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:3, Interesting)
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 X otherwise terminates... but sometimes if you just logout and back on, it will rearrange the applets and icons on your panels. So annoying.
I mean this is simple basic functionality that has been broken for years. Whoever wrote the GNOME panel code deserves a cockpunch and some lessons in programming.
Exchange 2007/MAPI Connector waits for GNOME 2.26 (Score:1, Interesting)
It looks like the Exchange 2007/MAPI Connector we've all been waiting for isn't in this release.
The road map shows it's planned for the Gnome 2.26 release.
RoadMap Link - http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap
Tabbed browsing... (Score:1, Interesting)
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!
Re:Huge number of bugs? (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 make it stop happening, but the industry again and again refuses to apply them. And by industry I mean you and me right here. We keep picking cheap shoddy crap (and sometimes expensive shoddy crap) over correctness.
We have the same kind of quality crisis going on in software as exists in governance and finance and energy and the food industry. Like the other crises, it has the potential to crash us back to the stone age one day soon, and is already stealing real people's real money today. We've got to wake up and realise that we cannot afford to tolerate security mistakes, and then write tools and methods that allow us to work in a zero-tolerance environment.
Anything less, and we have to realise that we hand the keys to all our users' identities and life savings to the Russian Mafia the moment we release our buggy 0.1.
Seriously. Get it right to start with. Don't rely on patching.