that not seem like a sure-fire way to kill the project to anybody else? "Uh...we just decided not to develop software anymore...we're just going to approve or disapprove of other people's stuff."
Make GNOME truly-cross platform- i.e., make apps and environment work on Windows.
Er...doesn't Windows sort of already have a desktop environment? I can see making apps portable....but what purpose are they really going to serve by porting the whole desktop?
There are also long, tedious discussions of moving from "applications" to "objects"...i.e. making the desktop centered on the document. People talk about this a lot it seems, but it always seems to me that it makes a lot of sense for some types of applications, and no sense at all for others. I don't have a document in solitaire, just for the dumbest example. And then there's talk about changing from a "desktop" metaphor to an "assistant" metaphor, with contextual text input and later voice input. Ok, it worked on Star Trek, but this concept just gives me the heebie jeebies when I think about it actually applied to real computers. I can just feel the suck from here.
In any case, there's more, but my point is just that I also don't see a reason to break from 2.x, and I think that most of the reasons that have been suggested are cart-before-horse ideas that suck. The only thing I saw on that page that I thought was a good plan was a rich-data-storing clipboard application, and I don't see how that requires breaking 2.x; furthermore, I'd just be happy if they would copy klipper...I don't care much about clipping anything but text, but the cut/paste management is the one thing I still miss from KDE.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Thanks, I will, because I currently have XScreensaver set to come up in five minutes, and lock in eight minutes. That gives me a nice buffer time to deactivate the screensaver before the system locks if I happen to be working on something else non-computer related and the screensaver pops up.
Because users can't be trusted, this option is removed in gnome-screensaver. It either locks, or it doesn't. Great.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
You wouldn't have ever right clicked on the panel and seen an items marked "New Panel" and "Delete this panel", would you?
Wow, you're right! Having a screwed up defualt setup is a-OK as long as the user is able to find the controls to change it!
Until those "confusing" controls are taken out in the next GNOME release.
May the Maths Be with you!
It's absolutely true. The more user-friendly Gnome apps get, the more time I spend hunting around in gconf-editor for obscure and undocumented configuration keys. It's like gconf is the new Gnome UI. What a step in the right direction!