[101410] in RedHat Linux List
Re: GNOME usability?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Fall)
Thu Nov 26 01:32:20 1998
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 01:30:40 -0500 (EST)
From: Greg Fall <gmf@dweezil.dyn.ml.org>
To: criterion-consulting@usinternet.com
cc: redhat-list@redhat.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.981125205258.7917E-100000@localhost.localdomain>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
On Wed, 25 Nov 1998, Fred W. Noltie Jr. wrote:
> Gordon Messmer inspired this question: How usable is Gnome now?
>
> I'm interested in giving it a try. I've been to gnome.org, and the
> rather extensive instructions associated with installing it are a bit
> of a turnoff if all I'll get is partial functionality or pretty buggy
> stuff.
>
> How does it compare to Afterstep/fvwm/KDE for functionality? What
> about bugginess?
It doesn't exactly perfectly compare with window managers 'cause it's
way more than a window manager. In fact it's not at all a window
manager, but still I catch yer drift.
The CVS releases of GNOME are I reckon a chore, though I haven't
bothered with them myself. However, the most recent public release of
the GNOME beta, 0.30, is a different ball o' wax. It's available as a
set of RPMs, and if you understand a little about RPM and some basic
truths about GTK, its installation is a breeze.
The gtk+-1.1 release, the one on which GNOME is based (including the
0.30 beta), is a DEVELOPMENT release, which means it incorporates new
features at the possible expense of stability. Other gtk+ apps, such as
gimp and a few of Red Hat's tools (e.g. usernet) are built to be pals
with gtk+-1.0 - the non-beta, non-development version of the libraries.
Fortunately, the folks who packaged GNOME 0.30 for non-developer
sampling were good enough to deal with this by including two packages:
gtk+10 and glib10. These packages provide the shared libraries
necessary for using gtk+ (and by association glib) version 1.0 without
competing with gtk+1.1 and glib-1.1. The way you do it if I recall is
to use --nodeps when you upgrade from gtk+-1.0 and glib-1.0 to gtk+-1.1
and glib-1.1. Then you install the gtk+10 and glib10 packages, which
settle the dispute that RPM complains about if you don't use the
--nodeps tag (try it that way first and see).
I've been using GNOME 0.30 regularly since its release about two months
ago. After you become friends with it (which does not take long), it's
very cool. Not bugless (not at all advertised as bugless), but still
very useable. If you want to sit tight for a couple of weeks, I think
they're planning a feature-freeze on the whole works sometime in
mid-December so they can devote themselves to debugging the thing, and
sometime between now and then there is likely to be another beta release
which will probably be still less buggy than 0.30. In any case I highly
recommend trying it out and playing with it if you are inclined to toy
with something new. Versus the KDE (which I guess you could call
GNOME's competition), GNOME as a package is not as tight and complete,
but what I like about it is that it is imaginative and fresh, especially
compared with the dull and positively unimaginative KDE.
That last bit is by the way not by any stretch a universal opinion. I
don't mean to target the KDE effort as some terrible fiasco; it
just does not blow my own personal skirt up. So there you have it.
By the way, you can use GNOME with any window manager (it does not have
its own official window manager, and that is intentional), so e.g.
WindowMaker and GNOME are just fine operating simultaneously.
G.F.
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