The GNOME Development Release 2.5.1: “Hey, at least I’m housebroken”, is ready for testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.
GNOME Development Release 2.5.1 Available
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Is any application and if yes which using the new file selector in 2.5.1?
To view the new file selector at this point, you need to load the GTK+ test apps (build by default when you build gtk) and load its sample app. At least that was the case 6-7 days ago when I compiled Gnome from the CVS.
A question for those who know, any speed improvements planned for GNOME 2.6?
I was under the impression that Epiphany had switched to the new file selector?
Waiting for the new garnome to come
It would be cool to get an article comparing and contrasting the core underlying technologies in the latest Gnome and KDE beta desktops. I like both, but I’m really impressed with KDE 3.1.4. Just recently is the first time I’ve run any KDE of the 3.x series. What I’m talking about is stuff like DCOP, Bonobo, Kparts and stuff like that.
can’t wait to see how it looks/feels, so, when’s someone going to start complaining about joke widgets in file selectors, something along the lines of “will the “frobnicate this file” feature be included in the final version, and what does it do?” do people not understand that development tag or something?
jbmadsen, correcct already has a very *simple* implementation of the new file selector…It has a “add bookmark” button and an icon to creat a new directory, neither of which actually do anything- but you can see them….In addition to the two pane file naviagation display(ie. right side choose files/left side choose directories) there is a horizontal line which goes through the middle of the left hand pane -above this line one has their homedirectory, followed by their Documents direcotry and lastly ‘/’-what should come below this line is not clear-for nothing shows up there when I navigate through the directories.
Unfotunately Epiphany’s Print dialog is still stuck in the stone age, compared to gedit. Epiphany comes up with “lpr” whereas the CUPS integration is already there for gedit-*nice*. For 2.6.0 there is the plan to completely merge Ximian CUPS integration into all of GNOME…
If you do upgrade to 2.5.0/1 beware that some older apps no longer compile with gtk-2.3.0/1 and libgnoneui-2.5.0/1, unless y<ou modify the source code, removing -DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED, -DGDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED, D_GDK_PIXBUF_DISABLE_DEPRECATED..(use sed and grep they are your firends)…
But you can really begin to feel the changes that gtk-2.3 is bringing with it, by 2.4 the desktop will look significantly different-its actually strange, you can’t quite pinpoint exactly where the differences are, but you *feel* them….ie. the point is -there is no utterly massive shift in appearance, but a gradual, scarecly noticable, yet fundamental shift in the appearance of all gnome apps…How GTK works with themes has certainly changed. I maybe forgetting something(already present in earlier versions) but for example when one pulls down the applications menu, each menu entry over which your mouse hovers is highlighted according to the theme you are using-which adds an interesting 3d effect-ie. beveled menu entries, which match color with the title bar and borders of your windows…
Now if you drag an image from your web browser to the desktop it creates a desktop file which when clicked on opens up a web browser pointed at the source location of the image. I did this after find a *horribly* funny little graphic on the gentoo forum last week.
Here is its .desktop file
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=godkills_bugs.jpg
Type=Link
URL=http://www.jacksonh.net/jackson/images/godkills_bugs.jpg
I still wish it would just save the image locally, but this is perhpas handy if one is doing web design.
For a developers snapshot is is actually quite stable-I use it now as my primary desktop, but beware- for some reason, which I cannot explain, gnome is finicky about what you have in your home directory, upon initially installing 2.5.0 gnome refused to work when logged in under my primary user account-gnome-panel just crashed and crashed and crashed. I deleted the .gnome/, .gnome2/, .gconf/, .gconfd,. nautilus/ and .metacity/ directories-something which one should *really* not be forced to do-but still the panel kept crashing-finally I moved all . files and . directories into a subdirectory and gnome launched fine-with no crashing panel…I am now in the process of merge those files back into the home directoy one by one …a tedious task to say the least.
Lastly I noticed two new panel apps-a terminal server-a launcher for tsclient, and wireless link monitor, unfortunately I don’t have wirless so I cannot test it…
Thank you for you on-topic comment! A interesting read after all those off-topic KDE fan-mail. I’ve a stable Gentoo/Gnome 2.4 installation as desktop at home, but now after reading your comment I have a urge to download breakmy.gentoo ebuilds of Gnome 2.5.x and try it out.
Something a really shouldn’t do now my GF finally is starting too like Gnome/Ximian-OOo machine better then here Windows-XP laptop. But the temptation.
Time for a experimental machine I guess
How about some proper work on performance and memory-hogging issues? Currently, GNOME makes a system feel about as bad as Windows XP — perhaps a tiny bit smoother, but it’s negligible.
Users switching from Windows need more of an incentive than free. Linux used to be the fast, slimline alternative (and still is with some other window managers), but all the mainstream distros now run GNOME/KDE and don’t give an immediate, positive first impression.
How about some proper work on performance and memory-hogging issues? Currently, GNOME makes a system feel about as bad as Windows XP — perhaps a tiny bit smoother, but it’s negligible.
Users switching from Windows need more of an incentive than free. Linux used to be the fast, slimline alternative (and still is with some other window managers), but all the mainstream distros now run GNOME/KDE and don’t give an immediate, positive first impression.
True, however, that isn’t the main attraction which will bring people across. What will bring people across is for commercial software companies to come on board and not only port their applications but also offer advice on desktop development; what benefits GNOME and KDE benefits the ISV’s as well. Hardware support needs to be improved, however, that is more a distribution and OEM vendor issue where by the OEM’s should work closely with their chosen distributor to develop the necessary hardware support required.
The most important thing I stress again isn’t necessarily niceties such as speed, but things like software availability. If Joe user can save AUS$150 by not buying the full version of Windows XP Professional and instead, the customer decides to spend that AUS$150 on third party software, it is a good thing long term for the ISV’s to develop a commercial Linux software market.
Gmodconf looks like a very nice tool.
CVSGnome 0.4.9 is available for download. It’s able to build GNOME 2.5.1 from released tarballs as well deals with CVS HEAD. Keyfeature this time is support of multiple CVS server which also autmates getting scrollkeeper, libxklavier, gstreamer and gst-plugins from CVS servers and build them through in one go.
The Script can be downloaded here:
http://www.akcaagac.com/index_cvsgnome.html
Quick instructions can be found here:
http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3667
German instructions can be found here:
http://tipps.gnome-de.org/installieren/cvsgnome.php
Happy testing of GNOME 2.5.1
ChocolateCheeseCake (my favourite kind of cheesecake!): I agree totally on the speed issue. BeOS was far more responsive than Windows could ever hope or dream without a significant boost in hardware. Yet it is a miserable failure. However I don’t think ISVs think it is worthwhile coming over to Linux now – there aren’t any money to be made. It is the chicken-and-egg problem. Linux is slowly solving that by entering markets where application needs are basic, cost is paramount and the same for security. From there, it would slowly expand its way around the enterprise market, ISVs joining it when they finally have incentive to.
I am really looking forward to playing with this test release. Does anyone know if Mandrake’s cooker has them available for urpmi’ing?
On another note, it amazes me that when there is news about a gnome release some people start clamoring for a review to be published about KDE. However, looking back at two article talking about KDE(http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=5370 here and http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=5344 here no such request is found. IMO this is no different then new about KDE’s 3.2 beta being released. So in other words, please keep on topic about your posts.
Thanks,
Aaron
for those of you that are unsatisfied with Gnome wanting a lighter version try this…
edit your .xinitrc to only load the following:
#!/bin/bash
exec gnome-panel &
exec metacity
Agreed. I really really really wish they would focus on getting a better performance out of Gnome. The actual implementation is waaaay to slow (not only Nautilus; all GTK applications are too slow).
Victor.
Not everything is slow.
I tried gnome 2.5.0 using garnome, and the new spatial nautilus is lightning fast
Of course.. GTK is still an issue :/
Some very good points raised by ChocolateCheeseCake, but I’d also say that performance can be a deciding factor for businesses — if they can get more out of older hardware then they’ll be more likely to take it up. Companies are sick of having to replace thousands of machines with each new Windows release, and currently GNOME and KDE aren’t helping that. They’re just getting bigger and bigger, slower and slower (although undoubtedly more featureful and mature), and it’s a problem.
The other thing is third-world countries; they don’t have the latest kit and they’ll stick with pirated/old Windows releases rather than switch and have everything crawl along. OpenOffice.org is already suffering from this a bit.
Here I have a 1.2 GHz machine running IceWM. Under GNOME, it feels much slower than my old 7 MHz Amiga! Sure, the Linux/GNOME combo does much more, but not nearly 200x more! It’s the major problem with open source development — while it produces solid, secure and flexible code (and great surrounding communities), there’s no incentive to speed things up. If GNOME developers find things OK on their 3 GHz boxes, they’re not going to spend a few weeks tuning and cleaning.
Of course, the great thing about Linux is choice — we’re free to use IceWM, XFce, Dillo, AbiWord and other light apps. But they require some knowledge. We need a modern, easy-to-use distro that doesn’t require 128 megs and a 2 GHz CPU to run fast. Mandrake, SUSE and Fedora all look overengineered and worryingly sluggish.
I noticed that epiphany 1.1.1 uses the new fileselector – for those wanting to try it out.
Performance, absolutely. After a stable release of gtk2.4, maybe the guys will concentrate on implementing some performance tricks on the gtk library for a while. Like 3 months of performance sprint.
If they do what they have in the past, future versions of GTK+ will be insanely sped up.
Personally, my experience of running Gnome on Fedora Core 1 was that it was slow, Nautilus could take ages starting. Then I tried on of the beta 2.6-test kernels availiable for FC1 (people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.5/), and noticed a huge speed improvement. Nautilus starts much faster now, didn’t remember to compare other applications. The only problem I see remaining is the dynamic library loading overhead. Gnome is split up into so many modules (which is good), that the linker has a hard time loading them at application start. KDE solution to this (kdeinit) works, but isn’t a clean solution IMO. I propose a huge improvement to glibc/ld.so/binutils or whatever library is responsible for this. No, prelinking is good, but not that good.
I don’t know exactly what KDE does, but whatever it does it’s great, because KDE applications load a lot faster.
So i propose copying what KDE does (kdeinit?) to load applications faster.
Victor.
That’s a new one. KDE applications have a history of loading much more slowely than GNOME ones. Maybe the recent linker changes have helped KDE’s C++ shared libraries more than GNOME’s C shared libraries?
As for GTK+ getting faster, I don’t know. Qt seems to get faster with every release. Qt4 is supposed to do a whole lot more, and yet take 15% less memory and overall run faster. Yet, I haven’t really noticed any significant performance improvements in all of the GTK 2.x series — only a major performance drop moving from 1.2.x to 2.x.
This is just the impression i get: KDE takes more time to load the “KDE desktop” than the “Gnome desktop”; but once KDE is loaded, it is pretty snappy to open applications.
Victor.
If I understand it correctly, the “kdeinit” application is used to start the other applications, the other applications aren’t started like other normal apps. This way, all the dynamical libraries are already loaded when you “start” an application, and you get rid of the linking overhead. Not an ideal solution though.
If I understand it correctly, the “kdeinit” application is used to start the other applications, the other applications aren’t started like other normal apps. This way, all the dynamical libraries are already loaded when you “start” an application, and you get rid of the linking overhead. Not an ideal solution though.
Well, if it works it’s pretty “ideal” to me
Victor.
> Well, if it works it’s pretty “ideal” to me
> Victor.
Thats a bad attidue. _Fix_ the _real_ problem instead of going around it. This is open source, not some locked-in Redmond-company’s product.
I thought that is a windows thing only.
I don’t know about you guys but anything that takes over 3 seconds after I click the button to respond is a no go. I am glad to say since MDK 9.0 with KDE only has been very usable.
I just hope gnome gets better but as of 2.4 it’s still very unresponsive (smp dual P3-450).
> Well, if it works it’s pretty “ideal” to me
> Victor.
Thats a bad attidue. _Fix_ the _real_ problem instead of going around it. This is open source, not some locked-in Redmond-company’s product.
Well, sometimes fixing the real problem needs lots of effort and time. So it would be nice to make some simple/quick workaround, and then try to fix the _real_ problem.
Better one solution than no solution.
Victor.
I always wonder about the complaints about the lack of speed under gnome. I’m using a 1 GHz athlon-tbird with a matrox G450, Gentoo and gnome 2.4 at work and I’m using a AthlonXP 2600+, Nvidia 4800 at home, I find Gnome on both systems quiet fast and have no problems with loading which is also speedy. I can’t tell the differents in speed between the two machine in desktop handling, everything is smooth.
I did notice when I installed a nvidia Geoforce 2 on my work system too test some things that this videocard was way slower then the Matrox and the nvidia at home, the speed drop was amazing.
>> Well, sometimes fixing the real problem needs lots of effort and time. So it would be nice to make some simple/quick workaround, and then try to fix the _real_ problem.
But when a problem is ‘fixed’, people tend to ‘forget’ (that’s not the word I’m looking for, but you get the point) about the problem, so it’s better to not apply a simple/quick workaround and do a real fix asap.
(believe me, I’ve got far too much experience in those areas
unfortunately)
Oh, and ontopic: yes, Gtk is dog slow, I really wish it would be fast like Qt3/4.
A loaded GTK app runs perfectly fine and fast on my system (and others too I would guess). It’s the loading that takes time, and this isn’t specific to GTK, but to any app that is linked to a lot of libraries dynamically. Perhaps we should convince Ingo Molnar to write a O(1) dynamic linker 8).
No, it is not the app loading the problem. It is the slow drawing and redrawing of some widgets on heavy GTK+ apps. GTK+ feels heavier than Qt overall.
They are all relative terms. In my experience GNOME is very responsive. Moreso than my Windows XP system or iMac. While some applications take a century to load — Epiphany, others begin to load even before I click the mouse button — xchat-2. {Switch off your hyperbole radar}
The burden of the load time of an application significantly lie in the boundaries of the applications’ developers. Not the boundaries of GTK+, it’s accompanying libraries or the GTK+ developers.
In fact, I’m beginning to believe some of you are exagerating GNOME’s sluggish performance. Or you are just trolling. I do acknowledge that GTK+ does have issues with redrawing widgets and resizing windows. Especially with certain applications. But most of you are clearly blowing the issue out of proportion.
On my 1.4GHz Athlon machine with 256MB of RAM and 16MB of video RAM, GNOME’s responsiveness is impressive. It’s so responsive I begin to wonder what the hell some of you with more powerful rigs than mine are talking about.
Except you log into to GNOME to resize and move windows all day, I find some of your complaints superficial and redundantly trivial. There’s nothing more vague than saying, “GNOME is slow” or “It’s GTK+’s fault”. As a developer, it makes no sense to me. You need to be more specific than that if you need help.
And please, if you don’t know what the problem is don’t automatically assume it’s GTK+’s fault and that by magically tweaking some GTK+ code somewhere, GNOME will automatically become “fast”. Nope, it doesn’t work that way.
Many other factors may contribute to abysmall performance. The type of theme you use, the theme engine the theme uses, your hardware specification, poorly optimized object code/executables, badly installed libraries, hard disk issues, nvidia issues, driver problems, your distro to mention but a few. Yes, your distro matters. I’ve seen people swear on their great grand father’s grave that the implementation of GNOME on one distro is faster than the other distro.
Having said all that, how exactly to do you all meaure a DE’s performance? Because slow, fast and sluggish only say so much when you write bug reports.
I’m not trolling, I’m just pointing out that the application start times should be dealt with. You mention XChat2 as an example of a fast GTK2 app when start time is considered, and yes it starts fast on my comp too. “ldd /usr/bin/xchat | wc” gives me 36 libs dynamically linked. “ldd /usr/bin/nautilus | wc” on the other hand gives 67.
I should probably mention that I’m on a rather slow comp. an Athlon 800Mhz, 256MB Ram.
You have to consider to points:
1) Speed is largely a matter of perception. The default version of Plastik seems irritatingly slow to me. Why? Because when a window is being resized, you can visibly see the toolbar being repainted. Fixing the problem is a matter of patching three or four lines of code, to set the toolbar background color properly. Yet, with this tiny change, the interface feels much faster. So when GTK visibly chugs to keep up with something simple like a resize operation, or when just moving windows around your desktop causes an expose lag as windows underneath redraw, the perception of speed is totally destroyed. Of course, there are some real performance problems with GTK+, particularly the fact that list-views are unusably slow even on a fast machine. I’m sorry, but if something as simple as resizing a column lags way behind the mouse pointer, that’s not just a perception issue, but a significant usability issue. But overall, the perception issues far outweigh the real speed problems.
2) People’s usage patterns differ a great deal. On my 15″ LCD, I resize relatively often, to get the most out of the limited screen real-estate. Under this kind of usage GTK+ shows itself in a bad light. On the other hand, I spend almost no time opening and closing programs. They get opened once at the beginning of the session, and stay that way for days. Thus, I don’t notice the relatively worse startup performance of KDE apps.
What Jacob Kroon posted is interesting.
“ldd /usr/bin/xchat | wc” gives me 36 libs dynamically linked
My question is once loaded do the libraries remain open if the app is closed?
Also if the libraries have been loaded for one GNOME app, will other GNOME apps that use these libraries take advantage of this and speed up quicker?
>My question is once loaded do the libraries remain open if >the app is closed?
>Also if the libraries have been loaded for one GNOME app, >will other GNOME apps that use these libraries take advantage >of this and speed up quicker?
I’m in no way an expert in this area, so don’t take make words to be fully true. Applications that link to the same libraries share the librarys code. So theres only one instance of libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 loaded, and its shared in memory between all the GTK apps. However, the dynamical linking still needs to be performed for each application that is loaded. So yes, you get a small benefit of not having to load each library into memory each time you start a GTK app.
But when a problem is ‘fixed’, people tend to ‘forget’ (that’s not the word I’m looking for, but you get the point) about the problem, so it’s better to not apply a simple/quick workaround and do a real fix asap.
But if the posible solution is out of your reach (I think it’s GCC problem, CMIIW) it will be better if hack around solution exists.
Not everything come in time, so whatever solution that work (even for temporary) is acceptable.
I’d just like to add my two cents on GNOME. I recently went through and did a massive clean up of my system (Debian/Sid). I dumped all those extra drivers I wasn’t using (usb-scanner and other ‘stuff’), enabled all the ‘speed’ options in the BIOS, and spent a few hours tweaking my video card (nVidia Ti4200) to run with Side Band Addressing and AGP Fast Writes. I installed the 686 optimized libc6 package. I made sure that hdparm was running all my drives and full spec, and finally got round to applying the Andrew Morton’s low latency kernel patch.
GNOME, previously would crawl on my machine (AMD T’Bird 1400 w/h 256 DDR266 ram). Now it flies. Even VNC sessions from other computers are faster. I suspect that a large number of people complaining about the relative speeds of GNOME, or Linux in general simply haven’t optimized their machines. I’ve come across a couple of computers running various supported AGP cards in unaccellerated VESA mode!
Previously, GNOME was too slow to be usable by one person, now, I can have five simultanious seperate users logged in, and it’s still usable.
Some very good points raised by ChocolateCheeseCake, but I’d also say that performance can be a deciding factor for businesses — if they can get more out of older hardware then they’ll be more likely to take it up. Companies are sick of having to replace thousands of machines with each new Windows release, and currently GNOME and KDE aren’t helping that. They’re just getting bigger and bigger, slower and slower (although undoubtedly more featureful and mature), and it’s a problem.
True, however, what I was mainly getting at was the point that many people try to some how link a small performance issue to why Linux isn’t being adopted.
Windows is no better, I’ve seen it fall to pieces under a heavy load, I’ve see explorer.exe hang for particular reason. Having run KDE and GNOME on FreeBSD, I’ve yet to see these “performance issues”. Sure, when resizing Windows there is a bit of ghosting, but any other operating system does the same thing when one resizes fast; with that being said, why would one resize a window when one could easily minimise it, then maximise it once they have done what they needed to be done.
What people don’t mind is a small performance penalty, most users don’t complain if their computer is a little slower as so long as they see benefits in other areas which counter it. For example, a friend who installed Windows 2000 noticed that its boot time was slower than Windows 9x, but on the up side, this was outweighed by the superior system stability he now has, now the boot time issue isn’t a concern.
Once trying gnome on slackware/ or *BSD, you never thumb down. slackBox runs gnome much faster than RH/FC1. No ideas about GNOME and KDE speed, responsiveness are compared (i dun use KDE for long – it is quite colorful and many buttons). simpilicity = efficiency. Just make the life simple.
I think you’ve got one point in that the consistency of responsiveness is definately more important than the best-case responsiveness. I know that my Windows machine at work isn’t nearly as nice while I’m doing a long compile as my Linux laptop is. While Konqueror’s window contents lagging during a resize might be a visual defect, it is certainly a whole lot better than Explorer going completely wacko while trying to browse SMB shares. Even little things like completely losing the panel when Explorer crashes (because you tried to browse an SMB share
is distracting and confusing.
Windows is definately still the GUI that *feels* the fastest, but its not all its cracked up to be:
– Expose performance is spotty. In some cases it is really fast, but in many cases (for example, an AIM window over an Explorer window) it is much worse than anything I can see on KDE. Oddly, it seems really inconsistent. At first, my AIM window will be the most expose-laggy app I’ve ever seen (you can nearly clear the window by moving another over it), but after you do that a few times, you can’t see any lag at all. There are definately some hacks in there to make window manipulation feel much faster than it actually is.
– Resize performance is great in some apps (Office, which seems to be one of Microsoft’s better-engineered program suites), but terrible in others (Explorer viewing My Computer). Again, it often seems much faster than it is. Unlike KDE, the window frame in Windows doesn’t stay right under your mouse as you are resizing. Instead, it lags a little bit behind the pointer to let the application catch up. This looks better (hard to see any lag), but feels worse (window frame movements are jerky).
– Performance degrades with complexity. Moving a window over a full-screen IE window in the background shows almost no expose lag. Layer several IE windows over each other, with different windows visible in different areas, and you see terrible redraw lag. In KDE, the best-case performance is not quite as good as Windows’ best-case, but performance doesn’t go down appreciably as you get tons of windows on the screen.
– Some things aren’t properly double-buffered. Try resizing notepad and you’ll see the content area flicker. Try resizing Task manager, and you’ll see the tabs flicker.
– I’ve got a strong feeling that Windows handles resize in the application instead of in the window manager. That would explain why the resizes are so smooth, and also why you often can’t resize hung windows (SMB shares again
To get a good demonstration of this, load up KDE 3.2 beta1 (beta1 because kwin III was fixed in beta2). Open up Qt designer. Notice that you can resize it both by the window frame, and by the little corner grab area. These are actually two different types of resize. You’ll notice that resizing via the window frame is very laggy, while resizing via the grab area is perfectly smooth. I have hunch that Windows XP’s window manager works like the latter case.
Overall, I wish KDE/GNOME had some of these hacks to make the UI feel faster. But there is no mistake about it, these are definately just hacks, and not fundemental performance advantages.
I use Gnome 2.4 on three machines:
Athlon 1.3Ghz Tbird (256mb RAM)
Duron 1.2Ghz (256mb RAM)
Intel PIII 700Mhz-M Notebook (Thinkpad T20) (256mb RAM)
I find them all snappy with OpenOffice 1.1 and Firebird and Thunderbird and don’t notice delays although things aren’t instantaneous. My brief trials of KDE 3.2 beta 1 and beta 2 on my Athlon Tbird felt slow in comparison. I don’t know if it makes any difference but I compile all my software (including Gnome) because I use the Gentoo meta-distribution.
Now it still is slow compared to a lightning-fast 98Lite-fixed Win9x PC (ie. Win98/ME using the Win95 explorer and no integrated IE) but such a system is crippled in comparison.
A few other comments.
Gnome is not just for newbies and I don’t really see why people say that. I’ve set up three Gentoo systems and a small Slackware system for an mp3 player operated remotely through the web. These are not click to install distros, particularly Gentoo.
I tried a lot of linux distros, always using KDE because “it was the best” but it wasn’t until I tried Gnome that I was sold. It’s an aesthetic thing.