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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."
I think the Software Oscar this year should go to whoever took the time to fix the slowness that is Gnome Terminal. Maybe they even fixed it so that international characters in mutt don't screw up too. But maybe that's hoping for too much.
Here's to being one step closer to switching from aterm. Not that I don't like aterm. But, ya know. And don't anyone say Konsole damnit.
I can see it now. A Penguin that resembles Tux pops up in the lower right corner of the screen. A thought bubble appears above his head as he smiles and waves. The bubble reads, "So, it looks like you're trying to write a letter".
If you want to see some follow the next link: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.h tml
I think that's partly true, but I think the free software desktop evolves faster. If you think about how much was new in WinXP, it wasn't much, and that was out in 2001/2002(?). So, the current W32 desktop is pretty old in computer terms. If you think how far GNOME has come in that time, it's a huge leap.
If they maintain the current pace, sure Vista might be superficially nicer when it comes out. In a couple of releases or so GNOME will have caught up in the areas Vista is ahead, but there won't be a new W32 UI to catch up where GNOME is ahead.
I think the current GNOME pace is about right. There aren't huge advances each release, but each release does bring stuff worth having.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
I already know 2.14 removes almost all the options available in the GNOME version of XScreensaver, and it apparently removes many of the options that used to be available from the Sound preference dialog. So what else has GNOME removed with this next release, because allowing users to have choice is "too complicated"?
Unfortunately for GNOME, they can't remove all choice; I can still choose to use KDE, because KDE chooses to let me customize it any way I want instead of being forced into the defaults GNOME wants. And, please, don't point out GConf, unless you can point to a list of what every single key (at least for a given application) in GConf does.
I swear, every release of GNOME adds to the eye candy, and removes from the usability. And to think I once advocated GNOME over KDE.
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!
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed this trend.
Within my local LUG over the last year or two opinions on GNOME vs KDE have become increasingly polarised. Personally I love GNOME and I think it's getting better every release. I have nothing bad to say about KDE but it just doesn't interest me.
Some of the KDE fans among us though seem to be starting to dislike GNOME more and more.
I don't know what it is but perhaps it's a good thing? A few years back it was my perception that both desktops were aiming for the same thing. Now though I think there is a clear and emerging idealogical difference between the two. While seen as bad by some (the desktops should be converging!), it at least presents more of a choice.
Anyone else noticed this or am I just going (even more) mad?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
But what I want to know is do you get an hourglass after you click an application shortcut on your desktop? Nothing confuses a n00b like clicking on something and having zero feedback (did I click it only once or is it just taking forever???)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
First of all, you assume that Vista will be the pinnicle of desktop features. As if OS X isn't already implementing most of the new features that Vista touts. And even still, you assume that all those new features are what users want or need. The (my) problem with Windows has always been that it tries to do everything for everyone. Mac OS has always been good about keeping feature creep down and just doing the core things very well. What is nice about a Linux desktop is choice. Believe it or not, many people choose fewer bells and whistles. I hope the GNOME developers can stay focused on doing the most important things very well rather than going off an trying to copy every feature that the "big guys" decide is important.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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've been using Ubuntu Dapper devel so I've been using the development versions of Gnome 2.14 for some time.- should-try-epiphany-as-your-default-browser-with-g nome-214n y-is-hype-get-over-it
:)
The biggest change for me is probably how much better Epiphany is getting. I was getting tired of Firefox freezing for few seconds every now and then so I switched and love it! There are few issues with it but overall, very nice!
There is an overview of Epiphany here: http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?2006/03/15/100-why-you
and here: http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/2006-03-15/epipha
I also love Deskbar integrated with Beagle! I've just stopped hunting down directories. I search for folders, documents, tomboy notes, web history, bookmarks, applications etc. with Deskbar.
This plus Xgl and all the Mono stuff is making my desktop really good
Windows Vista has a really good competitor when it comes out.
The Gnome development process seems to be more top-down than KDE's. The devs integrate a collection of unintegrated components from the g-world, which are all pretty much independently developed, in constrast to KDE's QT libaries, which come from a single company. The rules of this integration are the Gnome frameworks, which are either literal code, as with the Gnome libraries themselves, or conceptual rules, like the HIG. From this top-down perspective, the devs assemble a variety of tools from the open source world into a desktop environment.
With KDE, a more bottom-up approach is taken: the integration has been done at the level of the core libraries, QT, as well as the core KDE libraries that build on top of that. Above this level, things build in a sporadic nature that some would argue is more healthy for open source development (such as Linus Torvalds opined a few months back).
All in all, I welcome both Gnome's top-down and KDE's bottom-up approach to integrating the components of a complete desktop environment. Since KDE's integration does come from the bottom, KDE feels more integrated to me on the architectural front, whereas since Gnome's integration comes from the top, it feels more integrated in the look & feel, menus, etc.
Both projects have a lot to learn from each other; therefore, a lot to share. But really, the big experiment is to see which way builds a more successful desktop, or if the different models just result in desktops that serve different needs or different kinds of users.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Okay, they've removed possibility to change the sounds of the gnomegames from the "sound preferences" dialog, but really who need that? Instead they've added possibility to change which soundcard you wanna use. To me that's much more useful.
You are also right, that the new screensaver dialog is not as advanced as the old one, but that's not because anything has been removed, that's simply because it is a whole new screensaver, native to gnome, enabling gnomeprogrammes to interact with it, and making it translatable. I'm sure more features will be added in later versions.
Personally I really look forward to use the innovative Deskbar Applet, which I think the review forgot to tell about.
Users be damned, they're going to do whatever the hell they want.
Actually, the problem appeared when the menu specification appeared on freedesktop.org. They had to change their way to do menus to the new specification and, due the timed released, there wasn't time to do the menu editor. That came on two releases, I believe: the first when the specification came in and the next, where all applications on the desktop released where reviewed to include their ".desktop" files (the ones used on menus).
Also, the menu specification allows applications to register themselves on the menus. New applications, this way, should have zero menu edits to appear. Since the menu specification came in, I never had to edit the menus, to be honest.
Revolutionary new features include:
* Removal of the mouse pointer in favor of the "spatial mouse", where the user determines
what they are pointing at by the location of the mouse itself on the user's desk.
A moving arrow on the screen was too distracting for the average user.
* The rollout of the new "one monitor, one application" paradigm, wherein the user can
only run as many apps as they have monitors. This avoids confusing the average user,
who needs each application to show up in its own unique monitor location in the user's office.
I kid, take it easy.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Although it's not available from the Preferences settings, you can turn it on using the Configuration Editor (usually found in the "System Tools" menu). In the configuration editor, go to /apps/nautilus/preferences, and check the box for 'always_use_location_entry'.
I felt that method of advanced configuration was lame at first, but I'm getting used to it. I kind of prefer it over having every configuration item listed in the preferences dialog.
Anyway, that's how you turn on the location bar.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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
Icons no longer display useful information, like file type or network protocol in mounted shares.
God, that was stupid. Please change it back!
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
"Enhanced performance" yet "programs don't open any faster"? That doesn't sound like enhanced performance to me! I thought increased performance was one of the big things being touted for 2.14?
I think Pessulus is some bit of turkey anatomy, and Sabayon is an Italian dessert. So, like, is there an official dictionary of rarely words to consult for naming Gnome applications?
If you post it, they will read.
It was removed because it basically sucked. I'm glad to see it back though. Thanks to the freedesktop menu standards, though, I've have *yet* to need to edit my menu. Every app I installed put its icon in the proper place on the menu. No need to screw with the layout. With windows I'm constantly editing the start menu because it is layed out in such a horrible way. All gnome distros I've dealt with recently had sane and logical menu entries. All KDE and Gnome apps showed up in the proper place upon installation. Beats the heck out of installing your own crappy menu items only to have a bunch of stale links when you remove the program like in the old KDE days.
So basically as far as overall usability goes, menu editing is not quite dead last but definitely not a priority.
In short, these "gnome guys" as you call them actually are doing a great job. I'd rather have a feature implemented right than implemented poorly like Windows does. (Can't speak for KDE, but I haven't had to edit KDE menus in about 5 years either.)
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
Somehow that doesn't seem right. This will depend on whether you have stuff like transparency turned on. I just took gnome-terminal and aterm head to head using your same data file and got these results:
gnome-terminal (no transparency)
real 0m2.756s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.105s
aterm (no transparency)
real 0m0.861s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.105s
gnome-terminal (with transparency)
real 0m2.954s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.109s
aterm (with transparency)
real 0m3.027s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.105s
Aterm is generally considered one of the fastest terms available. Actually, I think gnome-terminal has improved their transparency handling in recent versions because when it first came out, it was slower than it is now. I remember seeing a more detailed comparison of term speeds done a few years back, but I can't find it right now. It showed clearly that gnome-terminal was 3+ times slower than most terminals.
I find that I like Gnome overall better than KDE, for productivity... While I think that KDE looks better, and has more "features" I get much much more work done in Gnome. Whenever I decide to try KDE, I always find myself messing around with the settings, trying to get that certain look, seeing if I can make it do this or that. (Same problem with E16/17) With gnome, I tend to login and work...
Have you ever tried gmenu-simple-editor? It's amazingly useless.
It lets you hide existing menu items. That's it.
You can't create new menu items, and you can't edit existing ones. It's essentially worthless as a menu editor. Ala Carte does allow you to add, delete, and edit menu items, which is what most people would want. gmenu-simple-editor doesn't.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
From what I have seen so far (have you tried the Vista beta yet?) there are a number of usability enhancements beyond mere eye-candy in Vista.
.Net where it does not belong
Did you mean:
1. performance meter? There were already zillion of "like-this" software-s. But most of the real problem lies in
- central registry, which is filled with too much non-sense that doesn't belong there and duplicated keys.
- the way windows accessed drives without a good scheduling
- implementing snail_speed_and_resource_hungry-technique like
- showing performance where it doesn't matter. If apps start faster, it doesn't mean they run faster. They were just preloaded and as such they consumed RAM which could be used much better
If you don't address the problem where it lies, every solution produces just additional mess
2. scheduled defragmenter?Win98 had it, and what good did it do
3. power management? Until you can control when devices are accessed and how they are accessed. File system provides better disk handling? All in vain. Even linux takes a day or two of tweaking to boost battery performance. But diff here is: while you can change the inside of linux, you can't do that for windows
4. stupidity like using USB memory as system. Yeah, that one is gonna be usable... as soon as USB gets GB/s speeds instead of MB/s. In translation, it is good that cars have handbrake, but it is not smart to promote it as casual driving tool.
5. TCP/IP stack? I won't speak about TCP/IP stack, since I haven't tested it terrily. So this might really be improvement. Especialy if they cleaned out the duplicated network settings in registry, where your networking could break without any reason.
6. media center? you can install MythTV under linux, you can install Media center under windows, Mac should already include media center. Problem is, 0.1% of people needs media center.
7. speech recognition? even gui translation in our language is poor and speech recognition is much harder to implement.
8. app based volume? almost all apps had this one so far, they just provided central interface for that. But not to bash, this is a usability improvement
9. DX10? Wow, 10 must be the gods number. But they were proclaiming the same about previous 9
10. calendar, photo app? yeah, now name one system that didn't include those for a few years now. Will I be able to publish my calendar to my apache based CalDAV server? Or flikr?
11. mp11? but it will still lack all but wmX codecs from the start, meaning... will play shit by default
12. eye-candy? windows is the last one to get here, so what is so revolutionary here?
11. security? ok, now you won't need to install anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-trojan. Good for users, but it will piss of quite a few companies out there. But these features are not even nearly important in the security scheme
Not to be bashing Vista, I'm bashing you and your bad taste for what is good. Not even one feature in that article (except TCP/IP stack) could be called improvement. Real improvement over previous versions in Vista lies in
1. least-privilege model (every other OS had it in its stone age)
2. userland drivers (every other OS had it in its stone age)
Both are booster for security model (one could say carbon copy of other OSs), and both will provide much safer environment for Windows users. All others can be threated as casual improvements of the system, but they are far from what it could be called selling point.
All I can say in the end, those two are enough good reason for Windows users to upgrade, even I as non-MS user will recomend the upgrade to the people depending on Windows because of them. But for non-Windows or users that plan to migrate they are not, becase same two features are present in any other OS.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Smeg isn't GNOME's menu editor. Smeg is just the version prior to the Alacarte Menu Editor developed by an Ubuntu user.
- showing performance where it doesn't matter. If apps start faster, it doesn't mean they run faster. They were just preloaded and as such they consumed RAM which could be used much better
No kidding. What's more annoying that logging into XP and finding that you have to wait 30 seconds before the HD settles down enough to get any real work done. Great, they shaved some time off the bootup just to add it after login. Brilliant.
10. calendar, photo app? yeah, now name one system that didn't include those for a few years now. Will I be able to publish my calendar to my apache based CalDAV server? Or flikr?
No kidding. What is it about the software that MS includes with the OS? Why is it always so... useless (with the exeption of IE)? What amateur wrote hyper-terminal? Did they spend more than 5 minutes coding the telnet app? Why can't I change the width of the command window or easily copy text with the mouse? Then there's MS Paint... isn't that the exact same program they had in Windows 3.0? Did they even modify the code? And CD burning... where the hell was that? Did I took this for granted on OS X and Linux.
It is amazing how useful OS X is out of the box compared to Windows. But maybe this is what makes Windows so successful. They provide just enough functionality to make it look complete, but ultimately users are compelled to become developers just to have decent basic utilities! So we end up with a million applications that all do the same thing.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I have been running beta versions of 2.14 as part of Fedora FC5 test3 for a while, and I'm very impressed by its speed, and increased pollish compared to previous Gnome versions.
/etc, /proc, /dev, /usr, /lib, /boot, /sbin, /selinux,... by default for ordinary users. These folders are mainly of interest for system administrators and developers, but this group most certainly know how to show hidden files. By hiding these directories folders containing business oriented stuff becomes easier to find.
.hidden file in your / directory containing the names of the directories you want to hide. Unfortunately .hidden only works in the Nautilus windows and not in filedialogs, where the disadvantage of having too many choises are a much bigger problem.
However, there are still a lot of things missing before it is ready for the Enterprise desktop.
For one thing, usermanagement seam to be for local users only. There is no way to manage users over LDAP. The same thing is true for sabayonne.
Another problem is the tools in the System->Administration menu. They all requires you to enter a root password to be used. This makes it impossible to have many people perform limited adminstrative functions. They should really use sudo for this. (I think Ubuntu allready do that).
Yet another thing I would have like to see, is hiding of files like
You can test this for yourself by createing a
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER