“For this release there has been a lot of focus put on
usability issues. While most people felt that the 1.0 series
of GNOME was a excellent piece of software in terms of design and
technical implementation, many felt that there were some rough
edges and especially new Linux users were a little skeptical about
the way GNOME worked. In the 1.2 release most of the problems
should be solved, with a lot of new features in the usability
department.”
“The previous release of GNOME drew many criticisms from the
press and users for the way it interoperated with Enlightenment
which was the window manager which most distributions bundled with
GNOME. … For this release the GNOME developers have tried to
alleviate this by bundling the Sawfish (ed: formerly known as
Sawmill) window manager instead. Unlike Enlightenment, Sawfish
doesn’t contain any duplicate functionality to that included in
GNOME and it is also configured through an integrated control
center applet. Sawfish offers just as good or better themability as
Enlightenment and can be easily modified by persons with some
knowledge in scripting with Lisp.”
“Many people were not completely happy with the way the GNOME
control center worked in previous versions. In this version, the
GNOME-UI team has worked a lot with design and modification which
has resulted in a much better looking and more intuitive
organization of the Control Center. Of course the beautiful new
menu icons provided by Tigert and his employer Helix Code helps a
lot in making things look better.”