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Gnome 2.22 Released
kie writes "The latest version of the Gnome Desktop is being released today.
New features in 2.22 include Cheese (an application for webcam photos and videos),
window compositing, PolicyKit integration and much more.
The full details are in the Release Notes."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.
GNOME (Or more accurately GTK+, glib, Cairo and X) has got faster steadily since the GNOME 2.12 days. GTK+s UI's are just as snappy for me as Qt equivalents. I noticed significant improvements after several video/X driver updates and updates to Cairo 1.4.x (from 1.2.x).
Evolution can switch spelling on-the-fly, and even do multiple language spelling.
pidgin however still has the problems you describe, the FAQ/help has the following to say about that
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How do I change the language for the Highlight Misspelled words option?
Pidgin currently only supports spell checking in your locale language. This is because gtkspell 2 does not offer a good way for us to know which dictionaries are available or to switch between them. This functionality has long been promised for gtkspell version 3, which has been delayed somewhat indefinitely. See gtkspell.sf.net.
There is, however a simple plugin called switchspell that can change the spell check language on a per-buddy basis.
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http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You should be able to do this with a tiny script. Not quite as simple as the launcher GUI, but not bad. Simply create in your home directory (or wherever you like):
And call it "pidgin-en_US". Make it executable and set the launcher to use that script to launch pidgin and you should be good to go.
Better still, if the launcher config lets you give arguments to the program you tell it to execute (I think you can), you can make just one script:
Call it "pidgin-lang" and in the launcher, set it to execute "/home/foo/pidgin-lang en_US.UTF-8" or whatever other language you want.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
The cake was a lie you insensitive clod!
Maybe we should shoot for more realistic goals. Like acceptance of Emacs' superiority.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
the traditional way to do a windowed gui was to limit each apps drawing area so that it could only draw within it's own window and force the app to redraw stuff when it's visibility changed. This system has the advantage of being light on ram and being low on CPU when windows aren't moving. However moving windows is a relatively expensive process both because of the need to ask apps to redraw and the need to actually move data arround in the screen buffer (this is why many older systems use a dotted box drawn with XOR to indicate window moving and only move the window when the user has chosen the final location). Also it is virtually impossible to support any kind of partial transparency or rotozooming under this system and even non rectangular windows are a pain.
3D games work in a totally different way. They work with a (large) set of textures and the scene is redrawn every frame building up from the back to the front and rotozooming everything into place. This makes transparency, drop shadows etc fairly easy and of course rotozooming is a fundamental requirement of a 3D game.
A compositing window system (afaict under X this requires support from both X itself and the window manager) draws each window into it's own buffer and then treats that as a texture. Then a frame for the screen is built up in much the same way a 3D game builds up a frame. This enables all sorts of effects from simple stuff like drop shadows and inverted colors to advanced stuff like a window selector that shows a thumbnail of each window or a desktop selector that puts the different desktops on the surface of a cube. Different window managers will obviously choose to use theese capabilities to different extents and in different ways.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
In general, I agree with the camp that hates making GUI's too simple and limited. Yet I'm using Gnome now because it's the default in Ubuntu and because of I work with Mono which uses Gtk, and spending some time with Gnome made me gradually like it.
It could be because I was lucky enough to find the features I want in place so that I wasn't bitten by the "too much minimalism" problem. I don't have much need for sound, printing or the like and 90% of my time are spent in either firefox, monodevelop or a text editor.
Also, the Tomboy note taker rules. I wish something like it was in Windows. This must be a milestone where a user begins to dislike working on Windows and prefers Linux because of an application.
I have to admit I like Gnome a lot. But even if I were a KDE user I would have to give Gnome credit for their release schedule and process. They come out with a good set of reasonably stable features every 6 months, reliably enough that Ubuntu (and Fedora?) base their distro releases on the Gnome schedule. They've guaranteed core ABI compatibility through the 2.x series, which has been out for 5+ years by my count. They're conservative in what they add and take away. And every release has a nice set of release notes which tells me exactly what to look for in terms of new features.
Software development ain't easy, especially not in the decentralized volunteer world of free software, but the Gnome guys seem to have it down pretty well. Kudos to them.