At linux.com, I just read an article about the new GNOME 2.18 release (although 2.18.1 was just released). the line that caught my attention is the following:

“[..] I’m underwhelmed at the changes between 2.16 and 2.18. It’s a solid release, but it doesn’t move the ball forward very far in terms of improvements, new applications, or new features.“

I’ll be hated for saying this, and am partially responsible for this (I’m spending only limited time at gnome-media at this time) myself. But I felt something similar when I saw the GNOME 2.18 release announcement. There’s simple things that make me feel this way. Compare, for example, the 2.18 and the very detailed and excellent 2.14 release notes. Of course, all honour to those who do the actual work, but somehow the 2.14 notes look very professional and like they were done with a lot of love. Compared to that, the 2.18 release notes look like they were pulled together at the last minute. Not very impressive, not very impressed.

But there’s more, it’s not just this. Compare the still very sketchy developer pages for GNOME (I know, I know, people are working to migrate to a new web service system, but the thing is: it’s not there yet) and compare that to KDE’s plasma, phonon, decibel or solid pages (and for fun, compare those to some comparable GNOME technologies: GStreamer, Telepathy or HAL). There’s a multitude of differences. The KDE pages are targetted at both developers and users. The GNOME (basically FDO) pages are only targetted at developers. They lack information for the user on what it is. More importantly, they don’t associate directly with GNOME. Unfortunately, GNOME doesn’t associate with those projects either, even though all of them have large backing by GNOME developers and community.

Lastly, apart from the obvious pimping of those very cool technologies, those technologies should be embraced also. If GStreamer is the one true love, then make it work for Totem (and ditch Xine). The Firefox plug-in, for example, should work with playlists, which is what every internet site will stream. While I’m at it, please know that GStreamer can still not play DVD menus, shame on you, go fix it instead of make up excuses (or just rip it from Xine and release it under the GPL in a separate module). GConf, Evolution and the panel should use DBUS (work is being done on GConf [see Jeff earlier today] and Evolution, but none of this is upstream yet…). Let’s integrate Telepathy, add Gossip (even if it only does Jabber and GPhone). There’s some very obvious stuff out there which basically already exists (and it’s far more than the examples I’ve mentioned up here, e.g. Novell’s new start menu, GnomeScan, etc.), it only has to be brought back upstream. GNOME as a whole would profit greatly, those projects would attract more developers making them (hopefully) develop quicker (releaseintegrate early & often) and reviewers would be a whole lot more happy.

In addition to all of the above, I’d love to see exciting new experimental projects such as Gimmie enhance my experience (and I’m as excited when Mirco puts new screencasts online), but some of that is probably further away than “the next release”.

Yesterday, I was playing with software that eats memory. Lots of memory. It’s the 3D analysis software Volocity. I loaded a pretty big image (basically several M per Z, and then several hundreds Zs), and made the mistake of trying to rotate it along multiple axes and then letting it go at the result.

In the old days, when Linux was a shiny new and hip OS, the OOM would come in and kill your app – if you’re lucky. It may first kill OO.o with that very important spreadsheet that you were working on. Otherwise decent, in a way. Nowadays, your system usually trashes beyond any reasonable repair and a reboot is the only option. If you’re patient enough, there’s a ~30% chance that the app actually kills within 5 minutes (out of ~10 times that it happened to me over the past ~2 yrs – since then I’ve given up and just reboot, a reboot takes less than 5 minutes anyway).

<Advertisement>Meet the Mac</Advertisement>. It pops up a warning saying that my system is low on memory (and later on it complained about diskspace also). The operation in the software, which is getting kind of sluggish up to this point (swapping?), eventually aborted with a nice error dialog. It actually told me that I was out of memory. In addition, the OS gave me suggestions on applications to close so I could retry the operation. No data was lost at any time during the +/- 10 times that I re-tried this. For a geek, there is no way to describe the feeling when you see this. In short: when will GNOME have this? [*]

_{In the end, I had to quit Photoshop and free up to 5GB HD space so it could complete the operation. Of course, at that time I had moved to the graphical workstation that we have since it would do that in a few seconds.}

[*] glib actually has provisions for this, such as

g_try_malloc()

instead of

g_malloc()

, but I doubt that any OSdesktop (through HAL?) interaction exists to tell me that I’m OOM and suggest apps to close when it happens. So to say, if it exists, they’ve done a good job hiding it, because I’ve never seen it.