Rubénerd!

Gnome 2.30 has been released. It could have been an April Fools joke.

Despite preferring Qt over GTK+ for application development, I still prefer Gnome to KDE4 from a user's perspective, it's almost like comparing Mac OS X to Windows. Gnome is elegant and clean, and while KDE4 has some impressive composting effects they just don't feel well executed. Then again my favourite desktop is still Xfce.

Random new feature observations

• Salutations to the entire Nautilus team for getting rid of the spacial file manager, I never saw the attraction with windows spawning hundreds of other ones. Have they implemented a NeXT-like column view yet?
• Double-clicking fonts to install them? Finally Gnome does what KDE has been doing for years!
• I don't use Epiphany, but it's new interface also brings it in line with current contemporary browsers which is a Good Thing™.
• I'm really looking forward to playing some of the cute bundled games now that they use Clutter :)
• You reckon they've fixed that Metacity bug where if you enable it's composting engine, then restart, the shadow under the main menu disappears? It sounds like a silly little thing, but it's graphical glitches like that that make DE's feel less polished compared to Mac, et al.
• The new default behavour of File Roller to download software required to extract archives is a fantastic idea, though I imagine this will probably be limited to Linux systems and not the BSDs.

While I was quick to point out the release of Apple's Aperture 3 software, perhaps even bigger news is KDE 4.4 now available. Time to check out openSUSE or Mandriva again soon?

9th February, 2010. Today KDE announces the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4, "Caikaku", bringing an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users. Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented. The KDE community would like to thank everybody who has helped to make this release possible.

Hysterical, no wait, historical

If you look through the archives here you'd see even as late as 2008 I was a huge fan of KDE and preferred it to Gnome. Qt rocks GTK's socks, and the applications that came even with the kde_base FreeBSD port felt more complete and mature than anything on competing desktops. KDE felt professional.

When KDE 4.0 was released many people switched because of stability concerns and a lack of features, I hurriedly switched to Gnome. Then Microsoft shamelessly copied it for Windows 7, go figure.

Comparisons are like comparing

I've tried each release of KDE 4 since, but I've gone back to Gnome each time because at some point Gnome became fairly usable, simple to use and polished whereas KDE feels as though they're competing on glitz and wow to the detriment of consistency and usability.

Apple still seems to be the only tech outfit that can create stunningly beautiful user interfaces that are also a pleasure to use. Gnome is like Google in that the interface is plain but very functional. The good news is many of the new features like the desktop widgets can be disabled and the new KDE menu can be configured to work like the menus in KDE 3.x (or Gnome) amongst other things, but it bothers me how much work I need to put in to get a desktop I feel I can use.

Of course all this is my own opinion and there are plenty of people who are really happy with KDE 4.x. I'm hoping the 4.4 release might give me enough reason to move back; Gnome has the better interface but as I said I prefer Qt and Mono's encroachment worry me. Plus I'd love to start using the KDE developer tools again, KDevelop is so much fun to use it's almost criminal.

I won't be giving up Xfce on my FreeBSD desktop any time soon, but Gnome on my ThinkPad X40 keeps finding new ways to surprise me. Its a beautiful thing, and its free!

This might be an old feature, but its one I've found wildly useful: the ability to set locations in the panel clock. Other desktops let you do this, but it's all the little extras that Gnome does. Perhaps KDE 4.2 does, I haven't had the chance to try yet.

When you define a series of locations they appear on a map of the world complete with an approximate night/day cast. Under the map each location is shown with digital and analogue clocks, and what I've found absolutely brilliant is each timezone is displayed relative to where you are, NOT to GMT! For example I can see Singapore is 1:30 behind us here in Adelaide, and Jim Kloss is 17:30 behind.

By default it's turned off, but if you use Gnome click the clock on your panel and click Locations.

Much to my excitement, one of my favourite free and open source software projects finally hit the big 4.6 release recently after over two years of development, and I've finally had a sliver of time this afternoon to take a look at it and type up a quick review.

I'm glowingly talking about the lightweight, zippy and very attractive Xfce Desktop Environment for Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems. Xfce is perfect for older systems with more modest specs, and for people like me who value clean design even on fast hardware.

Because my ultra-souped up FreeBSD desktop tower is back in Singapore, I installed the latest release fresh from the pacman system for Arch Linux on my little Armada M300, a 600MHz subnotebook with 320MiB of RAM. I'm typing this as we speak in Firefox inside the Xfce environment. Yes, it even runs beautifully on this machine!

I could go on and on listing the new features, bug fixes and changes, but the Xfce team have already done a great job documenting these. Instead, I thought I'd briefly talk about the thinks I've noticed and liked so far.

Click for the original size

First of all, the design looks much more professional now out of the box than version 4.4.x. It has a slick default background and an integrated panel which I moved to the top of the screen given I'm a Mac user. I also use the ThinIce GTK+ theme that comes with the Gnome theme pack, and the Tango Desktop Project's iconset.

Given I use other desktop systems one of the most nagging problems for me had always been Xfce shows you the Xfce Menu of launchable applications when you right click the Desktop. Now it presents you with a clean list of Desktop related functions as well as the Xfce Menu at the bottom if you still want it. Icons on the Desktop also behave more predictably as well: you can now select a series of icons by dragging your cursor.

Visually a new feature is the redesigned window manager titlebars, unfortunately this is the one feature I'm not sure I like. The default appearance now looks a bit too Windows Vista-ish for my tastes; I always thought having the buttons off-centre at the top instead of in the middle looked really silly. Still, Xfce does make it easy to change them to a dizzying array of other styles in the Window Manager settings manager pane. I use the B5 BeOS style title bars which you can see below because I use keyboard shortcuts instead of the widgets on window titlebars anyway. It's clean and minimalistic, and matches the ThinIce theme perfectly.

One of the great things about Xfce is it's lightweight but still has a comprehensive Settings Manager system like Gnome and KDE. Many of these panes have been reorganised and redesigned, the most notable of these is the Desktop pane which lets you change backgrounds and colours much more easily than before.

These are the things I can show you visually, under the covers there have also been some huge changes. The mixer application now uses the Gstreamer audio framework by default which makes it really easy to get going with audio applications (WWR streaming anyone?). The Thunar file manager now supports encrypted volumes! I could go on and on.

If you're on FreeBSD this version of Xfce is in the ports system, as it is in the Arch Linux pacman repositories. If you're a Gnome user in particular, give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised!

A huge thanks to Olivier Fourdan and all the contributers for this amazing software. The love and care you put into this project shows.