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Gnome 2.14 Review
An anonymous user writes "Linux.com (a Slashdot sister site) has up a review of Gnome 2.14. The piece touches on usability improvements, as well as the new administration and configuration tools included with this release." From the article: "GNOME 2.14 continues the steady improvement visible in the last few releases. It is an incremental upgrade, consisting largely of tweaks and the filling in of gaps in functionality. If few of these changes are major by themselves, the overall result is welcome. Perhaps the best way of looking at the release is not as an end in itself, but as a milestone on the road to desktop usability in free operation systems. From this perspective, GNOME 2.14 is a sign that much of the journey is already over -- and that the remaining distance is less than many observers think."
If you want to see some follow the next link: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.h tml
I just wanted to respond to a couple of things that the article mentioned in passing. Some are minor, some are things that I think may be suffering from a "Can't see the forest for the trees," problem.
Some of the interface changes in the new version, such as the addition of icons to dialog windows, are the equivalent of the gingerbread on the gables of Victorian houses -- decorations that do nothing for functionality.
Well, that may be somewhat true. Of course, there have been studies showing that people work more efficiently, with less strain, in an "attractive," work environment. This holds true in everything from adding plants to offices to adding "gingerbread," to a GUI. And in this case, it sounds as if they do provide functionality as well since I'd be very surprised if these icons weren't context-specific in some form or fashion. But even if they provided no direct benefit, they probably do something for functionality.
Two of the new tools, Pessulus and Sabayon, help administrators limit what users of everyday accounts can do on the system
Whoa. We're talking about usability, and we're not going to comment on "Pessulus" and "Sabayon"? Don't get me wrong, those are great project names. Really great. But as new tools (and therefore not projects like Apache that everyone is familiar with), those names stink.
From a security perspective, Sabayon and Pessulus are complementary tools, differing mainly in approach. They are joined by the Power Manager, used to control how a computer is suspended or hibernates when inactive.
Now, "Power Manager" is far from sexy, but without ever using it I could have guessed what it did. And I'd say that most people could have done as well. When software behaves as you expect it to, without changing your mental map from "solving a problem" to "using the software," that's usability.
A desktop tool for changing window managers would also be welcome.
Allowing the users to focus on their work or, failing that, their desktop environment, without ever having to stop and think about their choice of window manager, would be a welcome usability enhancement. The fact that, as evidenced by earlier comparisons of SawFish and Metacity, not only can the users not ignore their WM but are indeed actively encouraged to become involved, seems unfortunate.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
You might want to take a look into rxvt-unicode (which is often called urxvt), a blazingly fast unicode-capable terminal emulator written in C++ with support for such goodies as xft (though I don't use it, as it's slowing down things tremendously) and not dependent on GTK[+] at all. It even features tabbing (so your window-manager does not need to do that), and implements a really neat idea of a client/server-model which allows one to spawn new terminals REALLY fast, while making it more lightweight, too.
:)
To anybody out there: give it a shot, I bet you'll like it
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Can't remember offhand what version of Gnome i'm using at home, but Gnome now has tabs in the console.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If you are not disabled the best thing to improve gnome-terminal performance is to turn off the accessibility options (in Preferences -> Accessibility -> *). This makes gnome-terminal 2.6.12 only marginally slower the Konsole (maybe 20%) instead of several times slower.
Calm down dude. Ubuntu replace GNOME's menu editor with their own. GNOME's had a menu editor for two releases now.
I believe it's called SMEG or gmenu-simple-edit. But Ala Carte works well.
sri
I don't understand people who say that gnome-terminal is slow... I find that it is the fastest terminal emulator. The trick is to actually compare like with like.
Let's say we use 8 point Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, and a terminal size of 80x24. Prepare the test data:
$ dd bs=1M count=1 if=/dev/urandom | xxd > data
To run the test:
$ time cat data
The results:
xterm -fa mono -fs 8 (209)
The window is drawn very flickery. I couldn't use this for day to day use.
real 1m28.686s
user 0m4.370s
sys 0m0.371s
gnome-terminal (2.12.0)
The smoothest and fastest of the lot!
real 0m6.401s
user 0m3.425s
sys 0m0.208s
rxvt-unicode -fn xft:mono:size=8 (5.3)
Smooth but slowish
real 0m41.071s
user 0m0.871s
sys 0m0.182s
konsole (3.3)
Scrolling is jerky/stuttery, but not flickery.
real 0m10.337s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m0.091s
I used to be a firm KDE kamp member, but lately I've started to swing towards gnome.
;-) Take a look at Novell's Linux Desktop 10.1 Preview. You can search for OpenSuSE 10.1 beta screenshots. Gnome is the default, the default "look" is very, very clear and usable. It's not terribly sexy, but the icons are goregous, and the clean lines are a welcome change from KDE's proliferation of settings and dialogues.
Why?
1. Looks
2. Now, Gnome's loosing in the raw "theme" eye candy category, but they have KDE crushed in eye candy. How? Some neat new features. For one, SVG themeing on GNOME is a lot further along than KDE. For two, Cairo-GTK. This means that your SVG themes become DPI indepedant, as well as antialiased. This is a vast visibility improvement. Three, XGL integration. XGL is beautiful. XGL makes your linux desktop feel greater. A double buffered openGL desktop really makes everything feel more tactile.
3. Search. Beagle works, Kat doesn't. Kat, in its current iterations, exhibits horrifying memory leaks. My 2 GB desktop system slows to a crawl after 8 hours of indexing. Beagle works perfectly. Maybe it's cause I'm used to spotlight, but good, real-time fulltext search of your system is an incredible thing. It really makes it far less necessary to organize your files, you can spend less time on maintenance and more time working, and that's a good thing.
4. Fit and Finish. Some of this is in themeing (Gnome's interface exhibits less 'mis-alignment' of icons/images in interfaces, and other little uglies), and some of this is in userspace utilities. Gnome's networking is more reliable than KDEs. For whatever reason, all kinds of browsing on my KDE setup are semi-broken. SMB doesn't always work, nor does a variety of other kio:// interfaces.
Of course, I'm happy about this stuff, and I can't say that I've switched to Gnome for good. The last time I experimented with Gnome, the printing interface, the file browser, the (lack of) a menu editor, and nautilus were all vastly inferior to their KDE counterparts. Now, Gnome's various dialogues and interfaces are pretty functionally similar to KDE and more reliable. Gnome's also got the eye candy factor going for it.
I will say, however, that if KDE 4.0 is 1/2 as good as it currently is specc'd for I'll be moving back. As it is, KDE 3.5 is looking awful long in the tooth compared to Gnome.
Really, though, its not a huge deal. Install both (you'll want the libraries anyways), and they interoperate just fine. Switch back and forth as needed, and as long as your distro implements the freedesktop specifications you'll get the same entries everywhere.
Gnome has come a long way, and I think it can finally satisfy it's goals: A simple, defaults-are-correct, easy to use Linux environment. It's not necessarily a powerusers environment, but come on, how many average users are going to be using KIO and the like. Gnome aims for the Mac OS X goals (which are _very_ good goals when you are going after Joe Blow) and does it WITHOUT ripping off OS X part and parcel. Sure, there's some duplication, but that's to be expected: Sometimes the other guys just "get it right". But Gnome definitely has it's own identity, and is now feature complete for "the average user".
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
That's not true. The change was done in the development cycle but it was reverted way before the final release.