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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."
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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?