Just a few days ago, as I’m sure many of you are aware, GNOME 2.18 was released. It was somewhat interesting for me since it was the first release since 2.6 that I didn’t follow obsessively. Instead of aggressively installing betas and release candidates (that almost always caused crashes of various types), I simply avoided the development cycle altogether, and noticed the release came a lot faster in my mind. I haven’t yet installed the beast, since I’m waiting for it to be included in ~x86 in Gentoo, but if the release notes are any indication, I’m not going to be very impressed.

Maybe I’m just romantically remembering a past that wasn’t as glamorous as it really was, but it seemed that previous releases had new features, new applications, and other interesting developments. This time around, the release notes start out with rather vague improvements, like “personal security”, perhaps a warning in itself. If there were groundbreaking improvements, you’d think they’d at least be mentioned specifically. Next we find out there are a couple of new games. Well, that’s an improvement, I guess.

Next we finally get to the list of actual improvements. The killer GNOME 2.18 feature that was deemed worthy of the first bullet point?

Tomboy, the note-taking applet, helps you to keep better track of your most important notes by pinning them, making sure they will always easier to find.

Now, Tomboy’s a great application and I use it daily, but seriously? This is the top improvement? Maybe the editing was just bad. Continuing down the list, we finally do see some real improvements, but nothing stands out. I’ll just have to wait and see if I notice anything different when I finally upgrade.

This is perhaps the biggest problem I notice with some of these decentralized projects. A lot of small changes but no real direction. The same problem plagues Gentoo to a certain degree, and even KDE’s minor releases aren’t terribly exciting. Oh well, maybe KDE4 or GNOME 3.0 (if it ever even gets off the ground) will show some real innovation. Until then, I’ll just continue using my “functional” desktop.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.