Lets do the same order as the gnome release notes only with my opinion about them and of the items that deserve a little more attention.

Brasero

Brasero always seemed to be the burning tool to use under linux. Or the one most used. It didn’t made much sense to have nautilus-cd-burner (which has been removed in gnome 2.26) while most people preferred brasero. Brasero is also integrated in nautilus (go to Applications -> System Tools -> CD/DVD Creator) and seems to be offering the same as nautilus-cd-burner had. I didn’t test it yet. In my opinion it’s a wise decision of gnome to make the move to brasero.

Brasero screenshot

Brasero in nautilus

Totem

This is a good example of a feature that might be required by some people but is useless for most. Quote from the release notes:

While GNOME’s Media Player already has the ability to display subtitles for a movie, this still required you to have the subtitle data available. As of GNOME 2.26, this restriction is gone. Using the new subtitle downloader plugin, the Media Player will automatically find subtitles for you.

I don’t understand why they bother to add in features like that (and remember they did add in youtube support in either gnome 2.22 or 2.24) that are pointless for most people. This should be just a plugin that you can download somewhere but not a new feature mentioned in the release notes.

Updated sound preferences for PulseAudio

Now this is an interesting one! PulseAudio is in Fedora since release 8 and ubuntu has it since 8.04 so it was about time that those volume controls where going to work with PulseAudio instead of against it (or so it seemed sometimes). Sadly the application that gnome posts in a screenshot is nowhere to be found on my ubuntu 9.04 Beta (fully updated) machine so i can’t really say more about it without seeing it for myself.

Multiple monitors

If you have just one monitor you probably don’t care about this but it’s something that was divided in the past. Ubuntu had it’s own application to get this. Fedora had one and there where a few others floating around. Far from an ideal situation. Now Gnome has updated his display program to support multiple screens. This was all possible with the xrandr command line tool but a graphical frontend it quite handy for things like this. It’s becoming a nice tool now and way more centralized then then it used to be.

Epiphany

This browser for (and by) Gnome looks clean but has a lot of potential. I will write a bigger article or perhaps a review about this one later. What they added here is Firefox’s “Awsome Bar“… it looks funny and seems to be running fast from what i’ve seen so far. It’s definitely a browser to check out and see if you like it.

Epiphany - Note the wrong render of the legend box. That's bad and ugly! (no issue in Firefox)

Overall Gnome 2.26 impression

With the previous 2 releases (2.22 and 2.24) i found the release notes weak and more useless stuff that was added then useful stuff. Back then it seemed (to me) that they added what was popular at the time. Google had just bought Youtube and they felt some need to implement that in Totem. This time they did also include stuff that strikes me as useless but the majority seems to be useful for everyday Gnome usage. This release was a good one, despite the additions that i rather didn’t see, for Gnome although not much changed visually. This seems to be the release i’ve been hoping for since roughly 2.20. A release where they finally fixed the things that needed fixing and add the things that are needed.

Next in 6 months: Gnome 2.28

There are already some ideas for the next Gnome version. At this moment only the Artwork section for the next gnome has been filled in and that looks promising. If you want to have a look at it click here.

I hope you liked this small review of interesting new and updated Gnome 2.26 features.

Till next time,
Mark.