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GNOME GUI

Looking Ahead at GNOME 2 258

Posted by CmdrTaco from the one-for-the-hackers dept.
Able writes "This is a good article that will teach you how to use the new and improved libraries available with GNOME 2 so that you can write your own Nautilus view, and panel applets. It also provides you with the understanding to compile a few sample GTK+ 2 programs that will give you a good understanding of GTK+ 2's many improvements over GTK+ 1."
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Looking Ahead at GNOME 2 More

Looking Ahead at GNOME 2

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  • anyone think it cool that this is hosted on the ibm site?

    .brad
    • anyone think it cool that this is hosted on the ibm site?

      They're probably hoping this sort of thing will help lead to a return on their investment.

  • Higher numbers faster please.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Thursday January 03, 2002 @02:30PM (#2780019) Homepage Journal
    ..Geez.. 2.0? Thats no good.. I mean look at windows for instance - Its way past 3.0, past 98.0.. I think its even past version 2000 now! How is linux ever going to competitive with such small version numbers?
  • Seems a lot nicer, but it's still behind KDE. I like GTK alot more than Qt though. I wish GTK/Gnome would get transparency (I think KDE is, right?) Finally we got anti-aliased text, (did that take long enough??) Will Abiword have anti-aliased text now?
    • No, the transparent menu effect that Mosfet made for his liquid theme (and will now get added to kde 3.0 builtin themes I think) takes a snapshot of the area behind the menu and uses that image to make a pseudo-translucent effect.

      Not a very good way of doing it in my opinion, and this becomes clear when you move through the different menus in a menubar, you can see the ghosts of the menu you had previously opened beneath your current menu.

      If there is a better way of doing it, I'm not sure what it is, although I think you can do true translucent effects with Keith Packard's XRender extension [xfree86.org].

      But it doesn't seem that anyone is using that to do translucency so either its really hard to use or theres problems. I'd love to know which it is if anyone has some more information.

      PS - No offense to Mosfet or anyone else using this code to do translucent menus, it's a very good idea and I do use it when I'm in KDE. I just think it'd be cool to have it without the little quirks like seeing things behind the menu that shouldn't be there.

    • Have you used Star Office 6 beta?

      Awesome, aa fonts and all. It may as well be Word, Excel and Powerpoint for Unix.
    • I think the key problem GNOME has is that there is no native web browser that isn't a complete monster. In my brief usability tests comparing Mozilla with Konqueror I concluded that Konq is lightyears ahead of Mozilla in terms of usability, customization, ease to compile, and integration with a desktop environment (note that this last is also a potential drawback since it depends on certain KDE i/o slaves to do its work-- and yes, it can run under any wm or destkop, but will be most efficient inside KDE).

      I see the following two main advantages to gtk over Qt (and this is why I will not use Qt except as a user): gtk is written for C development. C is much more standard on Unix/GNU/Linux than C++. Perl is written in C, which means that adding wrappers for the gtk library is likely to be less problematic than for some other toolkits (although Perl has it's own excellent version of tk... this advantage is likely to extend to other languages written in C, Ruby being foremost in my mind).

      gtk has the same LPGL terms for every instance of the toolkit. This means that no matter what type of development you are doing that you never have to worry about licensing, at least not the way you might with Qt.

      It is too bad, however, that on top of these two fairly decent widget toolkits the desktop environments are vastly different. GNOME just ain't as easy to get up and running with as KDE-- and I mean in the "compile from source and install" sense. I've also noticed distinct efficiency differences between the two on low-end hardware (KDE coming out ahead).

      What we're left with is a mess, but it's a good mess. We have real powers like IBM supporting gtk/GNOME, and we have other serious groups like the German government supporting Qt/KDE (witness the Aegypten project for secure communications). We get the best of both worlds, and fortunately we can do some mixing and matching as needed. So either way users win and developers seem to have two decent high-quality choices to choose from (forgetting about the ubiquitous Tk for a moment).

  • Worried Gnome User..... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CDWert ( 450988 ) on Thursday January 03, 2002 @02:33PM (#2780044) Homepage
    I am a Gnome user, and athough I am NOT a sky is falling person, KDE seems to be making much more usefull strides, I am also concerned about the Ximian fork, (even though I use it) How long till XImian hack up all the libs to work for their effort and how compatible will it be ?

    I have thought about switching to KDE for no other reason than they seem to have a much better, much more focused direction.

    Does it seem to anyone else latley Gnome is becoming a throw in everything and if the kitchen sink dosent work its OK, or is it just me.

    Admittedly Gnome 2 has some nice stuff but how much will be functional by first release ?
    • KDE makes big strides, I'll grant you.

      For me, even more interesting, but quietly mentioned, was the Accessibility Tool Kit (ATK). If you start pushing Linux out there to handicapped people, OLDER people, who need help hearing, seeing, what have you, they can help provide a major market push for linux. Obviously the needs of these people vary greatly, so customized solutions are a must.

      In the same vein, it seems that KDE is for the people who want the solutions given to them, and Gnome is for the people who want to build their own customized solution (IE what they want.) That explains a little bit of the difference in the attitudes. Capt. Obvious does point out to me that the "build your own solution" approach is a general platform for Linux, KDE included, but I think Gnome really goes after that more.

      I hope most of it will be functional, but like you, I fear that we're going to see a whole lot more of "build your own" than in the past from Gnome. It's not just you...

    • Re:Worried Gnome User..... (Score:2, Informative)

      by ed__ ( 23481 )
      Ximian isn't a fork of gnome. They just package it for the end user.
    • I am a Gnome user, and athough I am NOT a sky is falling person, KDE seems to be making much more usefull strides, I am also concerned about the Ximian fork, (even though I use it) How long till XImian hack up all the libs to work for their effort and how compatible will it be ?

      Ximian is still open source. When THAT changes, worry. For now, don't.

      Their stuff is pretty compatible, tho to get things like Evolution working you have to have the latest versions of some things (gal, gtkhtml, I think bonobo)...

      I have thought about switching to KDE for no other reason than they seem to have a much better, much more focused direction.

      I use both Gnome and KDE. The only thing that irritates me about the holy war between them is that one would expect that, given all the hype, someone from one camp would have made that camp compatible with the other camp as a sort of reverse-psychology love-flame. They don't work perfectly together, but I digress.

      Gnome seems faster. It also does not have the annoying habit of attaching a blinking app icon to my mouse cursor when an app is doing something that takes a long time...but Gnome apps don't to seem to have the lag that the KDE ones do. KPoker roxxx tho :)

      Does it seem to anyone else latley Gnome is becoming a throw in everything and if the kitchen sink dosent work its OK, or is it just me.

      It's just you.

      Admittedly Gnome 2 has some nice stuff but how much will be functional by first release ?

      The idea of a first release is that the code is stable and fully functional.
    • Well it sounds to me like you're creating your own worries. I have trouble understanding why you'd be a "worried gnome user" because something else might become or is better. Why not just switch then instead of worrying?

      With that said, I don't think you should worry about Ximian, much of their work gets added into the vanilla gnome.

      My personal opinion of GNOME is that a lot of work is going into two sections right now: great applications (evolution, gnumeric, galeon, abiword), and whole new libraries for gnome 2.0. I think once gnome 2.0 stabilizes many people will be eager to take advantage of the new features and you'll see the desktop itself get many cool new features.

      This point is brought up constantly but people seem to prefer to ignore it. When KDE 2 was being worked on many critics were saying KDE must be dying because they weren't seeing the work. You need to understand that such big code changes happen a lot more smoothly without non-programmers trying to use it and complaining about this and that or sending questions on how to get it working. You're just going to have to be patient, or you could just use KDE2 for a while.

    • And the problem is? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday January 03, 2002 @03:20PM (#2780351) Journal
      Worried Gnome User.....I am a Gnome user, and athough I am NOT a sky is falling person, KDE seems to be making much more usefull strides..

      What's the problem, exactly? Gnome will get better, KDE will get better, you can use as much of either or both as fits your needs and at worst, you can go on using the current versions.

      It's not clear to me where there's a problem. What's the worst that'll happen -- you might be tempted to change desktops to something that works better for you? You can even keep using your GTK themes.

      By the way, VFVTHUNTER, you can turn off the launch feedback indicator on the cursor. I'm on a Mac right now, but it's in a pretty obvious place in KControl.

      • Re:And the problem is? (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It is not that great that there are two different competing desktop systems. We have limited resources and spend too many of them duplicating each others work. If you write a program, there is no easy way to have a dock app for each competing window manager. It would be nice for some simple standards in this area. It would not be too difficult to cooperate a little.
        • there is no easy way to have a dock app for each competing window manager. It would be nice for some simple standards in this area
          That is simply untrue. There has been a joint WM Spec [freedesktop.org] for quite some time. Not just for Gnome and KDE, but for other WMs such as Enlightenment and IceWM as well. I personally use IceWM, along with the Gnome panel (with pager and task manager applets). Everything interoperates fine.
    • I am a Gnome user, and athough I am NOT a sky is falling person, KDE seems to be making much more usefull strides, I am also concerned about the Ximian fork, (even though I use it) How long till XImian hack up all the libs to work for their effort and how compatible will it be ?

      I have thought about switching to KDE for no other reason than they seem to have a much better, much more focused direction.

      I am what you could call a KDE user, ethousiastically even developing my own KDE app, but still I don't feel that Gnome is losing out to KDE. KDE might seem to have some advantage at this time, but Gnome is certainly strong in the application department. Off course I can't be sure, but I definitely hope that Gnome 2.0 will rock and maybe recapture a bit of the current kde users. If there's one thing that helps to get motivated then it's solid competition and I don't like Microsoft very much in this role of 'evil' competition. I'd rather see two projects with the same idealogy compete and I think that most KDE developers certainly wouldn't want Gnome 'out of the way' either.

      Okay I'm just rambling now ... so I'll quit.

    • Re:Worried Gnome User..... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Skeezix ( 14602 ) <jamin@pubcrawler.org> on Thursday January 03, 2002 @03:52PM (#2780592) Homepage
      I am a Gnome user, and athough I am NOT a sky is falling person, KDE seems to be making much more usefull strides

      Which strides is KDE making that are more useful than the ones GNOME is making? I'm curious.

      I am also concerned about the Ximian fork, (even though I use it) How long till XImian hack up all the libs to work for their effort and how compatible will it be ?

      Ximian does not produce a "fork" of GNOME. Ximian packages a "distribution" of GNOME and makes it easy to download. They tweak some minor things such as artwork, splash screens, etc, but it's not a fork of GNOME. I don't think you understand Ximian's relationship to GNOME. I suggest you spend some time on irc.gnome.org in #gnome and spend some time getting to know folks better.

      Does it seem to anyone else latley Gnome is becoming a throw in everything and if the kitchen sink dosent work its OK, or is it just me.

      That is not at all how it works. We're very particular about what we put in the release. I suggest you spend some time reading the archives of mailing lists such as desktop-devel [gnome.org]. Much work has gone into making GNOME 2 more usable, accessible, functional, and a better development platform while keeping it solid.

      Admittedly Gnome 2 has some nice stuff but how much will be functional by first release

      We won't release if it's not functional :)

      -jamin

      • I am also concerned about the Ximian fork, (even though I use it) How long till XImian hack up all the libs to work for their effort and how compatible will it be ?

      I've understood that actually, ximian gnome is not a fork when it comes to the code, its just packaging and compilation of different versions of programs thats supposed to work well together. I might be wrong thou.

      Basicly ximian works on many OSS projects and actually contributes back to them, not just making "their own fork" ... For example, read release notes [gnome.org] of of Gnumeric, quite a few ximian dudes are warmly thanked there.

      Anyway, even thou the codebase is same, that doesnt mean all gnome distributions will work with each other. So, if you are using ximian, will stick with it or change it totally if the times comes ...

      (and yeah, i dont claim these are the absolute facts)

    • I switched to KDE recently.. mostly because of nautlis. It's forced upon you and if you follow their instructions to remove it, it dont work... nautlis still loads as the "desktop manager" and still steals about 30% of the entire computer's performance. KDE is a bit snappier, If you set it to the "crappy computer mode" it's dang fast and I'm happy with it. KDE though fails miserably at the install and upgrade level. as does Gnome. Ximian is the ONLY desktop system that has a decent install system and the others need to stop all development right now and work only on an install system to catch up.

      Basically, if they remove nautlis from Gnome... gnome would be great. but for now it's the reaswon I am staying away.
      • It's forced upon you and if you follow their instructions to remove it, it dont work... nautlis still loads as the "desktop manager" and still steals about 30% of the entire computer's performance.
        I agree that nautilus is too slow to use on most systems, but you do not have to use it to use Gnome. Go to the preferences dialog in a Nautilus window, select the "Windows and Desktop" section, then uncheck the "Use Nautilus to draw the desktop" box. Nautilus will no longer load when you start Gnome. Simple, wasn't it? If for some reason this doesn't work on your system, you should submit a bug report.

  • Sick of Fantasy Movies (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Damm, first Harry Potter, then Lord of the Rings, now Gnome Two, what next: The Company of Orcs? An American Elf in London?

    Sheesh...

  • My advice (Score:3, Informative)

    by kitts ( 545683 ) on Thursday January 03, 2002 @02:39PM (#2780077) Homepage
    This might sound like trolling, but I'd wait a bit until the GTK libraries are settled before beginning to seriously develop for Gnome. One of the big problems with GTK from version 1 to 2 was how certain widgets went through two or three different revisions, namely that very attractive treeview widget. With bonobo architecture on the way, stuff might change even more.

    • Re:My advice (Score:2, Informative)

      by jrb ( 11011 )
      GTK+ and the rest of the GNOME libraries are currently API frozen. Now is a great time to start using them.
    • Actually... AFAIK the API has been frozen for quite some time. The only changes that have been accepted since 1. December is accessibility-stuff and very small and critical changes.

      I think it should be pretty safe to start developing for Gnome2 now.
  • ...and see all of the KDE developers looking back at you!

  • Yay! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Burgundy Advocate ( 313960 ) on Thursday January 03, 2002 @02:46PM (#2780113) Homepage
    Hey kids! Now it's time to pretend that everyone here on Slashdot actually develops programs!

    "Yeah, last night I was really tring to get the object-oriented cobol bindings to gtk+ working but then in a fluke there was this gcc bug that caused my userspace code to go wonky and install the wrong x colormap which recursed until the system locked up. It was righteous."

    I don't know where open source would be without the fine users of Slashdot and all the wonderful programs they develop.

  • Misleading article summary (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is a good article that will teach you how to use the new and improved libraries available with GNOME 2 so that you can write your own Nautilus view, and panel applets. It also provides you with the understanding to compile a few sample GTK+ 2 programs that will give you a good understanding of GTK+ 2's many improvements over GTK+ 1.

    Not really -- that's what the series intends to cover, but this particular article only covers an introduction and overview of Gnome 2. For those familiar with the pace of previous IBM Developerworks Gnome articles, you know that it will take awhile before this series gets finished (assuming it does).
  • GTK/GNOME, QT/KDE, and GTK/Ximian and other similar packages all have their advantages, but you know...

    Taking all their advantages, sorting out the code until only the best remains, and having linux users standardize on one backend (not frontend) would be so great, but it shocks me how much shit one would catch for it.

    Anyone ever thought about just combining all the various backends into one, unified, STANDARD (that's what linux users like to parade about), backend API and let the users use any frontend without library problems?

    Just a thought...

    • Re:You know (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jagasian ( 129329 ) on Thursday January 03, 2002 @03:35PM (#2780460)
      Yeah, I am putting a Honda Civic backend into my F50. Oh wait, the backends for both cars are so different that trying to use the same backend for both cars is just silly. You ever wonder why the auto industry doesn't put the same backend into every car?

      Yes it could be done, two wrappers around the same backend resulting in QT and GTK. However, such a task would require so much additional coding that it would negate any benefits that it was supposed to have.

      I hate to say this, but what will happen, is one of the desktop environments will die out. Its the nature of Open Source Software. Things can't stay splintered forever. Eventually natural forces (user's needs, technical needs, development needs, market needs, etc) will cause the gap between both desktop environments to widen. However, the initial competition that exists when there is still more than one option helps the end user get a better desktop environment sooner.

      Now this has nothing to do with other ultra-feather weight desktop environments, which will compete amongst eachother for the bare bones performance niche.

      Back to the dying out of one of Gnome or KDE... well, you can give any prediction you want, but the productive thing would be to contribute to the development of the desktop you like the best. Contribute by using the desktop and reporting bugs. Contribute by writing code. Contribute by making art (icons, themes, sounds, wallpaper, etc). Contribute by educating others about the desktop of your choice.

      Finally, my point is that the dream of unifying Gnome and KDE is silly. One of them will kill the other, and thats a good thing because it won't happen until one is orders of magnitude better than the other meaning that natural community and technical forces will choose the best desktop for us.

  • GNOME is unorganized (Score:3, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03, 2002 @03:13PM (#2780319)
    GNOME team is out of focus. Its development is very very slow. Not much stuff has changed. The differences will be very few.

    Like said in a post, it's too little to consider a 10 years work. GNOME is always difficult to install from source. Hundreds of dependencies and packages.

    Would be better if they did arrange the packaging in a better way:

    gnome2-gui.tar.bz2 (4MB)
    gnome2-extra.tar.bz2 (4MB)
    gnome2-libs.tar.bz2 (5MB)
    gnome2-core.tar.bz2 (9MB)
    gnome2-applications.tar.bz2 (9MB)
    gnome2-addons.tar.bz2 (3MB)

    Hmmm... Looks much more organized. Lots of packages merged into "gui" like gtk+, glib, pango, etc.

    In "extra" we have the stuff like esound, audiofile, etc.

    And so on... forget the hassle to download all the 60 tarballs. Just download one single tarball, untar/ungzip it and start compiling!

    But yet, GNOME as it is, is unorganized for real.
    • GNOME team is out of focus. Its development is very very slow. Not much stuff has changed. The differences will be very few.

      Actually we are pretty focused though of course there is always room for improvement. Much has changed in the GNOME 2 platform. If you'd read the article you'd gleam a smidgeon of of the vast work that has gone into making Gtk+2 better. That's just one aspect of GNOME. GNOME 2 requires porting to a new platform and as such, is taking time. Many of the user-visible improvements will be visible in subsequent releases, though I personally think GNOME 2 is quite exciting from a user's perspective.

      We release the way we do for several reasons. The individual packages are just that, individual pieces of a platform. For users who have slow modem connections this is a godsend. Also many people do not want to get the whole platform. They just want small pieces. There are other reasons as well which have been hashed out several times in the past. I'd be happy to talk more about it offline if you want...

    • Actually, the packaging makes sense as far as the flexibility goes.

      glib is useful on its own. Without anything else. it gets its own package.

      Gtk+ is the widget set. It gets its own package (you can write applications just to Gtk+ if you want).

      CORBA stuff is independent. They get their own packages.

      Some things are likely to install even in distributions without GNOME. They get their own package as separate downloads.

      Each application needs to be independently installable.

      If you want something easy and organized, why not just either a) skip the direct download, and wait for your distribution, or b) use Red Carpet for download, and let it resolve the dependencies for you.

      If the complexity of compiling bothers you, don't compile.

  • I don't know if i missed it or not, but did the article mention anything about using a horizontal scroll bar for the new text widget? I hate those stupid "wrap arrows", and I was hoping the new text widget would replace them! The screenshot shown doesn't show either a wrap arrow nor a horizontal scroll bar... Anyone closer to the project know?


  • Before you automatically hate me, I am not necessarily bashing KDE + GNOME. However, I am a former BEos user and I would love to see a window manager/system/full-on GUI that maintains an ideal balance between beauty, features, simplicity and small size. For those of you who never used BEos, its GUI was so incredibly fast an efficient it made even the most hardcore Windows/Mac/UNIX user drool uncontrollably. That, and it was really nice to look at, and packed with desktop features that even KDE in its advanced state has yet to implement entirely to my liking (e.g., 'drag and drop to the extreme'). GNOME looks nice and is definitely useable, but it's sluggish on my 400MHZ PII, and I've seen the Beos Tracker fly on 166MHZ pentiums. KDE is too much like Windows, and has also gotten much slower since v 2.0. On the sparse side of things, Blackbox is quick and nice looking but low on features, and pretty much everything else I've seen is outdated and ugly looking. Has anyone ever considered a project using the resources of OpenTracker [opentracker.org]?

  • ...something we don't get often enough. I remember when I first loaded Linux, Gnome was the greatest. It was easy to use, stable (well, relatively), and it looked nice. The GTK+ helped get some great programs available.

    But since then, Gnome has remained Gnome. No new, fantastical releases. No big news. KDE has taken the spotlight.

    And between the two, I now prefer KDE. I mean, KDE 2.2.2 is fabulous. The desktop icons are easy to work with, the panel is just sweet. So much easier to use than Gnome. Konqueror is come so far. The first time I loaded Konqueror, I thought it was useless. I actually preferred Netscape (blech). Now whenever I'm in KDE, I use Konqueror almost as much as I use Mozilla. Especially when I don't want any cookies being passed without my knowledge. I know people that use Koffice exclusively.

    Don't get me wrong, I am -so- glad to see some big achievements from the Gnome camp. One of the biggest and greatest attractions to Linux is choice. Choice to use whatever you want, and to have as many options as you can handle.

    I'm not a developer, I wish I was, but don't we all? I didn't read the code in that article too closely, so I may have missed some great points. But GTK+ 2 looks like it has a promising future. As long as they keep going on it, making it easier to use (and install), maybe they'll surpass KDE again.

    Or maybe everyone will just go back to the CLI.

    Personally, I use AfterStep. Dunno why, I just like it. Talk about hard to configure, though.

    p24t

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