GNOME 2.13.91 has been released. As always, the odd-numbered branches indicate dev-branches, and as such the 2.13.x series is the step-up to the GNOME 2.14 release, planned for March this year. The 2.13.91 release is the second beta. Release notes: platform, desktop, and bindings; downloads: platform, desktop, and bindings.
When will Davyd put a new ” what’s new” page for GNOME 2.14 as he does since 2.8 ??
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-8/
Davyd’s own words:
“To be perfectly honest, I am a little embarrased with what I’ve been seeing in the latest GNOME betas. I was really, really happy with GNOME 2.12, I loved showing off screenshots of its hotness. I’m currently too embarrassed to write a review of the GNOME 2.13 beta. Some things look really good, but some things are looking really ugly. I really hope we don’t release like this.” You can find the full reason why he hasn’t done the new “what’s new” in his blog(http://davyd.livejournal.com/).
Regards
It’s worth noting that the “things […] looking really ugly” that he mentioned in his blog are already fixed in today’s beta release (the new icon theme and Clearlooks versions will have to wait for GNOME 2.16).
He’s probably working on the notes as we speak, as hinted by the graphs posted in his blog recently.
To be fair he did go onto clarify which things annoyed him at a later date on the mailing lists and these have been resolved in 2.16.
IIRC the fix was that Gnome is now shipping with an older iconset
Actually, it looks like Davyd *might* still in fact be doing a whats new in gnome page.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg…
that’s because gtk+ 2.8 is not mature enough for end users (slow!), so will be there no cleaklook-cairo stuff… and I really wonder about applications that uses gtk+ 2.8 new api!
myself I welcome whatever comes from gnome (faithful user from 1.4 days) cause I trust them… but 2.2, 2.6 and 2.14 (!!!) is releases I… !like
GNOME 2.14 will use GTK+ 2.8, just not with new cairo-based Clearlooks engine.
Fedora Rawhide still uses gkt+ 2.8 (called gtk2) and already take advantages of cairo backend (scrollbar for example).
source http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg…
gtk-engines is what contains the theme engines (like Clearlooks), it is separate from Gtk itself.
gtk-engines and gtk+ are two completely different things. GNOME 2.14 will use the same (major) versions of gtk+ and gtk-engines as 2.12 did: 2.8 and 2.6 respectively. GNOME 2.13.91 (this beta release) uses gtk+ 2.8.12 and gtk-engines 2.6.7. GNOME 2.16 should use gtk+ 2.10 and gtk-engines 2.8.
A gtk engine is only responsible for drawing things like buttons and scrollbars, gtk+ itself does the other things. You can have an engine that uses gdk, cairo or even qt or windows, because gtk+ is very flexible.
What GNOME decided (as shown by the link you posted) is that the port to cairo of the default engine is not ready for production yet, so GNOME 2.14 will ship engines that still use gdk. But cairo is still used in a lot of places, just like it was in 2.12. It just isn’t used for scrollbars, buttons and things like that.
+1 thanks for information
I don’t know if its just me but in recent updates to gnome I feel that there aren’t really any major changes being made to Gnome. It feels like some changes like spacial browsing seemed more counter productive and alot of user input was being neglected. I’ve used gnome since early verion that was included in redhat 6 and some of the updates in the past seemed more dramatic and than what I see now. I hope this issue is addressed or one, truely, open desktops will lose much of its user support.
Well, best to ask, what kind of changes do you want? its all very nice screaming, “new features!” but if you don’t actually list them, then go into detail about what you would like, the reason for it, how it fits into the ‘grand sceme of things’, no one will ever know.
I actually commend gnome for not being ‘feature crazy’. I like how most releases are improvements on the past. Not every release has to be Revolutionary, Evolutionary design and improvements are great also (and better from a UI consistence POV)
The 2.14 release shows a lot of focus on improving performance and decreasing memory usage.
And if you think that the future for gnome looks bleak, I encourage you the check out XGL + compiz / Metacity spiff2 branch, leaftag, and the ongoing improvements at the platform level, particuarly gstreamer and project ridley.
With a good focus on providing a good infrastructure, stability and performance, the future can build awesome applications!
Just to start off I don’t want to bash Gnome nor am I saying that KDE is great. Both desktops have their own appeal. Like I stated before I have been using gnome for the longest time and recently KDE. I like both desktops but I had really bad experience with Gnome especially speed. Furthermore, I am glad that gnome is finally getting a new icon set as I feel its been long overdue. I like gnome for its clean and and basic interface, especially the menus. I hate KDE menus with 4 different menus that do similar things. However, with that said I recently showed my gnome desktop i think it was 2.8 or 2.10, as I upgraded my desktop to 2.12, to a new user of linux and the person’s first impression was, is this a desktop from like 1990. It might seem funny at first but that is a thing that needs to be taken into consideration. A clean user interface and nice clean icon make up great part of the experience. As for the XGL and composit, which Novell recently released, I think it is a great leap forward but even so there needs to be more development in that area. I know that with companies like redhat and Novell working heavily in the x and gnome arena we will have something good but as always there is room for impovements. I remember a while back when Eugene (i appologize if i misspelled it) made alot of nice points for improving gnome and i think we should have more things like that as it can only benefit the desktop and the users. My final irk is the memory usage. I started using linux a while back and the main benefit was the memory usage and recently I saddens me to admit that the advantage has decreased dramatically and somtimes feels that my gnome desktop runs slower than my KDE or even XP I have a Intel D 3ghz with 1GB ram so my hardware specs are not that bad.
i thought 2.14 was gonna be the last of the 2 series?
The 2.x series won’t die soon. Or you could say 3.0 is being developed in 2.x in small steps (small = new developments every six months
.
See http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley for the devel platform.
As for the desktop, 3.0 shouldn’t be a major break. The GNOME devs won’t ever again go rewritting code for over a year while users are left waiting, that was painful enough in the 1.4->2.0 transition. Reworking major features is done in the 2.x releases with the sane release schedules. For example:
– evince replaced gpdf and ggv in 2.12;
– eog is much improved in 2.14;
– ekiga 2.0 is a major improvement over gnomemeeting;
– spatial nautilus in 2.6;
– metacity in 2.2;
– gnome-volume-manager (“Just Works”)
– clearlooks as the default theme;
– new icon theme planned for 2.16.
(these are a few “major” features from the top of my head that you’d probably list in a new major .0 release).
So what will 3.0 be? Probably just a cleanup to get rid of cruft (for example, libgnome* will officially die).
What would you like to see in GNOME 3.0?
What would you like to see in GNOME 3.0?
Decent performance.
You’ll see improved performance in 2.14 and every 2.x release after that; no need to wait for a 3.0 release to have that. If you’d like to keep track of some of the improvements keep an eye on the performance-list:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/performance-list
Running an accelerated X server (such as Xgl) will also help a lot.
Good, ’cause the motto of the next releases will be “polish”, and “no new features” 🙂
A lot of devs are actually working very hard on profiling and improving performance.
Just to name one of the worst offenders, the newly compiled vte module is now pretty fast: gnome-terminal will no longer suffer of slowness (expecially when scrolling back).
I think you mixed things up, John just proposed things, nothing ever got accepted or said it will be done.
http://gnomerocksmyworld.blogspot.com/
I know: I was just putting some emphasis on the subject.
The fact is that devs have been doing profiling and optimization work for months now, and that’s why even _this_ release has very few new features.
The fact is that devs have been doing profiling and optimization work for months now, and that’s why even _this_ release has very few new features.
Which IMO is a great step forward for Gnome – optimisation is essential. The featureset is pretty much there. Additional applications should ideally stay out of the “core” offering and be left up to the distributor / user to include.
What would you like to see in GNOME 3.0?
-A replacement for gnome-vfs, that works equally well as the kio-slaves in KDE. Perhaps KDE and Gnome teams could cooperate on this to get the systems to work together.
-Better user management tools, it should be possible to manage users in over LDAP. It should also be possible to use LDAP for GConf system settings.
-Posix ACLs. I would actually hope they get that a lot sooner as it simplifies handling of file access in large organizations a lot, especially for system managers with windows background.
-Make it simple to make sound work remotely. I.e. some sort of easy to set up “X server” for sound. Today there are far too much that is heard from the server room.
-Some way to handle layout of icons on the desktop that makes it possible to switch between logging in to X-terminals with screens of different sizes. An icon should never become hidden because you log in on a machine having smaller screen resolution than last time you logged in. If you go back to the machine with the larger screen resolution icons should still be in the same places as last time you looked at them on that screen size.
-Folders that are of use only to Unix people like developers or sysadmins, should be hidden by default for ordinary users.
This should work in file dialogs as well as in Nautilus. E.g. /etc, /bin, /sbin /usr, /lib, /dev, /proc,… should be hidden. If the user need things from /bin it should have application starters in the applications menu, or be in the users PATH.
-The problem with the Desktop folder in each users home directory need to be solved. As of now this breaks the spatial methaphore of Gnome, as it appears that the files on your desktop appears in two places. So I would suggest that the Desktop folder is hidden as well.
This also solves the internationalizisation problem that the desktop folder is refered to as “Desktop” when it shows up as a folder in the Nautilus window, but something internationalized everywhere else.
– They should create some guidlines for how icons should look. At the very least should be possible to see if an icon is a data file or an executable program regardless of what icon theme the icon belongs to. Gnome developers should cooperate with KDE on this. If they don’t a lot of good artwork only reaches about half of its potential audience.
-Some kind of workflow management framework, that could compete with the new tools in MS-windows in that area would be nice.
-Make sure that Beagle gets integrated as a standard part of gnome, or if mono is too controversial make a beagle replacement in some more commonly accepted language.
-Better development tools, I would suggest making Eclipse as good C/C++/…/Gnome tool as it is a Java good tool today. Eclipse have the advantage of being cross platform and as such it could be used to simplyfy development of gtk and Gnome apps on oher platforms than Linux/Unix. That way gnome could have a natural way to invade the windows and MacOS desktops.
Although I don’t quite agree with Linus Torvalds when he argued sometime ago that the Gnome usability developers don’t quite know what they are doing, I think that Linus had a good point in his criticism, although the wording of it may have been a bit too harsh. I often feel that Gnome is dumbed down a bit too much. Although I enjoy using Gnome (and have never learned to like KDE as much), I do often miss some “advanced” features of KDE or XFCE.
An example, I wonder why I have to find an unofficial add-on for such (IMHO basic) features like open terminal here in Nautilus context menu? I think that such basic options should really be integrated in Nautilus itself, though maybe as optional features choosable from the preferences.
I wonder why I have to find an unofficial add-on for such (IMHO basic) features like open terminal here in Nautilus context menu? I think that such basic options should really be integrated in Nautilus itself, though maybe as optional features choosable from the preferences.
You’re not alone in wanting this feature, but adding it into the preferences is a definite no. This sort of feature-preference creep is what Gnome is designed to NOT exhibit.
Look at other desktop environments (other than KDE, and outside *nix)… do they offer the user an option to open a terminal in every popup window in the file manager?
Simplicity is key for Gnome’s success. As long as features are available via addons, power users can customise, inquisitive users can ask questions on forums / mailing lists / emails, standard users need not worry.
Ok, installing addons is not that hard for power users. But I would just like to know that the power user addons and extensions are of high quality and work well with the official Gnome. Installing third party who-knows-what-quality add-ons is not preferable if you want to keep things stable and secure.
I would love it, if, for example, there was an official, or at least semi-official, Gnome/Nautilus expansion pack that would contain advanced and optional features like “Nautilus-open-terminal”. Why not? Don’t tell me that there would not be enough Gnome “power” users who would like it too.
So, the important question is if Gnome is meant for non-experienced home and office users only? Is it not for experienced power users at all? If supporting power users and their preferences is left to unofficial third party hackers only, it is easy to make the conclusion that Gnome really is not meant for power users at all?
I would love it, if, for example, there was an official, or at least semi-official, Gnome/Nautilus expansion pack that would contain advanced and optional features like “Nautilus-open-terminal”. Why not? Don’t tell me that there would not be enough Gnome “power” users who would like it too.
Your wish is some OSS developers command
http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1057
Nautilus Actions – see http://www.grumz.net/index.php?q=node/3 for screenshots
Well, do you only trust the GNOME people? Almost every open source software comes from “third party” sources, you should probably trust your distributor to do some basic QA for you. Also tools listed here should be expected to work reasonably well with GNOME:
http://live.gnome.org/PowerUserTools
As a side note, nautilus-open-terminal goes a few steps further than the old integrated “Open Terminal” function. I find it a lot more useful now and I prefer this targeted approach to the mediocrity you easily end up when you are trying to please everyone to some extend.
Hey, thanks for the great hint.
Now that you mention it, I may have noticed that Nautilus-actions extension before too but had completely forgotten its existence.
you should probably trust your distributor to do some basic QA for you
Yep. And I was frustatrated that the official or semi-official Debian (or Ubuntu) repositories didn’t have nautilus-open-terminal addon. I had to search apt-get.org to find an unofficial repository just for it.
Btw, thanks for another good hint: http://live.gnome.org/PowerUserTools
I am glad that gnome is finally getting a new icon set as I feel its been long overdue.
By the way, is the new Tango icon set going to be the new default GNOME iconset in the future and if so when? Tango looks ok, although I’m personally rather tired of most GUI things looking so blueish (Tango folders etc.) nowadays.
If you, like I, feel that the standard Gnome icons are rather ok but just need a face lift, I can recommend the gPerfection2 icons:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/18530981/
They are mostly based on the standard Gnome icons but much better done and finished and better looking IMHO. I think that GNOME people could just replace the old default Gnome iconset with gPerefection2, even though Tango or something else would be the new default sometime in the future.