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

Re:Memory Improvements

[_xeno_]

The new Dapper Drake with Gnome 2.4 use 179 MB of RAM (Less than default Win XP) for the default system

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.