The GNOME team has released version 2.16 of its desktop environment. The release notes detail many improvements in this new version. Ars reviews this new release (ok, a pre-release), and concludes: “Overall, I think that GNOME 2.16 is a good release with some nice additions, but I don’t think it has any killer features that justify an immediate upgrade. I’m going to wait for the official Ubuntu Edgy release in October rather than upgrading early. Of the new features included in GNOME 2.16, I think that the vertical view mode for Evolution is probably the one that will benefit me the most.” Update: On a related note, Monodevelop 0.12 is out, with lots of changes in it.
59 Comments
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2006-09-07 7:42 amLobotomik
Wow, it does look neat! It looks like a very nice alternative to Tomboy but, however, it doesn’t offer an outliner either.
¿Is there any good outliner around for Gnome or KDE?
¿Any plans to add outlining features to Tomboy?
¿Anybody knows whether OpenOffice Writer plans on adding an outline mode such as the one in MS Word? I have not used MSW for ages, and I still miss that very, very much.
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2006-09-08 5:37 pm
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2006-09-08 6:20 pmLobotomik
It is some kind of text editor (or a special view in MS Word) where the text that you write has a hyerarchical level. To each point you write, you can add details at a lower level, and you can shove all these points up and down easily inside the level until they are in order. You can also promote/demote points to higher or lower levels, dragging the hanging branches with them. You can also hide the lower levels in order to see just a general view of the structure of your document with no obscuring detail.
It sound confusing, but it allows you to organize your ideas in a very powerful way, dropping your ideas as they come, where you see fit, and shoving them around until the whole seems coherent.
In Word, this works great with technical documents, as levels can map to parts, chapters, points etcetera, and you can easily arrange the contents while automatically keeping a detailed index. Also, each level has an associated text style, so your whole technical document is formatted in a consistent way with no additional effort.
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2006-09-09 8:32 am
Hi,
thanks for this release, great work!
But I am missing one feature: Deleting and renaming of files/folders in the gtk file chooser. For those things I have to run Nautilus again and do the changes. Would be much easier if the DEL-key and F2 or a context-menu were working.
Greetings
Mike
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2006-09-07 7:47 amLobotomik
I like that feature in Windows, but don’t expect it in Gnome any time soon: Its absence is a /feature/ that prevents stupid jerks such as I from getting confused.
I’m afraid we’ll have to live with the trip to Nautilus in the foreseeable future, but it’s not that bad, as it does not happen that often.
I’m hoping that they work on getting a “kiosk mode” created. That would be very usefull for the Edubuntu lab here.
You can never satisfy people, 2.16 has features people have been asking for a long time. Menu editor, permissions, new icon theme, what more, warp drive?
Overall 2.16 is very good and the improvements are well worth the upgrade. What “killer features” are people expecting? small features make the world of difference IMHO.
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2006-09-06 9:29 pmcyclops
To be fair Gnome using the the new Icon naming specification is the thing that tickles my fancy.
Too long have KDE & Gnome had a split over this.
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2006-09-06 9:31 pmmym6
I like that ACL support is now in there. I also read some of the compisiting things are included which are great. Personally I think the incremental changes are nice.
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2006-09-06 11:31 pm
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2006-09-07 12:46 am
I love GNOME, but the one annoyance is the auto-adjusting task boxes in the gnome-panel. I know Thom has pointed this out as well.
I can’t seem to tell from the GNOME page — has this issue been fixed?
Edited 2006-09-06 23:04
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2006-09-07 12:51 amh-milch-mann
No. The windowlist stil has “warping” buttons.
Not that I care much since I use the windowmenu.
Edited 2006-09-07 00:52
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2006-09-07 11:22 amTemcat
I believe it can be corrected by a trivial but somewhat ugly patch to libwnck. I did that once to Xfce. Maybe I’ll do it someday to Gnome. The problem is, since I’m not a programmer, I can only do the simplest thing – namely, set a fixed maximum length in pixels for the buttons on the taskbar. But in theory this size should be set dynamically depending on the taskbar size and screen resolution, and I simply don’t have time to research all this.
I don’t know much about 2.16, but the one thing I do know is that they changed the Clearlooks engine and got rid of the colored scroll-bar. That sucks for people like me that use dark themes and need the scroll-bar to be lit up like a light-bulb to be able to see it. Hopefully this change is actually just a theme setting (not an engine setting) and therefore can be changed. If not, I’ll have to switch to Murrine and cook up my own theme for it.
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2006-09-07 1:03 amDaniel Borgmann
Hopefully this change is actually just a theme setting
It is, and thus your dark themes won’t even be affected. 🙂
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2006-09-07 1:28 am
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2006-09-07 10:55 am
IMO new folder icon is as bad as the previous one. It’s not worse but as bad. I’ve asked other people if they liked the icon and nobody did. What a disappointing icon theme update…
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2006-09-07 11:34 am
Despite all the politics regarding Mono over the years, it’s good to see that Gnome is making progress on the technology front.
Languages like Boo and Nemerle are a joy to work with. Common Lisp is my fun, exploratory language, but Boo and Nemerle are pretty nice for languages that are built specifically for mainstream runtimes and for leveraging the .NET libraries.
The evolution update was really needed.
Monodevelop coming along nicely.
Was expecting more Cairo stuff in this release. Disabled by default thet say but anyway.
Just to tell my personal opinion, the new icon theme is ugly. And the Clearlooks theme just got a turn for the worse. But well, I won’t be using those anyway..
But when will Gnome have a good integrated support for sending/receiving files? Like for example from Bluetooth/IRDA devices, or from other users logged in the same machine or another machine in the same network? Or am I the only one who would have use for such functionality? I don’t really wish to start up Gaim to just send a file to someone, or set up a network share..
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2006-09-07 5:41 pm
First of all, thanks everyone – Cannonical, RedHat, Novell, Fluendo, other small and big companies, independent coders – who made this release possible. It is great to see that GNOME community takes their mission seriously but in same time keeps everything what makes us what we are warm and kicking – discussions, critics, desire to improve our child-project. Kudos to you, kudos to all bug reporters, users, doc writers, and even KDE guys who finally choosed D-BUS.
Lot of things to be happy about, but lot of things awaits us in future. Yay!
Congratulations.
GNOME 2.16 will be the world’s first desktop release that features support for the Unicode Character Database (UCD), version 5.0, which defines more than 99,000 characters for the languages of the world. The improvements are built into GNOME libraries GLib and Pango, and are thus available to all other open source and free software projects that use these libraries.
I know the eye candy, plugin support and other necessary features in today’s systems are paramount but when you can have this built-in it really does push it forward when you actually work with documentation around the globe.
Personally I find it a shame that (AFAIK) there’s no clear roadmap for 2.18. I remember at around gnome 2.4 that I could easily check what the plans were for 2.6 and 2.8. Not anymore now…
– A real zoomable user interface would be great indeed.
– I really wish they would include SLAB with beagle integration. I find the current ‘start’ menu confusing sometimes.
– A very nice and userfriendly GUI for iptables would be most welcome! Completely integrated in the gnome DE. I actually like the firewall GUI in Windows: if a program wants to connect to the internet a dialog pops up if I want to allow that. Nice!
On a sidenote: I really like gnome but I think that the interface is way to big and clunky.
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2006-09-08 2:22 am
And also, maybe I missed something but what happened with leaftag which they wanted to integrate into 2.16??
Ars has a first look at gnome 2.16 with screenies :
http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20060905.ars
It still looks like shit.
No polish, no attention to detail or look and feel.
UI-wise Gnome feels ooooold.
I disagree.
It’s Simple, Clean and Smooth.
“A”
I have to agree. It is very smooth. I am using it on FC6. Load in a custom theme and the beauty is astonishing. Silky smooth experience. Gnome has definatley come a long way. Anyone remember the very first version where the popup menu subdirectories would be difficult to select if you didn’t roll exactly over them in time?
First I ever used was 1.4. I wouldn’t call it usable back in that day, but 2.0 was usable. And 2.4 and up were downright ok.
The last couple have been pretty nice though. I wish metacity would develop features at a less glacial pace though.
I wish metacity would develop features *at all*. But rest assured that very soon, when we get a bad episode of hypofeaturism, we will just pop a pill of compiz and everything will be dandy.
Every release of gnome within the past few years is incrementally better. It seems like the gnome developers focus on taking what is there and improving it. Look at all of the great things the gnome performance-list has done to optimize various parts of the Linux desktop.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/
Slow parts of the desktop like cairo, poppler, fontconfig, pango, etc have a crack team working on optimizing and rewriting slow parts. This is a gnome project that other desktops such as KDE, Xfce, etc benefit directly from.
This is what open source is about.
Also take a look at standards and interoperability thanks to gnome devs. The modern Linux desktop has great hardware plug and play thanks to this pie in the sky idea from Robert Love (Novell employee) he dubbed Project Utopia. Proj Utopia is the bundling of modern hotplug support into the kernel, HAL, udev, DBUS, desktop dependant code such as gnome-volume-manager, and freedesktop.org standards, etc.
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Project_Utopia
Slow parts of the desktop like cairo, poppler, fontconfig, pango, etc have a crack team working on optimizing and rewriting slow parts.
The pango improvements are really impressive. Mozilla Firefox (in Gentoo) use by default Pango for the rendering, and I must admit that some pages were loaded very slowly and with a lot of CPU usage. Last saturday I upgraded from pango 1.12.3 to pango 1.14.2, and the loading time is now between the 35% and the 50% of what it used to be.
I agree, some of project utopia is great. I often wonder why DCOP wasn’t chosen over DBUS? I suppose the Qt dependency might’ve been a turnoff which I can understand. I’m glad though that DBUS seems to be becoming the standard as it makes lives easier and improves the already great idea.
The Qt dependency, and the whole “being C++” thing.
DBUS is more than just standard IPC like DCOP. It has the idea of a system-wide bus instead of a message bus between applications only. This, and the fact that DBUS is *dead simple* make it the reason it was chosen over DCOP.
I often wonder why DCOP wasn’t chosen over DBUS?
D-Bus is kind of the successor of DCOP. It is a bit more abstracted, for example allows better addressing of objects inside the remote application.
I suppose the Qt dependency might’ve been a turnoff which I can understand
Very unlikley, since there is not Qt dependency on DCOP, only KDE’s DCOP library is implemented with Qt.
Anyway a non-issue, the KDE developers take care that D-Bus can be used for everything DCOP has been used before and thus make D-Bus a superset
I hope they fix my number #1 gnome issue…the lack of thumbnails and alternative views in the gtk file selector
Oh, and the “icon selector” dialog. It’s by far the most ugly dialog in the gnome desktop. Not to speak that when I try to open a directory with lots of big pictures and that dialog tries to make thumbnails of all pictures and meanwhile the interface blocks…which wouldn’t be a big problem if it weren’t because it ALSO blocks the gnome panel (¿¿??)
If gnome had a gtk file selector with ej: a thumbnails view…it’d solve *both* problems, since you could use the file selector thumbanils view to select your preferred icon. So far, that’s my #1 wishlist
Edited 2006-09-06 20:17
If you are thinking about video thumbnails, it’s proberly because you aren’t using totem with xine, this is because gstreamer doesn’t work with codecs like wma, and therefor can’t read the file and make thumbnails.
You either have to compile totem to use xine it or download totem compiled to use it.
“If you are thinking about video thumbnails, it’s proberly because you aren’t using totem with xine, this is because gstreamer doesn’t work with codecs like wma, and therefor can’t read the file and make thumbnails.”
No. You’re talking about nautilus. I’m talking about the gtk file selector – it doesn’t even have a “thumbnails view”; not even of jpg images (you have to select the file to preview it, a really ugly solution), so videos don’t even look possible until they add a thumbnail view.
Edited 2006-09-06 23:16
What?, gtk file selector can preview all sorts of images. I dont think having to select a image to preview it is unreasonable or a ugly solution.
Image previews in file selectors are very useful for the same reason they are useful inside of Nautilus. I assume you don’t think Nautilus could get away with only showing a preview of the selected file?
Anyway, it’s not a big deal to me, but I can see how some people would definitely want it.
There is an extension called Nautilus-action that should be available on your favorite distributio.
here is the list of action users can do with Nautilus http://www.grumz.net/index.php?q=configlist&PHPSESSID=9e6ef982a411a…
The only limit is the user’s imagination.
Or you can just install the gstreamer codecs for wma. You have the choice of using the gstreamer-bad and gstreamer-ugly plugins which may not always work, or the gstreamer-pitfdll plug that allows windows codec dlls and quicktime codecs to be loaded, and then just download the codecs that you want (or the package w32codecs for a nice set of nearly all of them)… no need to switch the entire engine when you could just install new codecs and get the other benefits of GStreamer.
Can we have a chance to see a real zoomable user interface (and not simply windows mapped on textures as in xgl) on a linux desktop ? What i mean is something with performances like that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ceiKZyGEHE
Hardly.
Windows will feature this (probably only used by few test apps at first). They use some sort of scene graph for 2D (and some simple 3D) graphic primitives. This scene and primitives are normally updated by app and at that point changes uploaded to graphic card so they can be accessed by DWM (D3D9 based desktop window manager, in fact it is also a compositor, very similar to compiz concept). Then using GPU shader programs (or pure software if only available) it renders vector data to screen-sized buffer and finally shows it on monitor on page flip. As rasterization is last step, zoom can be is taken into account before rasterization and visual quality is better. Dunno what Apple uses here, but I recall that they had similar scaling thing for apps (I guess because their API uses physical units, they can simply notify apps to redraw while libs will automagically multiply all dimensions and show scaled app).
Currently there isn’t a plan for something similar under linux/X.org as it’d need a lot of infrastructure work. Fallback software rasterizing+AA, hardware shaders for same thing, Extensions to X protocol and change in how most toolkits/modern X-apps build their UI, and after all a decent 3D(DRI,…) support for most popular hardware (also a Xgl/AIGLX adoptance issue).
The infrastructure work has been done in the form of Xrender and Cairo. All that’s really needed now is optimization work (Cairo is a bit slow, still — they prioritized working code over fast code for the initial release) and toolkit work (make toolkits use “real-world” units instead of pixels).
The actual zooming using cairo is trivial, of course — just apply a transformation matrix.
The actual zooming using cairo is trivial, of course — just apply a transformation matrix.
I’m not entirely sure what use-case you (all) are aiming for, but there is one problem with simply using the transformation matrix: Line-widths other than one pixel will look extremely ugly on most displays. Unfortunately we still need to do a lot of pixel tweaking to get things to look right, which makes the whole scalable thing considerably less useful.
At least we’ll be ready for the super-high resolution displays of the future. 🙂
First, the Tomboy notes app .. I much prefer an ‘outliner’ program myself. Any open source apps exist that are the equivalent of this?
http://www.winorganizer.com/en/winorganizer
Ok, technically it’s a PIM, but it does great with notes too .. running in the system tray, it consumes less than 5MB of RAM. No app is perfect, but this one is pretty close
I’m also interested in the new screen reader. Does anybody have an audio sample of it? What’s the quality like?
Edited 2006-09-06 20:48
There is the video of a presentation held at CSUN 2006:
Introduction to Orca: a Flexible and Scriptable Open Source Screen Reader
http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/csun/060320/default.cfm?id=6690&t…
There is the video of a presentation held at CSUN 2006:
Introduction to Orca: a Flexible and Scriptable Open Source Screen Reader