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Ephiphany/WebKit.

Epiphany works perfectly for me: small, clean, with support for custom stylesheets (which I use a lot, primarily to place serif fonts in place of these fscking sans-serif fonts some webmasters seem to be brainwashed in thinking that they are easier to read on screen), and upgradeable through extensions (either the included ones, third-party ones, or your own as it is very easy to build one). It even has support for both gecko and webkit (gecko seems to be working better on Debian GNU/Linux lenny/5.0 so I still use it even though webkit is now considered the preferred engine). A real full-screen view a-la Firefox 3.0 would be great to have by default, but never mind.

Firefox 3 adds support for tagging bookmarks

Epiphany has this for ages now.

Mozilla is no longer a friend to the open source community, and the sooner we realize that, the sooner these profiteering parasites will stop making megabucks riding on the back of their excellent developers, and those excellent developers can contribute to a project that actually makes a difference in the open source world. Mozilla (the organization) is no longer a benefit to the community, and has become dead weight.

Firefox should be forked. Better yet, it should be replaced with a browser that lives up to the lean and fast goal that Firefox initially had, but has since lost on its way to becoming the bloated mess that it is today.

There are many candidates out there that could be polished into a fully featured high performance browser. Being an Xfce user, my personal favorite is Epiphany.

You should stop try to find funding, and just do it. Like liboobs.

If I understand Aaron's post, version 1.4 and on will be released for Mac OS X.

The OS X changes were merged into the main svn branch on Oct. 23: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/banshee/trunk/banshee

The BBC is using open formats, protocols and systems to provide this service.

See:

http://uriplay.org/
http://open.bbc.co.uk/rad/uriplay/availablecontent
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555823

This is a source plugin for content made available by the BBC, kindly sponsored
by the BBC and Canonical. It's still quite basic, but functional.

(Note: this has nothing to do with the iPlayer, it mostly just makes content
available in totem which is already available in some form or other on the BBC
website now, at least for the time being; server-side things are also still
work-in-progress, so expect the occasional hiccups and problems with the
content in the feed.)

The totem plugin's implemented in open-source python. Go play!

The GTK button bug was killed at just seven years old.

We should all thank: Cody Rusell, Ed Catmur, Matthias Clasen, and everyone else who did something should have a big thank you.

I prefer this one.

It seems as though people here haven't heard of Beagle[1] and Tracker[2].

1. http://beagle-project.org/
2. http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/

Thanks for the Micheal Meeks link, that was very informative and in line with what I have observed in following OOo since its 1.0 days -- requirements are too cumbersome, the docs too byzantine, and developers simply can't be bothered to put up with all the extra hurdles that get in the way of contributing. Meeks's analysis shows a decline in the OOo developer community, which seems to be an unfortunate, albeit completely understandable, response to Sun's poor management of the project. I hope at least that some OOo derivative might work out -- perhaps NeoOffice, or IBM's Lotus Symphony.

Cheers,

Because Sun is very slow to accept features and bugfixes from outside contributors and have made that process very slow and bureaucratic. Furthermore, Novell is including additional worthwhile features that the authors aren't willing to assign copyright to Sun on. Others have commented on the Sun's indifferent stewardship of OOO and the following does more to answer your question.

http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html

OpenOffice 3 is much better than 2.4. More stable and mature.

However, the criticism of Meeks concerns me.

Crude as they are - the statistics show a picture of slow disengagement by Sun, combined with a spectacular lack of growth in the developer community. In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.

Does this matter ? Of course, hugely ! Everyone that wants Free software to succeed on the desktop, needs to care about the true success of OpenOffice.org: it is a key piece here. Leaving the project to a single vendor to resource & carry will never bring us the gorgeous office suite that we need.

What can be done ? I would argue that in order to kick-start the project, there is broadly a two step remedy:

        * Kill the ossified, paralysed and gerrymandered political system in OO.o. Instead put the developers (all of them), and those actively contributing into the driving seat. This in turn should help to kill the many horribly demotivating and dysfunctional process steps currently used to stop code from getting included, and should help to attract volunteers. Once they are attracted and active, listen to them without patronizing.
        * Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to 'share' all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.

Novell's Meeks critisised the development process of SUN. Novell forked OO.org.

NeoOffice claims that it speeds up the OO.org 3 series.

So maybe the problem is SUN Microsystems and their red tape.

Btw, the link to the Paris Party

That may have been true of the Eee 700 series, but I have an Eee 900 and it had no trouble connecting to my WPA-PSK access point with the default software. It would've been easier with NetworkManager instead of their custom configuration interface, but it worked nonetheless.

What I really don't understand is why, for a project which started out Linux-only, it contains so much hardware with mediocre-to-poor Linux support: the wireless card and the Ethernet adapter both require out-of-kernel drivers; the ACPI interface can't seem to get the battery capacity right; the sound support is flaky at best due to incomplete specs; and yet another driver was required for basic ACPI support (now part of the kernel). I managed to get it all working under a stock distro (Debian) eventually, and I'm quite happy with it -- I like a challenge now and then -- but if you're going to build a Linux laptop, why not pick hardware known to be compatible?

You should see what they are doing to OpenOffice.org. Sun buying or open sourcing something is really the death-knell of that product.

To be pedantic I think the C# language definition is open source. What isn't is the runtime. You could write a C# compiler with its own runtime and you'd have a pretty nifty alternative to Java.

http://live.gnome.org/Vala

Are you one of those Grammar Nazis I keep hearing about? I'm so excited! (by the way, this link says it's Toolkit).

First of all, stating that "Windows has had" something since Win98 doesn't mean that there were third-party applications available for it, or you wouldn't have bothered comparing Gnome to Win 98 with the phrase "It is nice to see more features that Windows had 10 years ago." Gnome also had third-party clients for most of these things years ago. They just weren't part of the standard desktop. You can adjust your score back down to 20-30% again. ;)

You also fail to understand the difference between the Gnome Deskbar and a taskbar. (Gnome doesn't call them taskbars: it has "panels.") The Deskbar is similar to Vista's Instant Search, but does a lot more than desktop search by default. Gnome has also had this for a while. It just added some new features like updating Twitter and using recommended searches from Yahoo!.

Regarding localization, I Googled and provided a Microsoft link stating what their retail languages were. I assumed it was accurate. Based on your and another poster's response, I guess I chose the wrong page and that there are many more, but I stand by my original assertion that Thai is still not supported by MS. Based on their release of the "Thai Starter Pack," which had about seven words translated, I would also guess that the translations they do have are not as complete as you think they are. All I can say is that MS must do a better job of localization there in Europe than they do here in Asia. It really stinks here.

Anyway, I'm pretty much done with this thread, so you can flame away without worry of a rebuttal from me.

How is what UI consistency? That has no sensible antecedent here.

Gnome has the HIG, which makes Gnome applications and the desktop function consistently. It means that Gnome does the same thing that Apple does for Mac in this regard. No, I don't want to get into an argument about whether Macs or Gnome are more usable. I'm saying that Gnome is consistent with itself. The developers judge applications based on the HIG before those apps are allowed to become part of the official Gnome desktop.

Windows applications, on the other hand, have no standard and every one is completely different, which Windows users seem to enjoy. Sometimes a context menu on the desktop will get you what you expect. Other times, though, it won't.

Evolution Exchange uses the web interface with Exchange 2003. Maybe they have something in svn?

http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/svn.shtml

Not only does evince not have "KNOWN security vulnerabilities as of the date of this posting", it was already fixed at the time Secunia reported it in 2006:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383485

Did you try the work they were doing here? They did mention that it's supposed to work with Exchange 2007.

Not the fact that Gstreamer doesn't support DVD Menus?
(Which, in all fairness, is fixed, hopefully for the next Ubuntu release: http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2008/08/04/gstreamer-dvd-support/)

Making something easier to use doesn't mean dumbing it down.

As a KDE user I think it does....see Gnome.

At least GNOME is heading in the right direction for this:

http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/

But guidelines do not an easy to use desktop make. Just look at Windows it's a friggin' mess and they, too, have a nice set of guidelines.

It's really also about the fact that there are many designer types in the OS X community and those people are noisy and most Mac users despise ugly or messy applications.

That forces developers to make their apps easy to use with a clear interface. Or better that forces developers to hire a designer/typographer or information architect to help them organise the workflow of their application to the users' needs, and have them design the GUI.

After all you don't want designers to write your code, why should programmers design GUIs? In the end people need to learn that unless you put as much effort in usability and designing the user interface as you'd put into programming, your apps have a dim chance of being even usable.

And this also means testing, testing, testing. Even with decades of design experiences, in every test we make we find out something surprising we weren't aware of before. It's not even about losing power or compromising on functionality, it's just about putting some effort in making a GUI and not just slapping something together that barely works.

With software "good enough", as a matter of fact, is seldomly good enough.

Gnome seems to be adopting Empathy ( http://live.gnome.org/Empathy ) as their default messaging application (they used to use Gossip). Empathy includes voice and video support (although I've never got it to work myself), so it seems unclear at the moment if Ekiga will remain part of Gnome.

As a side note, I've never got Ekiga to work either, but this is something to do with NAT traversal which doesn't seem to work even after forwarding the ports given in the documentation.

Empathy IM is worth mentioning. It's pretty basic right now, but it's been incorporated into the Gnome project and is developing rapidly. Check it out.

Because a lot of good programmers are tied up in projects that simply don't move the ship forward. They only decorate a room on the ship.

That kind of stuff has almost always been done at the distro level. Sun, Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu, etc. Independant developers tend to stick to their projects at least in the Gnome universe.

I wish Sun, or someone else would do more usability studies like this one. That is exactly the kind of feedback we need. I find it nearly impossible to imagine the noob experience after having used Linux for the past 10 years.

Because a lot of good programmers are tied up in projects that simply don't move the ship forward. They only decorate a room on the ship.

That kind of stuff has almost always been done at the distro level. Sun, Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu, etc. Independant developers tend to stick to their projects at least in the Gnome universe.

I wish Sun, or someone else would do more usability studies like this one. That is exactly the kind of feedback we need. I find it nearly impossible to imagine the noob experience after having used Linux for the past 10 years.

Huh? http://www.gnome.org/about/ says "GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project".

Notice that it says GNOME and not Gnome. Can you give me a reference to back up the claim that it has been renamed, or are you just claiming random statements as facts?

Notice also that it specifically states that GNOME is part of the GNU project. How it fits into the running system is irrelevant then, isn't it, when you were talking about the unfairness of not mentioning GNOME. I don't even see the point of arguing about this, I just pointed out that GNOME happened to be part of the GNU project, I wasn't trying to start a discussion -- and now it seems like you are suddenly attempting to contradict facts just to have something to argue about? :-)

Wow, that article on the French is an evidence-free zone. The only actual French OSS project they mention is some middleware doodah that I've never even heard of. Trying to think of some myself... um:

1. Mandrake
2. ...er ...
3. ... that's it.

I'm sure there are others but none springs to mind.

Actually it's Mandriva. Using Mandrake is no more allowed, because of Mandrake the magician ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva_Linux#Name_changes )

Well Mandriva is just an example of software tagged "French" (not by Mandriva itself, but it's often referred as "French distro" or something).
As you guessed, we can find some other examples of software started by french people (videolan, Xfce, azureus, libcaca, sympa, frozen-bubble[2] etc.).

But is it important ? Is Mandriva really a French distro ? Mandriva now owns Conectiva (from Brazil) and Lycoris (from USA). So it's more 50% French, 25% US and 25% Brazilian. But wait it's using a kernel started by a Finnish guy, and a Desktop Environment born in (and still hugdely attached to) Germany...
You know were i'm heading. I don't think counting the number or "French OSS projects" is a good measure of how much France is involved or not in FLOSS. Perhaps we can find more valuables way to measure it. For instance by finding some projects where French people are really involved :

• Gnome :
  • http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/GnomeWorldWideHuge.jpg (I agree, we don't see much here. Just a bunch of points somewhere in West Europa)
• KDE :
  • http://worldwide.kde.org/pics/fullmap.jpeg
  • http://commit-digest.org/mappy/?view=2008-08-17&scheme=map_default&region=world&mode=embedded&standalone=no
• Debian
  • http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc (Same remark as Gnome)

We can also looks at studies and statistics :

• http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/Final-2b.htm#_Toc14094379
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9992379-16.html

This part was only about FLOSS development, we could also study FLOSS use or lots of different things. Well, i think my post is long enough already (sorry when i start, i just can't stop) so i won't cover all this. One last thing : I have no clue about other countries, but there is a lot of movement around FLOSS : Events :

• RMLL/LSM (Libre Software Meeting) : http://2008.rmll.info/?lang=en
• Paris Capitale du Libre (Paris http://en.paris-libre.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&task=&id=0&Itemid=1
• Solutions Linux : http://www.solutionslinux.fr/
• FOSSDEM http://fosdem.org/ (That's true i lied again, it's not in France, but in Belgium. In Brussels, the French speaking part of Belgium)

There are also powerful Associations and usersgroups like April ( http://april.org/index.html.en )
Well April is Involved in so many things (promotion of FLOSS, lobyying, meetings with politics, action groups against tying, against treacherous computing, against software patents, against OOXML normalizat

No they don't support it. I've had many, many conversations with distributors over the years about this topic. It "works" simply because of the way the tools are constructed. But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees. In fact it's even possible for you to break peoples systems by distributing software on your own.

Trivial example of how things can go wrong, there's no namespacing in Linux. Let's say I make a game and call it Epiphany, then start distributing it outside the framework of the distributions. What sort of things could happen? Well, somebody else might make a web browser called Epiphany, which then might become a part of the base set of packages. What happens when the user tries to upgrade their distribution? Anything might happen, because you have two packages with the same name (or which both try to provide /usr/bin/epiphany).

In the best case the upgrade will just break and the user will be stuck having to choose one of the two packages. But they can't have both.

In the worst case, I decided not to fuck about with 10 different but somehow identical package management systems and used an autopackage or a Loki Installer. Almost all commercial software for Linux does this sort of thing. Now the package manager will just silently overwrite my game files with the web browser. It won't notify the user it's going to do this - it'll just uncleanly corrupt the game.

So what's the solution? Back when I was involved in distribution of apps for Linux, the usual proposal was to put third party software in /usr/local rather than /usr. Unfortunately no distributor properly supports this prefix, and besides, it just moves the problem around rather than solve it. Sadly there actually isn't a solution for this on UNIX - it's fundamental to the design.

You'll notice that Android doesn't use UNIX style directory trees or package management ... and this is probably one of the reasons why.

Hm. Interesting. It's possible, though, to dither images to something as low as 256 colours (contrast that to 32 levels per channel, which give 32^3 = 32,768 colours) even without it being very noticeable. For example, compare the true-colour JPEG from here with the same image converted to a 256-colour GIF. The difference is very subtle.

I'm really amazed that in this entire discussion, Vala isn't mentioned. I find Vala to be an ingenious project with the potential to please the whole GNOME community at once, especially users.

De Icaza originally created Mono because he wanted a nice high-level language to create GNOME applications quickly. Well, Mono did not quite deliver the goods. The applications are somewhat easier to develop (though I wonder if C# is really that much better than Python, which is also widely used in GNOME), but the applications require the large Mono runtime, which displeases users who want to get as much out of their computer as possible, and there's of course the problem that the whole project is precarious because of its relationship to Microsoft.

Vala does exactly what De Icaza originally wanted, without any of the costs. Developers get a high-level language, about equal to and in some cases more powerful than C#. Users get super-fast natively built applications, without any need for a virtual machine. And nobody has to worry about Microsoft, ever.

I realize that much of the excitement over Mono has nothing to do with GNOME in particular -- things like Silverlight support in non-Windows platforms, etc. I wish, though, that the discussion can go back to the problem Mono was trying to solve, and also make a fair comparison to what Vala is trying to achieve now.

While Vala won't help us get Silverlight running on OS X, it definitely is a project which could appeal to developers on various platforms. Vala compiles into standard C using the portable glib and GObject libraries, and makes it very easy to wrap and call standard C libraries, the most ubiquitous ABI, making it fully interoperable with practically anything you need. Some projects written in Java, for example, might be better of rewritten in Vala.

I encourage all of you to follow the progress of Vala, and help increase its visibility.

The CLR (.NET/Mono) is a step in the right direction for everyone.

Then so was the JVM a decade ago, before Microsoft ripped it off. For the record, I think that today Vala and ES4 are steps in the right direction.

I would love to see a desktop--Windows, Linux, whatever--done in managed code, built on a common...language...runtime (did you see what I did there?).

I do see what you did; you added needless bloat and crippled performance! Nobody is queuing to run JNode as their main OS any time soon.

No more assaches about "oh, that library was written in C++, I can't use it in my language of choice"--all languages build off the same intermediate language, and so they can consume code of all other languages.

See also the C ABI and while you're visiting check out JNI and P/Invoke! C is the lingua-franca of programming, no bloated runtime required! Javascript is fine as an IR for a dynamic runtime (haxe, hotruby, script#), Miguels comments about not wanting to write in js really betray the agenda don't they?

I love Gnome and I understand Mono is a somewhat simpler (than C++) way to build programs for it, but is it really necessary?

Of course not. If Python's not to your liking, check out Vala, which is a programming language influenced by C# and designed for Gtk+. Kinda like a free software "embrance, extend", only done properly and without the traditionally implied ", extinguish".

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono

As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.

What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?

Wine can be used to run those few windows apps for which you do not have no linux replacement, under linux. Mono is a development environment which could be used for just about anything... what if gnome, or some important gnome apps, got ported to Mono, and the day after Microsoft comes up with the bill?.. or with usage restrictions of some kind... Please read the link in the parent post, before replying... Here it is again:

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono

As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.

What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?

Wine can be used to run those few windows apps for which you do not have no linux replacement, under linux. Mono is a development environment which could be used for just about anything... what if gnome, or some important gnome apps, got ported to Mono, and the day after Microsoft comes up with the bill?.. or with usage restrictions of some kind... Please read the link in the parent post, before replying... Here it is again:

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.

What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?

1. Microsoft's C#/CLI licensing people, at high levels, are aware of us.
2. Microsoft can choose to do damaging things in the current C#/CLI licensing ambiguity.
3. Microsoft considers the free software / Linux community to be a major competitive threat
4. Microsoft does not "compete" gently
5. A + B + C + D = ?

Such documents exist; Apple and Gnome have great HIGs (Human Interface Guidelines). Microsoft provides similar documentation for Vista.

The problem, in my opinion, is caused by the following:
- people think "I don't have time for the HIG, I already know what I need";
- they get started using UI design tools and simply drag'n'drop widgets (Borland's IDEs are so easy to use, they gave birth to an entire generation of coders who "can do GUI"); afterwards they are too lazy to start from scratch because "so much has been done".

I once started a quest for HIGs, and downloaded and read every single one I could find. Since then I became more aware of the existing problems, and learned about their solutions.

In the end it boils down to taking your time to read a text (they are quite short too, I remember that after the Gnome HIG I was upset it ended so fast).

URLs:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

BTW if someone says that I should have filed proper bug reports, note that the bug reports concerning this problem have been reported a long time ago to relevant bugzillas.

What those issues need is a dedicated and experienced Gnome/KDE programmer to step in and solve them (I am not one).

I can't imagine my mom wanting to bother trying to set up wireless in ANY Linux distro

I haven't set wireless up at all, but with a wired network I found Windows was a pain in the ass; I had a 98 box and an XP laptop and had a hell of a time getting them to talk to each other. I put Mandrake (this was over five years ago) on both of them, and the Linux partitions were a piece of cake to network; it pretty much did it attomatically on installation.

Windows' vaunted "ease of use" is a myth, as is Linux's complexity. Windows' only claim to superiority to Linux is that it's prettier.

True. I can use iwconfig with the best of them, but NetworkManager is nice, clean, and incredibly simple. Been using it with Ubuntu since it debuted, and haven't wanted to go back to anything else.

In this case, GNOME project has some guidelines:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide/gad/
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

In this case, GNOME project has some guidelines:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide/gad/
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

In this case, GNOME project has some guidelines:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide/gad/
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

In this case, GNOME project has some guidelines:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide/gad/
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

You mean kind of like Tali?