Slashdot Mirror
GNOME 3.16 Released
kthreadd writes Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released. Some major new features in this release include a overhauled notification system, an updated design of the calendar drop down and support for overlay scrollbars. Also, the grid view in Files has been improved with bigger thumbnail icons, making the appearance more attractive and the rows easier to read. A video is available which demonstrates the new version.
installed it. Gnome, or rather Ximian's piece of shit installer (Red Carpet?). It uninstalled PAM from my linux box. UNINSTALLED! No accounts were valid for login.
After copying the RPM to a floppy (thanks you Ximian morons) and getting back in to log in, I was unable to un-install.
fdisk.
Thanks you Ximian morons. Do you even test this stuff before you distribute it? And my only option is KDE?
boy, i must be getting old. i remember being psyched when i finally got a machine fast enough to run it.
my favorite lightweight wm: tvtwm
I've installed Ximian using their red-carpet installer on Red Hat 7.1 and 7.2 five times (five machines) now and it's worked great every time. PAM wasn't touched, only the Gnome stuff
There are a few dependancy annoyances on RH 7.1 and the new Up2date/RHN from RedHat that I've not figured out, but the 7.2 RH machines are humming along just fine.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
So there we have it, the foot bothers you ;)
:)
Couldn't you have just said, "The foot bothers me?"
Jeremy
People are using the API's. Much of the improvements to Gtk+ and GNOME for version 2 involve making the platform and desktop accessible to more users. This includes better internationalization and rendering of text, accessibility (a major project being headed up by Sun Microsystems). This has been a very important emphasis of this release. Other improvement in the configuration system, component model, etc. allow developers to write more powerful applications quicker. And these are being used.
Making the GUI easier for first-time Linux users, which was the whole point of GNOME in the first place, wasnt it?
This has been a major focus of the GNOME Project for GNOME 2 and beyond. Check out the GNOME Usability Project and the GNOME Usability mailing list.
Celebrate the finer things in life
Use what works for you, if Microsoft works then so be it. They've never worked properly for me even windows 2000 would crash every month or so which isn't acceptable for me. However they do get the desktop right but it will never look as nice as gnome. Plus gnome is functional for me even though I hate some of the ways things are done as of late..
- The protocol is unavoidable overhead: even if client and server are running on the same host, a call to, for example, XPutPixel() still has to pack a protocol request and send it over a UNIX socket, where it is then unpacked, validated, and executed. This is tremendous overhead for something as simple as drawing a single pixel on the screen. If you're in the business of drawing pixels at a time, you probably want to use your own drawing routines, an X image, and a double-buffered window. However, doing this is a pain:
- Double-buffering is tricky to implement, and can be slow. Unless your server supports shared-memory pixmaps, in order to do double buffering you must:
Basically, X is great for usual GUI applications, but if you want to do something like, for example, an xmms plugin, you are incurring much overhead as opposed to direct access to some type of framebuffer device.- Allocate an X image of the appropriate size and depth.
- Draw the contents of the back-buffer onto the image using your own routines.
- Translate the image into a pixmap.
- Blit the pixmap to the window.
- Repeat from step 2.
This process can be very slow.The developer API has a lot to do with ease-of-use. If the API makes it easy to write easy-to-use applications, people will.
Think about old X applications. They were difficult to use, because Xlib is impossible to program in. A better API brings better applications.
Also, haven't you been looking at the recent announcements? Evolution 1.0, Galeon 1.0, and Gnumeric 1.0. These are all programs that are extremely easy-to-use while being powerful.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Usually X-Windows runs slower because most distributions have it running as a low priority (why is this, especially desktop versions?). Anyway, if you find the PID of X Windows, and do
renice -20 PUTTHEPIDHERE
You will be happy. You might also do the same for sawfish & panel.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Double-buffering is tricky to implement, and can be slow. Unless your server supports shared-memory pixmaps, in order to do double buffering you must
Moot point, every serious X server (including XFree86, which most Slashdot users have) _does_ implement shared-memory pixmaps. Indeed, this has been true for better than 7 years now, when I started running XFree in 1994 both MIT-SHM and XShm were certainly supported.
Basically, X is great for usual GUI applications, but if you want to do something like, for example, an xmms plugin, you are incurring much overhead as opposed to direct access to some type of framebuffer
Not at all, there are plenty of ways to bang on the framebuffer without the round-trip to the server. One of the most prevalent is GLX, the OpenGL X extension which is supported on many card for XFree these days. It's been around on other platforms for over a decade.
Remember, SGI ruled the graphics performance world for a long time _using_ X11. X was designed to be very flexible through the use of extensions. My bet is that in 1-2 years GLX will be standard on pretty much all new Linux desktop installations, combined with DRM that can give darned good performance. Of course, good drivers are a prerequisite to good performance.
And yes, GLX works great for high-performance 2D graphics as well as 3d.
Couple of other points:
The protocol is unavoidable overhead: even if client and server are running on the same host, a call to, for example, XPutPixel() still has to pack a protocol request
Not true in the general case. Xlib is quite good at buffering many Xlib calls into far fewer X protocol requests.
and send it over a UNIX socket
Even on my old PPro 200 we're talking order 5*10^-4 seconds for a server round-trip over a Unix socket. That's pretty quick. And there's work being done on X servers that don't use UNIX sockets but rather SHM or other transports for protocol submissions. Jim Gettys had a very nice post on the subject that I'll try to dig up and link here.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
As for GLX... Haven't played with it, now I will.
Finally, I must disagree about the UNIX socket. 5*10^-4 seconds seems short, but if that is the time it takes to draw several pixels (assuming the draw requests are buffered in Xlib), then you are in trouble. In that amount of time, a 500 MHz CPU goes through 250,000 cycles. Imagine how many pixels you could draw into a framebuffer in that amount of time...
I was under the impression that MITSHM supported shared memory images, but that shared memory pixmaps were something different
Yeah, I mentioned Xshm as well. Forgot to mention Xvideo, which is also worth looking at for video applications.
Finally, I must disagree about the UNIX socket. 5*10^-4 seconds seems short, but if that is the time it takes to draw several pixels (assuming the draw requests are buffered in Xlib), then you are in trouble. In that amount of time, a 500 MHz CPU goes through 250,000 cycles. Imagine how many pixels you could draw into a framebuffer in that amount of time
Not nearly that many. Going over the PCI or AGP bus is not going to run anywhere near that 500 MHz CPU, not to mention that drawing a pixel is more than one cycle _and_ you're going to be limited by memory bandwidth to get at your render data, _and_ most importantly if you update faster than the refresh rate of your display then you're just doing work that'll never be displayed. 85-90 Hz is about as fast as most displays are set.
Moreover, you're generally doing actual work to determine what pixel to display. If you're just blitting images as fast as possible to the screen, then either Xshm or or Xvideo or GLX extensions are probably what you want (XFree has them all).
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Look, Ximian's stated goal is to provide "simple, intuitive set-up tools for first time users". Failure to anticipate such a conflict on a widely-used Linux distro is pretty serious. Yeah, we all make mistakes, but this was a biggie.
blah, blah, Systemd, blah, blah, KDE, blah, blah...
Dispite desparate attempts of the linux user base to move to alternatives and avoid wholesale changes to the linux userspace, distribution leadership and paid developers continue their push toward 'unification and control'.
When gnomish developers develop on macs to produce a desktop centric operating system in the hope of capturing the windows/mac market, where mac users are happy with macs, windows users are happy using windows and all the linux users go anywhere else the question becomes 'who is going to use it?'
I am looking forward to this code to be ported into Cinnamon.
Really, I wish Cinnamon, Gnome, and XFCE could all be merged, each giving meaningful input for Desktop, Tablet, and Lightweight.
It's time to get it together!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
"the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems"
Well, well, aren't we full of ourselves...
Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released.
The "primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux"? Really? Does the poster just speak Marketing as your primary tongue, or is this a simply characteristic of the arrogance of a project that has loudly shouted down every rational discussion about the merits of its interface design, the merits of requiring systemd to the exclusion of all else (not really true despite what the gnome developers say: Funtoo Linux, a Gentoo derivative manged by drobbins, has gnome3 ebuilds and straightforward patches that allow gnome3 to work flawlessly with openrc instead), and the merits of embedding splashscreen code into an init system?
I suspect the latter, given the broader context, but really. Gnome isn't any more the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux than KDE is, or any number of other desktops. Just because Red Hat's marketing department says so doesn't make it so. In my work at numerous Linux shops (including large banks like Deutsche, and smaller Red Hat shops that will remain nameless to protect the innocent), nearly everywhere a Linux desktop is run the choice has defaulted to KDE, with a small minority of users choosing to run Gnome instead, or other less common desktops (Mate, etc.).
The sheer hubris of a project claiming to be "the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems" in their press release, regurgitated mindlessly by slashdot, boggles the mind.
I used to hate GNOME 3!
I tried out 3.14, and I have to say, it has gotten a lot better.
Also you can install GNOME shell extensions, to get it more in line with the classic GNOME 2. :)
Also you need get a new shell theme. But its possibly to get GNOME 3 pretty nice.
Again, new Gnome features match OS X stuff introduced years ago:
3.16 introduces a new style of scrollbar for GNOME 3. Instead of being shown all the time, these new overlay scrollbars are only shown when needed
Why bother. Gnome developers have been on the path of removing, not adding functionality since they started version 2. Why would you expect them to accept a patch that adds a good feature?
All you need to know about the mirage of "Linux on the Desktop" can be seen in recent GNOME releases. The developers spend far too much time either not adding things people desperately need and want (like a really first-rate file manager, instead of the toy versions various distros leave on users' doorsteps in a flaming paper bag), or screwing up things that do work at least reasonably well.
"Linux on the Desktop" is almost entirely a "solution" that only works for hardcore hobbyists/ideologues and those with very significant in-house technical support.
What an utter waste. I've been experimenting with Linux since the days of buying a book with an attached Slackware floppy disk, and I really believed at one point that Linux would become a serious challenger to Windows and other desktop OSs with at least a 25% market share. I was a naive fool, as is anyone who still thinks Linux has a chance of coming close to that level of success.
I posted the text below almost as-is for the 3.14 release, only later finding out that no, this bug is still present. So here goes again....
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
It's mainly on the file manager (that I've found) but you can click OUTSIDE the window and still interact with the window. For example if you have two file-managers close to each other with another window below them both and visible in the gap then you can't click the lower window directly even though you can see it and put your mouse over the visible part of it. All you do is focus one or the other of the file manager windows.
You can also hold down the windows key and click outside the file manager window and drag it around the screen just as if you had clicked inside the window (I can't remember if I changed the default key from alt to windows in my settings but the point applies).
Generally I'm OK with Gnome3 (providing you get the right extensions) but these invisible borders are such a fundamental breakage of the basic concept of a graphical windowed user interface.
Everyone is all down on it, but the terminal notifications thing looked sweet.
ref: http://fedoramagazine.org/terminal-job-notifications-in-fedora-22-workstation/
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Better than the command line? I hardly think so. Bash, KSH, and even csh (as much as I hate csh) are heart of the ability to use and administer a Unix host, incredibly flexible and have decades of refinement behind their usability. Gnome is off on a rampage to remove features and force someone else's idea of how you should do your work down the throat of ever gnome user. If I had to make the choice, I'll take a serial console over an X desktop running Gnome.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Agh! It's even ambiguous in their video. Is it pronounced "Nome", or "G'nome"? The female narrator in the video says g'nome at the beginning, and then makes the 'g' silent toward the end.
I can't take this anymore. And that, my friends, is why I use KDE.
sig: sauer
The GNU project has two desktop environments: GNUstep and GNOME. Of the two, GNOME is the primary one.
For the history: in the late 90s, the KDE desktop was getting popular but it required people to install non-free Qt libraries. Two GNU projects were launched to counter this problem. One was Harmony, which aimed to be a Qt replacement, to allow KDE be run without installing non-free software. The other was GNOME.
Years later, when GNOME was successful, the Qt libraries were released as free software.
There was a third GNU project which aimed to make a graphical desktop, but they decided to first focus on a Scheme scripting engine. This effort produced GNU Guile, but no graphical desktop got made.
I think there was even a fourth project, but I can't think of it right now.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
In other words, stupidity like the Metro interface (aka "Change for the sake of change because CHANGE MUST BE BETTER") is not reserved to just Microsoft, but is a symptom of a much bigger problem that permeates many projects and companies across the technological landscape.
Change is fine IF AND ONLY IF it can actually outperform the incumbent. Being different doesn't automatically make it better. Nobody complains that we should completely redesign current bicycles merely because they're old. They haven't changed drastically because they already went through a huge amount of experimentation. They're already a great fit for the problem they solve.
I vaguely remember some business proverb along the lines of: Ask your customers to change once, and they'll let you. Twice, and they'll hate you. Three times and they'll leave you.
If they want to force everyone to change user interfaces, they better be damn well sure that they've tested it and it clearly improves are ability to do real work. Because if it doesn't, we're leaving for more stable pastures.
It comes down to people not wanting to do janitorial stuff, but want the glitz and fame of making something new.
This is further compounded by the tech press fawning over changes and "new", resulting in the mentality that a project that is not introducing massive changes or new features constantly is a dead project.
This seems to be a offshot of the eternal growth mentality of Wall Street, where the moment a market segment (say Laptop computers) are not showing some quarterly growth it is all doom, gloom, and rats leaving sinking ships.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm