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GNOME 2.20 Released
Gimli writes "GNOME 2.20 has been officially released. There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them. The timing is impeccable, too: 'This release coincides with the tenth anniversary of GNOME's existence. The project has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation and has become a global phenomenon. Used as the default environment in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME is widely used by Linux desktop users and is supported by a growing community of companies and independent developers. GNOME 2.20 will be included in the next major releases of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10, which is scheduled for release next month. Users who wish to try it now can use the latest Ubuntu 7.10 live CD images, or the latest build of Foresight Linux. You can also check out the release notes."
Since this is a new GNOME release, what configuration option did they cut out now?
Gnome 2.20 has better power management? I never thought that was the job of the desktop environment. I thought it was just to supply some form of UI for the user. I understand that GNOME would have to give some details, to either the kernel, or some module about user activity, and the like but wouldn't think the the desktop environment just dealt with power management itself. Can someone clue me into how this works?
It be an enhanced GNOME. Didn't ye get the email?
Enahnce your GNOME, stay up longer, get better performance from your GNOME, have great timing and more control over your power! contact XXXXX@yahoo.co.uk.
scupper me, all we were t'were pirates!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A worldwide shortage of underpants has begun.
While Miguel de Icaza wasn't very specific about the improvements in the new version, Novell stockholders are anticipating record profits.
I just finished compiling 2.18
Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand. It's the only part of Gnome proper which uses mono -- so why do they bother shipping it?
Of course, asking whether major annoyances like new windows opening on whatever workspace you're currently on instead of the one they were started have been fixed is kind of pointless...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Packages are already in ubuntu feisty.
:-)
just do an apt-get update and then an apt-get dist-upgrade
On the 0th day, God created C
Naturally the poster focuses on Linux, but in fact GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors. The fact that it has done this says a lot about Open Source as a superior way to develop non-proprietary software. When GNOME became common in the Unix world, it mostly displaced CDE, a non-proprietary desktop that was developed the old-fashioned way: a bunch of companies got together and formed a committee that wrote a spec, that various people went out and implemented.
GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.
Why the long face? Or am I missing something?
Most of the core GNOME developers were (and many still are) against Mono. So I call bullshit on your assertion. Also, just to clarify a bit, Tomboy is not a required component of GNOME, nor does GNOME in any depend upon Mono. It's an officially sanctioned add-on application, which essentially means nothing more than "we host the source and Tomboy follows our release schedule."
I'm a hardcore Gnome user (it's prettier, more "solid", and I like how simple they make configuration, even though I've been a programmer, sysadmin, have used Linux exclusively for about 5 years and am by all accounts a "power-user") but man it bugs me that they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore. If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!
I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia. Of course, most of the C++ that comes out of the OSS community makes me want to take up trepanning, so maybe that's not such a bad thing...
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
"I'm a hardcore Gnome user"
Oh, so you're not a programmer.
"...they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore."
It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).
"If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!"
Glade isn't necessary anymore; GtkBuilder replaces Glade from a programmer's POV, Glade the UI designer tool just outputs an XML file that you can read in your App and generate a perfectly functional UI, which to me is just plain elegance. No more having to programatically design and update UIs. Pango is not a code generator either, it's a Font Layout system that supports complex font layouts. Orbit is a deprecated piece of hold-over bullshit the GNOME people haven't gotten around to officially deprecate yet, and shouldn't be used with new code (use D-Bus instead).
"I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia. Of course, most of the C++ that comes out of the OSS community makes me want to take up trepanning, so maybe that's not such a bad thing..."
Which is exactly why the OSS community is C++-phobic. Not only is most community-generated C++ terrible, it's very hard to make build across all of the dozens of "standard library" implementations. GLib was invented and written in C to give the OSS community a truly standard library that they could control across platforms, and because GLib is written in C, most follow suit and write their applications in C. Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.
It's the Celine Dion emoticon.
I've been using Gnome since 0.3 or 0.30 (or something like that), and just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work! It's the best desktop environment I've ever used (I use Windows and OSX regularly, but find Gnome to be the most efficient/least cumbersome). I've had no trouble with customization, but then again I find gconf-editor to be remarkably easy and intuitive to use for all the advanced options I want to configure (such as a ridiculous quantity of keyboard shortcuts). The latter half of the 2.x releases have completely eliminated my chief complaints, i.e., performance, menu editing, and file manager issues. Can't wait to try the next release when Ubuntu 7.10 comes out.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
See, that's why I put the parenthetical in there, I am a programmer, but I'd prefer 2 features that both work right to 1,000 that half work. To me, the latter is morally equivalent to lying. Although Gnome absolutely has its share of problems, it's well ahead of KDE as far as actually working. I keep an updated KDE installed on my desktop and check it out at least every 6 months--mostly because Gnome isn't good enough either, but it's the best I can find. The thing is, I jump into KDE, and within a half hour I've found four things that don't work, cause crashes, silently fail, or just suck (by just suck I mean unresponsiveness, the crappy menu transparency and shadows that are off by a couple pixels that's completely different from the crappy window transparency, which isn't even consistent in itself!).
As for the list of junk I rattled off for Gnome, yeah, you got me, that's just what I remember from when I was going to help out with the project a few years ago. After realizing that I'd have to learn 40 different, sometimes incompatible, often redundant frameworks, I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere. And yeah, I do have something that will be coming out Real Soon Now (had to take a break from programming due to tendinitis in the wrist that's still bothering me to this day) but the point is, Gnome looks like it does not because all that crap actually helps out, but because 50 different people had a Great Idea.
No, wait, there is no point. Oh! Here's one: A project as big as a desktop environment that needs to be extremely consistent throughout, needs a Linus. It needs one guy to be the benevolent dictator, because right now it looks like anyone can get any old thing in there. Tomboy a C# app? wtf? It's not complicated, it's an applet, a couple borderless windows, and a simple WebDAV client, all of which I'd bet lots of money Gnome already has libraries for. It could be just as easily implemented in C, and a halfway experienced Gnome developer could implement it, with all of its current features, in probably a week or less. I'm halfway tempted to take a week of vacation and do it myself just to prove a point.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Is any work being done on Gnome's performance? When I first tried it, ca. 2000, it was just painfully, ridiculously slow on my hardware. I would click on an icon and literally get up for a cup of coffee while it was responding. My sister told me about fluxbox, and I've been using it ever since. Today, I have a nice modern system (AMD x64, dual core), and Gnome is still not anywhere near fast enough that I would choose to use it every day. It takes 32 seconds to start up, and when I click on a menu there's a noticeable delay before the little icons show up. If I was forced to use it, I would, but its unresponsiveness is just embarrassing when I'm trying to convince other people to try Linux.
Find free books.
It was lightweight on memory and speedy. Every release since then has been slower. 12 meg of RAM for GDM? Give me a break. Its a freaking login box.
There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them.
Sure, and meanwhile, Program Manager (Windows 9x) and Presentation Manager (OS/2) did more with less memory (Two Meg), back in 1995.
Whats really sad is that Presentation Manager was OOP/Class aware which is what both KDE and Gnome are still striving for.
Congrats to the Gnome team. Hardware companies everywhere salute you.
If I bitch about system requirements for Windows, then I can bitch about system requirements for Gnome/KDE.
I won't be downloading Gnome. XFce4 is everything Gnome was suppose to be. How many Gnome programmers use XUbuntu for development?
And where in the hell is the new Enlightenment Ebuntu distribution?
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Gnome, though it is my favorite desktop for linux, has always been very buggy. This release is no different. What the developers don't realize is that once they commit to fixing bugs we the end user will see those bug fixes as new features. Someone there needs to be bonked on the head so they can understand that fixing bugs can be seen as new features by users.
.12 update and we cheer.
Users don't want buggy software even if it appears that new features have been added.
There are some real show stoppers in gnome. Interesting that for release after release they haven't fixed them. One of them clearly can be demonstrated by copying large numbers of files on a network. You'll be regularly prompted for generic errors about the copy process. You can retry and the file MAY be copied. Moving files over a network is not a safe endeavor. Yeah yeah, small groups of files are ok, but large groups can result in you thinking the process has completed when it really didn't complete the process.
So, some serious show stoppers yet we get a
FIX THE BUGS!!
Sorry, just couldn't resist.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Gnome is pretty darn good about "developers, developers, developers".
Like how? Look at how much code reuse goes on in KDE vs Gnome. Every KDE app has the same spellchecking engine, every KDE app has the same text editor component, the same menu structure, the same shortcut configuration, the same widgets, dcop, etc, etc. Kontact, the KDE equivalent to Evolution, is just a small shell around all the individual components. KDE4 extends this even further, by making more powerful components available to developers. In a Gnome changelog, on the other hand, you see changes like "gedit gets editable toolbars" or "somegnomeapp gets gnomevfs support". You will never find something like that in a KDE changelog, because all the apps get all those features for free with the framework. I find it absolutely mindboggling that Gedit would have to manually add support for editable toolbars on gnomevfs, and then even find it worth mentioning in the release notes. It really shows that the libraries are not nearly as simple to use, or there is some kind of impediment to using them.
This kind of thing is evident when you look at resource usage between the desktops too. Why is it that KDE and Gnome use similar ammounts of memory when Gnome has so many less features (I'm not saying more features are better, but you can't deny that KDE has more features than Gnome). I'd be happy with a simple desktop like Gnome (it is much prettier after all) if it also was lighter on resources, but it isn't.
If you use Gnome, you'd do well to try Epiphany. Firefox doesn't follow any of the Gnome conventions: it looks completely out of place in a Gnome desktop. The GUI for Epiphany is much more responsive and I get to tag my bookmarks. There's also the little gem of writing your own quick searches as easily as adding a bookmark. You like Firefox. Go ahead. Gnome users who try to stick with Gnome apps for a consistent look and feel should be on Epiphany, though.
Put identity in the browser.
And that is why Gnome, XFCE and especially Apple (hatesit!hatesit!hatesit!) completely fail to make a decent GUI. There is no default user. It might come as a surprise, but people are not the same. What's fine and intuitive for me is a hell for someone else. Really. Users should be able adjust the GUI to their wishes, not the other way around. Defaults are for people who don't care enough to change it. Which is a reasonable choice by the way, and should be supported by the system. KDE is the only GUI i ever used that gave me the possibilities to adjust it's behaviour exactly to fit my intuition. The holy grail of THE perfect GUI that fits THE intuition of THE user is a fiction. It seems only KDE understands this.
Trust me, I work for the government.