The GNOME 2.0.x Desktop and Developer Platform releases are devoted to bugfixes, translations, user interface consistency, and general polish of our major 2.0 release. In GNOME 2.0.1, you’ll see the results of our user interface review and continued performance and stability fixes.
GNOME 2.0.1 Desktop and Developer Platform Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’m just about to finish compiling Gnome 2.0.0, I’ve been doing it for more than 5 hours. And they seem to find very amusing to release Gnome 2.0.1 just now. Argh. 🙁
Anyone who has already tried this care to comment on the default looks ? I tried Gnome 2.0, but ran away after running into a very ugly (by default) desktop and miriads of bugs. Has this changed ?
Great work – Gnome2 just gets better and better.
/me waits for the next redhat release for even more nice surprises
First one to install, please post a screenshot. Cache.pol.co.uk poster, I’m with you, I’m waiting for Limbo3.
You might call the default look “boring”, but it’s certainly not “ugly”! What don’t you like about the default look? The only thing I really dislike is the plain menubar (that’s why I make it look good with a faked panel shadow background).
It doesn’t look different than 2.0, it’s a bugfix release! The interface changes are only about usability.
Screenshots are still here:
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.0/screenshots/index.html
BTW, you complained about the new GNOME icon too look to flat , what do you think about this one?
http://vhost.dulug.duke.edu/~louie/screenshots/csm-desktop.png
I mean the one that is used in the top right and bottom right for the GNOME menu. Would you use that one please?
s/right/left/g
ARGHL =)
> me waits for the next redhat
> release for even more nice
> surprises
Me too! Should be coming pretty soon it seems. Limbo 2 seems to be already gone from some of the FTP servers, and there is a new null directory is all the mirrors!
I must say Gnome is doing much better than I ever expected. Its even running faster than KDE 3
Spark, have you double checked what you say?
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The GNOME 2.0.x Desktop and Developer Platform releases are devoted to bugfixes, translations, user interface consistency, and general polish of our major 2.0 release. In GNOME 2.0.1, you’ll see the results of our user interface review and continued performance and stability fixes…
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I would say “user interface consistency, and general polish” and a “user interface review” could bring some subtle but nice UI changes in 2.0.1. Maybe I’m wrong, have you installed it? I haven’t.
>>>m: “I would say “user interface consistency, and general polish” and a “user interface review” could bring some subtle but nice UI changes in 2.0.1. Maybe I’m wrong, have you installed it? I haven’t.”
I’m running Gnome 2.0.1-rc1 and I don’t notice any difference to 2.0.0 as far as UI experience goes. But it’s more stable
> I would say “user interface consistency, and general polish” and a “user interface review” could bring some subtle but nice UI changes in 2.0.1. Maybe I’m wrong, have you installed it? I haven’t.
Yes, I’m using all the latest packages. Changes are mostly string changes and slight reordering of widgets, etc. Nothing that you could spot when first logging in. Most of it is in the preference dialogs.
Now it is _very_ stable though while 2.0 was just stable.
The biggest change between 2.0 and 2.0.1 IMO is Metacity, as it is very complete now and should be used by practically everyone. Also it has a theme called “Metabox” included which doesn’t suck. All that’s missing now is support for Metacity preferences and theme selection in the control center (meanwhile you can use gconf-editor to set themes and metacity-setup to change other simple options or just gconf-editor).
Some of those screen shot’s looked great. It almost doesn’t look like unix. Will have to give try.
it looks like it was designed by Fisher-Price
Care to elaborate on your opinion?
The icons are all cartoons; everything is square. It just looks to me like it is was designed for preschool kids.
Its just kinda cutesy
http://vhost.dulug.duke.edu/~louie/screenshots/gman-ugly.png
This is my fav screnshot on that page (taskbar anyway)
I am all about small, light, and out of the way. I am a firm believer that windwos XP should come with free crayons.
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.0/screenshots/crux-shot.png
The (rounded) taskbar on this page I believe looks bad in comparison. The fist screenshot just seems much more UNIX and professional to me.
Ian D:
> The icons are all cartoons; everything is square. It just looks to me like it is was designed for preschool kids.
So you are talking about the icons? Most of them are not square at all so I don’t know what you mean. They might not be your style, but they are not designed for kids. Most people like the artwork of TigerT and Jimmac, otherwise they wouldn’t be that popular in the first place.
Gnome icon style might be very fancy and “unprofessional”, but definetly not for kids.
Jim:
That really shows how much taste can differ.
And the importance of themes, styles, etc. You just can’t please everyone with one style.
I’m an anti-icons user, I long for a GUI without them, for a WMP (WindowsMenusPointers) UI instead of a WIMP. This would be something for another lenghty discussion.
In this article (http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0814.fm.html) Nicholas Petreley regards the folder metaphor as stupid. I wouldn’t call it “stupid”, I think that’s exagerating a bit, I do agree on the substance. However with a clear alternative this is much ado about nothing.
Although aged, there’s an interesting 1995 idea that Petreley links, Lifestreams: An Alternative to the Desktop Metaphor.
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi96/proceedings/videos/Fertig/etf.htm
And yet I think that with icons and all GNOME2 looks great, and getting better. In GNOME2, I disable icons on all menus, and the ones left and useful, don’t get in my way.
All their UI design, especially the icons, follows a pattern: there is a sense of graphical consistency, of uniformity. Try to explain that visual UI fact to the person/s who put together this monster:
http://spud.osnews.com/osnews/img/1492/xandros.jpg
The whole colour default theme looks good to me, easy on the eyes, something very important when you spend many hours in front of a screen. The set of icons have detail, you effortlessly recognize them,they have a neat and graceful design. And as Spark just said, they are not squared, look at it again because GNOME style is rounded. Square is more likely Microsoft style (with KDE tailgating). GNOME icons have bright ideas like the shirt&tie one:
http://vhost.dulug.duke.edu/~louie/screenshots/csm-desktop.png
In the GNOME2 screenshot above, check out the “Fred & Kim – Wedding” open window, see the filemanager toolbar, the icons are colour neutral, with a simple, clean and neat design. Pay attention to the little house (supposedly home) icon on that toolbar, it is the same house of the desktop icon, but the toolbar one has been designed to fit with detail in such an small size (they are not exactly the same one). In the same situation, the Xandros guy/s didn’t feel like designing two icons, that’s why one interface looks like Frankenstein and the other one is an smooth well designed one. The GNOME hackers (I don’t have GUI designers just as artists) have done an splendid job. A hacker’s job is never done: fonts come next.
If by ‘square’ you meant not original, too much conservative, make up you mind. GNOME2 makes a beautiful desktop, perfectly suited for corporations, if the posted arrangements look too fancy for you, check out RedHat Limbo2 GNOME2 desktop:
http://members.csolutions.net/zayda/osnews/img/1489/limbo1.png
http://members.csolutions.net/zayda/osnews/img/1489/limbo2.png
That’s a beta, not for production purposes of course, RH8 coming.
Finally, Ian D, if you think GNOME2 default theme looks like FisherPrice, well then you haven’t seen it all, or don’t want to see it. The next GUI sample goes beyond FisherPrice, yes that’s difficult, it’s even of lesser intelligence. Some call it “the Teletubbies Windows XPerience”:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23830.html
Yes Icon less desktops are nice. I’m glad winXP has this feature, makes for a much nicer look. But still icons are useful, but i think there use demisishes when you see someones screen with 200 icons on the desktop, just trying to find the icon is a choir.
I think Gnome has done a great job at coming up with a clean and elegant looking interface. Unix GUI well thing sbased off X have in the past looked like ass and you knew you were looking at some X based GUI, everything was square, big huge deskbar with no uniformity from left to right, Ugly huge clock and so forth. I think having something that is clean and elgant is a key to the open source OS’s success. Nobody will use it if ti looks like the 1970-80’s.
To the person who said it looked fisher price your mistaken. WinXP has that claim. It’s not bad ether. At least Fisher Price doesn’t make painful things.
http://www.digital-ink.co.uk/teletubbiesXP.jpg
That backround is a true work of art, windows XP simply wouldn’t be complete without it. It looks 100% consistant with the rest of XP.
I was basing my opinion on the screen shots provided by spark.
I guess cutesy does sound derogatory; I do like some of the screen shots. The houses and folder icons are just kinda cutesy IMO. Is that apple icon still include?
I do like the gnome logo.
I would like to see more shapes available for forms and buttons other than oblong. at least the tabs could be rounded.
RE: http://vhost.dulug.duke.edu/~louie/screenshots/kenneth-gnomemeeting…
I’ll take the gnome look over the xp icons and ms office’s building blocks and the butt ugly kde icons any day.
I try it the next time I up grade my system.
When did simplicity go out of style? Simple and functional will always win. Gnome is seems terribly inconsistant to me, pick a frickin default theme and polish that thing until you can see your face in it. It should be fast and light and it should make sense to use. There are so many obscene problems with linux on the desktop right now that one begins to wonder if it will ever obtain the success everyone wants it to. It’s going to take a plain revolutionary attitude ala, ‘lets rebuild X from the ground up and modernize it’, that means having to rebuild many many major apps, kde, gnome, just about anything that talks to X. There are so many things that are wrong with the system as a whole, it’s probably worth it to go back to the drawing board and actually make an effort to compete.
Hmmmpf… Did you even _look_ at this “fickin default theme”?
Don’t judge GNOME by the screenshots, those are mostly heavily themed and modified. And this possibility won’t go away, sorry. I can see absolutely nothing inconsistant on my desktop. Please provide some actual arguments and reasoning that can be commented, not just FUD.
It looks cheap. It looks unpolished. It looks like the half finished model train set in the neighbors garage. It’s not about the system it’s about the user, once people get it through their heads the computer will become what it was meant to be a tool, instead of becoming a giant wad of useless cruft like 20 window managers and 50 themes of which maybe two are decent. I used linux for a long time, around 5 years, it evolved greatly in that time but if this is the best we’ve got, well lets just say it’s a sad state of affairs. Gee look at all the things I can do to the computer with this, but what can it do for me? It’s not good enough for the average user. Not by a long shot. Don’t let your zeal for open source, the gpl, stallman, linux, bsd, or anything else blind you to that very real fact.
So you did actually install GNOME2? You don’t like the default theme? Or are you just making this up?
Don’t tell me you can judge the polishness of a desktop by it’s screenshot. If you can, look at this and cry:
http://www.veridicus.com/tummy/windows/XP/Windows%20XP%20an…
(first screenshot I found when googling for “windows XP” images).
You can be sure that I don’t let me blind by anything, I for myself was quite unsatisfied for a long while with Linux and X so I looked into a lot of alternatives (and used Windows 2000 for a few months which I liked quite a lot). I can’t compare it with Mac OS X or Windows XP as I don’t intend to buy them, so I would believe anyone if he seriously layed out why those are better in something and what would need to be improved to compete with them. But just bullshitting about it in such a general way simply sounds like uninformed and probably unintended FUD, that’s not meant as an offense.
It looks cheap. It looks unpolished. It looks like the half finished model train set in the neighbors garage.
I don’t share the same opinion. Of course, it’s just a matter of taste, so I won’t try to change your mind.
Gee look at all the things I can do to the computer with this, but what can it do for me?
If you think Linux doesn’t do enough for you, you can always buy some XP license, perhaps it will do more for you (for a price and some license limitations, of course).
It’s not good enough for the average user. Not by a long shot. Don’t let your zeal for open source, the gpl, stallman, linux, bsd, or anything else blind you to that very real fact.
After watching how some inexperienced user installed mandrake 8.2 on his comp as the sole OS, and started browsing the internet, writting mails, etc etc, I don’t think it’s so far of usability. Of course, I won’t deny it still needs more work on that issue. But watching where it was on 1999 and where it is now, the progress is pretty good. Give it some time instead of bashing it, after all, it doesn’t make you sign licenses, or pay to use it, you don’t lose anything for installing a Linux distro.
P.S.: Though there’re plenty of choices in Linux, it doesn’t mean you must use them all, neither will make you use only certain programs. That’s why having 50 different window managers is not a bad thing, as long as you choose the right one for your needs.
Ian D: The icons are all cartoons; everything is square. It just looks to me like it is was designed for preschool kids.
Hrmms, Windows XP uses cartoonish icons. KDE uses cartoonish icons. BeOS uses cartoonish icons. Pre-OS X Mac OS used cartoonish icons. There is actually an explaination behind this. http://artist.kde.org/introduction.html
The only OS I know that uses photorealistic icons is OS X. Heck, IIRC, Nextstep also used cartoonish icons.
Besides, I can’t find much icons that are square.
m: Square is more likely Microsoft style (with KDE tailgating).
XP’s icons don’t look square. KDE default doesn’t look square. Crystal (KDE 3.1’s) icons doesn’t look square. Besides, icon wise, since when did KDE tailgate Microsoft?
Jim: That backround is a true work of art, windows XP simply wouldn’t be complete without it. It looks 100% consistant with the rest of XP.
I use at first HP’s background, then no background, then my background. I hate that teletubbies background.
Of course, the link is really funny. But the company behind it isn’t really professional.
Ian D: I’ll take the gnome look over the xp icons and ms office’s building blocks and the butt ugly kde icons any day.
KDE is getting rid of that “butt ugly icons” is the next release (KDE 3.1)
Spark: If you can, look at this and cry:
It’s an beta for goodness sake!
matt: It looks cheap. It looks unpolished. It looks like the half finished model train set in the neighbors garage.
The version that came with Mdk 9.0b2 was really polished – at least to me. The Limbo one (I just deleted Limbo, ironically) is even more polished. In fact, Limbo’s GNOME 2.0 feels more polished than Windows XP (something I can’t say for 3.0.x).
—
Anyway, a few more changes (especially the file dialog), and I would support GNOME 2.0 over KDE when I recommend it. That’s the UI at least. KDE 3.0.x UI is ugly and boring, while 3.1 is nice looking but strains the eye after awhile. I think the main problem with KDE is there isn’t any non-Windows-clones making a Linux distro that integrates KDE like Red Hat does with GNOME.
GDM is really nice, but I really want a feature in KDM, Windows XP and Mac OS – to represent users by icons (don’t have to type the username in). Also to change the default theme to something more lite (well, from something with full of eye candy before login to something quite simple after login isn’t right, to me).
I like MetaCity, but it can get quite confusing just to hange the simplest of things. GNOME should have a easy to use applet to do simple changes, and another one for major changes.
I’m testing Lycoris now… not so smooth, icons aside.
“It’s an beta for goodness sake!
”
Oh really? Didn’t know that. If the look changed a lot since then, I might have to find a new one. =) Although I didn’t see a XP screenshot so far that looked less chaotic and inconsistent. I’m sure it “feels” much better when running it but that was my point, judging something by it’s screenshots is never fair.
“I think the main problem with KDE is there isn’t any non-Windows-clones making a Linux distro that integrates KDE like Red Hat does with GNOME.”
SuSE does. Yes they also pay people to package GNOME, but they are full KDE and they integrate it nicely. Their installation is Qt, YaST2 is Qt, you get the point. Just like RedHat is basing everything on Gtk/GNOME.
And they really don’t want to clone Windows, they stick very much to the KDE defaults though (like panel setup).
” GDM is really nice, but I really want a feature in KDM, Windows XP and Mac OS – to represent users by icons (don’t have to type the username in).”
That’s possible with the standard greeter but not with the graphical greeter. It could indeed be nice to make this possible and allowing nice themes for it.
“Also to change the default theme to something more lite”
I could imagine that the “GNOME art” theme will be a new default. Although I really love the sunflower.
Sure, it’s a little bit much of a contrast, but still… Using something less nice just because the rest is less nice too? 
Maybe.
“I like MetaCity, but it can get quite confusing just to hange the simplest of things.”
It’s “Metacity” as it is definetly not spoken like Meta-City (this is the first thing mentioned in the README
). And configuration will be embedded into Control-Center, for example title bar font will be in the font preferences and theme will be in the general “Appearance” preferences (as “Windowborder” most probably).
Lipstick on a pig.
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Besides, icon wise, since when did KDE tailgate Microsoft?
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Since version 1.
http://www.kde.org/screenshots/large/koffice1.jpg
http://www.intagliosoftware.com/images/screenNeoMem.gif
GNOME has done some UI tailgating too, Evolution comes to mind (Gnoutlook).
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/images/evolutionmailbig1.jpg
http://jjnet.prohosting.com/linux/screenshots/evolution/evolution-2…
I kind of like how KDE3 looks with the Waimea wm (not from the KDE project) the tail is now from QNX, and it doesn’t look bad to me, just for fun:
http://130.239.134.83/waimea/shots/waimeaSS-8/shot.png
Matt: Exactly what system do you think looks and performs better than the linux desktop? Mac OSX might look better in some people’s opinion, but it doesn’t perform better. Beos performed better. Hopefully linux will buy some time for OpenBeos to gain momentum, but Beos is very unlikely to attract a large user base without a way to piggyback off the linux drivers. Linux is now gaining a desktop user base faster than it’s growing in the server market. You will see some statistical evidence of that soon. Microsoft Windows looks so boring and uninspiring and insipid in comparison to the Gnome screenshots we’ve seen, and we all know about its performance.
Right now I’m using Windowmaker with mostly Gnome 1.4 apps. Only recently did I appreciate the elegance of Windowmaker. For those who prefer a more Windowish look, there’s Kde or IceWm. With Windomaker even someone with no artistic talent can design themes completely with a gui, never needing to edit a config file. You complain about the variety of Window Managers for linux but that’s one of its main attractions.
Despite the alleged need to redesign X from the ground up its performance is very good, even on my low-end system. And, X will evolve. It’s rate of evolution is not high which provides some needed stability. Kde and Gnome are not so dependent on X anyway, particularly Kde because Qt is a cross platform toolkit, but Gnome is also abstracted somewhat from X. A recent version of Microsoft Windows would choke on my hardware, but with X I can have a look and feel of my choice and multiple desktops and even multiple X sessions, with ease.