Submitted by The GNOME team has released version 2.30 of their open source desktop environment. “The GNOME Project’s focus on users and usability continues in GNOME 2.30 with its hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements. The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made.”
There’s a bunch of changes in this new release, obviously. The Nautilus file manager has received some love, including some user interface changes. Nautilus now also has a split view (finally), and now no longer defaults to spatial mode, preferring browsing mode instead. Yes, vanilla GNOME still defaulted to spatial mode. I love spatial mode – don’t get me wrong – but the rest of the world doesn’t. I was surprised it was still the default.
Empathy, GNOME’s instant messaging application based on the Telepathy framework, has also been updated. IRC support has been improved, and a new information bar will popup when an account fails to connect, including a nice reconnect button.
Managing users has also been made easier, the developers claim, for instance by integrating PolicyKit into the relevant management dialogs, so you no longer have to mess around with the unlock button. There’s more to this release than what’s mentioned here, of course, so have fun digging through the release notes.
The folder and trashcan icons are soooo ugly! I hope Gnome 3 will bring a new, fresh look to Gnome. It feels so Windows 98.
Congratz on the splitview, though. All I miss now are some equivalences Libraries and Homegroup (love the ease of the last one).
Call me crazy, but I actually like the classic Windows look. I didn’t like how they brightened it up in WinME/WinXP though (at least it could be switched back easily), and I’m not too crazy about Aero (though it has some damn nice features).
Yeah, that’s the thing with taste.
I love Aero. I hated Vanilla XP, all the colours. But Aero actually makes OSX look kinda dated. KDE 4 has a lot of potential, though. As long as they get rid of some of the clutter (Dolphin!).
But, this is so subjective and personal that it mostly doesn’t matter really.
Please explain to me what’s cluttered about Dolphin: http://bayimg.com/HAlpfAAcJ
The next release of GNOME will sport a new version of Nautilus that only shows one file at a time, to prevent confusing the user and cluttering the interface. It will also feature even more unused space above and below all toolbars and menu bars (which will themselves be removed in a future release as they are not necessary for interaction with the single file).
And the next relase of KDE will add 4 new menu entries in Dolphin, all chock-full with excellent new features like automatically calling your mother upstairs to bring you food in the basement, adding starcharts as meta-data on all your files, translating files to Klingon, printing out your documents and gift-wrapping them automatically if you supply Dolphin with a pair of robotic arms.. and there’s more! It also comes with full schematics on how to build a very own kitchen sink of yours, including in-depth discussion on the best materials to be used and not only one but actually THREE different calculators for determining how big it should be! Amazing!
See, I can do it too.
Yes, except that KDE has also been reducing the amount of stuff in menus and toolbars, so that argument no longer works.
And GNOME has been adding functionality and configuration options, so neither does your argument. It didn’t stop you from making yourself look like an arrogant, though.
New functionality and configurations? I don’t know where they are then.
Ahhh, April fool. Got you.
*yawn*
How about growing up some day?
You should have grown up several posts back.
It seems as though there was an attempt to be witty in there somewhere, and it backfired somewhat.
Well GNOME added tabs and split view in the last two releases, that’s more(KDE has had these nice features for a long time now).
Dolphin is able to look sleek and simple, with it even able to hide the menus. Spatial mode was never going to work for end users, unless they liked using OS’s from the 80’s and 90’s.
oh c’mon, yours is really cluttered, here’s mine
http://imgur.com/FWj0i.png
rub3nmv responded…
Okay, this has absolutely noting to do with the date…but I found that refreshingly minimalist. O.o;
–bornagainpenguin
If we are getting to the point when the only thing somebody can find wrong with an open source project as complex and ambitious as Gnome is the look of the Trash icon, then we are on the right track.
Those icons by the way are easily changeable by choosing a different theme.
Yeah, it’s a compliment! Gnome is pretty decent actually. It just looks so dated. I just think that the default theme is important enough to be focused on just a tiny bit more than it is today.
But then, this is all about taste…
As I said, Gnome is really good on many areas. My wishlist would be to include something like “Homegroup”. And maybe clean up the cluttered menus and create a control panel thingy instead.
It just looks so dated. I just think that the default theme is important enough to be focused on just a tiny bit more than it is today.
I agree to a degree. I personally find the icon theme pretty decent: it’s not overly complicated, flashy nor does it try to be photo-realistic. The GTK+ theme and Metacity themes are quite bland though. But usually all distros use something other than the default anyway.
With some work GNOME can be made to look really good:
http://i43.tinypic.com/2rcxrg4.jpg
Time to start unmasking! Congrats to Gnome team!!
unmasking? are you nuts?!
Certifiably :p
“The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made.”
Poor change management?
Boilerplate text that some projects like to use whenever they have a new release. It’s so overused that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
Do you expect them to revert to just dumping raw ChangeLog files with hundreds of changes *per project/component* onto users, instead of having a nicely formatted summary that just highlights the most visible changes they are susceptible to care about?
OpenOffice.org comes to mind as a textbook example of what not to do. Compare GNOME’s release notes with http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.2.0.html#new for example.
Their “we have hundreds of changes, we can’t list everything” catchphrase may sound silly to some of you, but 1) it is entirely truthful 2) it is good marketing.
But is it useful to anyone actually interested in the changes?
I prefer PHP’s change log. The announcement summarises the big important changes most people will be interested in. But the actual change log, lists all of the actual changes. Sometimes with some of these projects you find a bug, fix it yourself or someone else submits a patch, see it accepted ( or rejected
) into the trunk, but never hear what release it makes it into so you can stop manually patching the source.
Can’t you use git for that?
A readily available html page is easier/faster.
One summary/ one detailed change list. I think that’s the best. The detailed one has links to bugzilla to see the specifics of each change. Its nice. The php team does a couple things wrong, but change logs are not one of them.
=)
http://img6.immage.de/01049003da7screenshotaboutthegnomedesktop.png
hmmm… double double Gnome…
Tomboy seems to be mentioned a lot…. Hope this doesn’t mean Mono is now required.
I’m not entirely comfortable with Mono, partly for the same reasons as Java (the managed bytecode to rule everything crowd), and partly because of the MS shadow.
If Mono is now something that can’t be uninstalled, I think I might be moving away from Gnome…. (which is only on the desktop anyway). There is always Xfce which is quite nice……. and LXDE has always been perfectly decent for me on the craptop…… (KDE is of no interest to me)
Yes I know this might kick off a Mono attack/defence thread, don’t mean it to. We all have heard all the arguments now. I just want to know that Mono is still optional.
I wonder the same. Nothing against Mono (I actually find it a great piece of software), but the lesser dependencies the better.
I wonder the same. Nothing against Mono (I actually find it a great piece of software), but the lesser dependencies the better.
I don’t like Mono myself. Not because of the possible patent issues etc as they aren’t valid here anyway, but because of the fact that Mono takes so much memory if you only run one or two Mono apps; it always has to load the VM and all that crap. It’d be less of an issue if I used 5+ Mono apps all the time as the VM is shared by all of them, but that’s just not the case :S
I don’t sweep the patent issues aside, but only time will tell what happens there.
My big issues are with applications written in mono/Java. I’m not sure it’s the VM themselves that is the problem so much as the mindset it puts people in. Memory use isn’t their problem anymore, and if the application is slow, it’s the languages fault. I’ve met too many managed programmers unable to understand things in terms the computer does, i.e. data and instructions. They can only think in terms of objects. Worse still, those who think C++ or C is like assembler was. The gap in productivity between C or C++ and assembler is massive compared with the cap between C or C++ and a managed byte code language. There is no comparison. Even worse, thinking it’s not worth learning any lower language then the byte coded language as the future will be byte coded languages. The language allows them to stay ignorant, their beliefs keeps them so. Byte code as the one true way of the future has been stated for a long time, and this future never happened. I suppose you could argue that with microcode x86 is now a form of low level byte code, but that’s pushing it and I think x86 is suffering against ARM because of that when power foot prints matter more than Windows compatibility. Besides, if you do argue that’s byte code, you can’t argue it’s managed. So it’s like LLVM, which I have less of a problem with.
I feel the results seams to speak for themselves. Even if the application isn’t eating memory like it’s the most important app running, they all to often are unresponsive and take ages to start. I’ll stick with C or C++ applications, or python applications stuck together from libs written in C or C++. Don’t see why .NET/mono byte code “future” will be any more successful then the Java byte code future was.
Bit of a rant, sorry.
Oh you mean like how The Gimp is so much faster than Paint.net?
I think the patent issues, while not a non-issue, are, like you said, not extremely relevant. However, do keep in mind that Mono is only as useful as it is recent when compared to .NET. Should Microsoft desire to cripple Mono, they have a few billion dollars more that they can spend on developing features faster than the Mono team can possibly keep up. Mono lives at the whim of Microsoft so long as they control .NET development.
I’ll be honest and say that I love .NET’s more sane organization of standard libraries (over Java, and especially over every other language) and elegant syntax. But for that reason, I use Vala for much of my hobby projects.
Vala’s got a very similar syntax, plus language bindings are a non-issue. I don’t have to wait for the Mono team to decide to write a native port of my favorite C library. I don’t have to write and maintain complicated wrapper code. At the worst, I can draw up a simple text file and valac does the Vala->C translation for me.
Add to that the fact that it runs about as fast as hand-crafted C, and you’ve got the best of all worlds.
Now, if only they could work on the docs…
Mono is part of GNOME’s default installation, because by default Tomboy is also included. If you don’t install Tomboy then Mono is not required.
If it can still be stripped out, that’s good enough for me. Cheers. 🙂
C# is one of the ‘official’ languages for Gnome.
C#, Python, and C are the languages used in the default install for the Gnome upstream project….
C++, Ruby and Python would perhaps be the ‘official’ languages for KDE.
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages
Although C# is listed, I don’t know of a single project that uses C#/Qt/KDE. Dose anyone?
To write applications targeted for both, one’s logical choice would be Python.
To write applications targeted to both Gnome and KDE, the logical choice is Qt (either C++ or Python).
The app will look fine on both desktops, and you’ll have a nice developer experience to boot.
I on the other hand don’t really mind mono per say, but I prefer knotes.
But something tells me the gnome team wouldn’t consider including it in gnome.
Too bad GNOME’s icon placement is still horribly broken: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.30/figures/rnusers.na…
Not aligned to a grid, often even with different-sized icons within one window…
Not aligned to a grid
Right-click -> Sort -> By Name.
Yeah, I think that happens when using compact layout or something like that, I really hate it.
“The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made.”
Umm, not if you know what you are doing … this must be another april fools joke article.
Another GNOME comes, and yet, not able to lasso files in list-view… call that obsolete!!!! There’s even a patch already submitted that fixes this… but CALL THAT OBSOLETE!!!
They removed the interface tab from gnome-appearance-properties so now I have to fool around in gconf if I want icons in menus (the System menu in the menubar looks like junk without them turned on because it doesn’t have any icons whereas every other bar in it does, imo) and editable menu shortcuts. I know they’ll cut out the ability to do this completely eventually.
The usual behavior of GNOME, add features where they don’t belong or matter, and take away the ones that do. Oh no, we can’t have configuration options that matter! It might confuse the Ubuntu users!