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The Notable Improvements of GNOME 2.22
Michael Larabel writes "Phoronix has up a list compiling eight of the most interesting improvements on track for GNOME 2.22. These improvements include the Epiphany browser switching to the WebKit back-end, transition effects inside the Evince document viewer, a new GNOME application for taking photos and recording videos from web cameras followed by applying special effects, a mouse tweaking module for improved accessibility, and a new GNOME VNC client. On the multimedia end, GNOME 2.22 has a few new features appended to the Totem movie player and the Rhythmbox player. Totem can now search and play YouTube videos and connect to a MythTV server and watch past recordings or view live TV. Rhythmbox now can utilize FM radio tuners, integration with new lyric sites, improved Podcast feed support, and even has support for communicating with newer Sony PSPs. There will also be a standalone Flash player and flash previewing support from the file browser in this release."
AFAIK, the KDE team is also switching to Apple's fork of KHTML, WebKit.
KHTML is very good of course, but it wouldn't make sense to switch to an engine that's going to be made obolete soon.
I used to. And my Gnome using friends that I've talked into trying it still use it.
Compared to Firefox, it's prettier (if you think "fancy colors and icons" is more important than "consistent", you'll disagree), is much better integrated into Gnome, has much nicer "search engine support" (type in the address field, and your installed search engines are at the end of the auto complete list - please, someone, give me a firefox extension for that!), and has a quite nice tag based bookmarking system which can be synchronized with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia.com. All of that, and just a fraction of the memory of Firefox.
I stopped using it approximately the same time as they switched backend, and now use Firefox 3 instead - it doesn't swallow all memory (only almost all), and it actually looks more integrated into Gnome, than Epiphany with a Gecko backend (the times I tried Epiphany/Webkit, it didn't really work yet) since it's not only has a native theme, it also has native form controls (which Epiphany/Webkit apparently has too, but not Epiphany/Gecko). It also works with Online Desktop, and has the famous extensions, which makes up for the other downsides of not using Epiphany.
In other words: people are actually using Epiphany, but I don't think they will for long.
First of all, GNOME is not a window manager. It is a complete desktop environment. When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again. The point being, you can use a number of WMs with GNOME; it is not, itself, a window manager.
Low cruft? Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE (I'm a KDE user, and neither KDE nor GNOME come anywhere near low cruft in my book; XFCE is reasonably low cruft, although you also give up some things to get there; one user's cruft is another user's indispensable feature. YMMV).
If you really want low cruft, though, you need to really run just a window manager. Fluxbox and IceWM are a couple of very good choices in that area. They really are low cruft and they are also very, very fast. Of course, unless you truly are willing to trade a lot of features for speed, you may find yourself wishing for a bit more cruft after a while.
Is this new stuff going to slow it down? Yeah, maybe. OTOH, they may make tuning improvements in other areas to offset it. Of course, GNOME is already slow [1], so you may not notice an incremental slowdown. KDE is slow, too (especially KDE 4; having tried it, I put it back on the shelf to wait for 4.1, and went back to the 3.5 tree).
[1] Compared to faster things like XFCE, or even faster things, like $WINDOW_MANAGER_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, but still seems relatively responsive compared to certain proprietary systems.
Neither KDE nor Gnome are just window managers (that's Metacity and Kwin). Desktop environment is a more fitting term for them. They both aim to include most of what you need for basic day-to-day use of your computer. They also make sure everything they include is nicely consistent, which makes for a good user experience.
As for your speed concerns, I don't see how inclusion of a few new apps will slow down anything? It will take a bit more disk space probably, but it won't slow anything down unless you use these new apps. You're also free to uninstall anything you feel is redundant.
Actually, the plan is to create a new "gtkhtml" widget that's supposed to be able to work with different backends, so that you can use Gecko, Webkit, and existing gtkhtml through the same API. http://www.atoker.com/blog/2008/01/10/putting-the-web-in-gtk/
RE:["why don't you make a lighter, faster gnome"]
http://www.xfce.org/ = a lighter, faster gnome...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
my pet peevee with _any_ GTK based app is the filechooser.
it's ugly and far from intuitive.
there's a wrapper aplication that allows some GTK apps use KDE's filechooser, but it doesn't work with everyting.
if GTK developers really don't wan't to fix this, could they at least put something to allow the use of KDE's dialogs when the app is not running under gnome ?
BTW, the wrapper is here: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=36077
What ? Me, worry ?
When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again.
For a while now (since 2.2) the default WM has been Metacity.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Between those "extremes" are even-lighter desktops like Étoilé and EDE, and somewhat-heavier WMs like Enlightenment. Lots of options in the X11 world. Readers may want to take a look at this comparison to start.
Constitutionally Correct
I find it hard to understand why someone who likes C would then dislike C++ enough to base a toolkit decision on that, especially given the quirky C required for Gtk+, but that aside...
There are, in fact, Qt bindings for C, Objective C, Ruby, Java and many other languages. (QtPython is probably the most widely used.) I'm not sure why you think it's so much more difficult to write bindings for a C++-based API.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...