Slashdot Mirror
GNOME 2.30, End of the (2.x) Line
stovicek writes "GNOME 2.30 was originally intended to coincide with GNOME 3.0 — a massive cleanup and rethinking of the popular desktop. However, GNOME 3.0 is delayed for at least another release, which leaves GNOME 2.30 as most likely the last version in a series stretching back almost a decade. [...] 2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series. For those who were around for GNOME 2.0 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence of how far GNOME in general and the free desktop in particular have come in the last decade in usability and design. If you do a search for images of early GNOME releases and compare the results with 2.30, you can have no doubt that, although GNOME sometimes tends to over-simplify, its improvements over the last decade remain unmistakable."
If this is done properly, I think it'll be good for GNOME. From where I sit, they sound like they're shooting for a major architecture redesign. In other words, this 2.30 release is analogous to the 3.5 releases of KDE.
And I think starting largely from scratch will be a net benefit. I've never personally used GNOME (though I've recommended it to others) and I've found it to be technologically lacking compared to KDE (KParts and KIOSlaves are awesome, and while there are GNOME counterparts they aren't as used).
One thing I think GNOME does very well is their HIG - probably the best outside of Apple. The new release is very simple - dump a lot of legacy code and keep the HIG. Maybe drop the old-fashioned look too.
Though my fantasy is to see them use Qt.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
LGPL is less free than GPL, really?
Yes, I DO remember the early days of Gnome and how much better it was than now:
- automatic save and restore of multi-workspace sessions
- handy window operations like maximize-vertically and maximize-horizontally
- easy to change settings like which app to handle movies, etc.
I remember when clicking on a menu button gave an instant response,
not a several second delay for the first time in a session.
Gnome has become bloated and slower while becoming less stable and less powerful.
It is neither easier nor harder for beginners. It has more eye candy.
Gnome clients have also gone downhill: Evolution used to support my mh mail folders.
Now it uses a database that crashes when I try to load my old mail and fails to work
with my rules. It still doesn't integrate the contact manager with the mail rules.
I'd switch to KDE but they've been destroying themselves even faster!
You miss-understand me, I was implying that I see plentiful of Linux users around here, but that KDE is still so uncommon that it invokes surprise on my part.
What's fud about it?
Novell signed a contract with Microsoft. It indemnified people who got mono from Novell from liability. It doesn't cover third parties.
You go find the clause that covers third parties and get back to me.
--
BMO
You can run Firefox on KDE.
"2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series"
I've noticed that open source software generally seems to be more hung-up and obsessed with version numbers than proprietary software. For example Linus Torvalds has said that there will never be a version 3.0 of the Linux kernel. So I guess 2.9.99.99.999 will be the end of the line.
I don't get the big hang-up with version numbers. Who cares if it is 2.30 or 3.0? My current nVidia video driver for Windows is 196.21 -- as long as it works, who cares?
Does this version of GNOME allow for easy global key rebinding? There was a version not long ago that sent me off to KDE that appeared to impose some rather autocratically determined key-bindings.
Not the same, that's for sure.
Personally I liked Gnome 1.x a good deal better than I like the 2.x series.
Except for gnome-terminal. The newer versions of gnome-terminal are better.
But everything else is worse. More dependencies that shouldn't be necessary, worse performance, more emphasis on completely pointless features like the ability to use the file manager as a web browser (WHY would I EVER want that?) but fewer *useful* features (like, the ability to have an always-on-top panel of a particular size in a particular position, which was great for stuff like having a clock just to the left of where the minimize button was on maximized windows), more gratuitous bug-the-user annoyances (like dialog boxes asking you stupid questions and/or unasked-for windows popping up voluntarily every time you connect a USB device or insert a disc), more undesirably arcane Windows-esque stuff (like gconf), more effort required to get the theme the way you like it, and some things you just plain *can't* do, or I have not figured out how (like, changing the icons on the built-in feature buttons on the panel for things like logging out; in 1.x this was as easy as changing the icon on an app launcher).
If Gnome 1.4 were compatible with modern software (both directions: modern versions of the software it requires, like libraries, and, going the other way, modern versions of applications), I'd still be using it. It was good. I have no idea why they decided to screw it up so much. Gnome 2.x comes across as a bad sequel or a poor remake. It is inferior in nearly every respect.
I can't say I'm very excited at the prospect of Gnome 3.0. What features are they going to take away now, the foot menu and the ability to have a clock on the panel? And what are they going to add? A useless 3D "walk through" filesystem animation like in Jurassic Park, which activates automatically every time a filesystem is mounted? Fixed-size desktop-bound "gadgets", like in Windows Seven, which are strictly inferior to panel applets in every way? Take your time, guys, take your time. I'm in no hurry to upgrade.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Oh, for Christ's sake. Mono is safe. Microsoft made a legally-binding promise not to sue. No judge would even hear the case if they attempted to bring a suit against <I honestly have no idea who they'd sue> unless the GNOME people managed to infringe upon something else in Microsoft's portfolio.
We have much bigger fish to fry. Squabbling about Theora and Mono isn't a productive use of your time, no matter how valid your arguments might be. The standards have been set.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
and interestingly in kde 4.4 with firefox 3.6 it's even using the kde notification thing in the corner whenever it finds an update for things. I believe this is because its using a "standard" (don't know if it is or not) dbus thing to do the notifications so that both gnome and kde can use the same code.
The contract that Novell signed is not the same as the "promise" that Microsoft published later. There is a difference. Novell is indemnified, and so are Novell's customers and people (e.g., developers) who get mono directly from Novell instead of a third party.
Come on, Microsoft does not like standards and interoperability. They are already undermining their own OOXML by using the proposed standard (the one that passed ecma, but not iso) that was rejected instead of the one that the ISO actually approved.
I didn't fall off the kielbasa wagon yesterday.
Call it tinfoil. I don't care. You're naive.
--
BMO
I'm really tired of the trade-off between simplicity and functionality. This trade-off should not be inherent to either windowing system. Rather, the variety of options presented to the user should be configurable. Each distribution should be able to decide how simple or how configurable they want to make their windowing environment when it is first installed.
Uhuh.
And then people would bitch about bloat because supporting all those features, options, and workflows would required a fuckton more code.
So here's an idea: pick the environment that fits your needs. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or heck, throw components together that fit your needs. But quit expecting these projects to be infinitely flexible, it's completely unreasonable.
the ability to use the file manager as a web browser (WHY would I EVER want that?)
Wait, does GNOME even have that? I just tried it in Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1, and it doesn't work.
On the other hand, KDE has had that for years; Konqueror. (Google it; the top hit says "Konqueror - Konqueror - Web Browser, File Manager - and more!")
I agree with you that I am fine with the file manager and the web browser being two different tools. I guess I don't care if they are merged, but I don't view it as a feature.
As for most of the rest of your complaints, I can't feel much sympathy. When I plug in a USB hard drive, I like that a notification pops up. There is plumbing for you to control what happens; right there in the popup dialog you can choose what you want it to do, and then choose "always do this". At a deeper level, there are config files that let you absolutely control what happens when you plug things in. As for GConf, I like it: it takes every good thing about the Windows Registry and ditches the bad stuff. (Good: a daemon manages the settings and avoids race conditions when multiple processes want to update the settings; also good, the settings are stored in XML text files. Bad stuff in Windows: an opaque binary database format that is prone to corruption... yuck.)
I can't say I'm very excited at the prospect of Gnome 3.0.
Nor am I. As far as I am concerned, Gnome 3.0 should look pretty much exactly like Gnome 2.30. They will be removing all deprecated technologies; things like Bonobo will be completely gone. That's worth bumping the major version number. But I don't want an exciting new paradigm. (I am not happy about the direction Ubuntu is taking, either.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
> Let's hope it stays that way.
I'd think the die is now cast. Enough folks yelled "STOP!" loud enough they backed off from making mono a core dependency and replaced a pair of otherwise keeper apps out of the default install. It would be pretty hard to introduce a must have dep now, what would they say to the authors of F-Spot and Tomboy?
> But is that the "installed" or did they remove Tomboy and the rest in the repositories too?
Mono, F-Spot and Tomboy are all still in the repo. No problem with that, use it or don't. Heck, outside the US where software patents don't exist there isn't any reason not to use em. The problem was if we allowed those camels to put their nose under the tent there wouldn't be any way to stop the conversion of GNOME into a .NET project. Having a few .NET apps or using mono to run foreign code isn't going to be a problem because Microsoft won't drop the patent bomb on those uses. They would lose more than we would.
Much the same as Wine is probably an even greater patent minefield but nobody objects to it being in every distro's repo. But we would be daft to let some Microsoft sockpuppet con us into using winelib as a reason to adopt Win32 as the basis for the Free Software desktop stack. Think of the arguments in favor that could be made. Apps run as fast, or faster, under Wine as Windows so performance isn't an issue. With only a little care binaries would run unmodified on x86 Linux and x86 Windows; just like mono/.net! Lots more potential developers know Win32. Develop Free Software on Windows with their 'superior' tools. And so on. Then once a critical mass of can't live without apps were Win32 only the patent hammer comes down and we all run Windows.
Democrat delenda est
For those who were around for GNOME 1.2 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence that Linux on the desktop and GNOME in particular have made awfully little progress in the last decade. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, not 2000, and it was horrid; maybe if your first experience with GNOME was 2.0 then you might think 2.30 was a vast improvement- heck, TWM is a vast improvement on GNOME 2.0. 2.0 was extremely bug-ridden, and if you wanted to change anything from its mind-numbingly bad defaults you had to putz around with finding where in gconf's xml you could go to change things.
If you were around for 1.0, the RH 6.1 "October GNOME" release, or 1.2, you know that GNOME made a lot of progress, was centered on the needs of those most likely to use Linux rather than on unsubstantiated usability claims, and was becoming quick, convenient, and powerful. The progress GNOME made between 1998 and 2000, the big improvements in the 2.2 kernel series, and a host of other developments made it seem like Linux really would overtake Windows for desktop use soon. But I really don't find much about modern versions of GNOME that really improves on 1.2 or maybe 1.4; the last 9 years have seen little improvement in the Linux desktop IMO.
I agree. I'm about to say something that almost everyone here will think is completely crazy, but I'm going to say it anyway: some of these DEs and Linux distros should focus less on being infinitely flexible and configurable, and more on coming up with one single configuration that works.
Not that I don't appreciate the flexibility and configurability, but having all these different options ought to mean that at least one option is consistant, standard, and controlled. give me a distro that only supports one DE, but make sure that DE's experience is really smooth. Take away all the different themes, and give me one single theme that's extremely polished. Maybe even don't try to support every possible kind of hardware, but certify some set of hardware and support that hardware really well. Go ahead and make some choices for me, just so long as those choices are really good choices.
A lot of people would say that sort of mindset is antithetical to the open source movement, but I don't think it is. Leave it open source, and let other people make any changes they'd like.
Anyway, I it's part of the reason for the success of OSX. While the geeks are all complaining about the lack of configurability, everyone else is happy with how well crafted the defaults are. I think Gnome operates along the same line (but not to the same degree), and while that earns it the wrath of a lot of geeks, it's the reason why so many Linux distros use Gnome as the default environment.
"On the other hand, 2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series."
No it won't. 2.32 will be published in parallell with 3.0. The new gnome-shell (et.al.) that introduces new UI concepts to gnome heavily relies on HW accelerated graphics. The state of many Linux graphics drivers still need to mature to be able to run gnome-shell properly. The 2.x era will live on (and *my* magic crystall ball tells me it will do so for a long time.)
My impression is that Bruce Byfield never seem to get much stuff right. Who is he and why are people listening to him?