GNOME 2.24 Released

thhamm writes "The GNOME community hopes to make our users happy with many new features and improvements, as well as the huge number of bug fixes that are shipped in this latest GNOME release! Well. What else to say. I am happy." Notably, this release is also the occasion for the announcement of videoconferencing app Ekiga's 3.0 release.

Comments

Huge number of bugs?

[Cthefuture]

Isn't it weird how developers (myself included) consider it a good thing that they fixed a whole bunch of bugs?

Personally I know it feels good to fix bugs because it feels like you're making the product perfect and somehow that feels like "development". However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[fractic]

However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.

Sadly the reality is that it's just too hard to write such complicated software without bugs.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[wanderingknight]

Or downright impossible. I believe that's one of the things FOSS is based on ;-)

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wish GNOME would fix the damn panels to keep them from rearranging the applets. That bug has been there since pretty much the very beginning of the GNOME project and they have "fixed" it many times but it is never really fixed. They have done things like introduce the "lock" feature that locks an applet into place. All that does is make it even more annoying because you then have to unlock them to put them back where they were before the panel mangled them.

Especially if you get a crash, freeze, or X otherwise terminates... but sometimes if you just logout and back on, it will rearrange the applets and icons on your panels. So annoying.

I mean this is simple basic functionality that has been broken for years. Whoever wrote the GNOME panel code deserves a cockpunch and some lessons in programming.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[HTH NE1]

Well, there's the theory that every program contains at least one bug and can therefore be reduced in size by at least one instruction. Iteratively then, every program can be reduced to a single instruction which doesn't work.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Kjella]

Not impossible, but quite likely you'd maybe hit Gnome 1.0 in these days after 10+ years of development. And everybody else would be using the betas/unstable versions because they're soooo much faster and more featureful despite the odd bug. In fact, the FLOSS market seems to be going after exactly its own pace - live on the bleeding edge? You can do that. Stay with the ultra-stabile? You can do that and so the bug level is pretty much what you want it to be. In short, most people wouldn't want the bugfree version if one existed. It's too extreme in the "of these three things, pick any two" department.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[MojoMagic]

As a software developer I feel confident in saying this:

If your software "doesn't have bugs", it either doesn't do much or you just aren't looking hard enough.

(I'm not pointing any fingers...)

Good!

[Sasayaki]

Excellent!

Now when can I expect this in my Intrepid Ibex repositories, mmm?

Mandatory puns:

"Glad to see Linux really putting it's best foot forward in the GUI department."

"The new Gnome is a feet of software engineering."

"Maybe I'll revert from Kubuntu to Ubuntu, dip my toe in and see what it's like."

"I hope the new version doesn't have a much bigger footprint."

Re:Good!

[Trelane]

Now when can I expect this in my Intrepid Ibex repositories, mmm?

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/gnome-utils/2.24.0-0ubuntu1 the day before yesterday.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Hatta]

I'd like to see Windows pick up some features that any UNIX desktop had 10 years ago. How about virtual desktops that actually work? Window shading? The ability to keep a window on top of the others? Can I even add something like a CPU usage graph to my panel in Windows? If so, it's not clear how, but it's trivial in my desktop environment of choice.

UNIX has had a superior GUI than Windows for a long time. The only thing it's really missing is wizards to help the less savvy configure it.

Caveat: this is coming from an XP perspective. I've not used Vista, so I don't know if these features are available there.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

BS.

Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista is, only faster. Same bling available. Better consistency. Better features than WinXP (though probably not Vista). In fact, using Windows XP makes my ears bleed after only a few minutes.

X (not Gnome) has handled multiple monitor setups since before I started using it in 1997.

Gnome has strict accessibility and localization requirements and has since 2.2. Windows wasn't even localized in Thai until Gnome adoption there forced it to be, and even then they just half-assed the "start menu" and nothing else. A generation of Thais learned to do computing in a language they didn't understand.

ESD never had a problem with mixing stuff if you used it instead of OSS or ALSA. It even mixes stuff locally and outputs it to another computer if you want it to. Maybe your problem is that you didn't know what you were doing ....

Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.

Since we're playing this game, these are the places Windows doesn't live up to Gnome:

1. UI consistency
2. Context menus
3. Window management
4. Virtual desktops
5. Select and middle-click to paste
6. Deskbar applet (pre-Vista)
7. User filesystem layout
8. Menu layout
9. System messages
10. Mime handling
11. Panel layout
12. See them all

Gnome vs. Win95 or Win2000? Pshaw!

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

No, I call it trolling for being misinformation. 95%? Let's look at the details:

• 2.1. Stay in Touch
  This is about voice / video and the new IM client in Gnome. Has Windows had integrated AOL or Yahoo! Chat since Win98? No? Does it now? I didn't think so.
• 2.2. Track Your Time Better
  Did Windows 98 have an integrated time-tracker? No?
• 2.3. Ekiga 3.0
  Has Windows had an integrated Voice / Video / Text SIP client since Win98? Hmmm ....
• 2.4. File Management
  Complex Asian characters in Win98? Tabbed file browser? Tab completion in the file browser?
• 2.5. Do More With Deskbar
  Calculator, Google search, Yahoo suggestions, Twitter updates, and indexed search from a key press? Not even to this day.
• 2.6. New Screen Resolution Controls
  Windows has had this one for a while.
• 2.7. New Sound Theme Support
  Windows, annoyingly, has had this one since like Win95. I think it says a lot about Microsoft's priorities.
• 2.8. Better Digital TV
  I'd be really surprised if Win98 had DVB capability.
• 2.9. Extra Pretty
  Desktop backgrounds. Again, Windows has had numerous wallpapers for years, but it says something about what they think is important when they still haven't gotten window management to work correctly.

Two out of nine. 22%. Not quite 95%, eh? I give you a D+.

Let's talk about localization. Windows XP3 offers retail installs for Chinese Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish [1] (that's eight), while Gnome offers forty-five languages.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

Why is it that windows can actually hide taskbar icons that I don't use.

I assume you mean the system tray. My question is, if you don't use them why would you even want them in the system tray? The very fact that Windows needs a "hide" option is a problem.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Draek]

By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI.

I'm sorry, but most of us don't consider "regedit.exe" a GUI, at least not anymore than "gedit /etc/httpd.conf" is. And without considering the registry, then yes, there's plenty of stuff in Windows that you can't configure from within the GUI.