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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."
Yeah, but can I run it under Cygwin on XP on an Intel iMac?
This guy's the limit!
Dude, the Ides of March is, like, so yesterday.
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.
You have to read this as well.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
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.
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
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.
I always had one foot (*pun intended*) in Gnome and one in E17/Openbox/Xfce4 - but recently I've installed Ubuntu Dapper, and then Compwiz/XGL - holy cow! Yes, you need good graphics card, but my nVidia 6600GT is up to the task. The desktop is now totally snappy - even things like Firefox seem faster - feels like the graphics really fly on the screen now. As promised everything is faster, especially the startup of the main desktop. Apps are quicker, and even the menus just pop up (no annoying delay waiting for the icons to catch up on the menus). Oh and all of a sudden Gnome-terminal is just about as fast to launch and respond as Xterm! Woo-hoo! Considering that's what I use the most, this is a welcome improvement.
After reading the review from yesterday I tried out Epipany, and it's come a long way. There are only a couple of more config options I need, but if I get those I'll start running that in place of Firefox. For all of it's percieved 'heavy-ness' it feels nice and snappy now, and I think I'll be sticking more with Gnome for quite some time. Nice job.
fak3r.com
GNOME now features an integrated screensaver. GNOME Screensaver is compatible with the "hacks" popular in Xscreensaver, but also has lots of new features unavailable in Xscreensaver, like being essentially unconfigurable by the user, who can't be trusted not to put rude messages in GLtext.
Figure 16. Configuring the few GNOME Screensaver properties we deign to let the user control
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.
That's "5...4...3...2...1...KO!!!", which you would've known if you'd stop worshipping the HIG for a while and start listening to the users!
Lemon curry???
There are also a lot of new things with Epiphany.
- should-try-epiphany-as-your-default-browser-with-g nome-214 (lot of screenshots) and http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/2006-03-15/epiphan y-is-hype-get-over-it and http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/avahi-epip hany-2006-02-11-17-50
Read : http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?2006/03/15/100-why-you
Ploum.net.
Actually, Metacity has an OpenGL compositor with libcm now- it's only really working on Fedora, but it has wobbly windows and a minimize effect and whatnot.
Well, to 2.14 is closer to 10.4 than 2.13. I wouldn't say the metric is false.
.\.\att Clare
Does it still have the menu on top and taskbar on the bottom?
Takes up too much screen real estate.
You wouldn't have ever right clicked on the panel and seen an items marked "New Panel" and "Delete this panel", would you? You can have as few (say, zero) or as many panels as you like, drag them to any edge you like, stack more than one on any edge too if you like.
I personally like to take advantage of my large 800x600 monitors and have panels stacked five deep on every edge of my two monitors, so I can have one widget per panel. BTW has anyone else noticed how unusable slashdot is when the browser window is 300x200? You'd think they'd be more careful to test it on typical configurations like mine.
...that's because bash on OS X is the bash on Linux, not a copy.
however, I believe the grandparent post was talking about the graphical user interface, not the command line interface...
Advanced users are users too!
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.
Tha journal entry contains some excellent points that are well made.
But I am in a childish mood so must point out that you seem to be missing the entire raison d'etre of the GNOME desktop.
That is that a user should be able to control their entire computer simply by allowing a large drop of drool to fall from their mouth onto a special pressure sensitive pad. By allowing drool to fall from the left side of their mouth they will have "left drooled" on the selected object. Similarly by allowing drool to fall from the right side of their mouth they will have "right drooled" on the selected object
This will provide all the feature they need to work with the single file held in their home directory (further subdirectories and fiels having been banned as it "breaks the spatial paradigm" and "causes the user confusion")
Can you tell I'm not a fan?
What I noticed is GNOME 2.14 took a lot of features that are already in KDE, or got into one of the recent releases of KDE:
:-p
* the search bars in all applications, like Thunderbird also has.
* viewing man/info pages from the GUI.
* magnetic window borders.
* fast user switching menu.
* switch users from a locked session.
* editor with sftp/ftp/webdav support.
* editor plugins, for running "make" etc..
* preferred application defaults
* sound preferences.
* user lock-down editor for administrators
* terminal speed.. Konsole already knows how to speed up output like "ls -lR". Konsole with a transparent background beats a plain blank xterm.
So much for screaming how KDE suffers from the "not invented here" syndrome..
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
Great except for gnome-screensaver has NO options at all, you cant disable screensavers that your card does not support, or enable only 2d screensavers
or change the text or change the picture folder, or preview
someone submitted a preview screensaver patch, but the maintainers will not accept it
oh no! Just when I got compiled Gentoo from stage1 on x86_64 and Gentoo current... 2.12, just my bad luck... Well I have to start compilers again and resolve the depencies... huoh...
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
I have actually had a few discussions with the devs on IRC about it and the option philosophy is pretty dang ridiculous.
Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux. They probably know what they are doing. And even to a newbie, an option on window behavior will not do any harm. Yes, the whole 'linux-on-the-desktop' camp will tell you that simplifying programs is a good thing, but radically cutting out options is not the way to do this.
I wonder if a good solution to this would be to have a global 'advanced user' flag which if set would allow the user to access the more advanced options. When not set [the default of course], it would only provide the super-simple, no-options-for-the-newbie preferences. They can even make this option accessible only to the command line to help prevent the newbies from accidentally activating the advanced settings.
Is this a reasonable compromise or will I just upset the Human Interface gods with such heresy?
Nothing to see here
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?
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
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.
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.
I've been interested in this gl compositing business for some time, and was real excited when I read Davyd's preview of 2.14. But since then I've spent a bit of time trying to find out what I have to do to actually enable that functionality, without luck.
In the preview he somewhat cryptically says that you need "some features in unstable xorg" and "texture-from-pixmap" support. I'm not positive, but my reading suggests that the latter is a feature of the drivers, in my case meaning I have to wait for Nvidia to release new ones (Also, I think it means that Geforce2 and earlier cards are left out in the cold, as new Nvidia drivers no longer support them). As for the former, I couldn't tell whether "unstable xorg" at the time of his writing meant what would eventually become xorg 7.0, or something later than that which still hasn't been released.
If someone could enlighten me about this, I'd really appreciate it. What version of xorg does one need, what drivers, and about how much graphics horsepower?
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
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.
When I saw the first post calling Gnome an OSX ripoff, I started thinking, "Gee, I wonder what parts of OSX this guy could possibly think were ripped off by Gnome? Particularly with the restriction that they weren't ripped off by OSX in the first place?"
But now it all makes sense. The poster obviously was under the impression that Apple invented multiuser environments and indexed searches.
So, he's just an idiot; nothing to see here.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
wow the new gedit looks fantastic
it seems to be able to do almost everything that anjuta can do now.
I believe that one of the main advantages of defeaturing/focusing applications to the common use is that the Gnome project gets to spent more of its limited OSS developer time on new applications and functionality (e.g., zeroconf support would be an example). If they were to add an advanced mode to all of the desktop applications, the exisiting Gnome developers would be burdened with a lot of additional work in designing, developing, testing and supporting all of the new features made available in the advanced mode.
Another thought I had was that, for a lot of advanced features, the existing gconf application provides 'global' access to advanced features without burdening the application developers with extra work.
I'm not one of the HIG elite so take this opinion with a grain of salt.
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.
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!
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
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