GNOME Watch: Despite New Delays, The GNOME Desktop Excites
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-02-12 17:22:04 UTC
- Modified: 2014-02-12 17:22:04 UTC
Summary: Impressions of GNOME 3, GNOME 3.12, Wayland-induced delays, Fedora 20 GNOME, GNOME raves, and a lot of new application releases
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The GNOME Project has announced today, February 5, that development version 3.11.5 of the Mutter-Wayland software is now available for download and testing, bringing various bugfixes and improvements.
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The upcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment is supposed to be released on March 26, 2014. However, it appears that the entire release cycle might be delayed by approximately a week, because of the Wayland 1.5 release.
However, the bad news (for GNOME developers) is that all the GNOME 3.11.x milestones will be delayed as well in order to avoid longer freeze periods. As you might know, GNOME 3.12 will be the first ever release of the controversial GNOME desktop environment to fully support the modern Wayland display server.
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Writing to inform you that the GNOME release team is pondering moving the date for 3.12.0 out by approximately a week, to align the schedule with the Wayland release plans (a 1.4.91 release including all the xdg-shell API we need is planned for April 1). The latter 3.11.x milestones would be shifted as well, to avoid lengthening the freeze period unnecessarily.
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After a few weeks toying around with Fedora 20, I thought it was time to share my findings. Because Gnome 13.10 brought a long list of changes, I opted to download the Gnome Desktop version of Fedora 20. This release brings a vast list of features and updates and here you can see them for yourself.
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I think GNOME is mostly a "love it" or "hate it" kind of desktop these days. The folks who love it defend it passionately while the ones who hate it will deride it with their last breath. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of middle ground in the GNOME Wars.
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I’m writing the following article from the perspective of a normal user that uses Linux (Arch Linux at the moment) exclusively, both at home and work, for over 12 hours daily, with GNOME 3 as the main desktop environment. A users with over ten years experience in open source desktops, years during which I’ve tested any known desktop environment/window manager.
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The GNOME Project has announced a few days ago that Epiphany 3.11.4 web browser is available for download and testing, as part of the recently released GNOME 3.11.5 unstable desktop environment.
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The development team behind GNOME’s default text editor application, Gedit, has announced recently that another milestone of the upcoming Gedit 3.12 release is available for download and testing.
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GNOME Maps 3.11.5 introduces much smoother goto animations, avoids an unnecessary zoom-out at end of goto animations, “exact” is displayed instead of “0 km2” if accuracy area is less than 1, makes the gnome-maps executable a real binary, fixes a compiler warning, and updates recent added time on re-visits.
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GNOME Software 3.11.5 introduces a concept of rating confidence for each app, adds a file handler that allows the application to install local packages, allows each plugin to define the dependencies on other plugins, the “Picks” on the overview are now automatically generated, and a star widget is now displayed for each application, in the category panel.
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It's been some time in the making, with the redesign work started a couple of release cycles ago, but we finally reached a state where it's usable, and leaps and bounds easier to use than the previous versions.
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GVFS 1.19.5 sets etag::value for FTP, sets infinite timeout for enumerate response for daemon, removes GVfsUriMountInfo, forces openpty(3) on BSD for SFTP, rates limit progress callbacks for daemon, and properly removes socket_dir for gvfsdaemon.
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gThumb 3.3.1 is the first maintenance release of the development 3.x series. It now employs the dark theme, a GtkHeaderBar is now used instead of a toolbar and a menu, adds better support for RAW images, a frame is now displayed around an image in the image viewer, and zoomed images are presented in a better quality.
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