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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.
Why the long face? Or am I missing something?
I'm sure you mean Gutsy. I just updated my Feisty machine and there's nothing new, and I wouldn't expect a new major GNOME release in an existing Ubuntu distribution.
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"
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.
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>
There are actually only three major Unix vendors left: Sun, IBM, and HP. All provide GNOME as the default desktop.
SGI is still around, but they no longer sell systems that run Unix. Their flavor of Unix was IRIX, which only ever ran on MIPS, and that CPU is no longer cost-competitive for big iron. So SGI sells Itanium and x64 systems running Linux. FWIW, their default desktop is GNOME.
Dell is also a Unix vendor of sorts, since they sell a fair number of servers running Solaris. Guess what the default desktop for Solaris is?
It's silly to call Apple a "Unix vendor". Yes, MacOS is built on top of Unix. But they're not part of the Unix marketplace. Almost nobody buys them to run Unix software, by which I mean software that's coded against traditional Unix APIs. Almost all Mac software is coded against Apple's proprietary APIs, and isn't available on "other" Unixes. The fact that Apple found it convenient to code those APIs on top of Unix APIs is an implementation detail that matters not at all to 99% of Apple's customers.
BSD has no vendors. Just a few enthusiasts.
That leaves SCO. Do we really want to talk about SCO?
I must meet your sister.
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.