Gnome 2.18 Released

xdancergirlx writes "Gnome 2.18 was released today (on time as usual). Detailed release notes are available. Nothing revolutionary in this release but definitely some nice new features, bug fixes, and improvements."

Comments

did they include Linus' patch?

[Anonymous Coward]

*sneaks away and orders popcorn*

Did they include...

[Daemonik]

Linus' usability patches?

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/19372 37

Re:Did they include...

[QuantumG]

How do I know? I've looked. Yesterday I even fixed it. I sent the patches off to add the capabilities. It's a shame he didn't, ya know, attach the patches to his email.. this whole "contribute it to the maintainer" crap is the problem with open source. If you see something you don't like, sure, contribute it to the maintainer to get fixed.. but if the maintainer drops your patch on the floor, don't go cry on the mailing lists, just make your patch publically available so other people who want the same feature as you don't have to recode it themselves. Jesus, Linus should know better.

I can't feel any responsiveness improvements.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use both KDE and GNOME on a regular basis. I really don't have a preference either way; both allow me to get my work done well enough. But what I've noticed is that with each KDE release, it feels significantly more responsive than the previous releases. I can't say the same with GNOME. If anything, it seems to be getting slower as time goes on. I use OpenBSD, so I end up compiling all of the packages myself. I use the optimal C and C++ compiler flags for my particular system. It's not a matter of my using KDE packages built with a more recent version of GCC, or something like that.

In any case, earlier today I built GNOME 2.18 on my system. I've been using it for a few hours now. And compared to the KDE 3.5.6 installation I was using earlier today, I think it's significantly slower. Evolution is far more heavy-weight than KMail. Nautilus takes longer to display directories. I have one directory with about 15000 photos in it. Nautilus crashes when viewing it, while with Konqueror I can easily scroll through the thumbnails within about a second.

Maybe it's just a quality control problem with GNOME. While I don't follow the development mailing lists very closely, I've heard from co-workers that GNOME is suffering from some pretty serious organizational issues. Low-quality code is being accepted into GTK+ and GNOME itself, and many people are noticing a decrease in its quality as of late. Maybe somebody can shed more light on whether or not these rumors are true?

Re:I can't feel any responsiveness improvements.

[electrosoccertux]

AMEN! I just want to affirm what the parent is saying, I've heard people say "I've never noticed that" or "works fine for me" etc...it definitely feels slow.

I've found KDE to feel simply -less- slow. Could some of this "slowness" be due to a lack of threading? I don't understand how it all works but my intuition was: if lots of services are working in serial and each has to send up a flag for the next to do something, and then nothing happens until the next service refreshes and checks up on the previous service to see if it's raised a flag (for instance say the mouse hovering over a menu item yet the item not lighting up; I notice lag in Gnome in this area _all_ the time), then what you could have is a collection of services that, while very efficient and fast in and of themselves, are slow when added together. Best example I can think of is an assembly line with 15 mutant workers-- each worker can transfer his load from one hand to his other hand instantly, but the next worker has to realize it's his turn to pick up the load and pass it on. 15 guys and this time adds up and you notice GUI lag. Whereas in Windows XP with threading (I never notice this sort of lag in XP that I notice in Gnome), it's like the first worker shouts "alright get ready" and then the time spent handing off and receiving the load between workers is greatly reduced. With lots of services shouting "get ready" this may slow things down, but not where it's important-- if it feels fast, then it is fast.

Am I completely off the mark?

Re:It has nearly caught up to KDE.........

[thule]

KDE's KWallet has offered similar support for years. In combination with other KDE programs, such as the KMail mail client and the Kopete instant messenging software, KDE users have had access to such features for ages.

I did not see in the KWallet docs (http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdeutils/kwallet/in dex.html) anything about it being a frontend to gpg. KWallet appears to be closer to the gnome password manager than the newer gpg management feature. Since I removed KDE from my system a year and a half ago, I cannot verify this.

These features were supported back in KDE 2!

I didn't see anything in the KDE 2 notes about supporting vertical text. Though it could be they didn't specifically mention it.

Yep, KDE has offered such functionality for years. KDevelop is an extremely mature software development environment. It's of a far higher quality than Anjuta, and offers a far greater number of features.

Most definately true. KDevelop is a pretty nice program.

GNOME, Ubuntu, and the colour green...

[babbling]

I'm looking at this screenshot and thinking that it looks quite good. People often complain about the brown in Ubuntu being "ugly", and Ubuntu has stated that they don't want to be "just like Windows" by going for blue. Well, based on that screenshot, I think green would be a good choice.

Re:GNOME, Ubuntu, and the colour green...

[Max Littlemore]

I will stick with blue because it sooths, calms and refreshes me so that I don't smash my monitor in uncontrollable rages.

I thought green was better at soothing psychopathic behaviour. It's also suppoosed to be easier for people with various types of dyslexia to read and absorb information, so yeah, go green

That's Not Release Notes

[Doc Ruby]

That's not "detailed release notes", that's marketing spin. Release notes would mention specific apps, like evolution, and specific fixes, not just buzzwords and superficial brags about how the experience is better.

Such marketsprach has its place. But the release notes are even more important. And even more important is not pretending that marketsprach is release notes.

If GNOME release managers don't release that by themselves, then the project is in serious trouble.

Re:That's Nice

[AaronW]

KDE offers some of this, though nothing like dropping Blender into Gaim. In KDE, most applications are also components and can be easily embedded inside other applications. For example, Konqueror is not so much a web and file browser as a container. I.e. I click on a Word document and it opens it in the browser using kword, or I click on a MP3 and it can use Amarok, or a photo brings up my preferred photo viewer inside the browser.

As far as not requiring metadata for MP3s, Amarok already supports this (another KDE application). It calculates a sound fingerprint of the file and uses the Musicbrainz database to try and figure out the song. Not only that, but I can bring up lyrics, the CD cover and even Wikipedia entries on the band in question. It's pretty amazing.

As far as grouping photographs, I don't know anything open source that does that based on picture content.

-Aaron

Is GNOME stagnating?

[10Ghz]

Well, there were no major new features in 2.16 either. Is it just me or is GNOME.... stagnating? How about continuous versioning backup-tool? Infrastructure already exists, someone just has to create a GUI and tie it to the desktop. How about something like OS X's Expose? How about being able to re-arrange items in the Taskbar? How about looking in to Gimmie as a Taskbar-replacement? There are tons of useful features they could add to the desktop, but no. What do we get instead? "Using Tomboy to create lists is now as simple as adding a * or a -." Ooooooh, I have been waiting for THAT feature for a long time!

This release gets a big fat yawn from me. Like 2.16 did as well.