Submitted by GNOME 2.12 will be released to the world on September 7th, 2005, culminating 6 months of very exciting work by members of the project. A number of exciting technologies come together in GNOME 2.12 that will set the standard for free software desktops to come. Here is a sample of some of the outstanding work that has gone into GNOME thanks to its many contributors.
I was just whining about something like this missing in the Gnome 2.12 beta posting
Good summary, even though the text sometimes sounds like coming from a marketing droid (“Now 20% more flavor! Developed in our Swiss research lab, this product gives you whiter teeth AND smoother skin!”). I hope Evince can match the speed and usability of the new Kpdf, it sure looks promising. I have been using gstreamer for while — mostly with amaroK — and even though it is a very promising concept, I am not quite sure if it is ready to take over for Xine yet. Anyone seen a roadmap that says when gstreamer should be 1.0/stable?
Evince should match Kpdf pretty well. They use the same backend, poppler. Evince uses cairo too though, so there might be some speed difference from that.
I heard a lot of things about gnome’s reactiveness. Some say it is vaporware. I don’t use gnome, but the features displayed here look exciting (cairo for example) and I’d like to give a try. Will it work honestly on a 550Mhz, 256RAM ?
This could be application or GTK+ related, but everytime I fire up either Gnome or XFCE4 and work with them for a few hours, my 384 MB RAM laptop goes totally dead in swap. I’ve seen it so swallowed up in swapping, that there is nothing else to do but reboot it. Top reveals that Gnome and gnome panel applets eat about 30-50% of memory.
After removing all Gnome panel applets, about 50-70 MB RAM was freed and performance improved somewhat. The clock applet ate about 10 MB!?
This is under Ubuntu and has been the case under Warty, Hoary and still is under Breezy with Gnome 2.8, 2.10 and 2.12 beta.
I’m not an expert on memory usage and how objects and libraries are shared under GTK+/Gnome, but it seems like an awful lot to me or there are some serious memory leaks somewhere. Weren’t they supposed to start optimizing this at around Gnome 2.8?
On the same machine, I can run WindowMaker with various GNUstep apps for many days in a row without problems or swapping whatsoever.
I like the GUI improvements, but the interface speed hasn’t improved at all since 2.6.
Memory leak. Might wanna check on your xfce applets you use.
Ubuntu and others recently put out bounties to work towards speeding up Gnome. Hopefully it will come in some by this release.
Breezy will be slow till it comes optimized for the Preview Release I bet.
The clock applet does more than just display the time. It tightly integrates with evolution to display calendar events and notifications of events. Also, the 10mb you see under top is not entirely accurate. It does seem like too much though.
I have the same amount of RAM as you, and my computer never, ever swap when using GNOME, except when I’m edit very large images.
Probably not 10MB. If you want to know what an app uses for RAM in Gnome here’s what you do:
Open gnome-system-monitor.
Highlight the process.
Click on the memory map button in the context menu.
Then in the memory map, generally, the unnamed spots are heap area for the app (which is not all used by the app, but a majority of it probably is), and the named spot relating to it and not other libraries are it.
You can also.
less /proc/`pidof application`/maps
Or, if you don’t have pidof:
cd /proc.
ps -A | grep application
EX:
amanda% ps -A | grep firefox-bin
2576 ? 00:03:49 firefox-bin
2578 ? 00:00:00 firefox-bin
2579 ? 00:00:01 firefox-bin
2581 ? 00:00:01 firefox-bin
cd 2576
less maps
I believe using cairo/glitz to render the UI should actually speed things up considerably if you have 3d acceleration. Otherwise, it won’t be faster for you.
Actually, if you watch the Luminocity videos, you’ll see an accelerated windowing system, using GTK as the toolkit, rendering applications perfectly on an Intel i810 graphics card.
The future is bright
The future is bright
but the present is worrying… I did some test with gtkperf yesterday, and these are my results:
gtk+ 2.6.8 – 1000 rep.
GtkPerf 0.30 – Starting testing: Mon Aug 1 02:15:36 2005
GtkEntry – time: 0,45
GtkComboBox – time: 16,15
GtkComboBoxEntry – time: 14,07
GtkSpinButton – time: 2,12
GtkProgressBar – time: 0,53
GtkToggleButton – time: 6,82
GtkCheckButton – time: 5,56
GtkRadioButton – time: 5,84
GtkTextView – Add text – time: 67,20
GtkTextView – Scroll – time: 39,46
GtkDrawingArea – Lines – time: 3,40
GtkDrawingArea – Circles – time: 6,58
GtkDrawingArea – Text – time: 6,14
GtkDrawingArea – Pixbufs – time: 5,22
—
Total time: 179,53
gtk+ 2.7.4 – 1000 rep.
GtkPerf 0.30 – Starting testing: Mon Aug 1 02:03:07 2005
GtkEntry – time: 0,72
GtkComboBox – time: 22,67
GtkComboBoxEntry – time: 21,00
GtkSpinButton – time: 2,94
GtkProgressBar – time: 0,92
GtkToggleButton – time: 9,40
GtkCheckButton – time: 7,88
GtkRadioButton – time: 8,31
GtkTextView – Add text – time: 94,46
GtkTextView – Scroll – time: 71,61
GtkDrawingArea – Lines – time: 4,47
GtkDrawingArea – Circles – time: 7,58
GtkDrawingArea – Text – time: 12,57
GtkDrawingArea – Pixbufs – time: 5,15
—
Total time: 269,70
The delay with gtk+ 2.7.4 is visible, when moving fast windows around or when the whole screens is redrawn when I switch from a virtual desktop to another.
These are results with cairo+xrender backend, I couldn’t find how a way to enable the glitz backend.
I hope that the new xorg acceleration architecture exa will improve the performances.
christ dude.. you live in a third world country or something?
are you kidding ? even gnome 1.4 was sluggish on this hardware (but better than all gnome2.x)
these are some screenshots of ubuntu breezy:
http://img104.imageshack.us/img104/7868/desktop7ky.png
http://img75.imageshack.us/img75/8654/edit9sv.png
http://img75.imageshack.us/img75/7417/me3ge.png
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/4080/menu1kp.png
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/2290/nautilus4xm.png
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/250/places8oi.png
As much as I like the idea of the path bar (with the buttons) in Nautilus, I can’t help but think it should take up less space…
This looks quite promising. I might even want to try and give GNU/Linux/Gnome another shot now
But seriously: this integration is a good thing. Watch and learn other OSS desktop projects I can only say.
improve the default icon set, it is ugly.
I personally like GNOME icons. IMHO they have much more professional look than Crystal or any other icon theme.
They’re easy on eyes, simple and yet informative. Going further that’s my opinion of hole GNOME desktop.
By the way running it on pentium2 333mhz with 128mb of memory
Oh yes… the GNOME icons are done *very* professional, they look great, they are intuitive, they don’t get in the way and what’s best, they don’t look old after using for a week, a month or a year.
I don´t like GNOME at all but most of the latest iconsets were made by jimmac, who is is a freakin´ genius IMHO. 🙂 And I also like a lot this Clear Looks theme. Very professional and aesthetique.
GNOME is almost reaching a stage of maturity where I could consider replace my beloved KDE for a week or two for a test drive. But I REALLY would love to see a speed bump on it before. Gnome Terminal and Nautilus are two abominations in this regard.
Cheers,
DeadFish Man
I have to admit I am impressed with the new Gnome desktop. It uses quite a bit of memory but on the other hand you can configure about everything and make it look REALLY good and it is pretty fast and responsive.
everywhere, gnome deskop drop… kde take a lot of market share….
does gnome will use java, gcj… to improve her development?
You can use java NOW, it’s in the bindings package. But how exactly do you imagine that java can improve GNOME development? Java is nice for apps but for libraries GNOME will have to stick with C so Java wont improve GNOME the development environment, and most people chose their apps for themselves and don’t care all that much if app A is an official GNOME app or not as long as it fits in and works.
Yea, I actually consider it a negative point if it’s in the gnome dist because that means it will depend on a bunch of gnome libs that I may not want if I’m not using Gnome. And it will try and hide all its options from me. And I’ll have to dig through gconf to edit any real options.
But, I like Gnome apps. I consider it a deal breaker if it’s a kde app because I don’t often use kde.
It would be really interesting see more Cairo in action. Theme for example. I think there are some, but I haven’t found any screenshots yet. If someone has a link ..
No, there’s not much to see of cairo now… Best things would probably be the GTK color selector and Evince.
There are no usable Cairo theme engines right now but I know that at least one is in active development, stay tuned =)
“Cairo vector graphics library allows for smoother edges, RGBA translucency and better looking, more flexible theming.”
I think that RGBA translucency is what has people excited.
Anyway, there’s some discussion about Cairo’s software rendering being slow; I’d love to see something about it. Are we talking about slow like how ascii config files are slow, or slow like something someone could humanly notice?
Evince has to be the single coolest app in existance. I browse a lot of PDFs (technical papers, class notes, etc), and every PDF browser I’ve ever used (including Adobe’s) crawls with large complicated ones. Evince, however, is ridiculously fast, and never keeps you waiting when displaying a new page. If GNOME 2.12 had nothing other than Evince, it’d be a worthwhile upgrade.
Did you also try xpdf and kpdf which share the same backend as Evince?
XPDF and KPDF are glacially slow (I haven’t tried the new one everybody is hyping though). Evince is based in libpoppler, which is a fork of the XPDF codebase integrated with Cairo.
> XPDF and KPDF are glacially slow (I haven’t tried the
> new one everybody is hyping though). Evince is based in
> libpoppler, which is a fork of the XPDF codebase
> integrated with Cairo.
This is pure bullshit, specially your first sentence. Poppler as you rightfully say is a fork of XPDF, now tell me how KPDF and XPDF can be slower ? Specially XPDF while it’s the same code as Poppler ?
I find KPDF to be much faster and responsive than Evince. Evince in the recent past has caused a lot of problems for me, like not rendering large PDF documents correctly, you get white pages in the middle of your text.
Say you go from page 1 to page 5 in your document (a doc with 25 pages) and see that after page 5 everything shows up in white only. Or not being able to print a single page or their thumbnailer locking the entire application up and so on.
Another issue is that Poppler doesn’t return the correct paper size to Evince. You need to apply the paper size to Poppler during configuration time, so if you live in US you don’t add anything, if you live in germany and have A4 as paper size you need to configure –with-papersize-a4 or something and then compile Poppler and then Evince ontop of it. This makes the libgnomeprint/ui dialog become useless and you can select even postcard size if you want and it still prints either A4 or Letter format.
When you select 2 or 4 sheets on 1 physical page and you want to save this into a file (within the print dialog) then it doesn’t work, when you want to print exactly that stuff then it doesn’t work either.
There are a lot more issues with Evince, while it’s a nice application and definately going into the right direction it still lacks behind compared to KPDF who makes usage of the KDE printing framework and strangely works perfectly, renders better, apply papersize correctly to the application.
This is pure bullshit, specially your first sentence. Poppler as you rightfully say is a fork of XPDF, now tell me how KPDF and XPDF can be slower ? Specially XPDF while it’s the same code as Poppler ?
What about the term fork do you not understand? A fork would be kind of pointless if it wasn’t better. I have a version of XPDF sitting right here, and “glacially slow” is absolutely the right term. And that’s on a dual-core Athlon64!
I find KPDF to be much faster and responsive than Evince.
As I said, I haven’t tried the new version of KPDF that everyone’s raving about. However, Evince is much faster than the old versions.
Evince in the recent past has caused a lot of problems for me, like not rendering large PDF documents correctly, you get white pages in the middle of your text.
I haven’t encountered this problem. I’m using the version in Fedora Core 4, btw.
Another issue is that Poppler doesn’t return the correct paper size to Evince. You need to apply the paper size to Poppler during configuration time, so if you live in US you don’t add anything
We don’t have A4 paper here in the US, so that’s probably why I haven’t noticed it. Again, I couldn’t care less, since it works for me.
> What about the term fork do you not understand? A
> fork would be kind of pointless if it wasn’t better.
> I have a version of XPDF sitting right here, and
> “glacially slow” is absolutely the right term. And
> that’s on a dual-core Athlon64!
How can the forked XPDF aka Poppler be faster when it has CAIRO tied to it ? CAIRO is known to be dead slow, so the resulting output through Poppler automagically MUST be slower than through XPDF. Only exception would be if there was some code magic and some code refactoring that makes the code work faster.
> As I said, I haven’t tried the new version of KPDF
> that everyone’s raving about. However, Evince is much
> faster than the old versions.
But you are the person who shouted out first that EVINCE is faster than anything else, faster than Acro, XPDF and KPDF. So before throwing such arguments into the room, you should have made clear that this “non measured” experiences came from older applications.
> I haven’t encountered this problem. I’m using the
> version in Fedora Core 4, btw.
> We don’t have A4 paper here in the US, so that’s
> probably why I haven’t noticed it. Again, I couldn’t
> care less, since it works for me.
You do care anyways, specially if you want to print 4 pages on 1 physical sheet and realize that it doesn’t work, this is independant to paper size.
You also do care if you have a PDF file that has 20 or more pages and you figure out in the middle that after some pages the pages show up white only. Even this is independant to paper size.
Have you actually used or tested Evince with more than reading the one or other PDF file ? Or do you keep saying things about programs that don’t reflect reality.
Now let’s measure some values, you say that KPDF and XPDF are slower than EVINCE while all three apps are based on the same code and probably all three seem to inherit the latest changes from either XPDF, Poppler to be current and knowing that Poppler even has CAIRO tied to it. So how about some serious profiling and giving us some numbered values ?
How can the forked XPDF aka Poppler be faster when it has CAIRO tied to it ?
I don’t know, but it is!
CAIRO is known to be dead slow
I don’t think you can say that. Enough benchmarks haven’t been conducted to say that.
But you are the person who shouted out first that EVINCE is faster than anything else, faster than Acro, XPDF and KPDF. So before throwing such arguments into the room, you should have made clear that this “non measured” experiences came from older applications.
I used the latest versions of XPDF (which came out a year and a half ago!) and the latest version of Acroread. I didn’t use the latest version of KPDF, but I pointed that out in my original post!
You do care anyways, specially if you want to print 4 pages on 1 physical sheet and realize that it doesn’t work, this is independant to paper size.
I don’t have a printer
There is a central postscript setup here that rasterizes the file on their end.
You also do care if you have a PDF file that has 20 or more pages and you figure out in the middle that after some pages the pages show up white only.
Again, I have never seen this “white only” problem show up. What version of Evince are you using anyway?
Have you actually used or tested Evince with more than reading the one or other PDF file ?
I use Evince all the time. It’s great, especially for PDFs that contain hand-written notes, which render really slowly in XPDF.
inherit the latest changes from either XPDF, Poppler to be current and knowing that Poppler even has CAIRO tied to it.
The last version of XPDF was 3.0, released on Jan 2004. I’d assume that both KPDF and Poppler have diverged quite significantly since then.
CAIRO is known to be dead slow
I don’t think you can say that. Enough benchmarks haven’t been conducted to say that.
Rayiner, this isn’t some big secret that Cairo via software rendering has some major optimization work to go to be usable.
Ya know, I’m sure if Gnome wants to include Evince in their next version (in what, October?) that Evince is likely in the final stages of development. What I mean is that while it runs perfectly stable for Rayiner who probably has built it with the right library versions it may run horridly for someone with a sub-point off version of some off library because the developers haven’t done much major testing yet.
That or I almost wonder if he’s got a compositor that’s stopping evince’s updates from coming through consistently.
Cairo is not fast in software render mode, but with hardware render enabled, it IS much faster. Have fun!
“XPDF and KPDF are glacially slow (I haven’t tried the new one everybody is hyping though).”
Ha ha.
For the sake of exaggeration:
Evince is the buggiest piece of software I’ve ever used (I haven’t tried it since pre-alpha though).
XPDF and KPDF are glacially slow (I haven’t tried the new one everybody is hyping though)
I don’t see any slowness in KPDF 0.4 using KDE 3.4.1
Did you also try xpdf and kpdf which share the same backend as Evince?
AFAIK kpdf and xpdf don’t use poppler. xpdf is a stand-alone software and kpdf includes a local-maintained xpdf fork.
kpdf is going to switch to poppler in the future (there are kpdf developers regularly contributing to poppler CVS) but there isn’t a precise roadmap, yet.
umm. evince is in my fc4 install.. its not “new”
If GNOME 2.12 had nothing other than Evince, it’d be a worthwhile upgrade.
Of course since it’s been available as a standalone app for months (since before 2.10 release, I think), it’s not exactly an incentive for upgrading. But yes, it’s an excellent program.
I have to say that the Gnome team has finally fixed an important missing part to the spatial view: the hierarchical list a la Mac OS. This is what made the spatial view on the Mac tolerable for me. There were times where having the multiple windows worked, and times where I needed to launch an app or modify a file without opening a gazillion windows in the process.
Up until this version of Gnome, it was annoying to use spatial view and even though I hated using the navigational mode (reminded me too much of Windows), it was the lesser of two evils. Not so with 2.12. Good job guys….I may just switch back from KDE…. 😉
Yeah, the new list mode is neat but what’s really cool is the new pathabr in browser mode… turn off the menu bar, goto listview and open the new places sidebar. File managing at it’s best!
Unfortunately new treeview/list mode is *extremely* slow.
Luckily, browser mode is now more usable, with Places in the left tab and the pathbar.
Looks rather good. Clear Looks is a good theme, and it looks as if Eugenia was right, if a little premature.
More integration with Nautilus is a lot better and the enhacemants to the spatial stuff should make it far, far better.
GNOME 2.12 will utilise the latest and greatest in graphics toolkits through GTK+ 2.8. Still in its final stages of testing, GTK+ 2.8 will offer developers features not currently available in any other toolkit.
Well that’s inaccurate now that Qt 4 is released and has been for some time, but that aside, we’ll have to see how the new GTK and Cairo stacks up.
The new system tools look nice, especially the new services stuff. I don’t know how they manage that, but more GUI integration of that stuff really is welcome.
The menu editor on Breezy can only hide existing applications – how to add new ones? And also you have to logout and relogin to make the changes active. What happened to instant apply?
I like Smeg the best.
And also you have to logout and relogin to make the changes active. What happened to instant apply?
Gnomes never really had it, so nothing happened to it.
To refresh without rebooting, this command:
killall gnome-panel
Inotify support needs to be fully integrated for changes to show up immediately. Hopefully it’ll also increase the speed of the gnome menu, its way too slow for my tastes.
>> Gnomes never really had it, so nothing happened to it.
>> To refresh without rebooting, this command:
>> killall gnome-panel
No, you don’t need that if your system is working correctly… mostly gamin should be to blame here but for me, it works wonderfully, everything is updating in real time
I really don’t understand that they’ve decided to take Clearlooks as default but don’t use the Bluecurve iconset. Default GNOME icons are so *ugly* :S
Agreed. The folder icon is the worst offender IMHO. I understand that the Gnome HIG prescribe a specific color palette (which, in itself, may be a bit draconian). But stil… I also know there are alternative icon sets (Suede, Smooth icons, etc), but (1) they are only a little bit less dreary, and (2) thwy are much less complete than the “official” one.
Just my $.02
First I used KDE several years ago. Then I switched to Gnome when 2.8 came out since it had improved so much. But I still wanted more speed so then I switched to XFCE4.2. This setup is probably not for newbies since you can use either KDE or Gnome applications under XFCE4 but you will have to setup application launchers for the applications.
I am using some parts of Gnome 2.12 now: Evince PDF viewer and it is the best PDF viewer out there; and the clearview theme. This is what is cool about XFCE4 you can use any Gnome application but you don’t get the environment bloat that goes with it.
Did I understand correctly. The FINALLY implemented a menu editor ?
GOOD NEWS !
> Evince PDF viewer and it is the best
> PDF viewer out there;
If you reduce your view to Gtk-only you might be right. KPDF 0.4 (released with KDE 3.4) is certainly the best xpdf/libpoppler-based PDF-viewer for Linux/Unix in general though. For more information have a look at:
http://kpdf.kde.org/
rayiner was right with respect to kpdf 0.3 — it WAS glacial slow. But for KPDF 0.4 the glacier has melted! It’s incredible fast now (just like any current xpdf/libpoppler-based PDF-Viewer these days).
Already have Evince on Fedora Core 4 by default=p. Much better than the old ggv.
Why does it feel so dull. I mean really, the default colors should be a bit more vibrant. Look at JDS, it has one of the best themes ever created for GNOME. It looks so much more professionally created and alive than the pictures given in article.
I know i can change GNOME colors but if someone is going to buy a PC in the market and has GNOME with default and JDS side by side, i bet they will feel much attracted to JDS.
At least they should take Longhorn approach and if you have good graphics card, make the default theme better.
JDS is unbearably fugly. Who thought of using purple in a UI??? “Vibrant” is a bad thing when you have to stare at it for hours a day…
May be then our taste differs. I like even XP blue color theme better than the given GNOME ones. And yes i use PC almost 12 hours a day everyday and no i don’t find colors distracting. Vibrant doesn’t mean bright, it means more lively.
When i look at my PC, i should feel its more alive rather than dull. I like JDS color scheme but thats a matter of taste i guess.
Well there’s no accounting for taste.. A default theme should be, IMO, more muted and “dull” as you put it. It’s not supposed to draw attention to itself; it only needs to be aesthetically pleasing and usable. Clearlooks and the default icon theme accomplish this goal admirably, IMO.
People that want a desktop that yells at them are free to install something more like the JDS theme..
Does anybody know of a decent Debian repository to pull the Gnome 2.12 beta from? Ubuntu Breezy messes my system up (complete lockup and then I mean *complete*), so I’m looking for an easy method to upgrade to the latest beta.
Anyone?
http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org/
Try the info on that link. Right now it only has stuff on 2.10, but these are the debian gnome people so they will have the info first.
A lot of great improvements in there, I see. Man, this is gonna be fantastic. I especially like the multimedia improvements like embedded totem, that’s a big plus.
Yeah. I am really looking forward to that totem browser plugin. Hope it makes it into this next release. The GNOME people have done well. They build a solid foundation and have been steadily building solid applications on top of it. This is a perfect example of something that has been necessary for a long, long time…
I have been installing ubuntu on several family member and co-worker’s computers. This next version should make lots of them happy, and once it hits debian it will make me very happy too.
what good is it without commercial codec support?
Regarding JDS, I agree with what has been posted. It looks like the sort of gui that would be created to look ‘futuristic’ for a cheap 90’s sci-fi show! Someone at sun has been watching too many sliders episodes.
http://bugs.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44767
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113480
Assente
http://assente.altervista.org/
As a very easy test try running a Gnome session over a 10Mbit link and then try the same with KDE. While KDE is very usable Nautilus eats all the b/w alive. If you kill it then you can actually use Gnome. There’s something very wrong with Nautilus and many of the gnome applets. The cpu usage applet is a total joke, eats a 500MHz cpu alive. As much I like GTK+ I’ll keep using KDE until they fix all those bugs.
Completely agreed. We just have to accept memory leak for now. GNOME, Ubuntu and RedHat and other GNOME-ish companies are paying to implement the GTK+ Framework and fixes GNOME programs every day. We can hope for a bright future for GNOME.
I happen to like the default folder icon better than the Bluecurve one because it’s sharp and lays flat.
“The cpu usage applet is a total joke, eats a 500MHz cpu alive.”
Funny. I’ve never had any problems on a 700MHZ cpu. It certainly does not eat 71% of my cpu alive! I have it running constantly. If you want something that eats 512MB of ram alive, try opera w/ over 40 windows open(all day).
Funny story reguarding opera. When my co-worker upgraded from opera 6.x to more recent versions, opening opera would lock his 900 mHz 1GB RAM machine. As a temporary solution he switched to firefox and loaded extensions to make it more like opera. After the P/O for his new Athlon64 3000+ processor, mobo, and other parts went through he is back to using opera just fine.
BTW, he uses well over 40 tabs. One day we looked at his screen and tried to guess how many he used (I think I guessed 60 or something). After counting them it came out to like 80 or so.
GNOME
in a word, bland.
(very very bland)
* All those grey’s – yuck. Call it “clearlooks” or whatever, it still don’t smell like a rose to me.
* The broswer icons “back”, “home”, etc I also find unappealing, dull and unimaginative. It makes me want to fall unconscious.
* That default font for “File, Edit, View” menus (which is used in many many other areas too) has to go.
All in all, I think they have “look and feel” all wrong. No offence, but geeks rarely make good designers. That’s just how I feel.
* All those grey’s – yuck. Call it “clearlooks” or whatever, it still don’t smell like a rose to me.
That takes about 5 seconds to change if you don’t like it, but grey is a sensible choice for a generic look.
* That default font for “File, Edit, View” menus (which is used in many many other areas too) has to go.
They’re the bitsream vera fonts, same as almost everything in the linux world is currently using…
For professional software, GNOME have made a lot of very good choices. The defaults should always be livable, and anything that might provoke a bad reaction should be an option (up to a point anyway.) The alternative is to end up with a system that everyone will want to reconfigure, to some extent, whenever they sit down at a new install/workstation, which no one wants to have to do.
That comment is a bit nonsensical, because the GNOME HIG is designed by UI people, not geeks. KDE is a UI designed by an unholy alliance of artists and geeks. Luna is a UI designed by the marketing department. GNOME is a UI heavily influenced by HCI people. The GNOME Usability Project had lots of real HCI people on board (including four members of Sun’s usability team) and published the GNOME HIG. The HIG, in turn, is pretty well-enforced by the release team. To get into GNOME proper, apps generally have to do a good job of following the HIG.
i like gnome im sure that with 2.12 version, many operations done with terminal are simply unnecessary.
for example the nautilus pathbar is amazing so like other things.
🙂
> The GNOME Usability Project had lots of real HCI people
> on board (including four members of Sun’s usability
> team) and published the GNOME HIG. The HIG, in turn, is
> pretty well-enforced by the release team. To get into
> GNOME proper, apps generally have to do a good job of
> following the HIG.
You mean the same SUN who produced CDE ?
You mean the same SUN who produced CDE ?
Sun was not exactly alone, IBM, HP, Novell was involved too, and believe it or not CDE was a major improvement over Open Look that was used prior to CDE on Sun desktops.
As for Gnome, at least the embryo of Nautilus was developed by a former Apple employee, Andy Herzfeld
They want bland and boring. People get work done on bland and boring. This has been stated ad nauseum on this forum and everywhere else. Only Apple seems to be able to get away with shiny without annoying serious users…
I haven’t heard any complaints about bland and boring themes here. But then dropline has a slightly different default theme.
http://dropline-gnome.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
Although I’ve found that many people seem to consider anything that isn’t bright blue drab.
droplines default theme of course is bright blue. I realize that came out confusingly.
Its been my experience that there are plenty of very good looking themes that many people consider to look bad, simply because that aren’t blue.
“Only Apple seems to be able to get away with shiny without annoying serious users…”
Somehow I find KDE’s use of the glassy look less appealing than Apple’s. Maybe it’s because Apple’s colors are more washed-out, and not *everything* has a glossy sheen. It is possible to overdo it… having too many vibrantly-multicolored glassy bits can look pretty nasty (see Linspire).
“Yea, I actually consider it a negative point if it’s in the gnome dist because that means it will depend on a bunch of gnome libs that I may not want if I’m not using Gnome”
Well you should be happy to learn that gnome is trying to phase out the use of special gnome libs and instead add features to gtk itself.
“And it will try and hide all its options from me. And I’ll have to dig through gconf to edit any real options.”
Frankly, I don’t care if some options are out of view as long as I have access to them.
… More or less like a KDE version of evince. By which I mean, another modern useful document viewer, but with far more options to do… something or other.
That strikes me as how things should be. Personally, I can barely look at those kpdf screenshots, there are buttons/colours everywhere, and I would be constantly distracted.
Therefore, I use evince (and similarly, the rest of GNOME.) I’m willing to entrust a lot of settings to be decided by the people who make the software, so that I just get a system that is well set up immediately, and doesn’t cause me more work.
Isn’t that who the how desktop thing is? Neither is better of itself; I can’t bear to use KDE, others feel the same about GNOME, but I don’t see that’s any reason to bitch about either.
Ok! We finally have the answer to Gnome vs KDE issue
That strikes me as how things should be. Personally, I can barely look at those kpdf screenshots, there are buttons/colours everywhere, and I would be constantly distracted.
Gnome – for ADD victims (attention deficit disorder)
KDE – for all other (normal?) people
Dont take it seriously, I also think KDE can be toned down a bit.
well i like to think it is more like gnome for people who are very focused and do not care about what something looks like as long as it is functional, simple and nice whereas kde is more of the “look at me” crowd and I want to change colors everyday – today is a “say something” color day….
gnome – gay
kde – flaming gay
(honestly no offense meant to anyone)
or
gnome – black leather classy pimp
kde – tricked out, bling bling, pimp hat, pimp
🙂
.. that all those things can be changed and ask him if he would want my particular personal preferences to be the default; Because that is tantamount to what he is asking for.
A minor complaint, but I actually prefer the Minimize-Maximize-Close buttons in an older version of Clearlooks (the one in Ubuntu Hoary).
http://osdir.com/screenshots/gnome2.8/73.gif
For some reason I just think they look better than the newer ones in the Gnome 2.12 Tour.
I don’t remember that being the clearlooks theme. I think that is a theme called Human in ubuntu. Nnot on my ubuntu system right now, so I can’t check. The glider theme has simular buttons (as does clearlooks for that matter…).
Hmm, screenshots of older Clearlooks versions:
http://clearlooks.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
It may have been a version before 0.4. Still, of the ones pictured, I prefer 0.4’s minimize-maximize-close buttons to the later styles.
No matter what, it’s still not a pleasing site. Compared to OS X, Gnome and KDE still have a lot to do. Maybe some Apple UI people should get involved, but I doubt that will ever happen.
thats the difference in kde and gnome…
gnome-kind of muted, shaded, smooth
kde-flashy, shiny, glaring
some like one some like the other….few like both…
Just a note, the theme color used for the screenshots in the article is not the final one. The blue will be a tad more vibrant in the release.
Also don’t call it gray, it’s beige.
No we don’t look as good as OSX or Vista yet, but we do what we can. Apple and Microsoft depend on flashy looks and have the money to pay the best designers in the world. What do you expect? Please be realistic. It is not difficult to design flashy themes, but it is very difficult to design flashy themes which don’t become annoying after prolonged use. I may be biased, but I believe that Clearlooks already compares very favorable to most other (commercial) competition. The port to Cairo will also bring extra-smoothness for free and hopefully we’ll see some creative use of the new possibilities.
I occasionally play around with Ubuntu Breezy Badger (which is currently using the 2.11.90 of Gnome) within a virtual machine using VMWare and let me tell you… it SCREAMS. I have 512mb of ram and a amd64 2800+, but still, it’s much faster than even 2.10 gnome that is in Hoary (which is my host OS.)
I can’t wait for it to be final
At least they should take Longhorn approach and if you have good graphics card, make the default theme better.
It is so wrong on so many levels…
People who followed in footsteps of Luna (Loonitoona?) and produced Glas theme for Longhorn should be summarily shot for crimes against inteligent UI design.
Transparent title frame for an active window… I thought they’d be better after XP debacle.
weiter oben wurde nach mehr Bildern zu cairo gefragt… Seth Nickell hatte dazu mal einen ausführlichen Blog-Eintrag: http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots
Auch/Gerade die Videos unter Luminocity sind sehr interessant…
Post in english please… not everyone can read german
>Post in english please… not everyone can read german
sorry, i haven’t recognized that i have wrote in german. I have to switch that often the language that sometimes is don’t recognize if i write/read something in english or in german.
Here is it again:
Someone has asked for more screenshots of ciro. Seth Nickell has published some interesting images and videos on his blog: http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots
Very impressive, especially the “Luminocity” videos…
Until 3 months ago, I used Gnome quite comfortably on a dual Celeron 366 system with 256 megs of ram. There are a number of things you can do to make gnome feel more responsive. The main ones being use of lightweight themes, and selecting the low resources options for metacity.
Actually, I believe that clearlooks is more responsive than gtk default. Never use pixmap themes, even if you have a P4 they’re somehow a bit slow; not to mention they never seem to look quite right.
You can also use something other than metacity, but I think it’s probably one of the better low-resource wm’s; and using other wm’s never quite works right in gnome.
Where are the promised system tools for disk management (delayed from 2.10)?
Where is the cron front end (delayed from 2.10)?
Does Gedit have block select yet? This has been delayed time and time again…
In all these previews, take a look at the top corners of metacity windows when the user is using a theme that has rounded title bars. They still look “chunky”. You can tell that the bar isn’t round, but is instead a very fine-grained zig-zag of pixels. Was cairo not supposed to address this? I was looking forward to smooth circles and less pixely corners in 2.12 because of this. Does metacity not use cairo? Am I incorrect in assuming that cairo would fix this?
That particular problem is unrelated to cairo. It will be solved by the composite extension of xorg to allow real translucency in metacity themes, but that’s not quite ready yet.
Cairo fixes anti-aliasing for everything inside a window (well, once more of GTK+ actually starts drawing using Cairo…). However, to get good anti-aliasing of the window borders, you have to alpha blend each window with all the windows underneath it (compositing). This feature won’t be generally available until the X software stack catches up, namely once Xgl, Composite, and Luminocity are more mature.
cant wait to use it in FC5 , looks good. improvvement over 2.10
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/images/services-admin.png
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/images/panel-editor.png
Compare those 2 images and you’ll se what I’m talking about…some of the new Gnome lists seem obese in how much space they use! It causes so much scrolling because the icons don’t fit.
As someone who has never been a big fan of linux, I have to say I am actually impressed. All the changes I see there are things I think are little but important.
Hopefully the performance will improve too. I may end up giving linux a real shot again with GNOME. I tried Ubuntu Hoary, but still was left unimpressed overall (though impressed by Ubuntu as a linux distro).
Now if only MS was kind enough to make ClearType tech open, and linux was to implement it, I might finally try a switch (which would actually be me using linux and windows 50/50). And don’t try to tell me existing linux font rendering technologies look the same as ClearType. You can argue they are better, fine, I don’t care. But they do NOT come out being rendered the same as ClearType. That is fact. When that’s possible, if it is, I will be very happy.
That’s a very interesting response. I haven’t used Windows in a long time, but when I do, I generally don’t like it. Windows fonts are too small and the shapes too forced (from excessive hinting) for my taste, and I can see blatent color fringing as a result of Cleartype. I like FreeType’s more natural, if somewhat fuzzier rendering. To me, its a nice medium between Windows and OS X (which isn’t hinted enough). I do wish the auto-hinter was better at handling italic fonts, though. On most text, it doesn’t do a good job of keeping the tilted axis all the characters parallel to each other.
That said, you should be able to get results pretty close to ClearType. Turn on the bytecode interpreter (it’s illegal in the USA, thanks to Apple), and turn on sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Then, grab the Tahoma font from your Windows partition, and set things to 8pt. That’ll get you close.
First of all, you have to generally use the ClearType tweak utility to get it to look right on your screen. Otherwise itll look too sharp or too blurry. Once you do, it looks GREAT, even on a decent CRT.
I did use the BCI with free-type. I followed guides that said how to emulate ClearType perfectly and it still didnt look the same. “close” is not good enough for me. I notice the different. With FreeType trying to emulate ClearType, I notice some really annoying things. Like ‘w’ and ‘s’ and ‘D’ being too thick in parts. It really sticks out, as illustrated in this image:
http://weakmind.org/upload/files/osnews_ft.png
And clear type with the same stuff:
http://weakmind.org/upload/files/osnews_ct_mine.png
Yes, I used mscorefonts and even got Tahoma. It’s simply not the same. You may think it’s close enough or better, but it’s still NOT the same. And for me, that’s not good enough. It’s about choice, isn’t it? I want the choice.
I don’t know how people like ClearType so much. Until recentrly I haven’t turned it on in Windows and still I find it very blurry. I don’t like it very much but it’s the best you can have in a TFT screen. I’ve never found a problem with whatever application that’s using Bitstream Vera in Linux. I find it a lot better than ClearType. They are sharp and not fuzzy at all like all the fonts in Windows XP.
Please, tell me. What’s so amazing in the fuzzy fonts of ClearType?
And don’t try to tell me existing linux font rendering technologies look the same as ClearType<p>
They don’t at all. Fonts on Windows hurt my eyes. Fonts on Linux are softer and a lot less jagged. Personally I don’t see the big deal with the fonts on Linux. They have looked better than Windows fonts to me for a while.
You can argue they are better, fine, I don’t care. But they do NOT come out being rendered the same as ClearType.
You are right, they are not the same. I just don’t get how anyone likes fonts on Windows better. They look horrible in comparison. I guess it is just a matter of opinion.
um i wont even attempt to say they look the same.
cause XP’s fonts just flat out suck hard. what is with the psycholdelic multicolored AA system they use.
yuck.
Sorry a default gnome with some decent truetype fonts is FAR superior
I guess it depends on your display…
On my laptop, the fonts are FAR smoother in MS Windows than on X.org, even with the BCI and subpixel rendering. I’m using a 15.4″ LCD at 1400×1050.
It’s the opposite on my desktop with a 19″ CRT… Have some issues with the kerning and some international characters (anything with acute/grave accents) at smaller sizes, but the fonts still look better.
This appears to be a much bigger update than 2.10 was. The sad thing is a lot of the “fun” with this update won’t be realized until themes catch up and support alpha transparency. Further more, is there no support for hardware rendering for cairo yet?
Still though, the nautilus improvements are wonderful (treeview looks very nice!). Very nice upgrade!
Please?
Bookmarks and places should be the same in spatial and browser. Doing repetitive work requires too much drilldown.
Why should they be called differnt things: bookmarks/places?
“Bookmarks and places should be the same in spatial and browser. Doing repetitive work requires too much drilldown.”
This is exactly what has been done. Bookmarks/places/that list in the filechoosers are all the same.
I agree that Cleartype is too “fuzzy” for me in the sense that I can see the green fringe around the fonts. Although the tweaks considerably make it better.
I also recently just built up my new Gentoo install with all the tweaks I could. I have set up font rendering the best I could and here is a picture of my results. I am suprised how nice the fonts in linux can be. IMHO, they look much better than cleartype. But again, it really depends on the quality of the font in the first place. I plan to compile/upgrade to Gnome 2.12 asap to see what it brings.
Here is a sample of my fonts as they are now.
http://ordorica.org/misc/autohint.png
-HecHacker1 (need to register)
You know, altough it’s acceptable, your auto hinted freetype example is way more ‘fuzzy’ than my cleartype fonts on Windows.
Compare your screenshot with my tweaked cleartype:
http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/1089/cleartype3ll.png
Note that I’m using 1280×1024 as my most used resolution, I agree it tends to get a tiny bit fuzzy on lower resolutions, but on this one it’s just great.
My display has been color corrected as well, which may also play a role in seeing fuzzy fringes or not.
Will it be relatively bug free? Because up till now, it’s been a bug nightmare
I really like Gnome, but the bugs are just too much to handle after a while!
I agree on this particular page that cleartype looks better the way you configured it. I guess cleartype is just more consistent than Linux’s autohinting/subpixel rendering. For example, I just took this screenshot of gedit under gnome with the same settings as before. And this time there is hardly any “fuzzyness” to the fonts.
Something about black fonts on offwhite backgrounds makes linux’s subpixel rendering look bad (you can see the yellowish fringe). However, on all other colors it looks great.
——
For me Gnome 2.10.2 has been awesome. I switched from KDE when 2.8 came around and haven’t looked back. It feels very perfessional. I also got two other fellow CS students to switch to Gnome too after they had seen how a “well” configured Gnome could look like. Before all they seen were the preconfigured Gnome interfaces by the distro’s (back when Gnome was hardly competition to KDE, imho). But since I started using Gentoo I get the full Gnome experience and tweak it to exactly how I like it; which incedentily is almost default anyways.
doh! i forgot to post the link
http://ordorica.org/misc/xorg_conf.png
Is there a way to set a default size of the icons(-toolbar) (Menu icons, desktop icons, nautilus icons, …) or maby it is the icon toolbar which is way to high (50px). In my opinion the height of th icon toolbar should by dynamic with the possibility to scale it down to e.g. 20px. My notebook has a 15″ display at 1024×768 resolution and I don’t like to waste too much space for too big toolbars. Firefox has also the possibility to switch between big and small Icon size -> toolbar. Why not GNOME too?
but all in all I like GNOME and am looking forward to use the new GNOME 2.12 as soon as it is ready
try: go to system-> preferences-> fonts-> details and switch the Resolution to 80 or something, the icons and the tollbar will be smaller
thanks for the tip. But I have done this already, I set it to 77. I guess it shuld be fixed at ui design time. The toolbar is much higher (50px) than the icons (25px)
…there is one think that KDE is superior to GNOME: network transparency. Every KDE application can access remote files via kio slaves, read and write them, even with non-KDE application I can access remote files. In GNOME, gnome-vfs2 is used by a few of apps, it’s a shame that I have to copy a file in local with nautilus in order to edit it (a random app: gedit).
Gedit isn’t a random app, it is one that illustrates your point. Other apps which use gnome-vfs have no problem writing to remote files. a random app: screem, another random app: bluefish, another random app: gnumeric
Yep, that’s something that really bugs me too…
Yes, a KIOSlave equivalent is definitely needed. Has there been anytalk of this on the GNOME discussion list or in their Bugzilla?
Is it possible to turn off “double” taskbar in GNOME? It feels clunky to me.
I told billion times – FreeType&Co did not care about monitor gamma curves. CoolType at least assume gamma default ~1.4, much better then 1, but you can tweak it using cooltype wisard. Where is that hero who give us real accurate professional colors ?
the network functionality of nautilus is a shame
today i’ve tried to copy a file from a previous mounted ftp server well there’s no indicator that show if file is really downloaded too bad it doesn’t work either.
i guess that the problem is gnome-vfs that needs a complete rewrite.
i have agree with you. network transparency could be much better! I want to read/write every file from a nautilus window with every app (not just some gnome-vfs apps).
Last time I tried GNOME with Ubuntu Hoary, I couldn’t set up a wireless network using WPA-PSK encryption. Ignoring the fact that the driver shipped with Hoary didn’t supported WPA, I could just enter a WEP passphrase/hex key. Got the same issue with the wifi manager coming with KDE…
Did that changed?
I still can’t believe people think ClearType is “fuzzy”. Give it about 30 minutes to let you eyes adjust to it. Tweak again. If it’s still fuzzy, you have a bad monitor, or bad eyes. I have very sharp eyes and notice things most people don’t, and ClearType looks better to me. I know inconsistencies in FreeType rendering that are not present inClearType, and that bugs me.
ClearType is superior to FreeType on LCD though, that’s for sure. I think it’s also superior on CRT when tweaked properly, but that’s me.
Just doesn’t do it for me. I have it turned on and on startup will look ok but then whilst using Windows I get it flickering to a fuzzy look and there it stays. Freetype on the otherhand is really clean and crisp looking on my system. Pity I am staying a while on Windows for music purposes. Still, keeping my eyes open for decent migration opportunities and Gnome is progressing well.
Now if Audio on Linux was sorted I’d be there but at the moment, too much of a PIA to deal with as are the sequencing apps.