Review: GNOME 3

Shell Main Screen

About 2 months ago, I previewed GNOME 3. At that time, it was many weeks away from the final release, so there were still many things to be done. Since then, many things have changed, and a few days ago, GNOME 3 was finally released for the whole world to see.

The biggest change in GNOME 3 is of course the GNOME 3 Shell. This has gotten several changes, updates, and other revisions through its development. Since then, however, a GNOME 3 fallback mode has also been added. One of the common complaints about GNOME 3 has been that the new Mutter WM requires 3D effects to work correctly, and not all computers have this, especially older ones. This is where GNOME 3 fallback mode comes in, so in addition to trying out GNOME 3 Shell, I have also tried GNOME 3 fallback mode.

Fallback Main Screen +
Calendar Applet +
User Profile Menu Applet

I did all this thanks to the efforts of the Fedora developers in building the latest live ISO image of GNOME 3; I made a live USB of it using UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see how much has changed in two months.

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Featured Comments: Week of 2011 April 3

There were a whole bunch of comments on this past week's posts, so I'll try to repost most of those.

Ditching KDE Applications

An anonymous reader said, "As a kde user, I feel exactly the same about gnome apps - they start slow and perform badly- so the only gnome application I have is firefox, though konqueror with webkit is what I use more and more. I will add that I prefer KDE over gnome because a) KDE apps are MUCH better integrated with each other b) gnome is tightly controlled by RH and ximian and their agendas as opposed to KDE which I believe is a more community based and oriented desktop and c) these entities have acted and are acting a lot like m$ w.r.t. their dictation of policies and agenda in the desktop arena ( not to mention all the FUD they have spread and keep spreading on KDE)"
Commenter Mitsos had this to say: "There are some ultralight apps out there that are fantastic. Epdfview is a great example as you mentioned, and I use it on my openbox machine. On gnome I'd prefer evince which has an option for continuous display of pages (epdfview doesn't), and you already have the gnome dependencies installed. You could also try out FoxitReader. Viewnior is just amazing. My computer is 6-7 years old now, so apps like that make it fly. I mainly use GTK applications, but nothing keeps me back from using a Qt app like SMPlayer, or KDE apps, like K3b. They all run just fine."
There was a bit of back-and-forth about whether Mozilla Firefox is a GTK+ application or not, so an anonymous reader finally came to the rescue with this clarification and insight: "PV and anonymous, you are wrong in the following way- yes, firefox uses XUL for UI toolkit but currently, AFAIK, XUL only has a GTK renderer. There have been unofficial ports to QT that couldn't keep up and so got abandoned. The problem is that GTK is too tightly tied to gnome - the credentials, the VFS, the notifications and for many other features. XUL has nothing to do with gnome so if firefox is 'well integrated' with gnome, WHY is that ? It has to be because of GTK's assimilation into gnome."
Commenter Barnaby said, "Gpicviewer is another good and light weight one. Talking about KDE, I just wiped my Fedora 14 KDE install that I had around since October a few days ago, even upgraded to 4.6 it was still very slow, and that without effects turned on. It depends on the distro though. KDE 4 in Salix, Kongoni and Chakra is markedly faster."

Review: Linux Mint Xfce 201104

For one of the things that I noticed, an anonymous reader suggested, "Firefox is set to be updated from Mozilla. Open it as root (gksudo firefox), update it and close it again," while for another thing that I complained about, another anonymous commenter suggested, "multimedia keys: sudo apt install xfce4-volumed"
Reader Barnaby (again) said, "Thanks for trying this out. I was initially quite excited as well. I now think the most important thing to take away from their announcement is that they are progressively switching over to a Debian base for all but the main edition. The remaining polish will come as time goes on."
Commenter Ed the Red said, "I love and generally use Debian (over Ubuntu, my second choice), but I'm not sure I would have chosen this particular moment for rebasing a XFCE distro on Debian testing. Debian just released Squeeze as stable a couple of months ago and the big changes that always follow a release of stable have yet to really hit the testing repos. Those changes can cause snafus. It does seem like the big changes that normally hit the Debian testing repos after a stable release are taking substantially longer than normal. [...] Although Thunar is a lot faster than Nautilus (though less full-featured), I've never been convinced that XFCE was that much less memory intensive than Gnome (Xubuntu often uses more than the more full featured Gnome version of Ubuntu). And Mint generally seems less responsive than standard Ubuntu to me. But I was impressed by LMDE, I like it much better than the latest Mint Ubuntu spin, it seems faster. [...]"

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, I have one fairly big post coming up, but that's all I have planned, because once again, I'm going to be quite busy with classwork. Once again, if you like what I write, please keep subscribing and commenting!

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Review: Linux Mint Xfce 201104

Main Screen

Just over 2 weeks ago, I wrote about how Linux Mint is moving the Xfce edition to a Debian base. Well, a few days ago, they released the official Linux Mint Xfce 201104.
For those of you who didn't read that post, in short, Linux Mint Xfce is now Debian-based instead of Ubuntu-based. The developers had a few things to say about this: (1) the desktop will be faster and lighter on resources (114 MB of RAM at idle, 177 MB of RAM with Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice Writer, and LibreOffice Calc open all at the same time), (2) the Xfce edition will now include more mainstream applications like Rhythmbox instead of Exaile, and (3) the Xfce edition, being based on Debian Testing, will be a rolling-release branch. All these things sounded very exciting to me, so I decided to try it out.

Please do note that I have been using Linux Mint for almost 2 years now. I've become quite fond of it, so while I will try to be as critical as possible, don't be surprised if some elements of bias creep into this review.

I tried out the live session on a live USB made with UnetBootin, which is surprising to me because past versions of Linux Mint "Debian" as well as #! (since its switch to a Debian base) haven't worked with UnetBootin. I tried out the installation, just to see if anything has changed since the last version of Linux Mint "Debian" that I've tried, in VirtualBox inside the live USB session with 384 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

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Ditching KDE Applications

Exactly a year ago to the day, I visited Caltech, and we visited some old family friends; one of the guys there is my age, and he's also a free software enthusiast, like me. Yay! We got into a discussion about free software and the applications we prefer. I mentioned that I prefer using Okular, GwenView, and Amarok compared to the default GNOME counterparts in Linux Mint. He told me that mixing and matching GNOME and KDE applications hurts performance. I remembered that since then, but I never really gave it a second thought until recently. That's because I noticed that opening files in GwenView or Okular would take 3 to 4 seconds, which in these days of being able to open any file almost instantly on a modern computer is unacceptable.

But why should I care now? Shouldn't I have continued being happy with 3 to 4 second wait times to open images and PDF documents? Well, there was one other application that got in the way of that contentment: Gloobus Preview. Follow the jump to read the rest.

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Featured Comments: Week of 2011 March 27

There were a couple posts this past week that got quite a few comments, so I'll try to repost most of those.

Apple's Stupid Trademark Cases: Now Including Emacs

Before I get to the comments themselves, I would like to say that I wanted to write this article last year, but I decided not to in order to better build up a particular writing style and reputation. With readers coming from LXer, Linux Today, and Tuxmachines to read the articles in this space, and having written this blog for over one and a half years, I think both are now pretty much set.
Reader Innocent Bystander said, "OMG, this is the 3rd time today I felt for these April's fool stories. Blog authors are getting creative these days."
Commenter surja said, "whew!"

Review: Elementary OS 0.1 "Jupiter"

An anonymous reader said, "Unfortunately Midori will NEVER be replaced by the Elementary team. They have extremely tight ties to the Midori devs. google would drop gmail before elementary drops midori, lol."
Another anonymous commenter had this suggestion, of sorts: "Midori is an awesome browser if people actually take the time to configure it to their likings and investigate its features, which include being able to identify as another browser so some pages work better. You can always add another browser and keep Midori for backup."
The original Elementary developer DanRabbit said, "Hey There, Just wanted to thank you for writing the review :D But also to point out that nobody ever said Pantheon would be finished for Jupiter (in fact we weren't going to even tell anyone we were working on it yet). I'm sorry you were disappointed it wasn't included, but it wouldn't have been a good reflection of what Pantheon will be all about :) As far as the next version of elementary OS, there have been no promises to ship Gnome 3 or GTK3. We'll have to see what the future holds!"
Fuduntu creator FEWT asked, "I have a question (because I'm curious :), why the name 'Jupiter' when there is already an established FOSS product with the same name? It is a fantastic name though, I'm rather fond of it for some strange reason." For those who don't know, the other Jupiter application is the laptop hardware and power management tool included by default in Fuduntu.
Bodhi Linux creator Jeff91 had this to say: "Just wanted to say Midori is a great browser (posting this from it). The Elementary OS team just need to give it some sane default settings. You can easily resolve a few of Midori larger quirks with the right configuration. Personally I think if Elementary OS sticks with Gnome 2 it could be that drop in Ubuntu deriv for Gnome with the main distro jumping to that silly unity thing."
Reader G said, "My Major issue is not with Midori which worked quite well. I found the Major issue is the mail client they shipped with, which has no support for smtp authentication or any other custom options. So for me if was unusable referring to the email client. Other than that the OS itself worked as expected and allowed me to pull in firefox and evolution. Overall nice clean product. Another recommendation is on the software store you change the heading to say Elementary instead of Ubuntu and that will give it a more polished look."
Commenter Dillon had this to say: " @PV: Just wanted to say, great review. Very thorough. Agree with you on just about everything. @DanRabbit: if you're reading this, keep up the good work! Also, where can I send bug reports? Do you have an official forum where followers like myself could discuss the next release? Looking forward to seeing your secret projects in action come next release! Thanks."
Reader Ankleface Wroughtlandmire asked, "Hi, can Elementary be used without 3D effects? I have no need for another layer of bugs and complexity on top of the mess of bugs and complexity that is Xorg. And there are many machines that at least initially do not support 3D compositing out of the box. Apart from its 3D dependencies, Elementary OS is looking very promising."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, I hope to be less busy, but I only have two posts planned. We'll see what happens. Remember, if you like what I write, please keep subscribing and commenting!

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Review: Elementary OS 0.1 "Jupiter"

Main Screen

Well, after quite a long wait, it has finally happened: the first official release of Elementary OS is here! Codenamed version 0.1 "Jupiter", it's based on Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat", so you may be thinking to yourself, "Why should I care about yet another Ubuntu derivative?" I'll admit that I had (and still have) slightly bought into the hype about Elementary OS, but there are plenty of reasons to care about Elementary OS. Let's look at some history.

Elementary OS has a rather unconventional history. It first started out as just an icon theme. Shortly thereafter, it grew GTK+ and Metacity themes. Along the way came a mod for the Nautilus file browser, default in Ubuntu and most other distributions with GNOME, called Nautilus Elementary; I've mentioned that mod before here, but for those who don't know, this mod organizes the side panel items by category (Personal, Devices, Network), beautifies the breadcrumb-style pathbar, removes some redundant navigation buttons, and compacts the menubar into a button. Then, the project started to expand its focus to include applications alongside aesthetics, with the Postler mail client and the accompanying Dexter address book program. Alongside these efforts came many other mockups for various other applications, such as Mozilla Firefox, Pidgin, Empathy, FileZilla, and others. More recently, the Elementary developers created a new panel called the WingPanel to replace the GNOME Panel on top, along with a new application launcher called Slingshot, all combined along with all the other applications into a new shell for GNOME called Pantheon.

I tested Elementary OS on a live USB made with UnetBootin. Although this is an Ubuntu-based distribution, I tested the installation just for fun (and to see if the developers have made any changes there) in a virtual machine with 384 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS. Follow the jump to see what this icon theme-turned-full-fledged distribution is like.

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Apple's Stupid Trademark Cases: Now Including Emacs

Apple has become progressively more aggressive about its products' trademarks lately. The more talked-about example has been its aggression regarding the term "App Store" The problem is that Apple itself would refer to "app store" generically and even talked about other companies' possible "app stores", yet now, when Microsoft wants to make an "app store" for the Windows Phone operating system, Apple is claiming that "App" is short for "Apple". This is truly disingenuous because practically every app developer on the face of this planet and many users out there too know that "app" has always stood for "application", not "Apple". Well, this sort of behavior has gone on even further. Many thanks to the good folks at Tuxmachines and LXer for providing the links; you can go to those sites to follow the original links. Follow the jump to read more.

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