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Currently verging on vapor, but an idea whose time is very soon if not now.

hardly. Works great for me.

freedesktop and linux standards base make it possible, stone-age troll monkey.

Huh? You realise that the Red Hat apt repositories have been allying with each other for some time, to reduce duplication, overlap and synchronize metadata right? They just don't do press releases for it.

Most of the times open source projects don't really notice eachother and when they do, they just start a flamewar about who's best and who stole feature from who.

How do you explain that then?

It's good too see there are some developers out there with organizational talents who are willing to communicate with other projects in order to speed up development time and create a better product.

Sure, it's all good. I still don't understand how they intend to reduce duplication when using different packaging systems and different sources though. If we have packages A and B in fink and gentoo, but they both depend on package C, which network gets to "hold" package C? How do you interface emerge to apt? How do they synchronize the metadata between these two large bodies of packages? In the cases where there already is duplication, who gets to keep the package?

Lots of unanswered questions here. Will be interesting to find out the answers.

Oh, you mean like http://www.freedesktop.org/?

Well, you could use it with KDE. It's NETWM compatible, so you could just replace the kwin window manager with enlightment. If you want to try it out, just edit you startkde script, or set the environmental variable KDEWM to the path to enlightenment (that sounds funny) before you start KDE and it should use that instead.

Sorry, but your reply can't be taken seriously.

If GNOME is planning to go that way then they should have better helped on QNX or OpenBeOS.

And to correct some writings of yours.

LibXML which got added into Xfree86. Click on that Link and do you read the BIG GNOME logo at the top and also pay attention to various GNOME related buttons there.

PkgConfig Do you see who the author is ? The same person who works and dictates GNOME these days. It's not dependant on GNOME right, but it's written FOR GNOME and therefore insulting for people that don't like to use GNOME specially for KDE people. It makes me upset to have this shit delivered with Xfree.

Fontconfig and Xft2 is something I actually can life with even knowing that it's written by Keith Packard, Xcoursors and XRandr also written by Keith Packard and Jim Gettys. We know they work on GNOME as well.

As not enough that GNOME shit made it's way into Xfree86, now the minions of GNOME want to fork Xfree86 and make it become some more dependant to GNOME. Specially this mail is quite annoying. Xfree86 should not include the application breaking specs from FreeDesktop.org. An fork of Xfree86 is interesting and of course good for the future but not if it's made by the GNOME people who are only interested to push their own visions into their own fork of Xfree86.

Please think about this. Specially FreeDesktop.org caused no good. Try doing a fullscreen with Phoenix on GNOME 2.x with MetaCity. The specs break nearly every 2nd application.

I prefer GNOME; its licensing scheme, basic goals, and many of its technical decisions have been overall quite good. The "few preferences" approach is grossly misunderstood. It's not that they're trying to eliminate the ability to set preferences... it's that they're trying to make sure that software "does the right thing" without needing to set preferences. The canonical example is the option that you need to set in order for the software function to work (e.g., emacs cut and paste). There's no need for an option to make the software work: it should work correctly ALL THE TIME. Is GNOME perfect? No. Nor is KDE.

Others prefer KDE. Fine, enjoy KDE.

Really, what needs to happen is standard setting so that applications work correctly no matter what environment the user chooses, and no matter what toolkit the developer chooses. Please support Freedesktop.org, who really represent the way forward.

In gnome 1 I was able to put applets for gaim and xmms in my sidebar. They are unobtrusive there and available on all my desktops. It was wonderful. KDE doesn't have these.

Both GAIM (in nightly snapshots) and XMMS now have "dock plugins" that place themselves in the dock area. (KDE calls it "system tray", and GNOME calls it "notification area") The dock applet API is a freedesktop.org standard that both desktops are using. So KDE docklets work in GNOME 2.2 and GNOME docklets work in KDE 3.1.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is",
• "the user don't know what themes are",
• "the user don't know what a homedir is",
• "the user can't compile a kernel",
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop",
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

But seeing that it be solved (in a minimal, functional set of apps) is, to me, an issue for the distros -- something that I'd hope the effort under discussion will solve.

The distributors might not entirely agree with that. They might not be willing to supply modified versions of those applications (or toolkits) in the name of consistency, as that means more stuff to maintain and sync with the upstream software.

They might be willing to support efforts such as freedesktop.org, and let them try to encourage consistency, and they might even be willing to pay some developers to contribute code upstream.

Do Edit > Copy (or ctrl-C) in Mozilla, Edit > Paste (or ctrl-V) in Nedit. Nothing happens. Same with Kedit. Only right-click works.

7.0 is an older release, and at least some of that problem is due to the disagreement between older (pre-3.0) versions of Qt and GTK+ in the interpretation of the clipboard. SuSE's list of press releases speaks of 7.1 coming out in early 2001, and doesn't speak of 7.0 at all in 2001 (their archive doesn't appear to go back further than 2001); Qt 3.0 came out in October 2001, according to the Trolltech press release archive, so SuSE 7.0 was probably incapable of being bundled with a KDE release that included Qt 3.0 as it appears that no such release existed at the time 7.0 came out.

That means that KDE was, unfortunately, simply not going to play well with many applications when using the clipboard.

The inability of Mozilla and Nedit to play together is somewhat more of a surprise; I don't know where Mozilla uses GTK+ rather than rolling its own widgets, but the GTK+ parts should work together with Nedit, as Nedit uses Motif, and Motif uses the same interpretation of the clipboard as GTK+.

In the case of Mozilla and KEdit, it's not as if there's some configuration file that the SuSE folks set up incorrectly, and if they'd just fixed that those two apps would work together. The same is probably true of Mozilla and Nedit. It's also not as if they could've hopped into the time machine and shipped SuSE 7.0 with KDE 3.0....

Perhaps these are just technical details, but, regardless of whether a user wants to hear the technical details or not, they sometimes control whether the user's problem can be solved, when it can be solved, and how it can be solved.

Ultimately, much of the reasoning has to be developer's reasoning, because unless the developers can do something about the problem, and do so, the problem isn't going to get solved.

I'd personally be a bit annoyed if Ctrl+C in a terminal window copied the selection to the clipboard rather than sending a ^C down the pseudo-terminal to interrupt the current program

And what about PASTING! Highlighting to overwrite in one sequence copies what you highlighted to your clipboard (overwriting your precious clipboard text)!

Not in any desktop that implements its primary and clipboard selections according to the X clipboard explanation, which says "selecting but with no explicit copy should only set PRIMARY, never CLIPBOARD."

The problem here is that people have gotten confused about what the "clipboard" is. The clipboard is not what selecting something with the mouse changes and not what your middle mouse button pastes. Selecting with the mouse changes the primary selection, and the middle mouse button pastes the primary selection.

Who cares if it's called PRIMARY or CLIPBOARD? The end result is the same: a user is merrily copying and pasting with one method, only to find that, sorry, it shall break down when it comes to overwriting. Talk about interface consistency...

"See, use Ctrl+C (sometimes?), but if you're in a console, just highlight it... But don't highlight anything otherwise, or you'll lose whats in your clipboard".

Those are two different mechanisms; Ctrl+C is "copy to clipboard", and you then paste from the clipboard, but "just highlight it" is followed by the middle-mouse-button "paste current selection".

I'd personally be a bit annoyed if Ctrl+C in a terminal window copied the selection to the clipboard rather than sending a ^C down the pseudo-terminal to interrupt the current program - but I'd be similarly annoyed if it did that in the terminal windows on a certain non-UNIX operating system as well. (In that OS, at least in the 5.0 version of the "New Technology" flavor of that OS, you can either select "Edit->Copy" on the window menu or, apparently, use the "Enter" key - I guess "Enter" acts as a CR/LF only if nothing is selected.)

And what about PASTING! Highlighting to overwrite in one sequence copies what you highlighted to your clipboard (overwriting your precious clipboard text)!

Not in any desktop that implements its primary and clipboard selections according to the X clipboard explanation, which says "selecting but with no explicit copy should only set PRIMARY, never CLIPBOARD."

The problem here is that people have gotten confused about what the "clipboard" is. The clipboard is not what selecting something with the mouse changes and not what your middle mouse button pastes. Selecting with the mouse changes the primary selection, and the middle mouse button pastes the primary selection. "Copy" copies the primary selection to the clipboard; merely selecting something doesn't, it just changes the primary selection to refer to what you selected. "Paste" inserts the contents of the clipboard in place of the current selection (which could be a "zero-length" selection, in which case it amounts to inserting at the point of the selection, e.g. insert at the text cursor in a text window).

(As I remember, the KDE people spoke of them both as "clipboards" when discussing the KDE 3.0/Qt 3.0 change to make the primary selection and clipboard work that way, in order to, I guess, avoid confusing people whose brains had become too locked into the notion of the middle mouse button pasting some kind of "clipboard"; however, the X11 Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual calls the primary selection PRIMARY and the clipboard CLIPBOARD.)

The link at the end of the story that points to freedesktop.com should probably point to freedesktop.org (or even www.freedesktop.org since the non-www version seems to cause trouble for some people). Unless, of course, slashdot really meant to provide some free advertising to the lucky folks at freedesktop.com.

The link at the end of the story that points to freedesktop.com should probably point to freedesktop.org (or even www.freedesktop.org since the non-www version seems to cause trouble for some people). Unless, of course, slashdot really meant to provide some free advertising to the lucky folks at freedesktop.com.

The URLs ares
freedesktop.org and www.freedesktop.org

not freedesktop.com and www.freedesktop.com

which seem to be placeholders for a domain squatter.

The URLs ares
freedesktop.org and www.freedesktop.org

not freedesktop.com and www.freedesktop.com

which seem to be placeholders for a domain squatter.

Apparently the www matters.

Apparently FreeDesktop's web admin doesn't know what a ServerAlias directive is.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat , ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf , an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more , more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering . needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link . to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

"the user don't know what a window manager is",

"the user don't know what themes are",

"the user don't know what a homedir is",

"the user can't compile a kernel",

"the user don't want to customize their desktop",

"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus . the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link .

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment . we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link .

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml , pkgconfig , fontconfig , xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly attitude.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat , ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf , an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more , more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering . needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link . to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

"the user don't know what a window manager is",

"the user don't know what themes are",

"the user don't know what a homedir is",

"the user can't compile a kernel",

"the user don't want to customize their desktop",

"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus . the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link .

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment . we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link .

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml , pkgconfig , fontconfig , xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly attitude.

"Instead of text selection requiring a repaint of the entire text, with a different background colour, why not send just one transparent tinted box over the network instead?"

I think that's what XRender does.

"* decent fonts"

MS TrueType fonts and Xft.

"# better cut and paste, with a memory, and perhaps a history stack"

X clipboard mechanism standard (supported correctly by GTK+ 1.2/2.0, QT 3.0, Mozilla, Motif, and probably some other toolkits)
GNOME Clipboard Manager

"# make it so I don't have to run DRI programs as root."

You run DRI apps as root?! *gasp*
Why can I run Tuxracer as normal user?

"* standard widget set, and a standard 3rd party widget registry, so GNOME and KDE widgets can co-exist in the same application, or at least access eachother through a standard communications channel. (you laugh..)"

XEmbed. Work in progress.
BlueCurve and Keramik/Geramik provide a consistent look for both toolkits.

"Instead of text selection requiring a repaint of the entire text, with a different background colour, why not send just one transparent tinted box over the network instead?"

I think that's what XRender does.

"* decent fonts"

MS TrueType fonts and Xft.

"# better cut and paste, with a memory, and perhaps a history stack"

X clipboard mechanism standard (supported correctly by GTK+ 1.2/2.0, QT 3.0, Mozilla, Motif, and probably some other toolkits)
GNOME Clipboard Manager

"# make it so I don't have to run DRI programs as root."

You run DRI apps as root?! *gasp*
Why can I run Tuxracer as normal user?

"* standard widget set, and a standard 3rd party widget registry, so GNOME and KDE widgets can co-exist in the same application, or at least access eachother through a standard communications channel. (you laugh..)"

XEmbed. Work in progress.
BlueCurve and Keramik/Geramik provide a consistent look for both toolkits.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat , ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf , an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more , more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering . needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link . to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

"the user don't know what a window manager is",

"the user don't know what themes are",

"the user don't know what a homedir is",

"the user can't compile a kernel",

"the user don't want to customize their desktop",

"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus . the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link .

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment . we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link .

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml , pkgconfig , fontconfig , xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly attitude.

This Programs menu is the ultimate in cruft. It is an entire system for categorizing programs, on top of a Windows filesystem hierarchy which theoretically exists for exactly the same purpose. Gnome and KDE, on top of a Unix filesystem hierarchy which is even more obtuse than that of Windows, naturally copy this cruft with with great enthusiasm.

(...) And the ROX Desktop eschews the idea of a Start menu, in favor of using the filesystem itself to categorize programs.

In Vernor Vinges sci-fi novel A fire upon the deep, he presents the idea of software archeology. Vinges future has software engineers spending large amounts of time digging through layers of decades-old code in a computer system like layers of dirt and rubbish in real-world archeology to find out how, or why, something works.

So far, in 2002, this problem isnt so bad. We call such electronic garbage cruft, and promise to get rid of it someday. But its not really important right now, we tell ourselves, because computers keep getting faster, and we havent quite got to the point where single programs are too large for highly coordinated teams to understand.

But what if cruft makes its way into the human-computer interface? Then you have problems, because human brains arent getting noticably faster. (At least, not in the time period were concerned with here.) So the more cruft there is in an interface, the more difficult it will be to use.

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, Ive noticed that cruft has been appearing in computer interfaces. And few people are trying to fix it. I see two main reasons for this.

1. Microsoft and Apple dont want to make their users go through any retraining, at all, for fear of losing market share. So rather than make their interfaces less crufty, they concentrate on making everything look pretty.

2. Free Software developers have the ability to start from a relatively cruft-free base, but (as a gratuitously broad generalization) they have no imagination whatsoever. So rather than making their interfaces more usable, they concentrate on copying whatever Microsoft and Apple are doing, cruft and all.

Here are a few examples of interface cruft.

1. In the 1970s and early 80s, transferring documents from a computers memory to permanent storage (such as a floppy disk) was slow. It took many seconds, and you had to wait for the transfer to finish before you could continue your work. So, to avoid disrupting typists, software designers made this transfer a manual task. Every few minutes, you would save your work to permanent storage by entering a particular command.

   Trouble is, since the earliest days of personal computers, people have been forgetting to do this, because its not natural. They dont have to save when using a pencil, or a pen, or a paintbrush, or a typewriter, so they forget to save when theyre using a computer. So, when something bad happens, theyve often gone too long without saving, and they lose their work.

   Fortunately, technology has improved since the 1970s. We have the power, in todays computers, to pick a sensible name for a document, and to save it to a persons desktop as soon as she begins typing, just like a piece of paper in real life. We also have the ability to save changes to that document every couple of minutes (or, perhaps, every paragraph) without any user intervention.

   We have the technology. So why do we still make people save each of their documents, at least once, manually? Cruft.

2. The original Macintosh, which introduced graphical interfaces to the general public, could only run one program at a time. If you wanted to use a second program, or even return to the file manager, the first program needed to be unloaded first. To make things worse, launching programs was slow, often taking tens of seconds.

   This presented a problem. What if you had one document open in a program, and you closed that document before opening another one? If the program unloaded itself as soon as the first document was closed, the program would need to be loaded again to open the second document, and that would take too long. But if the program didnt unload itself, you couldnt launch any other program.

   So, the Macs designers made unloading a program a manual operation. If you wanted to load a second program, or go back to the file manager, you first chose a menu item called Quit to unload the first program. And if you closed all the windows in a program, it didnt unload by itself it stayed running, usually displaying nothing more than a menu bar, just in case you wanted to open another document in the same program.

   Trouble is, the Quit command has always been annoying and confusing people, because its exposing an implementation detail the lack of multitasking in the operating system. It annoys people, because occasionally they choose Quit by accident, losing their careful arrangement of windows, documents, toolboxes, and the like with an instantaneity which is totally disproportionate to how difficult it was to open and arrange them all in the first place. And it confuses people, because a program can be running without any windows being open, so while all open windows may belong to the file manager, which is now always running in the background menus and keyboard shortcuts get sent to the invisible program instead, producing unexpected behavior.

   Fortunately, technology has improved since 1984. We have the power, in todays computers, to run more than one program at once, and to load programs in less than five seconds.

   We have the technology. So why do we still punish people by including Quit or Exit menu items in programs? Cruft.

3. As I said, the original Macintosh could only run one program at a time. If you wanted to use a second program, or even return to the file manager, the first program needed to be unloaded first.

   This presented a problem when opening or saving files. The obvious way to open a document is to launch it (or drag it) from the file manager. And the obvious way to save a document in a particular folder is to drag it to that folder in the file manager. But on the Mac, if another program was already running, you couldnt get to the file manager. What to do? What to do?

   So, the Macs designers invented something called a file selection dialog, or filepicker a lobotomized file manager, for opening and saving documents when the main file manager wasnt running. If you wanted to open a document, you chose an Open menu item, and navigated your way through the filepicker to the document you wanted. Similarly, if you wanted to save a document, you chose a Save menu item, entered a name for the document, and navigated your way through the filepicker to the folder you wanted.

   Trouble is, this interface has always been awkward to use, because its not consistent with the file manager. If youre in the file manager and you want to make a new folder, you do it one way; if youre in a filepicker and you want to make a new folder, you do it another way. In the file manager, opening two folders in separate windows is easy; in a filepicker, it cant be done.

   Fortunately, technology has improved since 1984. We have the power, in todays computers, to run more than one program at once, and to run the file manager all the time. We can open documents from the file manager without quitting all other programs first, and we can save copies of documents (if necessary) by dragging them into folders in the file manager.

   We have the technology. So why do we still make people use filepickers at all? Cruft.

4. This last example is particularly nasty, because it shows how interface cruft can be piled up, layer upon layer.

   1. In Microsofts MS-DOS operating system, the canonical way of identifying a file was by its pathname: the concatenation of the drive name, the hierarchy of directories, and the filename, something like C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CTL3DV2.DLL. If a program wanted to keep track of a file in a menu of recently-opened documents, for example it used the files pathname. For backward compatibility with MS-DOS, all Microsofts later operating systems, right up to Windows XP, do the same thing.

      Trouble is, this system causes a plethora of usability problems in Windows, because filenames are used by humans.

   2. What if a human renames a document in the file manager, and later on tries to open it from that menu of recently-opened documents? He gets an error message complaining that the file could not be found.

   3. What if he makes a shortcut to a file, moves the original file, and then tries to open the shortcut? He gets an error message, as Windows scurries to find a file which looks vaguely similar to the one the shortcut was supposed to be pointing at.

   4. What happens if he opens a file in a word processor, then renames it to a more sensible name in the file manager, and then saves it (automatically or otherwise) in the word processor? He gets another copy of the file with the old name, which he didnt want.

   5. What happens if a program installs itself in the wrong place, and our fearless human moves it to the right place? If hes lucky, the program will still work but hell get a steady trickle of error messages, the next time he launches each of the shortcuts to that program, and the next time he opens any document associated with the program.

   6. Fortunately, technology has improved since 1981. We have the power, in todays computers, to use filesystems which store a unique identifier for every file, separate from the pathname such as the file ID in the HFS and HFS+ filesystems, or the inode in most filesystems used with Linux and Unix. In these filesystems, shortcuts and other references to particular files can keep track of these unchanging identifiers, rather than the pathname, so none of those errors will ever happen.

      We have the technology. So why does Windows still suffer from all these problems? Cruft.

      Lest it seem like Im picking on Microsoft, Windows is not the worst offender here. GNU/Linux applications are arguably worse, because they could be avoiding all these problems (by using inodes), but their programmers so far have been too lazy. At least Windows programmers have an excuse.

   7. To see how the next bit of cruft follows from the previous one, we need to look at the mechanics of dragging and dropping. On the Macintosh, when you drag a file from one folder to another, what happens is fairly predictable.

   8. If the source and the destination are on different storage devices, the item will be copied.
   9. If the source and destination are on the same storage device, the item will be moved.
   10. If you want the item to be copied rather than moved in the latter case, you hold down the Option key.

   11. Windows has a similar scheme, for most kinds of files. But as Ive just explained, if you move a program in Windows, every shortcut to that program (and perhaps the program itself) will stop working. So as a workaround for that problem, when you drag a program from one place to another in Windows, Windows makes a shortcut to it instead of moving it and lands in the Interface Hall of Shame as a result.

       Naturally, this inconsistency makes people rather confused about exactly what will happen when they drag an item from one place to another. So, rather than fixing the root problem which led to the workaround, Microsoft invented a workaround to the workaround. If you drag an item with the right mouse button, when you drop it youll get a menu of possible actions: move, copy, make a shortcut, or cancel. That way, by spending a couple of extra seconds choosing a menu item, you can be sure of what is going to happen. Unfortunately this earns Microsoft another citation in the Interface Hall of Shame for inventing the right-click-drag, perhaps the least intuitive operation ever conceived in interface design. Say it with me: Cruft.

   12. It gets worse. Dragging a file with the right mouse button does that fancy what-do-you-want-to-do-now-menu thing. But normally, when you click the right mouse button on something, you want a shortcut menu a menu of common actions to perform on that item. But if pressing the right mouse button might mean the user is dragging a file, it might not mean you want a shortcut menu. What to do, what to do?

       So, Windows designers made a slight tweak to the way shortcut menus work. Instead of making them open when the right mouse button goes down, they made them open when the right mouse button comes up. That way, they can tell the difference between a right-click-drag (where the mouse moves) and a right-click-I-want-a-shortcut-menu (where it doesnt).

       Trouble is, that makes the behavior of shortcut menus so much worse that they end up being pretty useless as an alternative to the main menus.

   13. They take nearly twice as long to use, since you need to release the mouse button before you can see the menu, and click and release a second time to select an item.

   14. Theyre inconsistent with every other kind of menu in Windows, which opens as soon as you push down on the mouse button.

   15. Once youve pushed the right mouse button down on something which has a menu, there is no way you can get rid of the menu without releasing, clicking the other mouse button, and releasing again. This breaks the basic GUI rule that you can cancel out of something youve pushed down on by dragging away from it, and it slows you down still further.

   16. In short, Windows native shortcut menus are so horrible to use that application developers would be best advised to implement their own shortcut menus which can be used with a single click, and avoid the native shortcut menus completely. Once more, with feeling: Cruft.

   17. Meanwhile, we still have the problem that programs on Windows cant be moved around after installation, otherwise things are likely to break. Trouble is, this makes it rather difficult for people to find the programs they want. In theory you can find programs by drilling down into the Program Files folder, but theyre arranged rather uselessly (by vendor, rather than by subject) and if you try to rearrange them for quick access, stuff will break.

       So, Windows designers invented something called the Start menu, which contained a Programs submenu for providing access to programs. Instead of containing a few frequently-used programs (like Mac OSs Apple menu did, before OS X), this Programs submenu has the weighty responsibility of providing access to all the useful programs present on the computer.

       Naturally, the only practical way of doing this is by using multiple levels of submenus thereby breaking Microsofts own guidelines about how deep submenus should be.

       And naturally, rearranging items in this menu is a little bit less obvious than moving around the programs themselves. So, in Windows 98 and later, Microsoft lets you drag and drop items in the menu itself thereby again breaking the general guideline about being able to cancel a click action by dragging away from it.

       This Programs menu is the ultimate in cruft. It is an entire system for categorizing programs, on top of a Windows filesystem hierarchy which theoretically exists for exactly the same purpose. Gnome and KDE, on top of a Unix filesystem hierarchy which is even more obtuse than that of Windows, naturally copy this cruft with with great enthusiasm.

Following those examples, its necessary to make two disclaimers.

Firstly, if youve used computers for more than six months, and become dulled to the pain, you may well be objecting to one or another of the examples. Hey!, youre saying. Thats not cruft, its useful! And, no doubt, for you that is true. In human-computer interfaces, as in real life, horrible things often have minor benefits to some people. These people manage to avoid, work around, or blame on user stupidity, the large inconvenience which the cruft imposes on the majority of people.

Secondly, there are some software designers who have waged war against cruft. Word Places Yeah Write word processor abolished the need for saving documents. Microsofts Internet Explorer for Windows, while having many interface flaws, sensibly abolished the Exit menu item. The Acorns RISC OS abolished filepickers. The Mac OS uses file IDs to refer to files, avoiding all the problems I described with moving or renaming. And the ROX Desktop eschews the idea of a Start menu, in favor of using the filesystem itself to categorize programs.

However, for the most part, this effort has been piecemeal and on the fringe. So far, there has not been a mainstream computing platform which has seriously attacked the cruft that graphical interfaces have been dragging around since the early 1980s.

So far.

Discuss

You mean something like this?
It's been around for ages, and supported by GTK+ since 1.2, QT since 3.0, and Mozilla since as long as I can remember.

So upgrade to KDE 3.0!

> Gtk+ is a toolkit or widget library. If an X
> application *DOESN'T* make use of it (e.g., LyX &
> Opera come immediately to mind), then it doesn't
> matter: the user is still confronted with
> incompatiblity progblems.

With "fixed" I mean that most applications supports it properly! And that includes all GTK+, QT 3 and Mozilla-based apps. Duh, you could have figured that out yourself.

Only a small number of apps that almost nobody use are still broken.
And copy & paste through selecting and pressing the middle mouse button always works. Support for the PRIMARY selection is correct in all apps, only support for the CLIPBOARD selection was broken.
Read the document!

Because they don't support the clipboard properly.
However, the majority of applications (every GTK+ and QT 3 app out there), do support it properly.

And xedit and xdm are not supposed to support the CLIPBOARD selection. They have no right-click-popup-Paste menu, and only support the PRIMARY selected, which is pasted by using the middle mouse button.

> All involved in this argument repeat after me:
> This is not a window manager issue

Duh! You didn't read the document.

All the X GUIs these days seem so focused on the G that they're ignoring the U and the I. There should be some standardization on the I, and the variety of Gs(The WMs and DEs) would be implementations of the standard.

It's freedesktop.org

There's a protocol that both GNOME and KDE follow, if an application doesn't support drag and drop it's broken.

See http://www.freedesktop.org.

"The clipboard has been well-specified for 10 years or more, you just need to file bugs on any specific apps that are doing the wrong thing. http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.tx t">

For a very good summary of clipboard behavior in the X Window system, see this document on clipboard behavior at FreeDesktop.org.

Basically, a few applications, including GNU Emacs 20 and applications based on Qt 2.x follow one interpretation of clipboard behavior where both mouse selection and copy and paste use the PRIMARY clipboard. Most other modern applications, including Netscape, Mozilla, XEmacs, Qt 3.x apps, and some GTK+ apps follow the preferred interpretation, where mouse selections and middle mouse-clicks use the ephemeral PRIMARY clipboard, and explicit cut/copy/paste operations use the CLIPBOARD clipboard. Under the preferred interpretation, Mac and Windows users could use the familiar menu operations, and experienced users could use the traditional select then middle-click paradigm, each without interfering with the other.

Upgrading to KDE 3.x would resolve the clipboard problems since it is based on Qt 3.x

If you plan to comment on the "cut and paste" issue, please read the X clipboard explanation, in detail, and make sure you fully understand it before commenting.

X - or, at least the X11 Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) - does specify a clipboard that works like the MacOS/Windows clipboard. Selecting text does not have to copy to that clipboard; it merely has to set the "primary selection". The middle mouse button can paste the "primary selection". Ctrl+C and Ctrl+X can copy/cut to the clipboard, and Ctrl+V can paste the clipboard even if you've subsequently selected something else (in which case it replaces the selection with what you're pasting).

Motif and GTK+, for example, work that way. Qt 1.x and 2.x, as used by KDE 1.x and 2.x, didn't; Qt 3.x, as used by KDE 3.x, works that way.

The KDE announcement speaks of the primary selection and the real clipboard as both being clipboards; that was, as far as I know, done to avoid "frightening the horses", i.e. to work around the confusion that some people suffer from, thinking that selecting text copies it to "the clipboard". The ICCCM doesn't call them both clipboards (it calls them both selections; for better or worse, that's standard terminology inside the innards of X, but you don't have to call them "selections" when talking to users).

Um, some of us like select-to-copy and middle-click-to-paste.

And some of us like select-to-select, middle-click-to-paste-current-selection, Ctrl-C-to-copy-current-selection-to-clipboard, and Ctrl-V-to-paste-clipboard.

Fortunately, that's all possible with X - Motif and GTK+, for example, have done that for ages, and now Qt 3.0 does it, so KDE 3.0 will do so as well.

(The clipboard is what Ctrl-C copies to. The current selection is what's selected. Don't confuse the two, they are not the same thing in X. See the X clipboard selection for details.)

KDE. Select: Copy first selection to clipboard. Ctrl+C: ignored. Select: Copy second selection to clipboard. Ctrl+V: No change, because second section is replaced with copy of second selection, the first selection being forgotten entirely.

As far as I know, that's Qt behavior that KDE inherits, and is fixed in Qt 3.0 (and will thus be fixed in KDE 3.0).

GNOME. Select: Copy first selection to X clipboard. Ctrl+C: Copy X clipboard to GTK+ clipboard. Select: Copy second selection to clipboard. Ctrl+V: Replace second selection with GTK+ clipboard (which contains the first selection).

No, it's more like

GNOME. Select: make the selected text the primary selection. Ctrl+C: copy primary selection to X clipboard "selection". Select: make the selected text the primary selection. Ctrl+V: replace the primary selection with the X clipboard.

See the X clipboard explanation for details.

KDE's semantics are the same as the oldskool X method, with Ctrl+V simply sending a button2 at the insertion point. GTK+ and some other toolkits have solved the problem by keeping a second clipboard for ^X ^C ^V.

Actually, as per the X clipboard explanatin, the "second clipboard" (which is actually the only clipboard; the middle mouse button pastes the current selection, not a clipboard) has been a standard part of X - or, at least, of the ICCCM - for ages (that's "ages" as in "dating back to the late 1980's").

there is no easy way to have a dock app for each competing window manager. It would be nice for some simple standards in this area

Some of the changes appear to allow KDE users the option to run Nautilus. My question is why? Why would a KDE user use Nautilus instead of Konqueror?

I'm not sure why a KDE user would use Nautilus instead of Konqueror (though perhaps they might just like it)? But my guess is that these changes in Nautilus weren't so much because they really thought a bunch of KDE users would want to run it, but for standards compliance. KDE and GNOME are supposed to meet certain standards for compatability; most of the KDE-related changes in Nautilus seem to be in order to meet these, especially the extended window manager hints spec.

About three months ago I got sick of all other window managers, so I wrote my own. Writing a window manager was the most fulfilling software project I've ever undertaken.

My window manager now does all the things I want it to do, none of things I don't want it to do, and I'm running it full-time. Running your own software full-time is an experience every programmer should have - you learn to write solid code, as it would really suck if my window manager crashed while I was writing this into Netscape.

I won't go into a diatribe about why I wrote it, but needless to say, it does a number things that all the other window managers I've tried get completely wrong (and yes, I've tried a lot of window managers, including the "configurable" ones like sawfish and scwm).

At some point, I might release my code, but that would probably require putting in hooks for a configuration file (since it's MY window manager, all the configuration I need to do is 'vi main.c'). If there's enough interest, I can go into details about what it does differently and at some point, I might even release some code. I really couldn't care less if anyone else uses this, however. This is MY window manager, and it does everything I want (this is why you should write your own, saying that feels really good).

Anyway, if you know any C, you should try writing your own window manager (think about it - what would be more satisfying, writing another GNOME/KDE applet, or writing software that you'll be using 100% of the time?). Here are the resources you'll need:

• Xlib manual
  You'll need to know Xlib. You can get the xlib manual in troff from XFree86 CVS, or you can read it online at the link above. I found the greppable, linked html much nicer than a big PostScript file.
• ICCCM manual
  You'll need to follow the ICCCM recomendations if you want your window manager to play nice with other apps.
• Extended Window Manager Hints manual
  The KDE and GNOME people say this is the standard for their desktops. Most of the stuff here is pretty simple, but you should look it over first, as it assumes quite a bit about how you implement your window manager (so you should implement it a certain way in order to support the KDE/GNOME stuff).

For reference, it took me about three weeks and 6000 lines of code to get something I could use full-time. You might also want to look at other window managers' code: there's a window manager called '9wm' that's very small and whose code is extremely legible. Trying to read code from Enlightenment or WindowMaker is not the best way to go as these are very large codebases and use multiple levels of indirection (which makes understanding how some detail is implemented very difficult).

I can supply more information for the potential DIY-er if needed.

While we're on the subject, does anyone know of a reference for Motif hints? I would rather not use someone else's code (licensing restrictions, etc), and would like the definitive reference, if such a thing exists.

Better interoperability between KDE and Gnome could only improve the situation for both desktops. Isn't The X Desktop Group supposed to be working on with KDE and Gnome on this?

There is activity going on on their mailing list. E.g. right now they're coining up a standard for storing image thumbnails so Nautilus, Konqueror and the GIMP will be able to share them.

Actually, I think this has to be about the best suggestion you could give. Better interoperability between KDE and Gnome could only improve the situation for both desktops. Isn't The X Desktop Group supposed to be working on with KDE and Gnome on this? I haven't heard much about it in a while.

I agree. Packaging is a trivial issue, and one poster already suggested the standard may have decided on RPM

OTOH, the lack of a standard desktop environment has the potential to be more of a problem.

Then support freedesktop.org. This group has already worked on and released a window manager standard for inter-op between desktops, and continue to work those other issues. The window manager standard was very well recieved I believe with just about every group out there represented (I followed the mailing list).

I believe if we support groups like freedesktop, the KDE/GNOME issue will slip more and more into the background, right where it belongs.

So, the probem is not the lack of a framework, but the lack of a standard framework. Here are working on it, however.

The list of immediate plans includes the simpler things to implement, including Menu/desktop files, MIME system, Themes (naming, pixmap engine), URI schemes, and Drag and Drop. There is a much larger list on the site, but those are the things to look for the next few releases of Gnome and KDE (there's already a draft stanard for the desktop entry system).