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Speaking about fonts, the new fonts coming with Gnome, like Nimbus, are great! Coupled with the AA engine, they give a really sexy look to the environment. Unfortunately, when launching Gnome for the first time, it picked as default an ugly sans serif font that it was also extremely small for the job (size 10). This is weird, because my Red Hat installation of Gnome 2-beta on my other machine, picked Nimbus correctly. Nimbus plus AA, looks like the default BeOS font. BeOS users will feel at home in this respect.

Gnome 2 comes with the Sawfish window manager as default. Everyone was raving about Metacity though, so I thought I should give it a go, and indeed I did so. Metacity seems a bit more lightweight than the feature-packed Sawfish. It does not have as many configuration options, but it works well and it plays well with the MetaThemes engine. For example, each time you change the GTK+ theme, the Metacity will pick it up and will adjust the color of the window manager. I am not sure if this is window manager's job, but each time there is a new popup window, I would like it to get focus, but I found no such option anywhere to turn on. So, when I get IM'ed on the net, I do not even see the message windows, as they popup on the background. Pretty irritating to say the least. However, I like the simplicity of Metacity. Its themes are simple XML files and not always have accompanied images.

Gnome 2 does not come without its problems. I do not have sounds on my Gnome 2. I think that Gnome 2 assumes that you have Gnome 1.4 installed, and while I do have the libraries needed to run older GTK+ apps, I do not have the full installation, therefore, it can't find the actual .wav files. The Sound panel argues that I should install the gnome-audio package, but a look at the 2.0 directory on many FTP servers, did not reveal such a package at all. On another note, Galeon stopped working from the moment I installed Gnome 2.0. And where are Pango's multi-language settings to select another language for my keyboard? And where are the system tools for networking, or maybe a universal media player? Also, why the included system monitor can't pick up both my CPUs? Oh, and I lost almost 2 paragraphs from this review, by typing it on the GTK+ 2.x updated Gedit text editor (which is also the default Gnome text editor). When I just place my cursor on the text, and then move my mouse away in order to type there, the program seems to think that I still have my button pressed and it keeps selecting my text. It happens so often that I was not always careful, and there go two full paragraphs. I changed my mouse settings from its Gnome panel, but it did not help the specific situation. Please note that the Kedit or Kwrite editors do not have the problem. Plus, scrolling this very document with Gedit is shamelessly slow when compared even to itself (or GXEdit) of the Gnome 1.x series.

These are small (or big, depending on the user) faults. As far as stability goes, I experienced on the final version individual crashes of some preference panels and applications that come with Gnome 2, but I have not experienced any true crash of its memu panels or Gnome itself that could take X down.

Gnome 2.0 is utilizing GConf, a Registry-like editor. Despite many of our readers getting shivers when hearing of the Windows Registry, I got to say I love GConf. It is a good idea and it is so easy to manipulate its values than the Registry itself. Partly this is because there are not many GTK+ 2.0 applications yet to populate its tree, but overall, you can find some cool options that you can't find in the config panels. For example, if you want to be able to detach (tear-off) the menus of an application on Gnome 2, you need to hand-edit GConf.

The other important problem is the largely unfinished Help included. Only a handful of topics are discussed. A shame really. A commercial company would have never ship an OS or desktop environment with no real Help files. If this is how open source works, there would not be a chance that I would recommend any of this to my friends or family. Of course, such things prove right the people at MSNBC saying that Linux (and the rest X-based OSes) is not ready for the desktop. I am only here, to my dismay of course, to prove their conclusion right. (KDE has its own problems too, and I will come to that soon...)

The big question on any new release is 'Whats New?' or 'What does it do more?'. In the case of Gnome 2, it does less, not more. GTK+ developers will of course be happy with the new API, and users will possibly enjoy the AA fonts, but other than that, users will not gain much more from this desktop environment. Hiding behind the 'this is a mostly a release for developers' excuse is not good enough for me. Gnome is around for years, and the GNU project was not able to deliver an outstanding version yet. Is this the best that the GNU project can offer to the Joe User who wants to switch away from the commercial option of OSX or Windows? Well, nice try.

I usually start my reviews with the positive points of a product and then continue with whatever I found as 'bad'. In this case, I just can't hide my dissapointment about the new version of Gnome. As a user, I expected more, and I want more. The new version removes the flexibility found on Gnome 1.x and it does not introduce anything really new or spectacularly interesting in its UI design. Gnome 2 fails to impress. It is not intuitive. It feels limited and not done yet. While it is not solidly stable yet on all of its respects, it is stable enough. But the 'not done yet' refers to the feature-set of the environment, not to its actual stability. It needs more work, it needs more enrichment at most places, and it needs even more refinement on the GUI and its scattered setting panels or on the small icons feeling 'glued' to the text on the menus. Because of this re-write of the Gnome environment, I keep feeling that this is version 1.0, and not 2.0. Except the name Gnome, not much are similar to Gnome 1.x, unless you are willing to re-configure all these panels away from their defaults. The non-similarity would possibly be a good thing (Gnome 1.x had UI flaws too), but in this case, it is not *yet*.

Overall: 6 / 10

1. "Gnome 2, page 1"
2. "Gnome 2, page 2"