Andy Wingo asks the question no one wants to ask: is Gnome development past the point of useful returns?¹ It’s a poignant question too, as so much care and attention is poured into these huge projects. Where are desktop systems going next? Should Gnome be looking further ahead?

1. Or KDE for that matter? ↩

It’s funny but I never realized how much Firefox’s non-native widgets bugged me. I installed the Grand Paradiso (beta 5) last week, and was surprised by how much smoother it felt. It’s a combination of things: it’s faster, the XUL widgets behave better, and many of the in-page widgets use the Gnome native controls¹.

1. Textareas don’t seem to use native widgets, however ↩

A comparison of desktop memory usage, pitting KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and Plain XFree against each other in the battle for the smallest footprint.

Midori is a Webkit-based browser for Gnome. It’s new, and the artwork is a bit weird, but it means that other Webkit-esque browsers are coming. Yay.

An overview of GNOME 2.20 at ARS Technica.

The Thunar File Manager looks like an OS X Finder for Gnome.

Here are a few possible fixes for the “Error activating XKB configuration” popup that appears after updating from Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10.

Gnome HOWTO: Sending notification balloons from scripts, used for popping up subtle messages from cron jobs and such.

A clear analysis of a few possible Gnome Terminal performance bottlenecks.

Check out Gnome’s newest photo management tool, F-spot. It’s written in C#/GTK# with Mono, and is easy to use. It imported 15k of photos in just a few minutes, making it fun/easy/quick to browse, tag, edit, and upload the shots to Flickr. The Free tools just keep on getting better and better.