Submitted by On popular demand, here is Davyd Madeley’s preview of GNOME 2.14. “Built on the shoulders of giants, GNOME 2.14 hits the shelves on the 15th of March. As well as new features and more polish, developers have been working around the clock to squeeze more performance out of the most commonly used applications and libraries. This is a review of some of the most shiny work that has gone into the upcoming GNOME release.”
Logging into GNOME 2.13 is now so fast, that splash screen becomes pointless. 🙂
Really? Also at the first login? Or at the second?
What machine do you have?
Greetings
Mike
I tested it on 1.4GHz athlon-xp with 256MB of RAM running Gentoo. I can’t remember the hard disk specs, but it’s not fast at all. I’m quite impressed. I didn’t find the the option to turn on composite in Metacity though. The version I have is 2.13.55.
Edit Update: Well, I just realized there is 2.13.89 ebuild at breakmygentoo that might have the compositor stuff.
https://svn.breakmygentoo.org/bmg-main/x11-wm/metacity/
Edited 2006-02-17 13:46
afaik the option to enable or disable compositor at runtime will be applied only in HEAD and not in the gnome-2-14 branch that will become metacity 2.14, see: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/metacity-devel-list/2006-February/ms…
but it seems that Davyd Madeley asked for immediate inclusion, even though it is a (partial) feature-freeze breaking: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/metacity-devel-list/2006-February/ms…
Edited 2006-02-17 13:52
That’s Davyd, not David.
This “the new memory allocator is faster when doing 1000000 things” is pointless.
I want to know how is going to influence that in real apps. I want to know how faster is gnome loging. Ie: I want benchmarks like the second one, not like the first one. They remember me of industry benchmarks: Manipulated numbers which try to tell me that $FOO is 10000x faster when in real life the code path that has been speeded up may not be so important. How many gnome app do “1 million allocations and deallocations of a GList” “with 1, 5, 10 and 20 threads each”? Really…
Another interesting thing to know abut that memory allocator is how well it behaves WRT. memory fragmentation.
Man pages in yelp: nice, kde has had that for years though. Gnomemeeting: How is the gaim (IM) integration being done? Does gaim 2.0 supports it through a plugin or something? IM is _the_ place where people uses webcam these days. (and: When is gnome going to have a native IM app, is gaim going to be merged some day?)
metacity: Ooooh, edge resistance. A killer and inovative feature! I’m compiling the CVS just because of that! [….]
Integrated compositing manager in manager which uses opengl: Really nice, kwin merged xcompmgr but this is indeed a step ahead.
The main major feature missing in gnome these days for my taste is getting a image and video thumbnail view for the file selector – it really sucks that I’ve to select EVERY image to see what it is, thumbnail views have been there for years. Also, I’d love to be able to order things by anything else than last modified date, like for example…size? (yes, already file in the 141154 and 325095 bug numbers but missing in this release anyway)
Edited 2006-02-17 14:04
Gnomemeeting: How about gaim integration? Kopete supports MSN webcam these days, and IM is _the_ place where people uses webcam these days. Is gaim 2.0 adding that
ekiga is not a im application (like gaim, kopete, msn, googletalk or icq), it is VoIP application, a whole different thing. compare it to skype, if you want.
I’m sorry to tell you that Skype *it is a IM application, as it has text message and online presence notification.
Skype always was and is a VOIP client. Text messaging and
online presence notification is not enough to call it an IM application because:
A)It is P2P ie Voice over IP that connects two clients.
B)IM means instant messaging : Skype is all about voice (No idiot uses Skype for text).
Does anyone know if there is any movement to intergrate Skype into Gnome? Not intergrate in the sense that it becomes a Gnome application, just intergrate so that Gnome meeting other Gnome Voip cleints will be able to dial out using Skype’s networks? I picked up a number with my Cyber k-phone earlier this year and since I’ll have the number for as year (at least) its important to me to know if I’ll be able to use my phone AS a phone when I’m in Linux.
Also, as someone who has turned on the composte manager and had to turn it off when doing any multimedia; doesn anyone else feel like its a cheat to make these typs of screenshots showing off the features then announce that they’re shipping withnthe manager turned off!
–bornagainpenguin
B)IM means instant messaging : Skype is all about voice (No idiot uses Skype for text).
Do you think?
The capacity of skype to scape to a firewalling rules has made it the default IM client on a lot of places. I haven’t used skype voice capabilities ever. And I use skype every day.
Well subjectively I can say that everything feels a lot faster. I am confident that it is not just a placebo effect either!
> This “the new memory allocator is faster when doing 1000000 things” is pointless.
It’s even more amusing when you notice that their old allocator was (6*) slower than the default malloc..
Sure their newer allocator is better (2*) than malloc, but still their new allocator look so good mostly because the old allocator sucked: being slower than malloc removes the point of using a custom allocator, no?
Wow, so many new features, I can’t waith to start using it.
worth the upgrade alone, even with all apps compiled with xinerama support they still dont open in the same place consistantly, that plus the speed/mem improvements, and enhancement to gnome terminal, they have satisfied every need of mine for now,, id rather they focused on this stuff for now, because gnome has been a bit slowish, and has needed some polish on its existing features for some time.. good work, hope it all goes as advertised
KDE 4 being a lot of time far away and XGL/compiz working well on Gnome I think Gnome is heading in the right way. The only problem is unintegrated plugins. KDE has the ability to integrate plugins nicely, Gnome well doesn’t integrate them well.
XGL is not DE dependent so KDE and any other DE or Window manager can use it.
In fact, compiz (the window manager from novell) was coded with kde in mind too (and people is already hacking it)
Besides the correction about compix and XGL people already made.
What the hell are GNOME or KDE plugins? Plugins for the panel? No, those are called applets. Plugins for apps or what?
Why did your comment got modded up? It’s wrond and totally vague.
Gnome doesnt have plugins? What u talking bout willis. Explain
…Linus will like this version and switch from KDE..!!!
Laughing out Loudly….. Linux is a skeptic of Gnome : He
doesn’t clearly like their policy of Keep It Simple. He will probably wait for KDE 4 anyways.
Laughing out Loudly….. Linux is a skeptic of Gnome : He
doesn’t clearly like their policy of Keep It Simple. He will probably wait for KDE 4 anyways.
Erm, I was being sarcastic… 🙂
I notice I’ve been marked down for my original comment. Good to see the Linus protection squad are here…
Edited 2006-02-17 15:08
He’s waiting for enlightenment just like the rest of us.
But not as nice as the 2.10 and 2.12 updates. But here I am wishing that Gnome 3 would be around the corner.
WOW!
Hopefully we Debian users will not have to wait as long as Gnome 2.12 took to come to unstable…
Does it mean it was axed from the release? It is quite useful when you have to share your computer with another person.
Looking at the module list, it appears it hasn’t been officially accepted yet…
http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointThirteen_2fDesktop
Although he included Deskbar, which appears to be in the same boat?
Thanks Davyd.
Great update by Davyd and GNOME 2.14 is going to rock, hope your happy because it’s features are what people have been asking for a agers.
Searching for files with nautilus search is great espically with Beagle intergrated, and I think 2.14 will be the best release so far. Just a shame the Tango icons missed this release but 2.16 will have a great new icon set.
The screenshots look really great! Very clean and beautiful and somehow they just feel right. I wish KDE (which I use) would look like this.
However, what really matters is applications. Right now, some very good applications like gimp and inkscape are written using gtk/Gnome, but other excellent applications like k3b, scribus, amaroK are written using Qt/KDE. But Qt/KDE applications do not integrate well with GNOME and gtk/Gnome applications do not integrate well in KDE.
Right now the user has to chose if he likes a clean, good-looking desktop, but miss some of the best applications, or if he likes a really functional desktop with the best applications available, but without real consistency.
Personally I think one of the most important things to enhance the Linux desktop experience is to make Qt/KDE applications integrate well with Gnome and make gtk/Gnome applications integrate well in KDE. For example, gimp and inkscape should use the KDE filerequester and the KDE theme when run from KDE.
actually if you use the gtk-qt theme engine off of freedesktop.org (seems to becoming standard now) which integrates nicely into the kde control center, gtk apps do works and integrate fairly nicely now in KDE (themes and fonts). On the distro I develop for the university I work at, KDE is our default, supported, desktop, however most of our “supported” core apps are either GTK based, or at least not QT. Works rather well (not 100% integration, but much better than without it)
http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/gtk-qt
Does gtk-qt’s opposite number exist?
ie Something that makes qt apps use gtk themes?
No, afaik. And it’s a pity, ’cause I did not find a good clearlooks lookalike for kde. I know, clearlooks started off as a plastik for gtk but… it now looks better!
As for icons, there is a “gperfection” kde companion I use for consistency (and for getting rid of those childish and garish glassy icons).
I know, clearlooks started off as a plastik for gtk but…
Argh! =)
Actually it started as a Bluecurve with gradients and rounded corners. Everyone was doing it at that time and any further similarities with Plastik have been purely coincidental (if there are any). Just pointing this out for historic accuracy. I’m not saying this because I think there would have been anything wrong with cloning Plastik, which was a very nice theme for its time.
I guess this may be of interest to you:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/metatheme/
It makes GTK+ and Qt look the same with neither being a second-class citizen. Still very much work in progress though, as you can see from the version number.
Try QtCurve, it looks very close to Clearlooks. I’m a Gnome user but I could not live without Amarok, K3b and Quanta, with this theme I can gnomify them a little. The icons are real problem since they are so different on both desktops, I hope Tango gets complete soon.
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=5065
why the heck did they do that?? thought I use KDE myself, I had to rip out it kscreensaver section and just make it call the vanilla xscreensaver-demo and such instead (works better with kerberos, and the interface is just better anyhow IMO).
from what I can see of this new gnome one, it only takes away the ability to fine grain your selection of screensavers now…
(mind you with jwz jumping ship onto osx now, I guess I can see _some_ justification for moving on, though he has released a new version even after becoming a machead)
I always see these drop shadows for menus and shading for windows in gnome screenshots, but last I checked (afaik) this wasn’t possible without bugs. Is this just edited for effect? Or am I missing out on wasteful eyecandy that I have been waiting on due to screenshot tweaks?
That application is still only using wav format. Support of formats like ogg is not implemented yet. I am not sure why Gnome team choose to not include them. Perhapas someone will hack it (in a sense of enhancement).
Because the sound planned to be used are ‘beep’ and the use of ogg instead of wav would only serve to increase the CPU load without reducing significantly the disk size?
Many new useful features. Sabayon looks great. The only problem is that in most corporate enviroments profiles is something that needs to be handled and applied to many machines. E.g. one profile should be applied to all machines in the sales department, another for people in HR.
According to the Sabayon webpage sabayon only handles the profiles, but have no means of actually deploying them to the machines where they are supposed to be used. Lets hope they get a LDAP backend in the next version. Or why not make it easy to handle Gnome settings in (Oh, horror) Windows Active Directory.
That would make it possible for Linux to move over threasholds to places where it otherwise would be banned.
At least this looks like a good start.
As I read the sabayonne page, I also noticed that they plan to support non Gnome apps such as Openoffice.org that too sounds very promising.
As a longtime KDE user I’m a bit biased, but this release is looking quite nice.. Performance improvements are always nice. I always thought that if Gnome was going to go the “simple” route, it should at least be fast. Looks like that is starting to happen. Gnome terminal, in particular, has always been a dog so it’s nice to see that it got fixed.
On the font rendering speedups.. I’m not sure if it’s the same work, but if Davyd means fontconfig then KDE will benefit from these improvements as well. Especially in application startup time in KDE’s case.
I agree with earlier comments on composite and drop shadows. If most people can’t use them, don’t pretend like it’s a feature of Gnome. KDE has had a compositing manager since… couple versions back, but you will notice the visual guide to new features in KDE 3.5 does not show it active. People will be dissapointed when Gnome does not actually come with composite manager enabled, or their video card doesn’t work properly with it (like so many do).
About the names. For years, people have been ragging on KDE for their K names. Now, people seem to go completely the opposite way with application names. Sabayon, Pessulus, Ekiga?? Those names mean absolutely nothing! Kiosk is at least descriptive of a common use case, and Gnome Meeting would remind some people of Netmeeting, which it basically is a clone of. Let’s get back to descriptive names!
The Deskbar looks big and not very usefull. But maybe some people will like it. I’ve never had a use for any of those sidebars, even though there are tons of clones out there.
The new features in GEdit look good, it appears that it is going in the direction of Kate (ie, a programmer’s editor), but does that leave Gnome without a lightweight, simple editor?
Also, prizing that GEdit can now save to remote locations seems odd to me. Any KDE app can read/write to any remote location (webdav/ssh/ftp etc) through ioslaves, and I was under the impression that Gnome had a similar framework. So why is it a big deal that GEdit can do it now?
The sound preferences dialog looks pretty big. Maybe a list view would have served them better here.
Am I missing something, or is the power preferences dialog way too simple? It has a slider for when to turn off the display and when to sleep the computer.. But what about profiles? It’s incredibly useful to have at least a “desktop” and “mobile” power profile for laptops.
I think my favourite feature from this guide is the notification framework. I like that style of notification, I just hate each application doing their own thing, in a slightly different style. A common framework is great for this.. I hope this gets done in KDE too. There is a wishlist entry open for it here:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78112
The new features in GEdit look good, it appears that it is going in the direction of Kate (ie, a programmer’s editor), but does that leave Gnome without a lightweight, simple editor?
Perhaps Leafpad could assume that role. It’s quite a bit snappier than GEdit for me.
“I was under the impression that Gnome had a similar framework. So why is it a big deal that GEdit can do it now?”
You are correct, gnome has gnome-vfs however previously gedit hasnt used it. Now it does!
I agree with earlier comments on composite and drop shadows. If most people can’t use them, don’t pretend like it’s a feature of Gnome.
The shadows in this guide are not generated by composite (aside from the composite screenshot of course). It is very common to put shadows behind screenshots of windows because it just looks nicer. The gnome screenshot tool even has the option to generate them automatically.
The Deskbar looks big and not very usefull. But maybe some people will like it. I’ve never had a use for any of those sidebars, even though there are tons of clones out there.
That’s a misunderstanding, deskbar is not a sidebar. What you see on the screenshot is just the popup that appears when you type in something into the deskbar. It can be as large or small as you want and can even be a single button, which opens the input box when pressed.
Deskbar is infinitely useful because it can replace practically every other input box you might ever want to use (like a dictionary or the Alt+F2 run dialog) and offers a lot more like life document- or google search.
Also, prizing that GEdit can now save to remote locations seems odd to me. Any KDE app can read/write to any remote location (webdav/ssh/ftp etc) through ioslaves, and I was under the impression that Gnome had a similar framework. So why is it a big deal that GEdit can do it now?
Well, it’s just that the gedit devs wanted to make darn sure that it works reliably before they enable it… So for GNOME users it’s good news that they finally got around to it.
Hey, Daniel… what gnome-screenshot tool are you speaking of there? I’ve never seen a “create drop-shadow” option in the default screenshot-tool of gnome. Is this some bleeding-edge version from CVS or some “well-burried” compile-time option of it?
Best regards…
MacSlow
Edited 2006-02-17 23:50
It was the default behavior in earlier versions (for single-window screenshots), but I guess that’s not the case anymore for performance or other reasons. You can still get the effect if you launch gnome-screenshot from the commandline with –border-effect=shadow. Only really useful with –window and –delay=something.
It was the default behavior in earlier versions (for single-window screenshots), but I guess that’s not the case anymore for performance or other reasons.
Actually, I think that’s my fault. The GNOME Documentation Style Guide recommends against putting drop shadows or other effects on screenshots in documentation. I believe the change was made to make the defaults conform to the recommended documentation style.
The new features in GEdit look good, it appears that it is going in the direction of Kate (ie, a programmer’s editor), but does that leave Gnome without a lightweight, simple editor?
The preview didn’t insist on it, but the truth is that gedit internals have been reworked for months in a development branch that is now gedit 2.13.x and will be gedit 2.14. according to developers, startup times dropped drastically, and new features (one for all, now tabs can be reordered Ă la firefox 1.5) are now easily being included
I’m working on a project called Scribes. The aim is to provide a simple yet powerful editor for GNOME. For those not feeling the mini-IDE direction Gedit is heading towards, it might be a good alternative.
http://scribes.sf.net/
http://scribes.sf.net/snippets.htm
A user made this screencast.
http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/images/blog/scribes.html
It’s a nice project, but Scribes is not a text editor either.
Just like gedit, it’s a “small IDE” for programmers and scripters.
What GNOME needs is a REAL text editor that was made for writing text, not code.
An already existing example of such an application would be Leafpad ( http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=365 ). No code completion, no code highlighting, no code this, no code that. Just raw text.
There is no difference between editing text and editing code. But lets define what an IDE is. An IDE is an integrated development environment. It is a self contained environment that provides facilities for building projects, debugging projects, outputing the results of projects, managing project resources, linking with compilers, connecting to CVS/subversion, etc
A text editor on the other hand is an application that focuses on processing and manipulating text. Whether or not text is code, is irrelevant. Because all code is text but not all text is code. Good text editors have the ability to process any text, regardless of whether or not the text is code.
If in fact GNOME needs a “REAL” text editor, then it would need one that integrates well with GNOME (that is uses GNOME libs), does not suffer from usability issues and that is versatile enough for a broad variety of users.
Edited 2006-02-18 10:42
I thought leafpad was for xfce and now has been discontinued in favor of mousepad.
leos is right about the names…I got a bit flamed by some GNOME devs for http://www.happyassassin.net/2006/01/08/names-names-names/ , but I stand by it…
I partly agree, but mostly disagree. I quite like the fact that Gnome applications don’t all have lame names like WinEverything, KEverything, and iEverything. But at the same time, I do see his point about the difficulty in filing bug reports when the menus say “Text Editor” but the bugzilla requires “gedit”.
Perhaps he is correct, and Gnome should start globally referring to projects by the names that users see in the menus, with the current clever names reserved for purely internal purposes. This would mean having a unified name in the menus, window bar, gnome.org, the bugzilla, the process list, the help system, everything.
Normal users aren’t going to be filing bug reports. More advanced users will know what the name of the apps are.
Bug reports are done automaticly in the new bugbuddy.
You mean names like Firefox, Opera, Windows, The Gimp, Nautilus, Blender, GNOME, KDE..?
You obviously didn’t read the post:
“No, “Windows / Mac / Firefox doesn’t do it” isn’t an acceptable argument.”
I’ve always thought that was a ridiculous argument – when you point out something in GNOME, or KDE, or Linux that sucks and someone says “well, the same thing sucks in Windows and OS X too, so we don’t have to fix it!” Why? That just doesn’t make any sense at all.
Has the build system been improved/streamlined?
Last time I looked at Gnome, I remember it being made up of many different interlocking interdependent pieces. Recall that Pat V. dropped Gnome from Slack, partially because of what a pain it was to build.
The things I’ve been waiting for are:
– more simplified and streamlined build process,
– aggressive removal of old deprecated parts of Gnome, and
– A simple control to make the computer go to sleep.
I’d be pleased to do without the fancy stuff, such as:
– Sabayon “changing settings inside a live, nested GNOME session.” ??
– Weird integrated desktop search features. At most, I’d just use a GUI’fied “find” command.
– ‘features like drop shadows, menu fades and “wobbly minimise”‘
– Deskbar
BTW, looks great what they’re doing with gedit. Plug-ins written in Python even. *Nice*. I’m currently a NEdit user, but gedit is looking better and better.
Edited 2006-02-18 02:07
A simple control to make the computer go to sleep.
The shutdown dialog has been redesigned to offer a sleep/hibernate button.
Plug-ins written in Python even. *Nice*.
Nice indeed, but the Python extensions that the GNOME web browser (Epiphany) has offered for the last few releases were the inspiration for this… 🙂