GNOME 2.16 Released

59 Comments

1. 2006-09-06 7:27 pm

   siimo

   Ars has a first look at gnome 2.16 with screenies :

   http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20060905.ars
• 2006-09-06 7:38 pm

  mr_crow

  It still looks like shit.

  No polish, no attention to detail or look and feel.

  UI-wise Gnome feels ooooold.
• 2006-09-06 7:48 pm

  alime

  I disagree.

  It’s Simple, Clean and Smooth.

  “A”
• 2006-09-06 10:21 pm

  buff

  I have to agree. It is very smooth. I am using it on FC6. Load in a custom theme and the beauty is astonishing. Silky smooth experience. Gnome has definatley come a long way. Anyone remember the very first version where the popup menu subdirectories would be difficult to select if you didn’t roll exactly over them in time?
• 2006-09-06 10:55 pm

  ma_d

  First I ever used was 1.4. I wouldn’t call it usable back in that day, but 2.0 was usable. And 2.4 and up were downright ok.

  The last couple have been pretty nice though. I wish metacity would develop features at a less glacial pace though.
• 2006-09-07 7:31 am

  Lobotomik

  I wish metacity would develop features *at all*. But rest assured that very soon, when we get a bad episode of hypofeaturism, we will just pop a pill of compiz and everything will be dandy.
2. 2006-09-06 7:53 pm

   SEJeff

   Every release of gnome within the past few years is incrementally better. It seems like the gnome developers focus on taking what is there and improving it. Look at all of the great things the gnome performance-list has done to optimize various parts of the Linux desktop.

   http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/

   Slow parts of the desktop like cairo, poppler, fontconfig, pango, etc have a crack team working on optimizing and rewriting slow parts. This is a gnome project that other desktops such as KDE, Xfce, etc benefit directly from.

   This is what open source is about.

   Also take a look at standards and interoperability thanks to gnome devs. The modern Linux desktop has great hardware plug and play thanks to this pie in the sky idea from Robert Love (Novell employee) he dubbed Project Utopia. Proj Utopia is the bundling of modern hotplug support into the kernel, HAL, udev, DBUS, desktop dependant code such as gnome-volume-manager, and freedesktop.org standards, etc.

   http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Project_Utopia
• 2006-09-06 9:47 pm

  GhePeU

  Slow parts of the desktop like cairo, poppler, fontconfig, pango, etc have a crack team working on optimizing and rewriting slow parts.

  The pango improvements are really impressive. Mozilla Firefox (in Gentoo) use by default Pango for the rendering, and I must admit that some pages were loaded very slowly and with a lot of CPU usage. Last saturday I upgraded from pango 1.12.3 to pango 1.14.2, and the loading time is now between the 35% and the 50% of what it used to be.
• 2006-09-06 10:17 pm

  TheMonoTone

  I agree, some of project utopia is great. I often wonder why DCOP wasn’t chosen over DBUS? I suppose the Qt dependency might’ve been a turnoff which I can understand. I’m glad though that DBUS seems to be becoming the standard as it makes lives easier and improves the already great idea.
• 2006-09-07 3:14 am

  rayiner

  The Qt dependency, and the whole “being C++” thing.
• 2006-09-07 4:42 am

  SEJeff

  DBUS is more than just standard IPC like DCOP. It has the idea of a system-wide bus instead of a message bus between applications only. This, and the fact that DBUS is *dead simple* make it the reason it was chosen over DCOP.
• 2006-09-07 12:10 pm

  anda_skoa

  I often wonder why DCOP wasn’t chosen over DBUS?

  D-Bus is kind of the successor of DCOP. It is a bit more abstracted, for example allows better addressing of objects inside the remote application.

  I suppose the Qt dependency might’ve been a turnoff which I can understand

  Very unlikley, since there is not Qt dependency on DCOP, only KDE’s DCOP library is implemented with Qt.

  Anyway a non-issue, the KDE developers take care that D-Bus can be used for everything DCOP has been used before and thus make D-Bus a superset
3. 2006-09-06 8:09 pm

   diegocg

   I hope they fix my number #1 gnome issue…the lack of thumbnails and alternative views in the gtk file selector

   Oh, and the “icon selector” dialog. It’s by far the most ugly dialog in the gnome desktop. Not to speak that when I try to open a directory with lots of big pictures and that dialog tries to make thumbnails of all pictures and meanwhile the interface blocks…which wouldn’t be a big problem if it weren’t because it ALSO blocks the gnome panel (¿¿??)

   If gnome had a gtk file selector with ej: a thumbnails view…it’d solve *both* problems, since you could use the file selector thumbanils view to select your preferred icon. So far, that’s my #1 wishlist

   Edited 2006-09-06 20:17
• 2006-09-06 9:46 pm

  gentlemanfinn

  If you are thinking about video thumbnails, it’s proberly because you aren’t using totem with xine, this is because gstreamer doesn’t work with codecs like wma, and therefor can’t read the file and make thumbnails.

  You either have to compile totem to use xine it or download totem compiled to use it.
• 2006-09-06 11:12 pm

  diegocg

  “If you are thinking about video thumbnails, it’s proberly because you aren’t using totem with xine, this is because gstreamer doesn’t work with codecs like wma, and therefor can’t read the file and make thumbnails.”

  No. You’re talking about nautilus. I’m talking about the gtk file selector – it doesn’t even have a “thumbnails view”; not even of jpg images (you have to select the file to preview it, a really ugly solution), so videos don’t even look possible until they add a thumbnail view.

  Edited 2006-09-06 23:16
• 2006-09-06 11:27 pm

  SlackerJack

  What?, gtk file selector can preview all sorts of images. I dont think having to select a image to preview it is unreasonable or a ugly solution.
• 2006-09-07 12:45 am

  smitty

  Image previews in file selectors are very useful for the same reason they are useful inside of Nautilus. I assume you don’t think Nautilus could get away with only showing a preview of the selected file?

  Anyway, it’s not a big deal to me, but I can see how some people would definitely want it.
• 2006-09-07 5:49 am

  Finalzone

  There is an extension called Nautilus-action that should be available on your favorite distributio.

  here is the list of action users can do with Nautilus http://www.grumz.net/index.php?q=configlist&PHPSESSID=9e6ef982a411a…

  The only limit is the user’s imagination.
• 2006-09-07 1:15 am

  aent

  Or you can just install the gstreamer codecs for wma. You have the choice of using the gstreamer-bad and gstreamer-ugly plugins which may not always work, or the gstreamer-pitfdll plug that allows windows codec dlls and quicktime codecs to be loaded, and then just download the codecs that you want (or the package w32codecs for a nice set of nearly all of them)… no need to switch the entire engine when you could just install new codecs and get the other benefits of GStreamer.
4. 2006-09-06 8:15 pm

   Barnard74

   Can we have a chance to see a real zoomable user interface (and not simply windows mapped on textures as in xgl) on a linux desktop ? What i mean is something with performances like that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ceiKZyGEHE
• 2006-09-06 11:17 pm

  siki_miki

  Hardly.

  Windows will feature this (probably only used by few test apps at first). They use some sort of scene graph for 2D (and some simple 3D) graphic primitives. This scene and primitives are normally updated by app and at that point changes uploaded to graphic card so they can be accessed by DWM (D3D9 based desktop window manager, in fact it is also a compositor, very similar to compiz concept). Then using GPU shader programs (or pure software if only available) it renders vector data to screen-sized buffer and finally shows it on monitor on page flip. As rasterization is last step, zoom can be is taken into account before rasterization and visual quality is better. Dunno what Apple uses here, but I recall that they had similar scaling thing for apps (I guess because their API uses physical units, they can simply notify apps to redraw while libs will automagically multiply all dimensions and show scaled app).

  Currently there isn’t a plan for something similar under linux/X.org as it’d need a lot of infrastructure work. Fallback software rasterizing+AA, hardware shaders for same thing, Extensions to X protocol and change in how most toolkits/modern X-apps build their UI, and after all a decent 3D(DRI,…) support for most popular hardware (also a Xgl/AIGLX adoptance issue).
• 2006-09-07 4:39 pm

  SomeGuy

  The infrastructure work has been done in the form of Xrender and Cairo. All that’s really needed now is optimization work (Cairo is a bit slow, still — they prioritized working code over fast code for the initial release) and toolkit work (make toolkits use “real-world” units instead of pixels).

  The actual zooming using cairo is trivial, of course — just apply a transformation matrix.
• 2006-09-08 3:49 am

  Daniel Borgmann

  The actual zooming using cairo is trivial, of course — just apply a transformation matrix.

  I’m not entirely sure what use-case you (all) are aiming for, but there is one problem with simply using the transformation matrix: Line-widths other than one pixel will look extremely ugly on most displays. Unfortunately we still need to do a lot of pixel tweaking to get things to look right, which makes the whole scalable thing considerably less useful.

  At least we’ll be ready for the super-high resolution displays of the future. 🙂
5. 2006-09-06 8:48 pm

   WorknMan

   First, the Tomboy notes app .. I much prefer an ‘outliner’ program myself. Any open source apps exist that are the equivalent of this?

   http://www.winorganizer.com/en/winorganizer

   Ok, technically it’s a PIM, but it does great with notes too .. running in the system tray, it consumes less than 5MB of RAM. No app is perfect, but this one is pretty close

   I’m also interested in the new screen reader. Does anybody have an audio sample of it? What’s the quality like?

   Edited 2006-09-06 20:48
• 2006-09-06 9:52 pm

  GhePeU

  There is the video of a presentation held at CSUN 2006:

  Introduction to Orca: a Flexible and Scriptable Open Source Screen Reader

  http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/csun/060320/default.cfm?id=6690&t…
• 2006-09-07 1:15 am

  WorknMan

  There is the video of a presentation held at CSUN 2006:

  Introduction to Orca: a Flexible and Scriptable Open Source Screen Reader