Rubenerd

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.