I guess all of us are familiar with the term GNOME. Well, if you’re not, it stands for the GNU Object Model Environment – The Desktop Interface Model, if you prefer to keep it simple.
Let’s hit the basics first. Each operating system follows a specific style of UI. Like in Windows, we’ve got the traditional start menu—Icon—desktop model and the newly Win7 phone inspired Metro Desktop now. Same goes with Mac. Linux desktops for years now have KDE, XFCE or GNOME UI of which GNOME and KDE are the most popular. Some of the most famous distros that use GNOME include Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse to name a few.
This week, GNOME had come up with a major overhaul for its newer version of Desktop UI – GNOME 3.4. Although GNOME had received considerable criticism among its users for being ‘not-so-easy-to-use’ upon releasing v3, they had constantly worked out changes and the newer UI looks promising.
Some of the notable changes in it are,
A new application by the name Document has arrived. It provides an easy interface to browse, search and organize documents. This looks much like the iBooks app that you use in iOS devices, the only difference being, this app runs as native in Linux.
The default browser Mozilla Firefox has been replaced with a light-weight browser Epiphany. It has been well integrated within the GNOME UI and looks slick and compact – not much functionality though.
GNOME’s Contact App has been redesigned to make it look even more organized. Some changes have been made to fetch new data fields as well.
The Disk Utility that you usually use with GNOME has gone on for a complete image makeover. The built in Screen Recorder shall produce ‘Smoother Videos now’ they say. Animated Wallpaper finally makes its way through to Linux. The interesting part is, the wallpaper shall change its colour on the basis of the System Time. Power Options have been reworked to make your device work efficiently.
Support for more USB devices, speakers. The built-in multi-protocol chat client shall now support Video Calling. Feature improvements have also been made to the MSN and Facebook chat protocols. WebM video file format has been made the default format for Webcam recording using Cheese Webcam Booth. File Browser app Nautilus now accepts Undo function. Zoom functionality introduced. Image metadata has been brought in to Image Viewer to view both image and its associated data at the same time. Boxes – the new app that allows you to connect to remote sites and use virtual machines has been released as a beta version here.
Live images of the GNOME have been hosted at http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/misc/promo-cd/ for anyone to try. Other distros are also expected to adapt the newer version of GNOME into them on their future releases.