The latest GNOME Development release, 2.5.4, is ready for testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.
GNOME Development Release 2.5.4
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have gone to the Gnome development website (url: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/) and cannot find a list of new features that will come with the 2.6 release.
The only thing I hear people talking about is a new file-manager. Is there anything else of significance in this upcoming release (e.g. fonts, gui-config etc…)?
I woudl think you would be grateful for getting a new filemanager!
You mean file-selector, right? They’re not canning Nautilus; are they?
> You mean file-selector, right? They’re not canning Nautilus; are they?
No, he meant Filemanager!
That is, the filemanager will not be canned but will change its behaviour for the desktop, spatial (think Amiga and old Mac finder), it will still be possible to browse the harddisk the old way thrue a new menu item (Browse filessytem).
I can hardly wait for ‘spatial’ Nautilus, The way i use links from the desktop (no deep tree), is very suitable for a filemanager that remembers every aspect of the window on a particular location. I think my Amiga years (at home untill 1998) are still showing
The fileselector will change too by the way.
The changes been made in GNOME are largely architectural and subtle in nature. “Under the hood” works if you may. I think the GNOME community is a lot more focused on polish, than on adding needless features at the moment. Once the GNOME base is solid and faultless, then they can focus on trivial shebangs.
So the changes in GNOME-2.6 will not necessarily be glaring, the would most likely be inconspicuous improvements over GNOME-2.4 with very few new added features, like the inclusion of Rythmbox and totem as the default music and media players and most likely gstreamer as the default multimedia framework back end in gnome.
There will also be numerous user interface improvements in many GNOME applications like, Epiphany, Galeon and Evolution, to mention a few. I don’t foresee large changes in GNOME until 3.0. Because really, GNOME is already quite polished. It just needs more gnomified gtk applications, like, Gaim and Xchat in my opinion. Also if there could be a gtk front end for OpenOffice in GNOME, that would be wonderful. I think the KDE folks are doing that. I really don’t like OpenOffice.org’s graphics toolkit’s look. I hope the Ximian and SUN develops would write a completely new GTK+ front end instead of the hack they are currently using.
New features are sure to be incorporated (off the top of my head):
– Use of gtk 2.4, that includes a new fileselector and some changes to the api that makes programming of menus easier and more consistent.
– Password management thru gnome-keyring (no more typing ftp passwords in nautilus’ location bar.
– New mixers using alsa and based on gstreamer.
– Spatial nautilus mode, as others said.
– New template folder in nautilus. Every document placed there by the user, will appear in a “new…” entry in the nautilus context menu.
Plus these enhancements (off the top of my head too):
– Nautilus first detects file type by extension, and uses mime sniffing just when the user manipulates (selects, executes, drags…) a file, or a file has no extension. Up to 40 times faster when loading a crowded folder, specially in remote filesystems.
– Yelp (help viewer) now transforms help files on the fly, and displays help much faster than previous versions. The “Loading…” message in help won’t be so cumbersome.
Now, the ugly side:
Evolution, Rhythmbox and Totem won’t still be part of the desktop (officially). All of them were not introduced (totem), or backed off by their authors (rhythmbox, evolution), as proposals for 2.6.
In the case of Evolution, because it lacked time for refinement (1.5 is a very unstable version) in the 2.6 timeline. In the case of totem and rhythmbox, because they aim to integrate new features in the latest gstreamer versions (like dvd playing and tag editing), so they would have to break feature and ui freeze.
Personally, I just wish they didn’t bother with that Epiphany crap; I hate the idea of having to effectively install two browsers just to use one. Firefox would be a much better option in my opinion.
they need their own browser(or browser interface) so that there is more integration with the gnome desktop.
Trust me, the new epiphany rocks
Please elaborate, why does the new Epiphany “rock”. I see nothing dramatic in screenshots, nothing that leads me to think that the latest developements would make me like it any more then 1.0 (which I just hated).
I personally echo Dermo’s sentiments, if I have to install Mozilla anyway, it makes much more sense to me to just use Mozilla. It puzzles me why there is a GTKHTML library when its own webbrowser doesn’t appear to use it. I will never use Epiphany or Galeon again until its dependencies on Mozilla are broken, and it is the single weakest eliment of GNOME.
Apparently GTK 2.4 will be significantly faster, so that appears to be a good developement. I can almost understand why Evolution, Rhythmbox, and Totem are still not part of GNOME also. I mean as much as I like these projects GAIM, GIMP etc are also not in the mainstream release of GNOME, so its not really a big deal. They provide a streamlined interface when they are installed with GNOME, so its not an issue. I just wish Mozilla didn’t have to be installed to continue that streamlining through to the browser.
Seriously, as stupid and insignificant as this issue may seem to some people, its the single reason I continue to switch back to KDE shortly after any new release is tried of GNOME on my box. I give every version a chance, but I simply cannot live with having 2 browsers installed just to keep a streamlined interface…
Please elaborate, why does the new Epiphany “rock”. I see nothing dramatic in screenshots, nothing that leads me to think that the latest developements would make me like it any more then 1.0 (which I just hated).
Well, I’m assuming tuggy is referring to the new download management system , and slight tweaks to the bookmark manager.
if I have to install Mozilla anyway, it makes much more sense to me to just use Mozilla
Well, Mozilla is installed by default on almost every modern distro. If you’ve opted not to install it , then it isn’t hard to install mozilla anyway. The reason the Gnome devel team is not looking at this as a major issue, is that they hope that the Mozilla Runtime Environment (or is it GRE) is released in a usable form soon. Won’t have to deal with 2 browsers then..
It puzzles me why there is a GTKHTML library when its own webbrowser doesn’t appear to use it
Well , gtkhtml is[/i] used by Evolution and Yelp (different versions though), and is being actively developed. The reason its still around is that it can be used for lightweight html editing (eg. HTML mails). Again, this is probably dependent on the maturing of mozilla’s embeddable html editing capabilities.
Bottomline: A few megs of extra software is worth bearing for a while.
Yikes! didn’t close the bold tag….. Oh what I’d give for previews….
That’s pretty much what Ramanan said.
Epiphany now has a better download manager (that integrates nicely with the Notification Applet), a better bookmark system, and it uses the same icons as the rest of your gnome desktop (usefull to look more integrated with the rest of the desktop).
GtkHTML is not supposed to be used by webbrowsers, its goal is to render just simpler html to be used in some applications like Evolution, Help systems, whatever…
I like Epiphany, it is exactly what it tries to be – a web browser. It has a very simple UI that doesn’t get in your way, unlike Konqueror for example.
Konqueror on the other hand has a VERY complicated and bloated UI. Have you ever tried to edit the toolbars in Konqueror? Ever got the result you wanted?
Well also epiphany is the only browser out there that’s over 80% translated into Irish 🙂
http://frink.nuigalway.ie/~dubhthach/gaeilge/epiphany1.1.3/
its the single reason I continue to switch back to KDE shortly after any new release is tried of GNOME on my box. I give every version a chance, but I simply cannot live with having 2 browsers installed just to keep a streamlined interface…
Oh, so you can’t live with 2 browsers, but you can live with 3 (three) text editors? Give me a break, please.
Victor.
errr.. i think you made a mistake, that post you quoted is not mine.
“Konqueror on the other hand has a VERY complicated and bloated UI. Have you ever tried to edit the toolbars in Konqueror? Ever got the result you wanted?”
More successfully then with Epiphany, yes… the interface used in Epiphany to change the toolbar is cumbersome and unintuitive to say the least…
Konquerors interface is not “bloated” at all, it simply has the options that you might want to use in each menu logically. If you do not go into the menu’s its no different then Epiphany. I would rather have everything I could possibly want to do as an option in the UI then go digging into GConf for various things because I can’t find them in the UI. I hate GConf with a passion, and avoiding it is not possible if I really want to configure anything to my taste.
Feel free to disagree with me here, but I like to be able to customize things. Maybe you can live with defaults, but simply fact is defaults are not my preference, they are someone elses. By default, half the screen is taken up by Epiphany’s toolbars (this is exadurated, but its too big). I spent a good hour trying to get Epiphany to look something like a browser I wouldn’t mind using, then it crashed and my preferences were lost… That was my last experience with Epiphany…
Umm, each are for different tasks. Kedit is for editing code and config files. Kwrite is for simple document editing, and Kword is part of KOffice (thus not part of the default installation of KDE) and is for processing advanced documents etc.
I could do without Kwrite, agreed, but its vastly smaller then Mozilla.
I only use Kedit, which IMO runs rings around Gedit. It gives you a CLI via a Konsole Kpart, and just makes life so much easier… Gedit seems to basically be Notepad with colorfull highlighting of code…
Compare the install size one day on a Debian box of kde-core vs gnome-core, and you will see why I use KDE… don’t tell me KDE is bloated in any way, its vastly smaller then GNOME and actually lets me do what *I* want to do…
I thought the 3 text editors in KDE were KWrite, Kedit and Kate (for ****’s sake stop the K names).
KWord is part of KOffice.
The Epiphany bookmark system just sucks in Epiphany. It would of been a great browser but the developers refuse include this feature.
Anyway, now that Firefox is out I dont need to complain anymore. I just hope all Gnome distributions include firefox instead of Epiphany until the developers realise that nobody is using their browser.
I’ve started a bit of a browser war here! That wasn’t my intention! I don’t mind Epiphany that much, it’s the requirement to have Mozilla installed as well that bugs me. But that said, if Mozilla are working on a runtime environment that removes the need to have Mozilla installed, then more power.
One thing though: I don’t understand the need to have a streamlined browser in GNOME to begin with. As someone mentioned earlier, Mozilla is installed with pretty much every distro these days anyway, so why do Havoc et al think that we need an extra browser? As for the UI non-issue – Mozilla can be compiled against GTK and when the ‘classic’ theme is activated, it uses standard GTK widgets in whatever desktop theme you are using. Likewise Firefox.
Anyway, horses for courses and all that.
dubhthach: tà sì go hàlainn!
Can any of you imagine what Firefox would be like now (level of polish) if both Gnome and KDE were to drop their browsers and pitch in fully on Moz Dev? Its not like it would be even remotely difficult to customize the resulting browser for their own branding and marketing… Some things in the programming world make less than zero *SENSE* to me at all. I realize there is a Chest Thumping and Screaming at the top of their lungs “yeah but we did it OUR way” type of nonsense. But Dangit I just want a browser that friggen works!! Firefox is exactly that, it works. Is the The *Best and most perfect* /shrug maybe… maybe not. But if you friggen DEV’s would knock off your chest thumping and PUSH firefox hot and heavy It would Surely be an awesome browser by anyones measure!!
KWrite is a nice little text editor
KEdit is only supplied because it has Arabic and Hebrew support.
Kate is almost an IDE.
And oh, victor, you can easily remove KEdit and Kate and still have the KDE application KWrite. You cannot use the Gnome application Epiphany when you remove the non-Gnome application Mozilla.
Mozilla can use GTK widgets, Epiphany makes Mozilla use GTK2 scrollbars. But buttons, dropdowns, checkboxes and radio buttons don’t look like GTK. Not even in Galeon or Epiphany. And Mozilla renders pages much slower than Konqueror.
But will the new file selector embed Nautilus views, so that it supports FTP and SMB? Will the session manager finally work*? Will the sound recorder not crash anymore on startup? Won’t GConfig forget the description and help of the options anymore, when you change them?
* Try this:
1) Start GEdit. Type something. Try to logout. At the “Save?” dialog, click CANCEL. At the then following Save As-dialog, click CANCEL. Your file is lost.
2) Open a non-important file. Overwrite the contents with garbage like “hfdhfdsgukfa”. Try to logout. At the “Save?” dialog, click CANCEL. Your changes will then be saved.
“More successfully then with Epiphany, yes… the interface used in Epiphany to change the toolbar is cumbersome and unintuitive to say the least”
How can drag and drop toolbar editing be cumbersome and unintuitive? You just drag the toolbar elements to the place you want them, just like in Mozilla Firebird/fox.
“By default, half the screen is taken up by Epiphany’s toolbars ”
Perhaps by default the toolbars take too much space… I personally like the way the toolbars are arranged in Firebird/fox, so I arrange the toolbars in Epiphany in a similar way ( 2 toolbars, 1st with the location bar and commonly used functions like back/forward and the 2nd is the bookmarks toolbar ) — it takes no more than 2 minutes.
In Konqueror I could never arrange the toolbars the way I wanted because there are many different toolbars, each holds something different. And the number of the things you can put on the toolbars is overwhelming.
Just a note: kwrite and kate share the same backend, they are just different front-ends to the same editor engine. One very easy for simple editing and one full featured which I think make sense. kedit will be dropped once kate’s and thus kwrite’s support for right-to-left scripts is as good as kedit’s.
nosrail wrote:
“The Epiphany bookmark system just sucks in Epiphany. It would of been a great browser but the developers refuse include this feature.”
Not only that, there is no way of changing the background and font color, my old eyes can’t hack the white background
with the black fonts.
It seems if “it is not invented here” then it’s no good.
Well, I just have an AMD K7 650Mhz (single processor) and KDE works perfectly. I don’t see real improvements between these Gnome releases, that’s all, so I wonder what’s all this fuzz about. That doesn’t make me a zealot.
I’ve started a bit of a browser war here! That wasn’t my intention! I don’t mind Epiphany that much, it’s the requirement to have Mozilla installed as well that bugs me. But that said, if Mozilla are working on a runtime environment that removes the need to have Mozilla installed, then more power.
Some distributions (at least FreeBSD and Gentoo) are offering a light version of GNOME 2. For example, I use the gnome-light package on my Gentoo installation. It doesn’t come with Epiphany nor Mozilla. I can install Firefox without having to install them. I also installed Evolution and it didn’t complained that ye ol’ Mozilla isn’t there. Sure, these “hacks” still need some polish (for example, the gnome-light package is missing gnome-applets) but at least you have the option.
“Well, I just have an AMD K7 650Mhz (single processor) and KDE works perfectly. I don’t see real improvements between these Gnome releases, that’s all, so I wonder what’s all this fuzz about. That doesn’t make me a zealot.”
Well, Gnome is very polished. I’ve never liked KDE: too much options everywhere, I don’t need them myself, I am using the CLI most of the time anyway.
Gnome is simple, and each application has few options. Take a look at rhythmbox, it is like itune: few options, etc… Sure, it is far from perfect, rhythmbox is in beta stage anyway.
This gnome vs kde war is ridiculous: you certainly don’t need a super computer to make kde work; sure, there are redrawing problems with kde (but they are worse with gnome, for me, on a PIII 800 with 256 Mo ram) compare to windows XP, in my experience. But it just works. No tweaking, no 5 menu for a useful option. I don’t need any FAQ for using gnome (hopefully, because the homepage of gnome is really awful compare to kde.org) Kde is just too much for me: the default setup is awful, keramik is just ugly, icons are ugly, etc… I really don’t need all these options.
But I am kind of old fashioned, I almost never used nautilus, for example.
Gnome and gnome apps have WAY too few options. If some people cannot tolerate this broad freedom of choise then hide those extra options and settings under some “Advanced..” button. I want to get rid of not-expanding gnome-panel handles and I want my windowlist applet to sort windows by desktop!
Ephiphany bookmarks sytem sucks as does galeon 1.3.12’s. When pressing Ctrl-D it ask title of bookmark. F*** it, why can’t it just shovel that bookmark into the default location where it used to be without wasting invaluable 0.5 seconds of my life.
To those calling people bringing up KDE zealots, saying KDE is bloated:
I find it funny to hear such comments after what I already stated here. As I stated, kde-core is about 75MB smaller then gnome-core on Debian. If something is smaller, how can it possibly be more bloated? Saying the interface feels clustered with too many options I can see, but its curtainly not bloated.
I don’t know what everyone else’s experiences are, but I found KDE 3.1 to feel a lot faster then GNOME 2.4. KDE 3.2 is even faster, although apparently GNOME 2.6 is also far faster. I came to this thread to learn about GNOME developement because I am interested, I just happen to like KDE enough to stick up for it. Both DE’s have their advantages and disadvantages, and if someone in a KDE thread puts down GNOME in a manor I disagree with, I am just as fast to jump to GNOME’s defense.
My only goal when disagreeing with someone’s opinion is to at least have them elaborate further. Maybe I will agree if I understand fully where they are comming from, usually I don’t, but sometimes I do…
How did this become a KDE discussion???
beats me…
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Andrew said “for ****’s sake stop the K names”.
Umm, most projects use a common first letter for their sub-projects. GNOME is part of GNU, which seems to still G infront of everything that has ever existed, you are just complaining to complain which is rediculous.
Rhyotte: KDE is to proud of Konqueror to ever work with Mozilla. KHTML was used by Apple for a reason, and its not because Gecko is better, or faster.
Tutsuo said “…if all these one-after-another stream of releases aren’t just a marketing thing to opaque the KDE 3.2 release that just ROCKS!!!”
As suspicious as it may seem, there has actually only been one release for each branch. GNOME 2.4.2 I think was released, and now this. I curtainly don’t feel its a marketing scheme. I don’t think they truely think people will like minor tweaks and a developement branch that is losing projects (Totem, Rhythmbox, and Evolution were supposed to go in, and now won’t make it) can truely compete with such a drastic upgrade to KDE.
I personally believe KDE 3.2 will be better then the final release of GNOME 2.6… but hey, here’s hoping there is more competition between KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.8… Hopefully what won’t be going into GNOME 2.6 will make it in by then.
/me goes to look for the release dates…
You didn’t really think you could have a thread with no mention of KDE did you?
No really, there hasn’t been a GNOME or KDE (or any other WM for X) thread that didn’t mention at least KDE and GNOME in as long as I can remember. Its kind of excepted now I think.
At least these threads no longer also see comparisons to Windows and MacOS X interfaces anymore.
David: hasn’t it occurred to you that you use the CLI most of the time because the DE isn’t powerful enough?
Isn’t that a clue that something is very wrong when you’re running such a bloated desktop you don’t actually use?
BTW, it happened to me whilst I used Gnome. Doesn’t happen that often since I switched to KDE.
I think here Apple did NOT want to go with something that was controlled by another company. Gecko is a better renderer than KHTML, but it comes with the baggage of XUL for the most part. KHTML shall get bigger and heavier. This comes with adding features. You have to keep legacy code there, and this is what makes something like a renderer difficult.
As the web gets new standards every day, the only way to cover them all is to make the renderer bigger anyways. Anyway, there are differing opinions as to whether KHTML is quicker or slower than Gecko. if you go to [url=http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/003/software/mac/browser/mac-bro…]Browser smackdown[/url] , you will find Gecko to be faster overall than KHTML with Safari. Where is your evidence to prove your statement.
Actually, GNOME IS a CHOICE. If you like tons and tons of options, then find something that gives you the options. Otherwise GNOME is not providing them soon. They are intent on providing things that just work.
Think of it this way, Apple is so confident in their UI they only provide one. You cannot theme it easily at all. But it is [retty successful. I daresay if OSX was on x86 and was free, pretty much no one here would install Linux in its stead. Its called polish, options are only there when you fail to make a good interface.
hi
these are old comparisons on the review. a clean code base like khtml is preferred by apple and thats why it was choosen.
gre isnt still as seperated from xul as needed
ram
Someone mentioned that Gtk 2.4 will be significantly faster. I hope that is the case. Even on modest machines I find Gtk 2.4 to be much slower than qt – especially tree widgets. What is even more disturbing is that when Eugenia did the interview with Havoc Pennington he acted like he had never heard of the problem. WTF.
Personally, I’m a KDE guy but intend to start using gtk# with mono eventually. You already have more overhead with gtk#, so I don’t want people with 800 mhz machines griping because tree redraws are like molasses. I wonder if Gtk+ on windows has this problem too. If not, maybe it’s a Gdk issue.
Also, does anybody know what the future plans for Bonobo are? One of the reasons I like KDE more than Gnome is the component integration issue. From the limited number of developer mailing list posts I’ve seen, it seems that not that many developers like or want to use Bonobo.
No matter how you approach the issue, having 2 dominant desktops for linux is not a good thing. Personally, I wish KDE had won it long ago, but because of various takes on the licensing issue that I won’t get into, it didn’t. If Gnome becomes the de-facto, dominant desktop then so be it. But, I wish would become the de-facto. That doesn’t prevent anyone from using KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox… What would have been interesting or I guess could still be interesting to shut the Gnome folks up about complexity is to have a minimal default interface for KDE and all its major applications and then with ONE CLICK you can change the entire desktop and all major applications to go back to the “complex” options way.
I agree with that idea. Given XML GUI, there is no reason a simplified KDE UI couldn’t be available, and you could switch the UI as easily as switching themes. It wouldn’t be a complete fix — panels would stay as they are now, but the stuff that people really complain about — bloated toolbars and menus, could be fixed. Actually, I’m in the early stages of doing something like this myself. We’ll see how it turns out
CLI? Well, “ls –help”. OMG, soo many many options. I don’t need all of them. Let’s simplified “ls” now, make it unbloated…
Actually, ls is a good example for a well designed application. It does just one job and does it well. The commandline options aren’t strictly speaking configurability but rather features. They are all offered without hindering the usefulness of the basic “ls” command, which really can’t get any simpler.
Almost all CLI applications are like that, they are easy to use and work wonderfully together (“ls | grep foo” is much more elegant than “ls –grep foo” would be IMO). If KDE would be like that, I wouldn’t complain at all. Well designed interfaces that do one job very well and are carefully crafted for good usability. I don’t mind how many options and features you offer if you can do it without making the application more complex than it has to be and without causing breakage. Just don’t give me the possibility to reconfigure the entire interface, because that’s what I learned programming for. I don’t need it. It has no value. If your application doesn’t work optimally in it’s default configuration already, then I’m not interested in using it.
I prefer the UI of most GNOME applications because they are better, not because they offer fewer options. Offering few options is just one way to reduce code complexity and making sure the standard configuration does everything it should do very well. Nobody is saying that you can’t design perfectly usable application with a great default configuration and unlimited configurability hidden behind some expert button, which you usually never have to touch. But nobody has done it yet and I just don’t believe that, considering the complexity of software, it’s really worth the effort, considering that the very nature of this functionality would be, that you should never need it.
To get usable applications, I’m perfectly willing to change my habits, even if this requires five minutes of re-training. The gains in productivity I get out of this outweight the effort required to change my habits by far. Often I even learn more efficient ways to work just by adjusting to how a certain application works. And if something strikes me as really inefficient, then I’d consider it a bug and discuss it with the developer. If the application doesn’t work in it’s default configuration for a certain task, then I’ll check what the problem is and try to fix it in the code for everyone rather than in the preferences just for me.
I understand that people who can’t program don’t feel very good about this, but they can still talk with the developer about their specific needs (without flaming) and try to find good solutions (that’s called usability work).
Lots of configuration options can give you the illusion that you can fix every problem by yourself (without coding), but my experience with KDE has always been, that once I have to fiddle with the settings to make something work better, the result is very sub-optimal, because it wasn’t designed to be used like that and with so many options, the chances of a certain combination of settings being well tested are very slim.
One obvious example would be the toolbars on KDE. I believe that text below icons is more useful, because it helps finding the right button on everything more complex than a web browser or media player, and it provides a larger click target (I’m not short off space on my monitor). But when I simply change the KDE toolbars to show text below icons, I get this horrible result:
http://liebesgedichte.net/Temp/Screenshot-konqueror.png
Text alongside icons is even more unusable (just try it) while it doesn’t even offer the much more useful “priority text” option (only showing short labels besides important icons). So while KDE has like a dozen settings for toolbar appearance, none of them but the default work for me. GNOME offers just three options, but they work all as intended and are very useful (icons only, priority text and text below icons). This is just one of many cases where more configurability does in fact not equal more functionality.
On the upside, I like the ability to increase the size of the icons, but even Konqueror, KDE’s primary application features a button on it’s default toolbar that will _not_ scale, so it looks rather cheap (the download manager button). Don’t even get me started on configuring the toolbar buttons, others have mentioned this already.
Bottom line, it isn’t just about lack of options, configurability and features, it’s about well designed interfaces versus generic interfaces. Configurability leads to generic interfaces, so this isn’t really to avoid. The suggestions to just remove everything but the most basic options from a “default” KDE installation won’t make the interfaces any better. So don’t expect either GNOME or KDE to go away anyway soon. If it would be so easy to combine unlimited configurability and a simple, well designed interface, then we’d all be using vimacs… It’s probably not surprising you, that I’ve always been more of a vi user.
Well said, Spark. I just feel irritated when people just repeats words like “too many options because I never use them”, a very selfish attitude.
Regarding option vs feature, I agree that ls and grep should be separated because they provides different functionality.However, I believe that most ls parameters is to _configure_ how ls displays its output. Hence, they are option.
Rgds.
One thing that has been keeping me from using GNOME or installing it for newbies, is it’s lack of launch feedback. This was partilly fixed in the 2.4 release, what is/has been done for the 2.6 release? KDE has great launch feedback, freedesktop.org standards seem to be helping the GNOME peeps out. GNOME is simpler for new users to use because of it’s streamlined interface, but the lack of launch feedback really annoys newbies. (Opps now I have 10 mozilla’s trying to launch cause I thought it wasn’t working…)
As far as I know, no GNOME specific application does not support startup-notification (a freedesktop.org standard used by both KDE and GNOME). GTK != GNOME, there are many GTK applications that have not in any way aligned with GNOME. In fact I can’t name any good GTK application that is currently part of GNOME.
For me, the best GTK applications include:
GIMP – The folks who brought us GTK originally.
Evolution – was supposed to be part of 2.6, but apparently won’t be…
Rhythmbox – not sure why this is not part of GNOME yet.
Totem – some things I don’t like, but mostly nice.
GAIM – I wish this would get into GNOME, I hate having to install it seperatly all the time
None of the above applications are part of GNOME, I have left out those applications recently aligned as “GNOME Office” officially also. Abiword is good, most of the rest of GNOME Office doesn’t compete with alternatives though. GNOME offers a nice collection of GTK applications, but I think the mature projects are right to be seperate. It is these applications though that don’t currently support the startup-notification libs, so please don’t blame this on GNOME.
I probably won’t try GNOME 2.6 though. I probably won’t until Totem, Rhythmbox, and Evolution are part of the product officially. I also really hope GIMP and GAIM align with GNOME, for no other reason then I believe both interfaces kind of stand out within a GTK environment. They just really don’t fit in as well as most other applications. Hopefully with GNOME involvement though, these applications will better fit in with a GNOME desktop.
Well I think I am done… I shouldn’t post here when I have been drinking, but I don’t think that really shows in my post, I hope not at least. Hope you all spent Valentines day with someone special, I wish far more that for one I had someone to spend Valentines day with though (no offense).
Frank, you are confusing some things there. Being part of the GNOME Desktop does have absolutely nothing to do with whether the application in question is a “GNOME application” or not. Inclusion in the desktop release is only done for some very central applications (yes, the line is a little bit blurry) to sync release dates, translation and such. Many perfectly fine GNOME applications are not part of the desktop release and will never be. It is not the idea of GNOME to bundle everything in one big official package.
Evolution, Rhythmbox and Totem are 100% GNOME applications. GIMP and Gaim will never be, but obviously they integrate pretty well into the GNOME desktop, too.
Startup-notification works fine here in 2.4 with (almost) every application when started from a launcher. There is no startup notification when I open a file from Nautilus and I’m not sure if that’s fixed in 2.5, but I think I heard something about it…
I see little problem in having many browsers, they are programmed in different toolkits and a developer used to the konquerer/khtml api may not be of much use for mozilla or epiphany. By having many browsers avilable different ideas can be tested and if they are any good the will soon show up in all browsers.
What I can’t understand is why must each browser have their own bookmark file format and bookmark file lokations.
Perhaps its time to introduce a .freedesktop.org folder where settings standardized settings and userdata could reside.
Here we could have a standardized format bookmark file, a trash folder, an icons folder etc. Desktops like KDE and Gnome really have to be more interoperable.
I agree completely. Now that Mozilla, Firefox, Konq, and Epiphany are all good browsers I don’t see one dominant browser standing pulling away from the others. Besides, 3 of the 4 I just mentioned all use the same renderer anyway.
Also, since I don’t see Gnome or KDE really becoming that dominant over the other in the near future better interop between the two should occur. Personally, I would like to see Gnome to maybe adopt some of KDE’s underlying technology because to me Gnome is really just a bunch of apps that happen to use the same toolkit(yeah, I know there’s more to it than that), where, because of its underlying technology, KDE apps are much more integrated into the DE. If that was not to occur it would be nice if the two desktops could converge on an independent interop/component technology.
I’m a KDE user. I’ve tried Gnome in the past and never liked it. But there are a few GTK apps I use:
GIMP
Galeon 1.2.x (1.3.x is trash–I’m purely a 1.2.x user)
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Firefox (I tend to alternate, browser-wise)
AbiWord (ONLY when I want to have compatibility with M$Word)
gFTP
gAIM (I tried to like Kopete, I really did…)
XChat
XMMS
You’ll notice that of all of them, there’s one Gnome app on the list. The rest are just GTK apps.
Frankly, I use them because the KDE versions aren’t that good, not because I like GTK. In fact, I hate GTK. Depending on your theme, it looks either sloppy & unprofessional or sickeningly fuzzy & bright, with no other choice. IMO, the latter is worse than the former–when I see screenshots that resemble the look the Gnome2/Ximian people are pushing, it makes me want to ralph. Antialiased fonts + just-slightly-off-white colours + rounded-everywhere, too-large widgets = bad. I can get rid of the font problem (with way too much effort), I can use a more grayish theme, with less rounded widgets (ThinIce for both GTK1 and GTK2). But then it looks like the former (sloppy & unprofessional), with all the widgets looking bulky and sloppy, and still too-large. Thank goodness Firefox and Thunderbird use XUL–MicroFirefox/MicroThunderbird looks great, and very Qt-ish.
Qt, on the other hand, tends to be sleek and professional. Even the uglier themes (Keramik comes to mind) don’t have GTK’s bulkiness.
Did you try KBear, Konversation (CVS version is much better than latest release) and Amarok?
Konversation is pretty much EXACTLY like XChat, almost EXACTLY. Apparently both are based on Amirc or whatever its called, but Konversation looks like XChat with a Qt theme… Why remove an application and install one that looks the same… seems more logical to just get a Gtk theme that matches your KDE desktop…
I can’t say as though I have used Kbear or Gftp, I presume Kbear has some advantages? Personally I just use console for ftp
Personally I don’t like XMMS, and use Beep instead, its basically the same application afaik, cept Beep is GTK2… Amorak seems nice too though…