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Gnome 2.14 Review

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tiny-little-feet dept.

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."

1 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's a moving target by baadger · · Score: 0, Troll

    Personally I think you are correct.

    For me, the most annoying thing about GNOME/X/KDE/Linux desktops at the moment is the quality of fonts. Especially font antialiasing in FreeType, which IMHO isn't yet upto the standard of MS's ClearType.

    I've tried half a dozen fonts with the BCI both on and off, various settings for hinting, antialiasing and subpixel order, but ClearType just looks better than any of the results i've been able to get.

    That said, I _have_ seen screenshots (example) where font rendering is rather nice, but I have idea how acheive such a result and have pretty much given up.

    When I goto one of the Linux based labs the university I attend I can barely stand using their Fedora Core gnome desktop for sake of the horrid fonts. In constrast when I sit at almost any Windows station, provided the screen resolution is acceptable, the fonts never bother me.

    Linux newbies (like me) do alot of harping about desktop consistancy, but one thing all GUI based OS's should have in this day and age is readable comfortable fonts. It is sad to see many desktop Linux distributions still suck in this area 'out of the box'.

    My point is, Linux desktop's, although generally brilliant, don't get to polish and deal with the nitty gritty (and most difficult) bits out of the way before the bar get's moved up.