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I was trying to be specific, but I'll get more general. You can download and double-click install any .deb for a system which includes GDebi, which is most of the Debian derivatives these days.

If the application isn't set up with an installer for your OS, then it's going to be a PITA to install it, whether that OS is Ubuntu, Red Hat, OSX, or even WindowsXP. Just try installing Empathy on Windows. It's possible, but it's going to take some work.

The bottom line is that you work within the same construct that Linux users do. More software is packaged for your platform, so you don't think about it much.

The final kicker: Users of some Linux-based operating systems with Wine installed have the possibility of installing and running WindowsXP software, while the converse isn't true.

gFTP - okay, it kinda works except if you want to delete a large directory. I mean seriously, how difficult is it to solve this bug? And if you (YES YOU!) had coded it, wouldn't you be embarrassed at such a silly bug?

XSane - does it's job I guess, so I'll not be tooooo mean to this. But it is perhaps the ugliest GUI app ever! But hey, don't worry because Gnome scan will be ready soon. Any day now. I can feel it!

Actually, I could quite get into this being unnecessarily horrible to FOSS! :D

http://ubuntu-women.org/

http://women.debian.org/home/

http://www.gnome.org/projects/outreach/women/

We're nerds and haven't seen enough boobs is it. When [Redacted] joined the [Redacted] team, I recall a couple months of visually frequent comments about her boobs in the devel channel. I'm sure this is exactly what chicks want in a community: eternal focus on their tits.

That bug's moot. It's quite easy to work around, as any competent developer using GTK knows by now.

Anybody complaining about the bug at this point is a useless whiner.

And it has bugs that exists for over 7 years: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56070

From the redundant slots and signaling department. The underlying widget toolkit isn't a huge issue for end users but as a developer I personally find C++ and QT hideous to work with. Of course C and GObject is hideous too, Vala and Genie however are quite pleasant (pre-1.0 bugs notwithstanding).

I don't run the Gnome desktop but I'd be lost without stuff like GLib, Pango etc... QT doesn't have that established foothold, the libs are rarely useful outside the QT environment and it imposes it's own programming model throughout. Attempts at delivering the "Gnome experience" (whatever that may be) on top of QT would be rather pointless.

From the redundant slots and signaling department. The underlying widget toolkit isn't a huge issue for end users but as a developer I personally find C++ and QT hideous to work with. Of course C and GObject is hideous too, Vala and Genie however are quite pleasant (pre-1.0 bugs notwithstanding).

I don't run the Gnome desktop but I'd be lost without stuff like GLib, Pango etc... QT doesn't have that established foothold, the libs are rarely useful outside the QT environment and it imposes it's own programming model throughout. Attempts at delivering the "Gnome experience" (whatever that may be) on top of QT would be rather pointless.

Whatever, you misrepresented the actual situation with this issue.

You may be right. In the sense of fairness, here is another quote from the same link as above. Also, please notice that six months have past since the previous post:

Comment #22 from William Jon McCann (gnome-screensaver developer, points: 22)
2006-03-03 14:44 UTC [reply]

Take it easy everyone. Please understand that I'm not paid to do this and it
isn't my full time job. Also understand that simply reiterating the issue
doesn't add anything. Also, unless you are motivated enough to actually write
some code or pay/convince someone else to do it for you then you are less
likely to get what you want. That's open source for you. Please try not to
make demands of me.

I've added a stub to the FAQ about directory translation.

Chris Weiss: I'm glad to see that you have actually looked into this. I'm
afraid there is probably something wrong with your system since that should
work fine. Try submitting a bug to your distro.

Miles: Looks like someone upgraded the wiki and it changed the way the URLs are
accepted. Try, http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

I think was is needed here is a product manager or something that acts as a firewall/router to translate between the actual coders and the general public.

Coders are geeks. They don't deal well with people who don't understand what it is that they really do. It doesn't help that they get bombarded with stupid requests from people who don't know what the software is supposed to do. In my current position, part of my job is to act as that firewall. I take the good requests to our developers to consider and keep the stupid ones to myself. I understand coders and don't get offended when they say, "that's a stupid idea. This was never designed to do that crap and the user needs to find another way to get that done." The user would get offended and find another solution to their problem, probably from our competition (Linux's main competition is Windows). Instead, I tell them, "here, try this application. It does a better job as all it really does is what you are trying to accomplish."

Either way, users need to be treated with respect whether they are paying customers or not. When I'm deciding between upgrading my 50 office machines to Visa or switching to Ubuntu, it doesn't help when my requests are brushed off because a developer doesn't think they are necessary.

Evolution just might be what you are looking for.

From the GNOME website:

Some GNOME hackers have discussed what form GNOME '3.0' would take, such as radically changing its user model or taking advantage of new technologies. However, the changes in this roadmap are more incremental, designed to fit within the basically stable UI and APIs we guarantee within the 2.x series. For more on the radical changes that could be in a GNOME 3.0, see the long-term ideas at ThreePointZero. And remember, even then, the GNOME 3 APIs would be available in addition to the existing GNOME 2 APIs, so there is no risk that today's applications would break in the future.

=> Further see http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero

I liked that idea. Maybe it's just a version bump to reflect the progress they're making.

Recently someone added TABS into Nautilus (the default file manager). It broke the HCI guidelines making the UI confusing (search width vs breadth problem, when you have the spatial model in your head) and truly harder to grasp. In reality most of the users (99.999%) do not need such feature at all. Most of the developers seemed to actually love the brainfart (take a look at the comments at http://blogs.gnome.org/cneumair/2008/07/08/its-done/ ) and it will be in the next Gnome release.

There goes the HCL, eroding, and fast. Those tabs in Nautilus are a prime example of why KDE's HCL has been a plain joke (slapping stuff, all sorts, everywhere).

Here is the GNome developer response to the screensaver thingie:

Is this a troll or do you suffer from short attention span? This was his first comment, but the discussion on bugzilla was very long, and further down he identified technical issues that prevent this from being done sanely atm, wrote an FAQ on the matter, asked for help from those who see this feature, and so on.

Right, after about 20 posts of people ragging on him. The fact remains that he tried to weasel his way out by saying that it shouldn't have to be done because it was hard to do. I bet it is hard. That's why I'm not a programmer, much less a maintainer. If he has a problem with what the people using the product want, he should hand it off to someone who gives a damn. (not to mean that I don't appreciate his efforts, but he chose to be the maintainer for a reason.)

Anyone interest in the issue is well-advised not to rely on the parent but read the discussion themselves.

Good idea. If only had posted a link or something...

Here is the GNome developer response to the screensaver thingie:

Is this a troll or do you suffer from short attention span? This was his first comment, but the discussion on bugzilla was very long, and further down he identified technical issues that prevent this from being done sanely atm, wrote an FAQ on the matter, asked for help from those who see this feature, and so on. Anyone interest in the issue is well-advised not to rely on the parent but read the discussion themselves.

Community software should mean that people can easily post bug reports and get issues like these addressed.

Open a bug for each issue and hopefully they will be addressed.

I think it is beneficial to the entire community when people report these things.

Here is the GNome developer response to the screensaver thingie:

Comment #1 from William Jon McCann (gnome-screensaver developer, points: 22)
2005-09-19 13:32 UTC [reply]

I don't have any plans to support this. My view is that any screensaver theme
that requires configuration is inherently broken.

Is developer arrogance a bug or a feature?

GLib has what you're asking for and is available everywhere under the LGPL. You write to the GLib API, which is mostly sane, and your code will run natively on *nix and win. I believe they even support AIX.

For example, see

http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/stable/glib-String-Utility-Functions.html

I use Tomboy a LOT. It features notebooks, cross-linking, and the next version (due Oct.) should feature audio. Since it uses Beagle or Tracker to index the notes, finding stuff is easy.

In my opinion the Bitstream Vera/DejaVu fonts look better than anything else and they have a free license. I use them for everything.

Try Dia: http://live.gnome.org/Dia

It's what I use in place of Visio and, being cross platform, it can save on licence fees for Windows users that want to create diagrams but don't need any Visio specific functionality.

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

I too use Liferea. You can also try Straw at http://www.gnome.org/projects/straw/ or Mozilla Thunderbird News.

http://planet.gnome.org/
http://planet.mozilla.org/
http://planet.ubuntu.com/
http://planet.i2p/ (only accessible through the i2p network)

More people need to use these. Operating without a centralized Certificate Authority, GPG really depends on there being sufficient users to establish a web of trust.

I think people (in the US at least) either don't understand the simplicity of sniffing cleartext, or don't think they care. The aggravating part is that GPG can be really easy to use. Apps like Seahorse make key and keyring management trivial. There's a great Thunderbird plugin that makes signing and/or encrypting your mail no harder than it was before. (Yes, I know not everyone uses Linux and Thunderbird, but I trust GPG tools exist for other OSs/email clients)

Given a safe and ubiquitous encryption scheme, I can't think any reasons for sending text/data in the clear. Now all we need is a ubiquitous encryption scheme.

Gecko-1.9 actually has a propper accessibility implementation for *nix, see this page for the details on using firefox with Gnome/Orca.

Yes, I do use Linux for most of my daily work, and it's mostly okay, although for GUI things at the moment, windows still beats it hands down. See here and Here.

Gecko-1.9 actually has a propper accessibility implementation for *nix, see this page for the details on using firefox with Gnome/Orca.

Yes, I do use Linux for most of my daily work, and it's mostly okay, although for GUI things at the moment, windows still beats it hands down. See here and Here.

People have been writing webcam tracking software for ages, some is actually open source and there's even phonecam tracking software but this the first hopeful sign I've seen for something more fun than some stupid logitech wobbly eyebrowes and a moustache!

--
Free Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii

I know a work around has been posted. But this is not some random feature that Mozilla devs came up with. It is a common interaction in unix desktops and is specified in the Gnome HIG. http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/input-mouse.html.en

Your application uses the middle button to paste the current PRIMARY (usually the last-highlighted) selection at the pointer position, as follows:

Table 10-1 Effect of modifier keys on a middle button transfer operation Modifier Function
Unmodified Copy selection
Ctrl Copy selection
Shift Move selection
Shift+Ctrl Create link, shortcut or alias to selection

Do not over-ride this functionality in any part of your user interface where the transfer action is likely to be useful. If you do intend to use the middle button for a different purpose somewhere, only do so as a shortcut for experienced users, and only for operations that can also be performed without using the right button or middle button.

You have to get her started on Mahjongg http://live.gnome.org/Mahjongg. My parent's computer is dual boot xp/ubuntu and after I showed them how to play Mahjongg they started booting into Linux. Now they are hooked. They have actually adapted all their other computer activities to Linux so that the game is readily available.

Cheers,
    _GP_

Yes and no. I have an aging Omnibook with gorgeous 1400x1040 15" screen. Most desktop apps work fine with the DPI set correctly (No thanks to GDM trying to set 96 DPI regardless of what XF86Config/xorg.conf says (And don't get me started about Gnome deciding that I live in "Colourado" (but I digress)))

Unfortunately, most web pages are so badly designed as to be almost unreadable at high res, and if you increase the font size the formatting goes to hell. Opera does a pretty good job at handling this, and Firefox 3 looks promising. That still leaves the unreadable Flash apps, but most of those are a wast of time anyway.

Yes. I think my biggest pet peeve about GNOME, other than button issues is instant apply.

So very annoying (to me).

If someone knows how to make this go away in GNOME, I'm all ears.
If KDE ever started adopting it, I'd be very sad.

They do?

Im not sure which distro's you use, but so far every distro I use has a choice between KDE or Gnome (of which i choose the former) aswell as the usual other more lean ones.

There are some distro's that frown upon Gnome aswell (Slackware for example, which happens to be my favorite)

Distro's that come with KDE (not a complete list)
http://www.kde.org/download/distributions.php

Distro's that come with Gnome (Probably not complete)
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/footware.shtml

Gnome has always been behind KDE when it comes to features and configurability. Their only goal is ease of use. Whether they meet that goal is debatable, but I'd claim that if a desktop doesn't have enough features, and you can't configure the ones it does have, then it's not very easy to use.

Why can't Gnome keep up? They get bogged down in policy, whereas KDE just writes things that work.

Check out Vala: C# like syntax, no runtime, FOSS.

I don't know about the Pidgin guys. I think empathy is going to be stealing the place of pidgin in many linux users desktops if they aren't careful. It already has a form of video/voice chat built in and has been proposed for inclusion in Gnome.

You're looking for Tomboy.

It's like a personal, offline Wiki and you could easily have links to all of your wifi-related notes.

That sounds similar to my experience, but both Acrobat and the freebie Acrobat Reader were dog slow.

Fairly recently I realized Evince was available, it's blazing fast and supports all the stuff I need.

I've had a few documents that were amazingly slow to read in any PDF viewer, one comes to mind that was particuarly awful, a ~300 page spec that was watermarked with 'Confidential' in big grey letters across the page. The pages would load very quickly, then you'd see some flickering and it'd go blank while the watermark was slowly displayed, then the text of the page would flicker and it'd finally be done.

It doesn't look like AisleRiot has an easy way to install on win 32, but when i googled it this interesting message from the gnome mailing list came up http://mail.gnome.org/archives/games-list/2007-June/msg00009.html

but installing 2 large ported windows apps to get a small, basic '82 game' version of solitaire on windows is almost as much work, as just switching to Linux...

I use the GTK Theme Selector and themes from http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/ to theme Pidgin.

For IM use under KDE, you might want to try Kopete instead of Pidgin. Here is their website: http://kopete.kde.org/. It will probably entail less hoop-jumping to theme, etc than a Gnome app running under KDE.

Soon there will also be Linux and OSX ports of Digsby if you are into the social networking aspect of the internet. It also supports the MSN protocol.

For the really adventurous, I am sure you can port MirandaIM over to Linux. The client and source are GPL and are freely available. I think someone from Russia has already done this: http://forums.miranda-im.org/showthread.php?t=4624&highlight=Miranda+IM+Linux

Part of this perhaps is that it's particularly difficult in GTK. The drawing API is not very good.

For example, if you look at the GtkStyle API ( http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.12/GtkStyle.html ), the drawing functions technically draw on a GdkWindow. Firefox and QGtkStyle get around this by passing a GdkPixmap, which also inherits from GdkDrawable. It works, but if a theme actually tries to enforce the argument being a GdkWindow, it'll fail.

Also, alpha channels are apparently screwy. Look at the QGtkStyle's code. It draws everything twice: once on black and once on white. The two resulting images are then compared to restore the original alpha channel. Of course, this is cached afterwards, so that a redraw with the same state (hover, size, etc.) is faster.

Although, I think a larger part is due to the fact GNOME users tend to be less willing to run Qt apps than KDE users are willing to run GTK apps. Hopefully as this integration improves (many kudos to Trolltech for trying to integrate well in GNOME) and as computers get better that two frameworks in memory become less of a problem, this unwillingness will go away. On both counts. Diversity in the Linux desktop is a wonderful thing, but we shouldn't allow speciation to occur; the two desktops should feel comfortable with each other.

Ah, yes, the GIO/GVFS, which I didn't post, but is at
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gio/unstable/
They are somewhat orthogonal concepts in my understanding, because if you want to use custom protocols across sockets you would need to use GIOChannel, whereas if you just want VFS functionality you would use GIO and friends.

Yes.
http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/stable/glib-Threads.html
http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/stable/glib-IO-Channels.html

Granted, Glade is vastly inferior QtDesigner, but such is life.

Yes.
http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/stable/glib-Threads.html
http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/stable/glib-IO-Channels.html

Granted, Glade is vastly inferior QtDesigner, but such is life.

If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

I use GNOME as my primary Linux desktop, and that's going to stay. However, this is an alarming thread between some applications ostensibly aimed at simplicity and improved usability. First, Gossip developers thought flashing in the notification tray for 10 seconds to indicate a routine state transition is a great idea. Then, Rhythmbox developers regard a play/pause button changing appearance accordingly to next action as bad usability (all hail the HIG). And now this.

Still, I think there is a criticall mass of GNOME applications which manage to stay simple without becoming idiotic.

Actually usability testing has been going on with Linux for many years - since at least 2001 for GNOME when Sun started doing this ( http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/usertesting.html ). Here's a good article that talks about usability testing for Linux, also from 2001, and mentioning KDE user testing: http://lwn.net/2001/0614/desktop.php3

GNOME is the way it is today largely because of usability testing, I believe - while many power users and developers whinge about this, it is becoming much closer to Macs in overall usability.

So the issue is not "stupid developers", it's a matter of taking the time to do the testing - and it helps if you have some expertise at running the tests. Then it's the time to actually make the changes. Many developers aren't that interested in doing the testing, which is why there have been separate usability initiatives that can feed changes into projects.

Some of the issues logged here are not that easy to solve - e.g. making Firefox pop up an Ubuntu-specific Flash installation prompt, rather than executing the YouTube JavaScript logic that pushes people towards an Adobe plugin site that actually does have a Linux plugin for Flash, but one that's much harder to install than an Ubuntu-packaged Flash plugin.

Also, the one about finding MP3s on the Windows partition is not that easy - you could simply copy the files across with the Ubuntu migration assistant, but what if they're in a non-standard place? Indexing the Windows filesystem to quickly find these might help, but building the index could take some time. However, it would probably be enough if there was some feature in Ubuntu that scanned for existing partitions and said (based on partition type and a few key directories/files) that 'this looks like a Windows partition, it's available on the desktop through this icon', and ideally did a special symbolic link for the My Documents or similar (though that's tough as it's per-user under Windows - which user should this use).

I'd _like_ to stop using C++, frankly, but I don't seem to have a choice. A lot of my work depends on real-time capability, the kind of speed that is still only really possible on natively compiled languages that don't do dynamic typing.

I don't even mean hardcore real-time mechanical nano-second control of knife-wielding deathbots, just simple, This Must Run As Fast or Faster Than The Rate At Which It Will Be Converted To Analog. Python and Java still don't replace C in this area. (Mainly audio, video, and high-speed mechanical control.) And when it gets complex and you need to get into object oriented models to simplify the programming, there is unfortunately no real alternative other than C++. Combine this with that fact that there are a bunch of great libraries out there written in C++ that would be very difficult to replace, and you're stuck with it.

(I sort of oscillate between liking C++ and hating it, but I'm preferring straight C more and more these days. But like I said, I don't always have the luxury of choice, depending on what libraries I need to use.)

All these other languages mentioned (Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc) do not compile to native code, and all do dynamic memory management. Hell, that's exactly what makes them *good*. But unfortunately they're not so good for real-time tasks.

For real-time, you need deterministic memory management, and native speed. I've been looking at some other languages that compile to native code these days, like D, or Vala, but I haven't really decided yet whether I can start using them on serious projects.

I'd really like to learn more about functional programming in this area, too, but there seem to be very few functional languages that are designed for real-time. FAUST is one, but it's only for audio.

Anyone know any other good natively-compiled languages that actually have well-implemented modern features?

I wish it were possible to have a compiled version of Python, for example, but there are many dynamic features it depends on. (Some stuff could be done in Pyrex, which is a pretty cool little project, but so far I've only used it to make bindings to C libraries.)

I'd never dream of using .NET or mono. Vala OTOH, is beginning to rock!