LinuxPlanet: Gnome 2.0 RC1–A Huge Step Toward World GNOMEination

“GNOME 2.0 is a big jump, release-number-wise, from GNOME 1.4.
The primary reason for this change is that GNOME 2.0 is
fundamentally a complete rewrite of much of the infrastructure that
supports the GNOME desktop. This includes fundamental libraries
such as the GTK, the GIMP Toolkit library (which serves as the
basis for much of the GNOME GUI), and centralized configuration
mechanisms such as GConf, the GNOME Configuration database. GNOME
1.x applications will need to be modified in order to work with
GNOME 2.0 and later, and many may simply go away because they deal
with GNOME subsystems or configuration mechanisms that no longer
exist.

“From the user’s point of view, GNOME 2.0 focuses on enhancing
the appearance, usability, and accessibility of the GNOME desktop.
One of the more significant improvements in the appearance of GNOME
2.0 applications is that GNOME now supports anti-aliasing in order
to provide better looking fonts by softening steps and sharp
transitions at the edges of characters.

“The pango (http://www.pango.org) library used to provide
Unicode support (among other things) throughout GNOME applications
provides a font renderer for X Window system applications that
removes many of the visual limitations of scaling the bitmapped
fonts that are traditionally used in many X Window system
applications. GNOME 2.0 also uses Unicode consistently, simplifying
internationalization and enabling the use of mix-and-match
character sets within applications. If Linux is to succeed on the
desktop, it has to dress for success, and improved font support and
the consistent use of Unicode and associated internationalization
throughout GNOME 2.0 applications is a huge step in the right
direction…”

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