GNOME 2.24 Released 163
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.
Re:Huge number of bugs? (Score:2, Informative)
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]
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.
Re:Is this feature available? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good! (Score:4, Informative)
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/gnome-utils/2.24.0-0ubuntu1 [launchpad.net] the day before yesterday.
Re:Catching up ever so slowly (Score:2, Informative)
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 Start menu and waiting for five seconds to have it show up. You can turn off icons in the menu, too, if you want that.
Re:I thought they were skipping this release? (Score:3, Informative)
2.24 -> 2.26 -> 2.28 -> 3.0
Re:Did the "people picker" in GDM ever get fixed? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did the "people picker" in GDM ever get fixed? (Score:2, Informative)
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 the 2.24 release.
Re:Catching up ever so slowly (Score:3, Informative)
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 OS, but what does it have to do with the OS? Just another bundled app.
2.3 Hello AOL IM and MSN. Just another bundled app.
2.4 Finally an OS feature!! And the one that I mentioned I would love to see in Windows. Also, Asian language support has been available as a download from MS since windows 98, and starting in 2002 they started putting it in a package called Global IME - available in several flavors of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
2.5 Deskbar. MS has implemented a taskbar, that since Windows 98 has been able to perform these functions - however they chose to leave it to 3rd party developers to develop apps for it, which, by the way is what Gnome does too. They also made the entire desktop available for these lovely 3rd party apps. For some wierd reason MS took the ability to float toolbars and dock toolbars out of Vista, but it was available in every version of XP.
2.6,2.7,2.9 well you already pointed those out.
2.8 DVB? More 3rd party software, has nothing to do with OS operation. ATI's All-in-wonder has brought TV to the Windows OS since 1996.
Talk about localization. SP3 may only be available as of yet in 8 languages, but MS standardized on 24 localized languages starting with Windows 2000. In 03-04 they added the Language Interface Pack (LIP) for 27 more languages. That's 51 for those who are counting. And that's not 80% translated like Gnome, MS made sure things were finished.
By my count we've only identified one OS feature that Windows does not have or is not capable of doing. Just because 3rd party developers haven't created specific functionality doesn't mean that Windows can't do it. I don't really want most of these "features" anyways, like IM clients, TV broadcasting, and time tracking.
OK so that's 8 out of 9 user features that windows has done or was capable of going with 3rd party addons since Windows 98. There is also 3 accessibility features, all of which MS has done well since Windows 95. All total we're at 11 of 12, which is darn close to my original estimate at 92%. I give YOU a D+ also.
So maybe I misspoke. I really only saw 8 total OS features really listed there, the rest were 3rd party apps, which MS would typically get sued over including. So I'll give you just 7 of 8, so I really meant 88%. Sorry.