Gnome 2.14 Released 348
joe_bruin writes "Beware the Ides of March... the Gnome people have announced the release of Gnome 2.14, right on time to meet their 6 month release schedule. See what's new in this release, as well as the release notes. New features include many more searching options, fast user switching, and speed increases to all the apps you know and love." From the release notes: "Just as you would tune your car, our skilled engineers have strived to tune many parts of GNOME to be as fast as possible. Several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster, including text rendering, memory allocation, and numerous individual applications. Faster font rendering and memory allocation benefit all GNOME and GTK+ based applications without the need for recompilation. Some applications have received special attention to make sure they are performing at their peak."
Great...Hopefully they fixed some bugs too... (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah well, I guess I could always go back to icewm.
KDE Fanboy misrepresents facts. (Score:3, Informative)
The "KDE, on the other hand, cures all diseases, ends war and farts kittens" speech is just the same tired fanboi ranting. KPDF has an op
Re:DRM to be used in GNOME's multimedia backend (Score:4, Insightful)
Your assertion that gstreamer is evil because it allows others to make linking proprietary software is zealous anti-user crap. You say the GPL nature of KPDF allows the user to remove the DRM and "be left with a fully-functional PDF viewer." But you miss something obvious to anyone who actually has to use the software: the PDF viewer is no longer "fully functional" when it can't read the DRMed file somebody sent you.
It's great to want everything to be free. But here in the real world, real users want to be able to work with everyone else, and some of those folks aren't willing to open up. Your response is to stoically ignore them and purposefully keep users from being able to properly interact with them. The Gnome team's response has been to do what they can to enable their users to work with the outside world.
You're never going to have a legal and free-as-in-speech mp3 plugin. You and the OSS-religious-crazies would thus force us to break the law or not use mp3s. That strikes me as downright ridiculous.
Oh, and about the FSF warning against the LGPL. Isn't Gnome part of the GNU project, and thus FSF-sponsored?
yeah but (Score:3, Funny)
Re:yeah but (Score:2)
=oP
Beware ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Beware ... (Score:2, Funny)
GNOME 2.14 was released on the ides of March [gnomedesktop.org], but the editors were all out enjoying the new grilled chicken Caesar burrito at Taco Bell to post the story in a timely fashion. And who can blame them -- the new grilled chicken Caesar burrito at Taco Bell is just $1.99 for a limited time when you mention this post. Take your $2 bills down to Taco Bell and get ready for a feast that will make you wish you had a Caesaerian of your own!
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Memory Improvements (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Memory Improvements (Score:2)
Launch a word processor, web browser, email client, desktop chat, shared drives to a server and then let me know how much memory is used. (real world scenerios)
Also let me know which one is more responsive, easier to use and integrated the best.
Re:Memory Improvements (Score:2)
I really don't think he was trying to claim that Gnome is now better than Windows XP because of this one measurement. Nobody is going to steal your prescious Windows XP box from you so calm down.
Re:Memory Improvements (Score:2)
Java 1.5 and upcoming 1.6 have improved startup speeds, GUI rendering (single threaded Open GL) [java.net] and cut down on real and precieved memory usage [java.net] to
Re:Memory Improvements (Score:5, Insightful)
What? A default Windows XP install uses about 70MB doing nothing. You can easily run Windows XP on a machine with 128MB RAM total - it's just that you're essentially limited to one application before swapping. (And, generally speaking, only one "document" in that application at that...)
The problem is that most Windows programs are giant memory hogs, so when you start installing non-default software (especially things like Office that like to preload) you start pushing the memory usage up and up and up...
I'm loving my Debian Linux install at work if for no reason other than I don't have to run the corporate-required Norton Anti-Virus on it. Things are so much faster without Norton. A basic Windows XP install isn't terribly resource-hungry - it's just that the standard bundle of software that comes with most Windows XP computers, simply put, sucks.
Re:Memory Improvements (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Memory Improvements (Score:3, Informative)
Measuring memory usage on Linux isn't a simple business. Frequently memory usage appears much greater than it is, due to a number of reasons. For instance, if 10M of libraries was shared between 10 processes, then a process manager would report 90M more memory than was actually being used.
Easiest way to check it out.... (Score:4, Informative)
It's pretty nice! I've been using the pre-releases for a while....
Re:Easiest way to check it out.... (Score:2)
Yeah, I've been using dapper for around 3 weeks now and can say that as i experience it, it's pretty much stable... no crashes at all, just a helluva lot of updates all the time :-)
Gnome 2.14 (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/ [gnome.org]
If you're running ubuntu dapper, it updated to 2.14 wednesday. It isn't really immediately distinguishable from the previous version but then, if you are also running xgl/compiz, who the hell cares?
http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=916 [tectonic.co.za]
-rcmiv
HA! HA! I have the cube!
Gnome Terminal speed improvements (Score:2)
Re:Gnome Terminal speed improvements (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Eterm and aterm. Both are highly customizable, support fake transparency (except in E17), and give the appearance of speed over konsole and gnome-terminal.
Re:Gnome Terminal speed improvements (Score:3, Informative)
Check out gnomebaker. It's easy to use and has all the features I use in a cd burning program.
GnomeBaker [sourceforge.net]
Re:Gnome Terminal speed improvements (Score:2)
But as you mentioned, Konsole is many times faster. That makes a big difference in many cases. Often when compiling code, gcc will only get about 1/3 of the CPU cycles since the rest get sucked up by gnome-terminal (and X). And what really drives me nuts about gnome-terminal is that it eats the same CPU even if the window is iconified or that session is tabbed-out! The only
GLib == good (Score:5, Informative)
And if it helps you, please buy my completely unrelated book [pmdapplied.com]!
Re:GLib == good (Score:2)
GLib == Good
but
GLib-implemented-in-OO == Better
I like GLib but there are far too many work arounds since its not truely OO driven.
Re:GLib == good (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, you're not making alot of sense here..
Canadian English is now supported, eh ;) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Canadian English is now supported, eh ;) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Canadian English is now supported, eh ;) (Score:2)
2.14? (Score:2, Informative)
I just upgraded to 2.12.2. I have to admit that I have noticed a significant performance improvement, especially when compared to KDE.
I look forward to this release.
Re:2.14? (Score:4, Informative)
And if you can't wait for two days and don't mind a few bugs, you could emerge 2.13.92 from the breakmygentoo overlay...
Re:2.14? (Score:2)
It will probably be available within the next few days will be stable in about a month. That is my guess.
Re:2.14? (Score:2, Informative)
"I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stu (Score:4, Funny)
But I am in a childish mood so must point out that you seem to be missing the entire raison d'etre of the GNOME desktop.
That is that a user should be able to control their entire computer simply by allowing a large drop of drool to fall from their mouth onto a special pressure sensitive pad. By allowing drool to fall from the left side of their mouth they will have "left drooled" on the selected object. Similarly by allowing drool to fall from the right side of their mouth they will have "right drooled" on the selected object
This will provide all the feature they need to work with the single file held in their home directory (further subdirectories and fiels having been banned as it "breaks the spatial paradigm" and "causes the user confusion")
Can you tell I'm not a fan?
de/up/grade (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm hoping a reinstall of Ubuntu's next release, now delayed, will return the lost quality of the previous version with the promised speed of the next version.
And I'm hoping that biannual OS reinstalls aren't the price of a feature-complete OS, as Microsoft would have me believe.
Re:de/up/grade (Score:2)
Seriously, I had similar problems--a GNOME library broke and all my text disappeared. I decided that was it, and switched. No problems since, in spite of going through two major KDE point releases.
Re:de/up/grade (Score:2)
And GNOME really loves me, and always apologizes so nice when the bruises really show
Re:de/up/grade (Score:4, Informative)
From the Ubuntu website [ubuntu.com]:
"The installer may not be GUI, but you only ever need to use it once, because we support ongoing upgrades via the network, from version to version. You never need to reinstall the operating system, just upgrade from each released version to the next when you want to."
At the most you should only have to reboot biannually... to use the new kernel that comes with each new Ubuntu release.
Re:de/up/grade (Score:2)
As I detailed in my post, I'm planning to reinstall the OS because the usual update system isn't fixing a bug. Since it seems that some component is corrupt, or some metadata, maybe the fonts themselves or their registration, I'm going to reinstall from scratch. Ubuntu's APT system will make reinstalling all my apps a lot easier. Maybe even selecting to rebui
Multiprocessing (Score:2)
Faster, slicker (Score:5, Interesting)
After reading the review from yesterday I tried out Epipany, and it's come a long way. There are only a couple of more config options I need, but if I get those I'll start running that in place of Firefox. For all of it's percieved 'heavy-ness' it feels nice and snappy now, and I think I'll be sticking more with Gnome for quite some time. Nice job.
What's new for users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Figure 16. Configuring the few GNOME Screensaver properties we deign to let the user control
Re:What's new for users? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks, I will, because I currently have XScreensaver set to come up in five minutes, and lock in eight minutes. That gives me a nice buffer time to deactivate the screensaver before the system locks if I happen to be working on something else non-computer related and the screensaver pops up.
Because users can't be trusted, this option is removed in gnome-screensaver. It either locks, or it doesn't. Great.
Re:What's new for users? (Score:3, Insightful)
FC5's release pushed back 5 days (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FC5's release pushed back 5 days (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Epiphany improvments ! (Score:2)
I saw Mozilla Firefox, with a slightly different skin, and only partial extention support.
Perhaps someone can inform me why exactly I would pick this browser over Firefox?
Button order... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem I have is the button order on dialogboxes, which can - AFAIK - not be changed. GNOME adopts the same schema used by Apple. It is based on a study which says that the readers eye starts searching for a information on the lower right corner of the screen (I did not read the study, so my description may not be accurate). As a result, a typical button order looks like this:
(Cancel) (Save)
On KDE, Windows and many other Desktops, a "most important first" scheme is used. The promoters of this scheme state, that people (in the western world) read from left to right and expect the most important information to come first. therefore, the order looks like:
(Save) (Cancel)
In principle, the button order is not a problem, if all of the applications use the same schema. For example, if You use a Mac, you may expect consistent order. And there is no "right" or "wrong" order, there are just different philosophies.
The only problem I see is the consistency. If you are a GNOME user and also use KDE Apps (or vice versa), you may find the different order disturbing. Of course, if You use Firefox and Kate every day, you can get over this. As for me, I work with a swiss/german keyboard in the office and with a US-keyboard at home. After having problems in the first days, I now switch intuitively between the keyboard schemas.
But anyway, it would be nice to see GNOME and KDE apps adopt the sema Interface guidelines or let the user choose which one he likes.
Re:Button order... (Score:2, Insightful)
GNOME aims for Action oriented buttons. Which would be
[Save] [Don't Save]
Where as Windows uses
[OK] [Cancel]
I've always felt GNOME is in the right in this respect. Users will never stop complaining as long as Microsoft continues ignoring any sort of Human Interf
Re:Button order... (Score:2)
Re:Button order... (Score:3, Interesting)
screensaver options are a "flaw" (Score:2, Interesting)
or change the text or change the picture folder, or preview
someone submitted a preview screensaver patch, but the maintainers will not accept it
oh no! (Score:2, Funny)
It's great! (Score:3, Informative)
At first I wasn't sure if there was much difference, but after using it for an hour I started to realize I was enjoying it much more than ever before, without really being able to put my finger on what was different.
Basic speed increases give it a much more real-time feeling, and some minor graphical enhancements, while hardly noticable at first, make for a more enjoyable experience.
Also noticed alot fewer bugs and annoyances.
Give it a shot!
gedit (Score:2, Informative)
it seems to be able to do almost everything that anjuta can do now.
2.16 (Score:5, Informative)
As many gnome devs have argued, changing to 3.0 and breaking compatability would only make sense if there are things that can't be done within the current code base.
Frankly, I have yet to see a reason why breaking compatability would be needed.
Oh, and from using gnome2.14 on dapper I'll have to say that this is a great release. Very polished and some exciting new things, like deskbar with beagle integration. Combine that with the new XGL and AIGLX eye-candy and you really have a winner.
Re:2.16 (Score:3, Insightful)
It's worse than that...when I looked at http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero [gnome.org] , my first impression was that it was full of terrible ideas. It also looked like people were just reaching for ideas that needed to break 2.x, but maybe that was just because the criteria for being added to that page included breakage (the stuff that sounded more reasonable was mostly moved to other pages for possible inclusion in 2.x). But seriously...here are some of the suggestions:
Make GNOME a standards organization instead
Main point of this release (Score:5, Informative)
That should make things much snappier.
Re:Main point of this release (Score:5, Informative)
Given a particular usage pattern, for example majority allocation of blocks > 512 bytes with a higher fragmentation ratio than would be acceptable in a server, you could technically outpace the malloc which would waste more time to find a best fit versus an algorithm that just finds you 512 byte blocks when you needed 4 bytes of memory.
Assumptions simplify algorithms, so is it a surprise ?
Re:Main point of this release (Score:2)
Of course, you could read about why I wrote this par
Re:Main point of this release (Score:2)
Not trying to belittle their achievement, but it's not that hard run faster than straight malloc if you use a memory pool, eg. http://www.boost.org/libs/pool/doc/index.html [boost.org] . In fact, for most applications doing a lot of allocation, you better be doing better than malloc/free as those a very slow.
Re:Main point of this release (Score:2)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:5, Informative)
No.
1) You're thinking of the new gl effects in xorg x clients. This is a desktop environment release.
2) Gnome is not attempting to copy os x, but create a new desktop environment. So your metric (closer to Mac OS) is a false one.
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
Well they're certainly doing a good job of copying stuff out of OS X, even if they're not trying to! ;)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
however, I believe the grandparent post was talking about the graphical user interface, not the command line interface...
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
Apple took the great things from OSS, portions of stable kernel and userland, and then added their own awesome GUI onto it. I would really doubt that much of the OSX GUI is actually copied OSS code.
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
I'm not too sure what you mean.
Do you mean a GUI on top of a unix kernel? (Gnome did that before os x)
Do you mean transparancy (existed in gnome before os x existed - even if it was an ugly hack)
Do you mean using common Open Source tools like apache & ssh? (These are tools that os x has copied from the open source community)
os x is cool, but much of what it does not particularly new or revolutionary, j
Re:Eye Candy (Score:3, Insightful)
"Fast User Switching" is a terrible example to use. Microsoft beat OS X to that punch, and itself was only an incremental improvement over linux, where you could run multiple x servers concurrently and switch between them. Mic
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
Fast user switching, my original comment was really meant to signal the fact that Gnome called it "Fast User Switching", rather than it being an original idea. Obviously features like this have been a
Re:Eye Candy (Score:3, Informative)
*sighs*
I think it would have been obvious from my previous comment what I think about "x is ripping off x" in GUI design. It just doens't happen.
Anyway, hard Drive indexing is not new. Web-style search interfaces are not new. Spotlight was not the first to combine the two. I think the gnome coders have been exposed to a hell of alot more sof
Re:Eye Candy (Score:3, Funny)
But now it all makes sense. The poster obviously was under the impression that Apple invented multiuser environments and indexed searches.
So, he's just an idiot; nothing to see here.
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:3, Interesting)
In the preview he somewhat cryptically says that you need "some features in unstable xorg" and "texture-from-pixmap" support. I'm not positive, but my reading suggests that the latter is a feature of the drivers, in my case meaning I have to wait for Nvidia
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
If you're asking about Xgl and compiz...
I'm not. I'm asking about Metacity's new compositing manager, which depends on the texture-from-pixmap extension in new xorg drivers. It accomplishes roughly the same thing, but is to my understanding somewhat less of a hack.
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2, Insightful)
Right. And KDE isn't trying to clone Windows 2000.
Trying to clone a well-designed GUI isn't exactly the worst thing in the world. It's probably better than trying to imitate NeXTStep since NeXTStep was designed in the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit era and had several features designed specifically to be original instead of good. (Or so it seemed to many outside observers.) Indeed one of the best design features of Mac OS (menubar at the top of the screen with effec
Re:Eye Candy ..like KDE? (Score:3, Interesting)
* the search bars in all applications, like Thunderbird also has.
* viewing man/info pages from the GUI.
* magnetic window borders.
* fast user switching menu.
* switch users from a locked session.
* editor with sftp/ftp/webdav support.
* editor plugins, for running "make" etc..
* preferred application defaults
* sound preferences.
* user lock-down editor for administrators
* terminal speed.. Kon
Re:Eye Candy (Score:2)
I don't understand why anyone would WANT something to behave like OSX Gui.
The OSX Window manager has got to be the least responsive system I've ever worked with. The machine itself seems very quick, and capable, but the GUI is very unresponsive. Just clicking to bring a window into focus has a large delay. Probably the #1 thing for productivity is a quickly responsive GUI, and OSX seems to be the worst.
Re:Glad to see menu editing has been fixed (Score:2)
Re:Glad to see menu editing has been fixed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Glad to see menu editing has been fixed (Score:2)
Re:Glad to see menu editing has been fixed (Score:2)
It's much better in Ubuntu... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Glad to see menu editing has been fixed (Score:2)
If someone took a window manager like IceWM (very light-weight and does allow menu editing), and added the ability to put files/folders on the "desktop" [I like to put active stuff there], that would be my window manager.
Re:Glad to see menu editing has been fixed (Score:3, Informative)
Wait - I'm being handed a message Parent must be trolling [gnome.org] as a menu editor has been included since Gnome 2.12
Oh - and that page includes the line:
Re:Glad to see menu editing has been fixed (Score:2)
Re:Ready? (Score:2)
Yup... and then you get the intelligent users who use something light like WindowMaker piping in with their zealot stories (or did I just do that?)
Re:Ready? (Score:5, Funny)
That's "5...4...3...2...1...KO!!!", which you would've known if you'd stop worshipping the HIG for a while and start listening to the users!
Re:defaults... (Score:2)
The menu bar is very important, so it deserves an edge of the screen, so that it's as fast as possible to use. Apple got it right back in 1984.
Re:defaults... (Score:2)
It's useful.
Re:defaults... (Score:5, Funny)
Takes up too much screen real estate.
You wouldn't have ever right clicked on the panel and seen an items marked "New Panel" and "Delete this panel", would you? You can have as few (say, zero) or as many panels as you like, drag them to any edge you like, stack more than one on any edge too if you like.
I personally like to take advantage of my large 800x600 monitors and have panels stacked five deep on every edge of my two monitors, so I can have one widget per panel. BTW has anyone else noticed how unusable slashdot is when the browser window is 300x200? You'd think they'd be more careful to test it on typical configurations like mine.
Re:defaults... (Score:2)
Actually, Slashdot looks fine in a 300x200 window.
Put another way, the ability to limit text to narrow (immensely readable) margins in combination with the absence of a horizontal scrollbar is what distinguishes Slashdot from most sites that offer news-related material.
That, and the opportunity to inject off-topic comments about one's pers
Re:defaults... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, you're right! Having a screwed up defualt setup is a-OK as long as the user is able to find the controls to change it!
Until those "confusing" controls are taken out in the next GNOME release.
Re:So how many options were cut? (Score:3, Interesting)
Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux. They probably know what they are doing. And even to a newbie, an option on window behavior will not do any harm. Yes, the whole 'linux-on-the-desktop' camp will tell you that simplifying programs is a good thing, but radically cutting out options is not the way to do this.
I wonder if a good solution to thi
Re:So how many options were cut? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cut out the hype, GNOME (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cut out the hype, GNOME (Score:3, Informative)