GNOME 2.22.0 release candidate has been released. “This is the last unstable release before 2.22.0. It’s been a pretty fun ride since September. New features. Bug fixes. Translations. Documentation. Lots of bug triaging too. And we’re getting ready to start again for 2.23! But before, we need to make sure 2.22.0 will be rock-solid. There’s still a few days before the hard code freeze, so it’s not too late to fix this last bug you’re ashamed of.”
But what is the status of gtk development these days?
I remember in the past reading about the speed of development of gtk and the number of developers is very low. Is this true? Why do you think it is so that we are able to find so few developers to work on the only really big open source bazaar toolkit?
Is gtk holding gnome back?
(And slightly off topic (This paragraph is not a critique but just an observation))
With the version number becoming so high (22) i find it harder to remember which version they are on. Not sure why but it might be because the relative size of the change in number becomes smaller every time. ((22-20)/22) << ((8-6)/8)
Edited 2008-02-28 21:15 UTC
Oh no. You appear to have version-number-itis!
Its a debilitating disease where one assumes that version numbers have literal meaning. 🙂
Don’t worry too much about version numbers. Glib/Gtk is on a different release schedule to GNOME, so the version numbers are bound to get out of sync.
As for developer effort/number of new features added, like all of FOSS it comes and goes in waves. A lot of people have invested money in Gtk, so its not going away. It recently had a quiet period, and now it (incl GNOME) seems to be bouncing back. KDE4 has inspired a lot of motivation on the GNOME side, and I’m willing to bet that the next GNOME release will have many new features, to keep pace with KDE4.
Thats why competition in FOSS is good.
Edited 2008-02-28 22:27 UTC
The only thing holding Gnome back in my opinion is stupid bugs that have remained for 5-6-7-8 years without being fixed despite patches has been submitted. Not because the patches haven’t been any good, but because it seems the Gnome community can not decide how things are suppose to work.
What is making me say that? Well for once the infamous variable length window list buttons that just got fixed in the previous release after what…5-6 years? And the debate about []’s around minimized windows on the window list is still yet to be decided. I could probably go on like this forever. They are getting there cause I have seen many of the ancient bugs being fixed lately, but they still got a long way to go.
Just mod me down if you are a Gnome fanboy and are blind to these problems, and are not even reading the debates on bugzilla and the mailinglists before making up your mind. I for one will keep watching the debates and let them make up my mind.
If it’s anything like Gnome in Ubuntu 8.04 alpha5 then this Gnome release will be like KDE4 – not really ready for adoption. Due to introduction of GVFS everything is really shaky and unstable. Nautilus has been crashing every few minutes and it’s been doing so much weird stuff I don’t even know where I would have to start if I wanted to submint bug reports (and I’m sure they don’t go unnoticed).
I doubt it’ll be usable for the final release. It’s a shame, I’ll have to skip this one. It’s a bugger that this release is called “RC”, seems like there are even more parallels with KDE4… and Vista.
Ubuntu is in real trouble too. Even if they release Hardy 2 months late (like Dapper was) I still have a hard time believing they can get this done in time.
Edited 2008-02-28 21:28 UTC
Seriously, I haven’t had any problems with it, it seems as stable as Gnome normally is. I am running it on Ubuntu on my Laptop and it hardly ever crashes. Not sure why you are getting so many problems :/
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu
I’ve said that I’d report that bugs but I’m overwhelmed by their amount. Most are hard to reproduce too – just random crashing.
And no one has yet looked at my patch from 2007.
I dont know what you mean, I tried Hardy alpha 4 and it was very stable considering, nowhere near as bad as you make out. Do you have another agenda?
Edited 2008-02-28 22:44 UTC
I haven’t tried any of the Hardy Heron alphas yet–getting Gutsy to work on my Laptop was a major endeavor in and of itself! Which was strange because I never seemed to have half of those issues under Feisty Fawn… Now that I’ve finally gotten somewhere with Gutsy Gibbon I’m supposed to hop ship to the next release? I think I’ll sit this one out for a little…
Try to remember that everyone’s hardware is different. I’ve had many issues with Ubuntu on my Laptop, but for some reason my Desktop runs it just fine. My parents desktop is unable to run Ubuntu altogether due to its insistence in seeing the onboard video instead of the PCI card–but runs Fedora perfectly. As noted above there can be very different behaviors across Linux releases, even within the same distro!
Don’t automatically assume someone has an agenda because they report they’ve had problems; sometimes their report simply means they’ve had a bad experience and nothing else.
–bornaginpenguin
Edited 2008-02-29 04:53 UTC
Exactly my experience as well. With Edgy my laptop worked perfectly. With Feisty I got a few problems, but nothing I couldn’t handle with a bit forum-surfing. With Gutsy I finally just gave up. I am also sitting this one out for a while and see what others say first…Unfortunately when I tried finding the solutions for my problems I got flamed on the forums where people said “NO it is not a problem! everything works perfectly! You are wrong” and my bugreports are STILL not touched by anyone…kinda getting an Apple vibe from the community nowadays. Sad but true.
(this was not an attack on Ubuntu, but go ahead and mod me down to prove my point).
I think the most awesome part here is that you just *can* site Gutsy out for a while. You got the freedom to run it, no newer version is shoved up your throat and you will even receive security updates for a while. I love freedom
Not a flame but can you point out your bug reports and forum threads? I would not call “it works for me” flames so much as stereotypical and unhelpful for users having hardware issues. For that matter what is your hardware? I doubt I can help, it is mostly morbid curiosity. I stick to hardware I have confirmed before hand works well with the distro I intend to install on it. You stand a much higher chance of success now at throwing a distro on random hardware but it is still a long way from a guaranteed success.
I do not believe the OP has an agenda, but I do believe the problems he is having are not being experienced by most. Miscz is falling under the hubris of self. “This is not working for me, everyone must be seeing these problems. This release will not be usable.” Also of note is if you go to the Hardy forum at Ubuntuforums.com you will notice a sticky thread at the top about gvfs in Nautilus ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=676747 for those who do not know where the forum is). In that thread there is an open call to test gvfs with Nautilus and a statement that its inclusion in the final Hardy release is in question due to how new it is.
If you are going to use a alpha of a product (not beta, not RC, not final release) the least you can do is read the support channels for the product and provide meaningful feedback rather than spouting complaints on random websites about a feature that was specifically singled out as in need of testing. Better yet you can provide useful feedback where it may do some good (bugs db and support forum) rather than being judgmental elsewhere.
Further, there is a world of difference between hardware problems and DE problems. Hardware problems are usually much less widespread and are generally harder to reproduce. The large number of combinations and options in hardware will always make this an area where some machines will have more problems than others. In contrast the DE is an area where generally, not counting problems due to hardware, failures can be reproduced and debugged more easily than hardware issues. So really what the OP is complaining about and your problems with various releases have little in common in terms of the reliability of Ubuntu in general or the Hardy Alpha release in specific. If whatever Linux you are on is working for you, by all means stick to it. And if you want to try Hardy once it is released I would think the live CD should reveal whether the hardware compatibility issues you described have improved with the new release.
I believe both of you in your stated experiences, but the OP is an example of someone who should not be using an alpha. He does not check the support channels, is resistant to reporting bugs, and spreads complaints about the alpha where they will not only do no good but could prejudice others about the final release based on incomplete information.
I have never said that my opinions are more than, well, opinions. I usually do not add “IMO” or say “that’s your opinion” – whose else opinion would it be?
I’ve tried alpha5 on 2 computers and both had been really unstable. Both run various Linux distributions well so I doubt those are hardware problems. I’ve been using alphas of many previous releases of Ubuntu. I start usually with 5th as they have proved to be stable enough in my experience. I usually do not submit bugs and I know I should but you’re going quite far saying that I shouldn’t even be using it. I do not have time to report everything, I waste enough time doing stuff like trying out weird operating systems
I am prepared for trouble and I’m discussing them on OSnews, what’s wrong with that?
What is wrong with it is you are commenting about bad stability of something that is marked as unstable and in need of testing in the support channels. Rather than checking the support channels for a fix or working with other community members to make one you are whinging on a board where the chance of useful feedback on the problem are very low.
Further you are comparing an Alpha release to two problem child gold releases saying that you have no idea how it it will be ready on time and you doubt that it will be ready even if it came out two months late.
The point of Alpha releases is to get it into the hands of testers who can write good bug reports and provide feedback so that the final release is as stable as possible. If you can not begin to figure out what is wrong and do not have the time to debug/write a bug report in the first place then you should not be using alpha releases of the software. By installing an alpha then complaining about its stability on OSNews you are not helping in any way, you are simply generating noise at best, fud at worst.
Taking as a simple example, for close to a week around Alpha 3 I was not able to use any KDE4 apps or login to the KDE4 desktop. By searching launchpad and the forums plus a little conversation we figured out it was a bad package that had been fixed but there was still a stray file that I had to delete by hand. I wrote a bug report and searched the forums for a fix. I did not complain on OSNews (or /. or reddit or whatever) saying Hardy was hopelessly broken, I could not even log into KDE4.
This is why I say that you should not be using an alpha release. Because not only are you not helping, you are spreading doubt before the project has even released a beta, much less a rc. Competence or ability have next to nothing to do with it. Alphas are all about giving the developers the information they need to make the release stable.
We are talking about gnome not hardy(hence the subject), I had to back up hardy mayself on my own experience. Whats to say they are not hardy bugs, it’s in alpha after all.
It’s funny how KDE4 always fits into the equation in a GNOME announcement as though to deflect it’s bad press and problems.
I love the posts complaining about *completely free software*. Especially when they’re based on the ridiculous assumption that no bugs have been triaged between two leadup releases (2.21.91 – 2.21.92).
Until you’ve tried the RC, I’d caution you to refrain from judging it like the last release. If you have specific problems, you can help the community (and yourself, imagine that!) by reporting the bugs. A cursory glance at GNOME’s bugzilla would have shown you whether your complaints here have credence, before you bothered to post disparaging other people’s freely donated labor.
In this case, as things are not finalised, it’s difficult to be justified in treating such software as final.
I hope, though, that you’re not one of these people who believes that free software (open or closed source) should be given extra latitude simply because they don’t charge. Buggy or poorly-designed software is just that and being free doesn’t make it any better. It’s just that paying for it makes it that much worse.
I hope though, that you’re not one of those people who believe that using an open-source development model as is the same as a closed source one.
In this instance those with the talent or money can even *fix* any problems. I know that’s a poor reply, but any individual can submit a bug report, talk on a chat site, or get involved…those here I would imagine would enjoy that.
Anyone else can roll back a version without being tied to the newer one. The reality is though bugs/features/regressions are generally ironed out earlier due to the transparency of the development process. In fact isn’t that the point of all these alpha/beta/release candidates. Its not perfect just a better model.
Stangly I find it most odd anyone would suggest the denial of any problems in open source free software when there bug reports are *open* and available, another advantage of the development model.
Now back to Nexuiz 2.4
Using the latest updates to the Fedora and Ubuntu alphas, I’d have to say GNOME-2.21.91/92 works pretty well for me.
gvfs bugs are being fixed very fast. network: and ftp: were fixed. I believe obex-ftp is also working now.
There were problems with icons which were fixed.
I can’t confirm any of the problems on the latest Hardy packages.