Gnome 2.10 has been released. “It includes a number of interesting new features and hundreds of bug fixes” along with a video player and a CD-ripping utility.
Gnome 2.10 has been released. “It includes a number of interesting new features and hundreds of bug fixes” along with a video player and a CD-ripping utility.
You are aware you can turn spatial viewing off? In fact its been mentioned here before…
Looks like they actually added and improved a lot here, instead of 2.8 which for me was just bug fixes (all the new features were kinda bleh for me, but helpful to many people).
I’d like to see them put a lot of work into metacity though. In gconf it talks about application mode instead of window mode (I’d love to see a good implementation of that!), and a configurable compositor would be a cool beta-type feature.
Currently, I’m using xfce because getting xfwm to work in Gnome is not bad, but getting thing to not randomly get screwed up seems beyond my reach. (And I don’t use the compositor, because it made web browsing annoying).
Have you tried switching back to the old nautilus view using the checkbox on the second tab of its preference panel?
In any case of course, defaults matter.
Personally, I like Nautilus, it’s just that I find it slower than any other default file manager for any other platform. When it takes up to 2-3 seconds to open your home folder in the classic view, you know that there’s something wrong (regardless of distro or machine used). Even Mac’s Finder is instant on my 867 Mhz Powerbook.
I love the idea behind Gnome, but I finally realised the other day that it is doomed until such time that it can run effectively on slower hardware.
To all intents and purposes, KDE kicks it’s ass in terms of speed on low end systems.
There is simply NO denying that fact.
Anyone with half a brain that tests KDE against Gnome on the desktop will come to the same conclusion.
Sweet!
Congratulations on the release of GNOME 2.10 today. GNOME has evolved into my favorite desktop platform ever. I eagerly look forward to playing with it. I also hope that Ars Technica will revisit GNOME soon as their articles on the platform are the best I have ever seen.
I am really excited about the future of this platform. The rapid release cycles really seem to be a great idea, as each iteration of the GNOME desktop includes many incremental improvements.
Thanks for all the hard work in creating such a powerful free software desktop!
Their articles on just about everything are the best. It’s almost like people write them while having rational thoughts and ideas about the topic at hand!
When’s this going to be added to Debian Unstable?
To all intents and purposes, KDE kicks it’s ass in terms of speed on low end systems.
There is simply NO denying that fact.
Congratulations, you’re wrong. I deny it
No, seriously. Up until very recently GNOME has always been faster for my every day tasks then KDE. But, remember the perception of speed to a user is subjective… So maybe you feel like you can’t deny it, but I feel very much so as though I can. Many factors contribute to the perceived speed of a user’s desktop environment, and because of that not everyone will have the same experience.
You wouldn’t tell from gnome.org. Its now 17:23pm GMT and there is still no mention of it.
exactly what has been changed/improved?
last time i asked this question i was pointed to the Gnome 2.10 page which had zero actual information on the new release.
“I love the idea behind Gnome, but I finally realised the other day that it is doomed until such time that it can run effectively on slower hardware.”
As a Gnome user, I really look forward to the 2.12 release of Gnome because it appears to be the first release where they will seriously tackle a lot of the resource issues head on. There has been a lot of noise made recently by some Gnome developers about isolating and fixing the many resource hogs within Gnome. I think they could easily knock up to 50% off of the required resources if it was focused on. Until only recently Gnome Terminal tabs each took up 500k of memory, which has been already reduced to 250k and should be reduced further (the KDE equivalent consumes 50k of memory per tab).
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/
Cool, a new gnome release.
I know kde is faster/better/whatever, I have tried it myself. But somehow, I prefer gnome, there is something about it…. I don’t know, it just feels right.
I hope it’ll go in debian testing before summer.
Yanik
Why 2.10???!?!?!?!?
Why not 3? I don’t get it… *goes and bangs head on the wall*
going more and more to functioning similar to the Windows XP desktop??? the only difference is a different skin that StyleXP can easily fix. Good for Linux or something I guess… I’m not sure, but XP in it’s original form is in my experience a lot quicker…
There aren’t any. I think the problem is with GTK2, not GNOME. The only slow GNOME app I can think of is Nautilus. GTK1 was way faster.
> I think the problem is with GTK2, not GNOME.
Then explain us why Xfce (which uses Gtk2 as well) is a lot faster than Gnome…
>Why 2.10???!?!?!?!?
>Why not 3? I don’t get it… *goes and bangs head on the wall*
It’s not a decimal number, it’s a version number. It’s the tenth minor version of the second major release, hence 2.10. Just like the Linux kernel is now 2.6.11.
They will change to 3.x when they make a major change to GNOME (such as breaking backwards compatibility or majorly changing the API).
I feel like there’s a great speed improvement for nautilus with this release (also for 2.9.x dev series).
I know that gnome fanatics say “nautilus is MUCH faster” at each release but this time, i agree (or i became a gnome fanatic!!)
Great news! My favourite DE.
So the new Ubuntu must not be far off either… anyone know the release date?
“Anyone with half a brain that tests KDE against Gnome on the desktop will come to the same conclusion.”
I sure don’t *feel* like I’m missing half my brain, and KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.8 are about equally slow on my laptop (128MB of RAM, P2-400 CPU). i.e., they’re both slow as hell. I use Xfce instead. There’s lots of work going on on reducing GNOME’s memory usage right now, which should make 2.12 more useful on anything under 256MB of RAM, but I wouldn’t recommend either KDE *or* GNOME for such a machine now.
First improvement: Not just a link to a ftp site this time. Finally
I hope they have fixed launch feedback for all apps, smb-gnome-vfs that WORKS, smarter error messages (“Unknown error” is not so usefull) and less random quitting applications. There are really a million small things to complaint about (Oh, oh, like that Totem can only load subtitles if you launch it from command line, and then in a weird format lile file:///path/to/file/blah.avi#subtitle.srt), and I wonder why I don’t notice similar annoyances in KDE. All logic says they MUST be there.
What IDN phishing prevention/warning has been implemented in Epiphany? Or has it been disabled completely?
The new panel-menus seem nice, and I like what they did to nautilus. Gnome seems to be going in a good direction. It’s also great that more gui-tools for system related tasks are appearing. The DE felt sort of incomplete without them.
I have superfast Gnome, but I run Gentoo.
GNOME 2.10 has a new ability that you might not notice at first, implementing another cross-desktop Freedesktop.org standard.
In the past, while typing something into one application when suddenly your instant messenger offered a chat request from your friend, your words would be typed into the chat window. Imagine if you were typing your password at the time. This should no longer happen in GNOME 2.10.
In addition, if an application takes a long time to start, your work will not be interrupted when it finally opens its window.
I just HATE this! Can’t it somehow be reverted using GConf? I want my windows popping up in the foreground.
After playing with the betas for some time now I have to say it’s a really nice release. Probably not so many really exciting new things, but a lot of small changes and cleanups, which is great. So congrats to the devs.
The only thing I really, really have trouble to understand, is how the devs could decide that menu editing wasn’t needed in this release. I mean, I appreciate Gnome implementing a freedesktop.org standard, but not being able to edit the menu is simply a major inconvenience.
the gnome 2.10 is running on hoary hedgehog and all is well.
The only thing I really, really have trouble to understand, is how the devs could decide that menu editing wasn’t needed in this release. I mean, I appreciate Gnome implementing a freedesktop.org standard, but not being able to edit the menu is simply a major inconvenience.
They know that it’s needed, but they’re not willing to include it until it’s ready, and it isn’t ready yet. GNOME releases are time based, so they don’t hold things up when desired features aren’t ready (as a general rule).
GNOME has a HIG, good. But it even better if it would comply to it. Look eg at figure 24 of “What’s New in GNOME 2.10”: All radio button texts and group box titles are in violation of the GNOME HIG.
I know that someone is working on a menu editor. However, the main reason that it wasn’t ready for this release was that the devs didn’t think it is a priority and believe it or not I respectfully disagree with them on this subject.
Now if Gnome only didnt look so gosh darn depressing…prob a memory hog as well. Sigh
The release notes mentions the “Desktop User Guide”. But the newest version available seems to be for GNOME 2.6? Same for “Desktop System Administrator’s Guide”. Only the “Accessibility Guide” is available for at least GNOME 2.8.
> Looks like they actually added and improved a lot here, instead of 2.8
Cannot say so, the 2.10 notes are kinda bleh too, everything “even more”, “even faster”, “even easier”.
> is how the devs could decide that menu editing wasn’t needed in this release.
Use the KDE menu editor. 🙂
> All radio button texts and group box titles are in violation of the GNOME HIG.
Care to explain? I wouldn’t know either way – so you’ll have to help me out. They don’t look very good in figure 24, but please explain why this is not compliant with the HIG.
it would actually be brilliant!
Seriously though, the redraw of GTK/X11 applications is too poor to be an alternative to most desktop systems. Even my 250mhz Octane redraws quicker than my FreeBSD box with the latest Xorg (optimised, mind you). Basic Java Swing applications seem faster on Windows than native GTK apps. I’m singling out GTK because we’re talking GNOME here. It’s been like this since GTK-1.x in my honest opinion.
Nonetheless, I love GNOME and wish the redraw problem can be conquered, it’s the biggest hurdle to the mainstream. Want examples?
+ subjective performance of Eclipse IDE, Firefox
+ redraw of menus on most apps, redraw in general
I like gnome very much, and I write this to thanks to the developers of gnome, they are great programmers.
THANKS GUYS
The Hoary Hedgehog is scheduled to be released April 5.
exactly what has been changed/improved?
last time i asked this question i was pointed to the Gnome 2.10 page which had zero actual information on the new release.
It’s all in the release notes, which aren’t linked from this OSNews post. Read them here:
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.10/notes/
Last time you asked this question was probably during the 2.9 cycle. We simply can’t compile full release notes like these on every unstable release. We do, however, aggregate the bullet-point NEWS files of every module on every release. See, for example:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.9/2.9.3/NEWS
Eugenia, could you put a link to the release notes or the 2.10 start page in the article? It would help your readers and our users a lot.
there is no redraw problem, go read some tutorials on how to setup your box correctly.
Radio button texts shall be in sentence style capitalization and groupbox titles in header style capitalization. Also groupbox titles never shall end with a colon.
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design-text-labels….
“there is no redraw problem, go read some tutorials on how to setup your box correctly.”
>>>>>
You mean one has to extra setup work to not have redraw problems? Here goes usability …
GREAT!!! Congratulations to the GNOME developers team.
You guys are the best.
I’ve been using GNOME 2.9 for awhile in Ubuntu. Off the top of my head, here are a few new things that I have noticed while using it:
-improved applets (transparent edges)
-ability to blank CD-RW in Nautilus before burning
-tools menu in gedit
-when changing default application used to open a file users can select from list of installed applications
There are probably others but that’s all that I can recall at the moment. Then only questionable new “feature” in my opinion is the support of the FreeDesktop.org menu specification *before* a way to edit the menu was implemented.
I think that the FreeDesktop.org’s recommendations will prove invaluable as they will help to provide a foundation for interoperability that has been sorely lacking between various Linux desktop applications. However, I do not think this interoperability should be rushed and come at the expense of usability. If GNOME is to be taken seriously as a desktop environment for the masses (especially the corporate desktop) then a decision to rip out an existing feature before a suitable replacement has been provided should be avoided at ALL costs.
And its already in Ubuntu/Hoary:
1) apt-get update
2) apt-get dist-upgrade
Yup, i’m running it right now on Ubuntu and i can say: i love it
I have always been a huge GNOME fan. It is quite simply the most functional, easy to use, and best looking desktop for any operating system. It is loads faster than KDE as well. Keep up the good work GNOME folks!
Still 27 packages to build the platform alone. I’m now trying out Garnome… but I don’t think it’s working. I see a lot of errors but they aren’t stopping it, so maybe that’s ok… time will tell.
Good, and thanks to the GNOME devs – look forward to trying this out, as ever – lets hope Nautilus can “remember” screen size in browser mode in this new version – do like windows opening full screen size and not 3/4 size and then having to maximise every time.
Come on, don’t be silly. Gnome 2.x is a lot slower than KDE, no doubt about it. The reason could be the bloat added – take a look at http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9889 – bloat is for real and not FUD.
I prefer KDE still but think that 2.10 is starting to get pretty good… i especially like the menu system and the overall visual experience.
Nope, didn’t work. Had to bootstrap a couple of things, then it died.
You’ve already wasted your time… ;-P so he had success stealing you some of it…
Anyway… Kudos to the dev team! Great work. Keep it up!
Great!
I can’t wait to play with new release.
Thank you very much Gnome devs, I really like Gnome (I tried pretty much everything).
Can you drag folders out of archives in 2.10 because I’m using 2.8 at the moment and not being able to is quite annoying.
You can. There’s a trick to it. Drag the folder out, but don’t drop it on the desktop – until the mouse icon changes to include a ‘+’. You’re dropping it before the folder has been extracted…
I hope one day GNOME use GNUstep instead of GTK+.
Can I get this, already?
What would be the advantage of moving to GNUStep? Such an endeavour would require massive rewrites of code for no readily visible gain.
Gnome 1.x had a menu editor.
Gnome 2.x (x<9) had applications//; which was flakey
Gnome 2.10 no menu editing
Gnome 2.12 no menu?
What about integrating GNUstep into GNOME besides GTK+?
GNUstep using the GTK+ native themes and GTK+ supporting global menu can be a start. Developers can chose either of the toolkit just like Carbon and Cocoa on Mac OS X.
Gnome 2.12 WILL have a menu editor.
Totem still dosent have a mozilla plugin. Both Kaffeine and EVEN gxine have one!
totem-mozilla-plugin.c AGE 8 months
totem-mozilla-viewer.c AGE 8 months
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/totem/src/
Its just been sitting there in CVS. Booo!
Gnome 2.12 no menu?
—–
yes thats the current plan
Does this release finally have a color scheme editor?
correct me if i’m wrong ( i think i am), but wasn’t kde the slow desktop and gnome the fast one. i’m talking about 1999 era here?
what happened?
It became slow when some people started trolling.
Congratulations to the GNOME community. Thanks to the GNOME contributors who actually do something rather than whine.
>what happened?
Gnome switched to GTK2 with pango(?), bonobo and all the other stuff. While KDE have done lots of optimazition since their switch to a heavier toolkit in KDE2 and in addition reaps the benefits of the improvements to C++ compilation in GCC.
at school we have 850mhz pcs with 128mb ram they dualboot w2k and gentoo. i can honestly say that i cant feel any speed diffrence betwen win2k , gnome and kde. wel maby w2k is a bit slower but then they run av software in windows and no firefox
wich migth explain that. i have asked other students to and they all say that they dont notice any diffrence so its not only me
Java SWING is probably blazing fast running on new hardware. It’s fast enough for me using a 1Ghz AMD processor and 512 RAM.
Part of the problem is that people use Fedora Core 3 which in comparison to my experience with Ubuntu is much slickier and in general slower and I cannot explain fully why.
Startup of Gnome on Ubuntu is faster than KDE on a Suse box for goodness sakes.
Are there no problems? No. not saying that at all.
Isnt KDE still more mature. Yes. Its been around longer for goodness sakes. KDE2 was frickin’ nasty hog.
Is that an excuse? no.
Most of the apps I prefer are Gnome or GTK based.
I prefer the cleaner less cluttered interface of gnome.
Does KDE suck? No. I just don’t dig it.
Do I get frustrated that browsing mode in Nautilus is dirt slow or they f*cked the menu editing? Sure.
But I also know that people talk about how slow gnome is and start talking about OpenOffice or Firefox like they were gnome apps which drive me nuts.
I don’t care how much hell they take or trolling incurs they do need to optimize. But people also need to know what the heck they are talking about before criticizing.
Then again on almost any box with say 512MB it seems to me lightning fast as quick as XP on the same box with all the bells and whistles turned on.
Memory is very important for gnome hence the need for optimization.
256MB it is quick but on 128MB it is livable but pokey.
> When’s this going to be added to Debian Unstable?
Well 2.8 was released on middle of september but it was uploaded to unstable at the end of november.
A Debian developer told they wanted to make the transiction smoothly.
:-/
On the top bar Right click and choose Add to Top Panel
Click on Custom Application Launcher
Click on browse and then select Fileystem /usr/bin
Then my HDD led is like a power led for about 30 seconds.
It’s frustrating…have I too much application @ /usr/bin ? (2143 precisely)
.
I’m using Debian/unstable Gnome2.8 celeron 400, 128mb of ram and I’ve open only firefox to write this post.
Yes,
that’s the first thing I will do when I will install it on my Debian machine to see if it improved
.
Heh, seems some post that whined about the old spatial Nautilus thing got nuked. Good, that’s apparently no problem anymore and can easily be turned off. Nuke all post whining about spatial Nautilus! And at the same time some moderator can nuke all posts whining about KDE’s toolbars being too complex. Those can be turned off too, so it’s no use whining about that either.
many pieces of gnome 2.10 have arrived at marcuscom. I only wanted pieces, streamtuner, liferea, etc. only using enlightenment currently.
Tried the LiveCD now, Epiphany allows IDN phishing. I am not impressed.
The only thing I have against Ubuntu is that it runs slower than normal Debian, I’m sure this will be fixed eventually though.
The best way to use Gnome 2.10 is to not use Gnome 2.1. Say what? Let me explain myself. The collection of GTK applications that comes with Gnome desktop are pretty useful such as Nautilus, Gaim, Gedit, Totem, etc. So you install the latest Gnome desktop. Then use install the RPM’s for the latest XFCE4.2 or use yum or apt to get them depending on your distro. Then you login to XFCE4.2 and use all the GTK applications you want. The lag from the Gnome window manager is gone, everything runs stable and snappy. You have the best of both worlds. If you want to pretend you are running Gnome desktop then add icons to your panel for you favorite GTK applications and turn on the show desktop feature. All the bloat problems people have mentioned here disappear. Try it and you won’t go back to Gnome.
I’ve done something similar in Ubuntu: I compiled and installed Blackbox 0.70 yesterday, and I installed ROX-Filer via apt-get to replace Nautilus, both for the speed and the fact that I lost my icons in Nautilus now that the GNOME theme engine isn’t running. I spent 20 minutes creating a Blackbox menu that was basically a clone of the GNOME Applications and Computer menus, another 10 minutes setting up ROX, and now I have a desktop that is ultra-fast on my 1GHz system, yet still allows me to run the same apps as before. Amazingly, even gnome-terminal opens in about one second, whereas before it took almost five seconds under GNOME. I’m not sure what makes the difference; I have 512MB of RAM so memory is not the bottleneck.
Hi
is it pronounced gee-nome
or
ga-nome
thanks.
Guh-nome
Why would someone use Nautilus in /usr/bin. Theo ne thing that is always true about /usr/bin is that there are many files there. Invariably, too many. What do you want to do in /usr/bin with nautilus. By the time you have 1000+ files in a folder, a file manager is way too inefficient for that. You are better off looking for a better solution, like a photo manager if you have lots of photos, or a music manager if you have lotws of music. A file manager is general purpose. Part of what makes Nautilus “not useful” for many files is mimetype sniffing, which makes in pretty useful for managing small numbers of files. So you have a tradeoff.
… at least not when showing a folder of files. It only uses mimetype-sniffing when you actually try to open that file. When showing a folder it only uses the filename suffix.
The reason for the sniffing is security. It makes Nautilus show you a dialog if you click on a shell script named “boobs.jpg”.
seems nice, that’s just it
Aagh gconf, found it – navigation_window_saved_geometry
that’ll do – cheers all.