Xfce Diary

Thursday, September 08, 2005

GNOME 2.12

So, the next GNOME release is out, and even Eugenia came down to earth for a short review. Indeed, applications like Evince (which I personally prefer over Acrobat Reader) and Sabayon are great improvements, but speaking about the desktop as a whole, I don't see any evolutionary steps (as Eugenia calls it) there. Ok, I'm not using one of the two or three Linux distributions that are claimed to be supported properly by GNOME. But if GNOME now requires Linux distro A in version X to run properly, then it's actually atleast one step backwards.

From what I saw:

  • Nautilus: Nothing amazingly new here, but I shouldn't comment on Nautilus anyways.
  • Evince: Really nice. It would be even better if they would drop the GNOME dependency here, tho. There's not really any need to depend on GNOME (well, except the VFS stuff, but hey, we're talking about a PDF viewer here, not a file manager).
  • HAL integration: What? Where? Ahem, requires a special Linux version. Ok, good abstraction there.
  • Panel: I'm not compatible with this new Add item-dialog. The old one was better, but that's surely a matter of taste.
  • Metacity: I'm too used to my xfwm4 setup, so this is probably more a layer 8 problem, than a problem with metacity.
  • Sound Juicer: Nice, definitely. But not an evolutionary step either. It's a CD ripper.
  • System Tools: Not working.
  • Menu: Half-hearted, but I doubt that we'll do better here with 4.4.
  • Resources: Still too much memory consumption (e.g. why does Nautilus use GTypeModules for the extension if it keeps the extensions in memory anyways?). Doesn't feel faster either.

All-in-all a nice release (if you use one of the few fully supported systems), but by no means an evolutionary step (I'm not a regular GNOME user, so excuse my ignorance if this release looks like an evolutionary step to you). It's a new GNOME release with some highlights, but atleast as many drawbacks. Taking into account the amazing manpower of GNOME (with quite a few very skilled developers and programmers), the financial support from big companies like RedHat and Novell, and the number of testers available, it should be possible to do better. If not, maybe they could send a few of their guys over to help with Xfce instead. ;-)

Eugenia should be careful what she says. A sentence like "However, even as it is today, Gnome 2.12 is the best X11 DE there is" would be better phrased as "I, Eugenia, think (while writing this), that Gnome 2.12 is the best X11 DE for me".

Update: Of course that should revolutionary instead of evolutionary, and I shouldn't blog after 20h.

posted by Benedikt Meurer at 22:15

5 Comments:

  • No, I don't have to be careful about this. If you read other reviews from others on many sites or magazines, they don't keep their tail safe saying "for me". They simply make a statement as people who are in the industry.

    By Anonymous Eugenia, at 9/9/05 00:48  

  • Erm, evolutionary in this context means progress in small steps, gradual, as opposed to revolutionary which means a big leap forward.

    That is what you describe as well, isn't it?

    By Anonymous Jasper, at 9/9/05 08:01  

  • Indeed, that's what I meant. So, yes, it's an evolutionary step, but not a revolutionary step.

    By Blogger Benedikt Meurer, at 9/9/05 10:59  

  • Which is exactly what I said. :D

    By Anonymous Eugenia, at 9/9/05 16:28  

  • Ok, so excuse my ignorance, Eugenia. :-)

    By Blogger Benedikt Meurer, at 9/9/05 16:37  

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