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Gnome 2.14 Released 348

Posted by Zonk from the hooray-for-shortiez dept.
joe_bruin writes "Beware the Ides of March... the Gnome people have announced the release of Gnome 2.14, right on time to meet their 6 month release schedule. See what's new in this release, as well as the release notes. New features include many more searching options, fast user switching, and speed increases to all the apps you know and love." From the release notes: "Just as you would tune your car, our skilled engineers have strived to tune many parts of GNOME to be as fast as possible. Several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster, including text rendering, memory allocation, and numerous individual applications. Faster font rendering and memory allocation benefit all GNOME and GTK+ based applications without the need for recompilation. Some applications have received special attention to make sure they are performing at their peak."
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Gnome 2.14 Released More

Gnome 2.14 Released

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  • Like the way wnck-applet ties up my system every few days.

    Ah well, I guess I could always go back to icewm.

  • yeah but (Score:3, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:38AM (#14932695)
    Yeah, but can I run it under Cygwin on XP on an Intel iMac?

  • Beware ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Random BedHead Ed ( 602081 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:41AM (#14932732) Homepage Journal
    Dude, the Ides of March is, like, so yesterday.

  • Memory Improvements (Score:4, Informative)

    by ramrom ( 934556 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:42AM (#14932744)
    The new Dapper Drake with Gnome 2.4 use 179 MB of RAM (Less than default Win XP) for the default system, which is way better than the previous versions and all the applications seem more responsive too.
    • The power of computing and the utility of the OS has absolutely nothing to do with the ram it consumes on bootup.

      Launch a word processor, web browser, email client, desktop chat, shared drives to a server and then let me know how much memory is used. (real world scenerios)

      Also let me know which one is more responsive, easier to use and integrated the best.
      • A bit defensive are we? I'm pretty sure he was just mentioning that Gnome has made a lot of progress on its memory usage. My guess is that at one time or another Gnome used more memory than Windows XP, so he sees the fact that it is now lower than Windows XP as a sign of improvements.

        I really don't think he was trying to claim that Gnome is now better than Windows XP because of this one measurement. Nobody is going to steal your prescious Windows XP box from you so calm down.
    • A lot of companies and open source projects seem to have a focus now on making things faster and using less resources recently, which I think is great news. I just updated Suse 10.0 on my laptop to a new KDE and Qt version (3.5 and 3 repectively, I believe), and things are really faster and more responsive now. I'm eager to download the Gnome live CD too and test.

      Java 1.5 and upcoming 1.6 have improved startup speeds, GUI rendering (single threaded Open GL) [java.net] and cut down on real and precieved memory usage [java.net] to

    • Re:Memory Improvements (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @12:31PM (#14934029) Homepage Journal
      The new Dapper Drake with Gnome 2.4 use 179 MB of RAM (Less than default Win XP) for the default system

      What? A default Windows XP install uses about 70MB doing nothing. You can easily run Windows XP on a machine with 128MB RAM total - it's just that you're essentially limited to one application before swapping. (And, generally speaking, only one "document" in that application at that...)

      The problem is that most Windows programs are giant memory hogs, so when you start installing non-default software (especially things like Office that like to preload) you start pushing the memory usage up and up and up...

      I'm loving my Debian Linux install at work if for no reason other than I don't have to run the corporate-required Norton Anti-Virus on it. Things are so much faster without Norton. A basic Windows XP install isn't terribly resource-hungry - it's just that the standard bundle of software that comes with most Windows XP computers, simply put, sucks.

      • And I just finished a Windows Server 2003 install into a Virtual PC image that we can use in-house for testing -- it came out at 67MB, after all security patches installed but before any server roles or user accounts are configured (besides Administrator). I was pleasantly surprised, though the install is sloooooow into a Virtual PC. Ah well -- at least you can do other things with the host PC while the virtual one is chugging away.

      • Re:Memory Improvements (Score:3, Informative)

        by arevos ( 659374 )
        What? A default Windows XP install uses about 70MB doing nothing.

        Measuring memory usage on Linux isn't a simple business. Frequently memory usage appears much greater than it is, due to a number of reasons. For instance, if 10M of libraries was shared between 10 processes, then a process manager would report 90M more memory than was actually being used.

  • Easiest way to check it out.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:44AM (#14932782) Homepage
    Is to grab an Ubuntu Dapper preview live CD [ubuntu.com] (and best of all, it's not an install CD, so ubuntu won't email your cleartext password to world + dog [joke])

    It's pretty nice! I've been using the pre-releases for a while....

  • Gnome 2.14 (Score:5, Informative)

    by rcmiv ( 68991 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:47AM (#14932806) Homepage
    A good overview:
    http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/ [gnome.org]

    If you're running ubuntu dapper, it updated to 2.14 wednesday. It isn't really immediately distinguishable from the previous version but then, if you are also running xgl/compiz, who the hell cares?

    http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=916 [tectonic.co.za]

    -rcmiv

    HA! HA! I have the cube!
  • The 3x speed improvement along would be worth the upgrade. I still am using aterm because Gnome Terminal is SOOOOO SLOW!!! Besides that, its always had trouble displaying my mutt sessions.

  • GLib == good (Score:5, Informative)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) * <tom AT thomasleecopeland DOT com> on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:49AM (#14932829) Homepage
    Gnome's got a great library in GLib. I wrote a tutorial for IBM [ibm.com] last year on the GLib collections; there are so many useful utilities and data structures in there. If you're writing a C app on Linux it's definitely worth a look, and if you're already using the GLib collections, take a look at that tutorial to see if you can optimize anything, like using g_list_prepend vs g_list_append.

    And if it helps you, please buy my completely unrelated book [pmdapplied.com]!
    • Yes
      GLib == Good

      but

      GLib-implemented-in-OO == Better

      I like GLib but there are far too many work arounds since its not truely OO driven.

  • Canadian English is now supported, eh ;) (Score:5, Funny)

    by norskeld ( 947658 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:55AM (#14932886) Homepage
    Just look at the bottom of this http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rni18.htm l [gnome.org] page:
    ...Also noteworthy are that British and Canadian English are supported.
    It must have been a really hard work to add trailing ",eh"...

  • 2.14? (Score:2, Informative)

    by ArcherB ( 796902 )
    When is that going to be approved for Gentoo and be available in Portage?

    I just upgraded to 2.12.2. I have to admit that I have noticed a significant performance improvement, especially when compared to KDE.

    I look forward to this release.

    • Re:2.14? (Score:4, Informative)

      by tetromino ( 807969 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @11:38AM (#14933352)
      Most of the 2.14 packages are already in the official portage tree (and, at the moment, hardmasked). According to posts by gentoo devs in the forums, gnome-2.14 will be in ~arch by the end of the week.

      And if you can't wait for two days and don't mind a few bugs, you could emerge 2.13.92 from the breakmygentoo overlay...
    • When is that going to be approved for Gentoo and be available in Portage?

      It will probably be available within the next few days will be stable in about a month. That is my guess.

      • Re:2.14? (Score:2, Informative)

        by j79zlr ( 930600 )
        Stable in a month? You must not use Gentoo. Gnome 2.14 will be hard masked for atleast a month, then in ~unstable probably until Christmas. I love Gentoo, but the stable release cycle is absurd.

  • "I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Simon (S2) ( 600188 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:55AM (#14932895) Homepage
    You have to read this [livejournal.com] as well.

    • Re:"I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stu (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, 2006 @11:34AM (#14933305)
      Tha journal entry contains some excellent points that are well made.

      But I am in a childish mood so must point out that you seem to be missing the entire raison d'etre of the GNOME desktop.

      That is that a user should be able to control their entire computer simply by allowing a large drop of drool to fall from their mouth onto a special pressure sensitive pad. By allowing drool to fall from the left side of their mouth they will have "left drooled" on the selected object. Similarly by allowing drool to fall from the right side of their mouth they will have "right drooled" on the selected object

      This will provide all the feature they need to work with the single file held in their home directory (further subdirectories and fiels having been banned as it "breaks the spatial paradigm" and "causes the user confusion")

      Can you tell I'm not a fan?

  • de/up/grade (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @10:57AM (#14932908) Homepage Journal
    I'm glad they fixed some text rendering. Because after the last upgrade, my Ubuntu 5.10 renders text illegibly (some weird garbage font that does display properly after being selected with the cursor) in some apps, including Firefox and Evolution (but not Mozilla). I never even got a response to my discussions in the GNOME bug forums.

    I'm hoping a reinstall of Ubuntu's next release, now delayed, will return the lost quality of the previous version with the promised speed of the next version.

    And I'm hoping that biannual OS reinstalls aren't the price of a feature-complete OS, as Microsoft would have me believe.
    • I used to get annoyed by the OS reinstalls. Then I switched from GNOME to KDE.

      Seriously, I had similar problems--a GNOME library broke and all my text disappeared. I decided that was it, and switched. No problems since, in spite of going through two major KDE point releases.
      • I prefer the GNOME applications, especially Evolution. And GNOME's overall integration tech is more complete under the supposedly joint GNOME/KDE/etc desktop alliance specs. So I put up with the noncritical bugs, while friendly KDE users gently remind me that they don't have them. Of course, there are probably noncritical KDE bugs to annoy, but mainly I stay because the pros outweigh the cons.

        And GNOME really loves me, and always apologizes so nice when the bruises really show :(.

    • Re:de/up/grade (Score:4, Informative)

      by AeroIllini ( 726211 ) <aeroillini@NOSpam.gmail.com> on Thursday March 16, 2006 @12:17PM (#14933847)
      And I'm hoping that biannual OS reinstalls aren't the price of a feature-complete OS, as Microsoft would have me believe.

      From the Ubuntu website [ubuntu.com]:

      "The installer may not be GUI, but you only ever need to use it once, because we support ongoing upgrades via the network, from version to version. You never need to reinstall the operating system, just upgrade from each released version to the next when you want to."

      At the most you should only have to reboot biannually... to use the new kernel that comes with each new Ubuntu release.
      • I use the GNOME desktop "update notifier" bundled in Ubuntu every few days when it offers upgrades. FWIW, it offers kernel upgrades (requiring reboot).

        As I detailed in my post, I'm planning to reinstall the OS because the usual update system isn't fixing a bug. Since it seems that some component is corrupt, or some metadata, maybe the fonts themselves or their registration, I'm going to reinstall from scratch. Ubuntu's APT system will make reinstalling all my apps a lot easier. Maybe even selecting to rebui
  • Will the new version move most rendering operations into the GL hardware on my Inspiron8000's GeForce2Go? Without crashing my desktop like CompMgr does?

  • Faster, slicker (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fak3r ( 917687 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @11:08AM (#14933031) Homepage
    I always had one foot (*pun intended*) in Gnome and one in E17/Openbox/Xfce4 - but recently I've installed Ubuntu Dapper, and then Compwiz/XGL - holy cow! Yes, you need good graphics card, but my nVidia 6600GT is up to the task. The desktop is now totally snappy - even things like Firefox seem faster - feels like the graphics really fly on the screen now. As promised everything is faster, especially the startup of the main desktop. Apps are quicker, and even the menus just pop up (no annoying delay waiting for the icons to catch up on the menus). Oh and all of a sudden Gnome-terminal is just about as fast to launch and respond as Xterm! Woo-hoo! Considering that's what I use the most, this is a welcome improvement.

    After reading the review from yesterday I tried out Epipany, and it's come a long way. There are only a couple of more config options I need, but if I get those I'll start running that in place of Firefox. For all of it's percieved 'heavy-ness' it feels nice and snappy now, and I think I'll be sticking more with Gnome for quite some time. Nice job.

  • What's new for users? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jejones ( 115979 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @11:11AM (#14933066) Journal
    GNOME now features an integrated screensaver. GNOME Screensaver is compatible with the "hacks" popular in Xscreensaver, but also has lots of new features unavailable in Xscreensaver, like being essentially unconfigurable by the user, who can't be trusted not to put rude messages in GLtext.

    Figure 16. Configuring the few GNOME Screensaver properties we deign to let the user control

  • FC5's release pushed back 5 days (Score:3, Informative)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @11:12AM (#14933076) Homepage
    Fedora Core 5 was supposed to have been released yesterday as well but for reasons having to do with the 64bit version, it was delayed. Perhaps, then the new GNOME package will be included in the release. Here's to hoping!

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @11:16AM (#14933123)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It's an interesting browser. I recall trying back when I still used Mandrake.
      I saw Mozilla Firefox, with a slightly different skin, and only partial extention support.

      Perhaps someone can inform me why exactly I would pick this browser over Firefox?

  • Button order... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bstocker ( 886888 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @11:33AM (#14933288) Homepage
    Please do not take me wrong, I like GNOME very much and i see it as a superior Desktop for UNIX Systems and the most important competitor to KDE.

    The problem I have is the button order on dialogboxes, which can - AFAIK - not be changed. GNOME adopts the same schema used by Apple. It is based on a study which says that the readers eye starts searching for a information on the lower right corner of the screen (I did not read the study, so my description may not be accurate). As a result, a typical button order looks like this:

    (Cancel) (Save)

    On KDE, Windows and many other Desktops, a "most important first" scheme is used. The promoters of this scheme state, that people (in the western world) read from left to right and expect the most important information to come first. therefore, the order looks like:

    (Save) (Cancel)

    In principle, the button order is not a problem, if all of the applications use the same schema. For example, if You use a Mac, you may expect consistent order. And there is no "right" or "wrong" order, there are just different philosophies.

    The only problem I see is the consistency. If you are a GNOME user and also use KDE Apps (or vice versa), you may find the different order disturbing. Of course, if You use Firefox and Kate every day, you can get over this. As for me, I work with a swiss/german keyboard in the office and with a US-keyboard at home. After having problems in the first days, I now switch intuitively between the keyboard schemas.

    But anyway, it would be nice to see GNOME and KDE apps adopt the sema Interface guidelines or let the user choose which one he likes.

    • Re:Button order... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by creepynut ( 933825 ) *
      You missed the important bit:

      GNOME aims for Action oriented buttons. Which would be ...

      [Save] [Don't Save]

      Where as Windows uses ...

      [OK] [Cancel] ...for almost ALL dialogs. No matter what. Sure, its consistant, but for users who don't read the dialogs, which most don't, OK and Cancel aren't very descriptive of what action the user is actually selecting.

      I've always felt GNOME is in the right in this respect. Users will never stop complaining as long as Microsoft continues ignoring any sort of Human Interf
    • No need for shity studies about reading habits of people in the "Western World" (as if other people where so different, bidi doesn't count here, indeed those people don't think and act like us, don't they !?). 99% of people who come to Linux from Windows, so they expect things to be the Windows way and this is the only thing that really count.

    • Re:Button order... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by caseih ( 160668 )
      Fortunately the button order is the thing that Gnome got right. I absolutely cannot stand the Windows and KDE button orders. It is not logical to my mind. This compounds the problem that Windows buttons (maybe kde too) often mix word types, leading to horrific "yes," "no," "cancel" situations. On windows (and sometimes KDE) I have to always make sure to read the entire prompt before I decide on an action. In Gnome it is much better. Usually the verb in the button is enough. This practice makes a diff
  • Great except for gnome-screensaver has NO options at all, you cant disable screensavers that your card does not support, or enable only 2d screensavers

    or change the text or change the picture folder, or preview

    someone submitted a preview screensaver patch, but the maintainers will not accept it

  • oh no! (Score:2, Funny)

    by AnXa ( 936517 )
    oh no! Just when I got compiled Gentoo from stage1 on x86_64 and Gentoo current... 2.12, just my bad luck... Well I have to start compilers again and resolve the depencies... huoh...

  • It's great! (Score:3, Informative)

    by XMilkProject ( 935232 ) on Thursday March 16, 2006 @12:24PM (#14933944) Homepage
    As someone who has been using the latest builds of what is about to be Gnome 2.14, I can say with certainty that it is an awesome upgrade.

    At first I wasn't sure if there was much difference, but after using it for an hour I started to realize I was enjoying it much more than ever before, without really being able to put my finger on what was different.

    Basic speed increases give it a much more real-time feeling, and some minor graphical enhancements, while hardly noticable at first, make for a more enjoyable experience.

    Also noticed alot fewer bugs and annoyances.

    Give it a shot!

  • gedit (Score:2, Informative)

    by Intangion ( 816356 )
    wow the new gedit looks fantastic

    it seems to be able to do almost everything that anjuta can do now.

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