The GNOME desktop, by default, has the same old 'la Ora' theme as 2008.1 Spring. The default desktop has the regular GNOME icons, and also the other partitions¬which is a bad choice as it's unnecessary. But then again, it's the default behaviour of GNOME, I guess. Apart from the theme, the other Mandriva custornisations are the Applications menu-you can, of course, revert back to the default GNOME Applications menu by launching MCC and navigating to System~Menu Style-and an MCC shortcut icon on the panel, next to the default Evolution and Firefox icons. That's all-the rest is all default GNOME.

GNOME 2.24 has introduced some nifty features. One of the very basic, yet important, ones is that the Nautilus file manager now has support for tabs (see As expected, pressing Ctrl+T opens a new tab. Although something quite odd about it is how it opens the same location in the new tab-I'd have been happy if it opened the home directory instead. Another new feature is the compact view. As the name says, it can display more files/directories in the given window without the need for you to scroll because, well, things are compact here. Although I don't know if it's of any use to me, at the moment.

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Another change that G OME 2.24 introduces is a new instant message client called Empathy. Mandriva, by default, still installs Pidgin. After installing and using Empathy for a while, I've got to say 1\'Iandriva has made a smart move by defaulting to Pidgin-Empathy, as of now, is simply too feature-stripped for my tastes.

Overall, there are tiny feature improvements here and there, and over a period of use since the RC2 release, things seemed pretty stable with no application crashes to talk about. However, it seems like GNOME now has become much more resource hungry than what it was a couple of releases back. On my laptop with 512 liB RAM, the desJ.."top didn't seem as responsive as it should have been. I don't know whether the fault lies with GNOME or l'landriva, but I would have liked it a bit snappier. Guess users with 256 liB of RAM will be sort of stuck.