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GNOME 2.24 Released
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Sep 24, 2008 03:25 PM
from the ekiga-has-the-best-screenshots dept.
from the ekiga-has-the-best-screenshots dept.
thhamm writes "The GNOME community hopes to make our users happy with many new features and improvements, as well as the huge number of bug fixes that are shipped in this latest GNOME release! Well. What else to say. I am happy." Notably, this release is also the occasion for the announcement of videoconferencing app Ekiga's 3.0 release.
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SmallerFasterLighter? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Hmmmmm?
timothy (Score:2)
I know typos in summaries and headlines are the norm, but have we really got to the point where the dept. gag has them also?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
He's referring to Ekiga's tendency to fire little bits of rock and gravel at people. It's a feature.
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Oops.
Whooosh'd by the editor, ouch.
Huge number of bugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it weird how developers (myself included) consider it a good thing that they fixed a whole bunch of bugs?
Personally I know it feels good to fix bugs because it feels like you're making the product perfect and somehow that feels like "development". However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.
Re:Huge number of bugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.
Sadly the reality is that it's just too hard to write such complicated software without bugs.
Parent
Re:Huge number of bugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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I just wish GNOME would fix the damn panels to keep them from rearranging the applets. That bug has been there since pretty much the very beginning of the GNOME project and they have "fixed" it many times but it is never really fixed. They have done things like introduce the "lock" feature that locks an applet into place. All that does is make it even more annoying because you then have to unlock them to put them back where they were before the panel mangled them.
Especially if you get a crash, freeze, or
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Same thing happens in KDE, for me, and I've NEVER had GNOME do this.
Teach them a lesson (Score:2)
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This can be partly mitigated using the Launcher List applet aka quicklounge. That way, at least your launchers won't rearrange themselves when they feel like it (and you can lock the whole applet). As an added bonus, you can drag and drop launchers (also from the menu) with the left mouse button.
Re:Huge number of bugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not impossible, but quite likely you'd maybe hit Gnome 1.0 in these days after 10+ years of development. And everybody else would be using the betas/unstable versions because they're soooo much faster and more featureful despite the odd bug. In fact, the FLOSS market seems to be going after exactly its own pace - live on the bleeding edge? You can do that. Stay with the ultra-stabile? You can do that and so the bug level is pretty much what you want it to be. In short, most people wouldn't want the bugfree version if one existed. It's too extreme in the "of these three things, pick any two" department.
Parent
Re:Huge number of bugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
If your software "doesn't have bugs", it either doesn't do much or you just aren't looking hard enough.
(I'm not pointing any fingers...)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I'm pissed because I spent the better part of last night reinstalling Wordpress because 2.0 got rooted. Nice going, open-source movement.
I've used computers since the mid-80s and I'm just losing patience with security exploits and especially with this slapdash attitude of 'it'll happen'. No. It does not need to happen. It should not happen. Real people may die when computers malfunction; it is not enough to say 'that's okay, we'll patch it afterwards'. We had the tools and the methods in the 1950s to m
Re:Huge number of bugs? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, there's the theory that every program contains at least one bug and can therefore be reduced in size by at least one instruction. Iteratively then, every program can be reduced to a single instruction which doesn't work.
Parent
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It's just not feasible to write software without bugs. In fact, Jeff Atwood would claim you're an amateur developer until you realize that everything you write sucks. Go read his post on the subject: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001020.html [codinghorror.com]
Is this feature available? (Score:2)
I would like to know from those who have test driven this new release, whether I can copy a PDF URL address link, paste it into the appropriate PDF application, and have the application open the file.
Is this possible? In earlier versions, one had to download the PDF file, then point the application to it...a nonstarter to me!
Just note that I handle PDF documents all day.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Good! (Score:5, Funny)
Excellent!
Now when can I expect this in my Intrepid Ibex repositories, mmm?
Mandatory puns:
"Glad to see Linux really putting it's best foot forward in the GUI department."
"The new Gnome is a feet of software engineering."
"Maybe I'll revert from Kubuntu to Ubuntu, dip my toe in and see what it's like."
"I hope the new version doesn't have a much bigger footprint."
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Re:Good! (Score:4, Informative)
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/gnome-utils/2.24.0-0ubuntu1 [launchpad.net] the day before yesterday.
Parent
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I thought they were skipping this release? (Score:2)
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2.24 -> 2.26 -> 2.28 -> 3.0
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I think it was GTK that was going to do a 3.0 release, not Gnome.
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I'm working on a Fx/Tb extension for importing Photos to F-Spot. Comments/Testing appreciated.
You know, not two days ago I was thinking that it would be nice to import an image from a website directly into F-Spot. I just installed your extension, and it's fantastic!
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Not available for u (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Catching up ever so slowly (Score:5, Informative)
I'd like to see Windows pick up some features that any UNIX desktop had 10 years ago. How about virtual desktops that actually work? Window shading? The ability to keep a window on top of the others? Can I even add something like a CPU usage graph to my panel in Windows? If so, it's not clear how, but it's trivial in my desktop environment of choice.
UNIX has had a superior GUI than Windows for a long time. The only thing it's really missing is wizards to help the less savvy configure it.
Caveat: this is coming from an XP perspective. I've not used Vista, so I don't know if these features are available there.
Parent
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You don't mention much to explain just why UNIX has a superior GUI, but I expect a GUI to be able to control all aspects of the OS that I need to access. This is where Linux and UNIX fall way short, as is evidenced b
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This is about voice / video and the new IM client in Gnome. Has Windows had integrated AOL or Yahoo! Chat since Win98? No? Does it now? I didn't think so.
Did Windows 98 have an integrated time-tracker? No?
Has Windows had an integrated Voice / Video / Text SIP client since Win98? Hmmm
Complex Asian characters in Win98? Tabbed file browser?
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2.2 Track your time? Hello, this is just a applet for which there has been software available to do pretty much ever since there was multitasking. No, it wasn't built into the O
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I expect a GUI to be able to control all aspects of the OS that I need to access
Why?
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It is better because when you minimize a window, it goes somewhere far from its current location (a place on the taskbar which also depends on further windows being opened).
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Re:Catching up ever so slowly (Score:5, Interesting)
Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista is, only faster. Same bling available. Better consistency. Better features than WinXP (though probably not Vista). In fact, using Windows XP makes my ears bleed after only a few minutes.
X (not Gnome) has handled multiple monitor setups since before I started using it in 1997.
Gnome has strict accessibility and localization requirements and has since 2.2. Windows wasn't even localized in Thai until Gnome adoption there forced it to be, and even then they just half-assed the "start menu" and nothing else. A generation of Thais learned to do computing in a language they didn't understand.
ESD never had a problem with mixing stuff if you used it instead of OSS or ALSA. It even mixes stuff locally and outputs it to another computer if you want it to. Maybe your problem is that you didn't know what you were doing
Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.
Since we're playing this game, these are the places Windows doesn't live up to Gnome:
Gnome vs. Win95 or Win2000? Pshaw!
Parent
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Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista
That bad, huh? Well, I think I'll stick to something that's at least an upgrade from XP like KDE.
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Gnome can hide panel icons that you don't use. You put them in a "drawer."
Managing the network is the job of the operating system, not a desktop environment.
I'll quote myself, since you obviously didn't read my post the first time:
Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.
Getting slow icons is certainly annoying, and has been improved in recent versions, but it's not more annoying than clicking on the Star
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Re:Catching up ever so slowly (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it that windows can actually hide taskbar icons that I don't use.
I assume you mean the system tray. My question is, if you don't use them why would you even want them in the system tray? The very fact that Windows needs a "hide" option is a problem.
Parent
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Compare
Next, compare
Now tell me with a straight face that Windows knows how to look like Windows.
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By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI.
That's true, but only because you can't configure anything without the GUI. I could remove all of the command line configuration tools from Linux, and then everything that could be configured would be what would configurable via the GUI.
Here's my list of Windows GUI functionality complaints:
Windows only has one panel, ever. You can't remove the start button. You can't move the start button. You can't rearrange the start menu. Application launchers in the start menu are not organized. There are non-lau
Re:Catching up ever so slowly (Score:4, Insightful)
By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI.
I'm sorry, but most of us don't consider "regedit.exe" a GUI, at least not anymore than "gedit /etc/httpd.conf" is. And without considering the registry, then yes, there's plenty of stuff in Windows that you can't configure from within the GUI.
Parent
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not as good as being natively built into the UI, but there are plenty of workarounds for all the flaws in windows.
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gdmsetup has gone from recent releases. GDM is undergoing some fairly major changes and the developers haven't got round to reimplementing the preferences. You can make some changes by directly editing custom.conf, but the documentation is a bit sparse right now. Things which used to be easy (like turning off the people picker are currently difficult or not possible. Things are likely to improve soon but I don't know if they're sorted in th
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Gnome developers don't give a frak about BSD.
Really? The core GNOME developers may not develop on, or principally for, the BSDs but they are pretty receptive to patches from the ports and package maintainers. Since the release of GNOME 2.0, the code has certainly got more portable across different Unix like operating systems, which is quite remarkable as there's far more features that rely on OS specific implementations of things like Bluetooth. (Freedesktop initiatives have certainly helped).