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You'd need to toss X and its bazillion GUI toolkits, and replace them with something new. Then you'd need to organize a Human Interface Police, whose job it is to kick developers who don't follow the guidelines.

There's nothing wrong with X, no one is forced to use multiple toolkits. One toolkit and one Human Interface Guideline is exactly what GNOME is. Apps that don't follow the HIG don't get accepted as 'official' GNOME apps. In fact, GNOME is striving for everything you suggest, they're just not completely there yet. That's a big reason why Ubuntu was GNOME only in the beginning.

The only valid recourse for anybody who doesn't like the bugs is to either fix them, write a better browser altogether, or switch browsers, but good luck finding a better browser.

It comes with all these. :)

Hey, it it means I'll finally get my vector desktop, so I can just turn the DPI up or down for big happy controls or tiny intricate controls, I'll be happy. Nearly everything's still bitmap-based; it's so 1990s. And whatever happened to dynamic themes for GTK?

Last time I checked, Firefox was open source. You are more than welcome to fork the project and make a "lite" version. I would probably give it a try.

er, like this? http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/

As a contributor to both GEGL and GIMP, I am sorry to say that the integration of GEGL as the main processing core into GIMP will take quite a while.

Barebones, browser only, users must install their own extensions. Most geeks will want this one.

What on earth are you talking about? What debian is shipping is just firefox minus branding plus debian-specific patches. Why would anyone else have an interest in adopting that?

Your idea about a full fork shows a complete lack of understanding about how the Mozilla project works. Why would you want to fork Gecko or XULRunner just because of disagreements over a front-end that makes up 10% of the code, tops? Because that's all Firefox is. At least learn the basics about Mozilla before calling for a fork of it, otherwise you won't get far.

And for your "corporate governance" argument... Mozilla Corp. is just a subsidiary(sp?) the Mozilla Foundation created for administrative purposes. GNOME has the GNOME Foundation, Apache has the Apache Software Foundation, Python has the Python Software Foundation, GNU has the FSF. Are you calling for a fork of those projects too, to rid them of their evil governing entities?

Well, it depends on what you define as an 'important role'. For example, X11 is also as important as glibc, gcc, or binutils, especially for a desktop OS like Ubuntu.

OTOH, just as important to the user experience in Ubuntu as a desktop OS is the GNOME desktop (notice I said Ubuntu, not Kubuntu), and GNOME actually is part of the GNU project. (I've had people argue with me on this point -- if you don't believe me, hear it from the horse's mouth.)

On the gripping hand, Ubuntu and GNOME use quite a bit of other non-GNU software to aid in the user experience: Python, for instance. Much of the packaging system (apt-get, synaptic, etc.) comes from the Debian project, of course, which is not part of the GNU project.

IMHO, the best thing you can say about an operating system such as Ubuntu is that it consists of a motley collection of open source tools offered under a variety of different licenses and is packaged in a nice way that smooths over integration issues, adds polish and shine, and provides the out-of-the-box experience.

You mixed Rhythmbox with Rockbox: Rockbox the replacement firmware project, http://www.rockbox.org/ and Rhythmbox, the GNOME iTunes-like player: http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/

Visio equivalent... dunno

Pfft. Just use openoffice, it's not like the vast majority of those charts aren't made with WordArt anyway.

Make sure you're running GTK+ 2.10 or later; running as an untrusted client was one of the fixes made during the 2.9 development cycle. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136571

I don't really see what's so bad about it. It works, it's simple, it's understandable. It certainly seems more usable than this and provides more information than this. I couldn't find an equivalent OS X screen - maybe it manages services in some radical, insanely great way, but frankly this seems like a ridiculous complaint.

I don't really see what's so bad about it. It works, it's simple, it's understandable. It certainly seems more usable than this and provides more information than this. I couldn't find an equivalent OS X screen - maybe it manages services in some radical, insanely great way, but frankly this seems like a ridiculous complaint.

Wait, what? A disaster? Am I the only person who doesn't mind that dialog at all? Couldn't you always have Ctrl+Led to get a path entry?

FWIW, it got a permanent one in 2.16. Am I going to immediately say, "Oh, total improvment!" Nope. *shock gasp!*

GNOME is fighting the hard fight it seems. I do subscribe to the simpler is better philosophy. I am one of those GNOME admirers. And I am a Linux power user: I have gotten Gentoo to run. I'm also more sensitive to usability issues than most, I've programmed UIs for 7 (going on 8) years.

Agreed, the old GTK file chooser is an absolute monstrosity. Looks like relief is finally on the way with the new GNOME 2.16 http://www.gnome.org/start/2.16/notes/C/rnbackend. html

While I understand that GNOME has its admirers, and it can't be classified as a failure, it sure hasn't lived up to the hype of the early days.

GNOME was touted as being a real competitor to KDE, before the days of Qt being dually-licensed under the GPL. There was some initial progress, but since about 2000 it seems that KDE has been the leader. Ever since Miguel became more focused on Mono, the quality of GNOME really decreased.

One notable incident was the terrible GNOME file chooser. You can see it here:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/filecho oser.png

The many usability problems are well known, and were much discussed. One major flaw was the inability to enter in a pathname or filename manually. The lack of path separators made the top breadcrumb trail difficult to follow at times. The 'Places' pane wasted a lot of space when it listed few items. The file list didn't show enough detail about each file. It wasn't possible to view only certain file types.

Frankly, it was a rather massive mistake to include that dialog. When compared to the dialogs of KDE, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, it was the black sheep. What was worse, on some platforms non-GNOME applications like Mozilla Firefox made use of that dialog, in turn making their usability a nightmare. While things have gotten better, and the newer dialog is a slight improvement, the mistake was still very costly.

I personally know about six people who used GNOME, and swore that they'd never touch it again after seeing that monstrosity. One went back to Windows, to the best of my knowledge. The rest switched to KDE, and have been quite pleased, as far as I know.

I think that the GNOME file chooser disaster is one incident that all GUI developers should learn from. At least then it wasn't a total waste.

Mine is Dont have selection boxes with just yes no and canel on them, make them more informative such as is in linux, ie Save File and Discard, Don't Close and Save.

...which was, I think, recommended by Apple before being popular on other systems. (See "Buttons for addressing the alert".)

Of course, "on Linux" in this context really means "in GNOME" or "in KDE" or ..... The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines make the same suggestion about button labels, which I think they took from the OS X HIG. The KDE HIG also suggests buttons with verbs. I don't know what other DEs or toolkits recommend (if anything) or support.

Then again, even one of Microsoft's HIGs suggests that, albeit not as strongly (look for "Dialog Box Commands"). For that matter, so does the Vista HIG (look for "Use positive commit buttons").

Mine is Dont have selection boxes with just yes no and canel on them, make them more informative such as is in linux, ie Save File and Discard, Don't Close and Save.

...which was, I think, recommended by Apple before being popular on other systems. (See "Buttons for addressing the alert".)

Of course, "on Linux" in this context really means "in GNOME" or "in KDE" or ..... The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines make the same suggestion about button labels, which I think they took from the OS X HIG. The KDE HIG also suggests buttons with verbs. I don't know what other DEs or toolkits recommend (if anything) or support.

Then again, even one of Microsoft's HIGs suggests that, albeit not as strongly (look for "Dialog Box Commands"). For that matter, so does the Vista HIG (look for "Use positive commit buttons").

The GDM daemon normally runs as root, as does the slave.

I preffer my operating system to be stable, secure and beautiful:

http://art.gnome.org/screenshots/gnome215

I have used Evolution on Win32. It mostly works and it looks like development binaries are also reasonable. I wouldn't consider it much more alpha than Sunbird. I suspect that other comments on the GPL are the more likely explanation.

OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future.

Hmm, searching Google doesn't yield much of anything either. Some blog mentioned the "lack of information" on Plasma, and an image search only turns up a few pages. The best page I found is written in Czech (I think).

But aside from that, I think it's probably a good idea to mention Gnome ToPaZ (AKA TPZ, or Three Point Zero). I think it was originally supposed to be a plan from Gnome 3.0, but it's turned more into a brainstorming session for a "next-generation" desktop. Some of the ideas on that page are pretty lawl-tastic, but one very cool one is "lowfat". I strongly suggest checking out the video.

I'm given myself a word to not use GNOME until its developers would not document all the magic behind .gtkrc and .gnomerc files

The GTK resource file format is described here. (Note that gtkrc files have existed - and been documented in the API docs - since the GNOME 1 days.)

.gnomerc is something entirely unrelated - it's a shell script in the user's home directory that is simply sourced before the Gnome session is started. It doesn't exist on a standard Ubuntu installation, and I wouldn't know why I should create it, but it's hardly a magic thing. Now, I will not pretend I understand everything about XDM replacements and session management, but there actually is a large and up-to-date GDM reference manual in Gnome's online help system, and for session management GDM follows the freedesktop.org standard (with /etc/X11/Xsession.d) that KDM apparently follows as well.

So it would, all in all, appear that you are extracting matter out of your rear end. Not that anybody wants to force you to use Gnome, but if it does indeed hinge on a promise you made to yourself, and that promise is essentially nonsense, I think fate may be giving you a strong hint here ;-)

Thanks for the link, which in turn links to LibgnomeMustDie... I'm still unclear on whether the dependencies are growing, shrinking, or staying reasonably stable, but it's nice to see some action on this front.

Proud Member of the Clam Shill Alliance

I hate and love Gnome in equal parts. For example - http://www.gnome.org/start/2.16/notes/C/rnusabilit y.html - how the hell can the new permissions dialog be seen as an improvement. It's been made much worse, and I now take more clicks and thought to change permissions. This is plain wrong.

To be fair though, this is probably an isolated case, but they do make at least one blatant cock up per release.

GNOME 2.16 now depends on GTK+ 2.10, making use of many improvements that were made available by Project Ridley; an effort to consolidate a number of GNOME libraries into GTK+.

I think it is more important than eyecandy. Maybe the developers of widgetsets/window managers/... should stop running for eyecandy and launch a profiler?

Maybe it's time you looked at gnome development to notice heavy performance work has been done since before the 2.14 release:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/

Including, of course, use of profilers like sysprof, massif and the like.

If you're referring to eye-sores like this... I agree! I'm no artist but that looks ridiculous. "Rediculous" even! ;-)

Yes. And now Gedit has a filelist sidebar (heh!). The things is, you can criticize MS for being late to the game, but if you say almost everything Gnome offers in their new releases has been in KDE for ages, you get a -1. Of course, KDE4 will enlarge the gap once again so Gnome despite all the support it receives is guaranteed to stay behind for a few years at least.

And speaking of KDE4, if you take a look at some of the proposals for Gnome3 ( http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/ObjectModelEn vironment ), you'll realize Gnome is not even at KDE2 level.

hahaha http://www.gnome.org/Sucks

Pluto is a planet of the hearts. Why define what constitutes a planet? We know by now that our universe is full of intresting objects which adhere to a solar cult. Pluto was always considered as the mysterious dark planet. And how should we call it now? A belt object?

Will researchers show up and tell us that Gnome, Suse, KDE and Classpath have no planets?

Is it any surprise they don't want you to learn about Evolution?

If what he wants is a spreadsheet, Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet application I've seen anywhere, and that's including Excel.

The bottom line is it's nice to finally have a viable (and free!) solution to Word and Excel.

I think AbiWord and Gnumeric are quite nice. Why do you think the Google versions are more viable than these?

In addition to that a quick search for ipod on Gnome Files turns up Banshee , Rhythmbox , Listen and Yamipod>{not open source} , all of these look like nice options for iPod and music library management under linux but Banshee and Listen really stand out. No DRM of course but there is an entry on codeweavers' site for iTunes though i've no idea how compatible it is at this stage.http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/bro wse/name?app_id=134

..in various posts, let me summarize how the article's implication of poor ipod support is total bullshit and ipod works with linux just fine (in fact, better than with windows).

libipod ( http://libipod.sourceforge.net/ ) is the library that interacts with the database on the ipod that stores your music.

Several music players on linux like amarok ( http://amarok.kde.org/ ), rhythmbox ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/ ), gtkpod ( http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html ),( http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/juk.html ) etc have plugins/embeddings that can interact with the library seamlessly

Ipods are detected just fine by the USB mass storage driver with no probems in any modern linux distro.

Itunes can be run thru wine (though I've never tried it), and Sharpmusique
( http://nanocrew.net/software/sharpmusique/ ) can connect with itunes, buy music, download and strip off the DRM so that the files can be played anywhere.

CD-ripping and transfer to ipod can be done seamlessly in amarok (if you have lame etc installed). It's easier than in windoze thru third party rippers and itunes where there are all sorts of restrictions and issues.

Both "pc-compatible" (fat filesystem) as well as "mac-compatible" (HFS filesystem) will work equally well on any linux box coz linux has drivers for both filesystems.

Last but not least, there is ipodlinux ( http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page ), where you can install linux firmware in your ipod itself. Advantage is that you can play videos in your nano, music management is thru filesystem rather than database so just treat it as a mass storage device in any OS, and a host of other linux stuff will work on it, and you can play any music format that can be played on linux, not just mp3's (ogm,wma etc). You can even play quake on it if you want.

My nano ran just fine with my Mandrake box with no probs. Anecdotally, I had more problems with it on windoze (usb connection to it acted wierdly, though the usb bus was fine; I didn't care enough to analyze what was up).

Rule number 1 about naming a project -- do a google search. If something else that might be pretty related comes up pretty easily, you've picked a crappy name. In this case Sabayon is already used as the name for GNOME profile editor. It seems like this has been around much longer too.

Rule number 2 about naming a project -- when naming a project, try to get a domain name that reflects the project. I'm confused about how I would know from a URL like http://www.lxnaydesign.net/ that it would be about Sabayon linux.

Remember to play nice boys and girls. And for the Sabayon Linux folks, don't worry, Mozilla made the same mistake a few years ago. Clear up the confusion and move on -- it looks like you've got a pretty slick little distro going.

And of course, resizable dialog windows are possible in Qt since the dawn of time. Not only that, they work wonderfully.

Here comes iCal, doing everything that Sunbird should have done several years ago

Outlook? There's Evolution or kontact

Viruses? what's that?
Oh well, if you're worried about email viruses, you can always check out ClamAV

ActiveX controls that install software without you knowing is the last thing you have to worry about linux.

Popup blocker? It comes with Mozilla Firefox

Firewall? It's called Netfilter but if you find it too hard to configure, there are tools available, like Shorewall

And finally, there's a large choice of IM Clients on linux, like aMSN and Gaim that support animated emoticons and toaster popups (I haven't got the slightest idea about what the blue tray guy is)

Anyways, if you don't like any of these, you can always check out your distribution's package database for other other software.

Few games with a Plot, or even decent character development, are aimed at casual gamers. WoW? People spend hours in monotonos play, just to build their character up. They even appropriated an English word for that form of gameplay: "grinding."

Oblivion? The developers managed to make the character development fairly transparent, so it becomes a secondary element instead of a primary element. Bravo. But you still need to play for hours and hours to solve the sub-quests, or even the main quest. (And I'm not going to drop the money on Oblivion if all I want to do is speed-run through the main quest.)

Half-Life 2? I might be able to see that. Most of the replay value is in deathmatch, so sure.

The world's most popular games certainly do run on Linux, however. You might have meant, "best-selling" ... There are millions of gamers out there who haven't bought a new game in years.

Now even for a fancy feature like this one?
http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/blog/gtollina

C'mon... Admit it:)

btw. hitting your wife is so 70's. Now its all about hitting computers.

I suggested that feature to the Epiphany developers, the result? They called it "crack". Of course, they call a lot of things "crack" if it isn't the absolute bare minimum needed to display a site... and they think that it's a lot better for users to have their tabs mystically disappear when opening more than 5-7, rather than rezising them. The only reason I've actually heard so far is that it is easier to close many tabs if they are same size. And so on...

Would be a great addition to Firefox though, I agree. My favourite would be CTRL-SHIFT-V as default key combo if it isn't taken.

If you just want to draw a diagram then Inkscape or Dia are probably what you are looking for. Inkscape should be fine for most uses of throwing together a simple diagram or drawing, while if you have slightly more pedantic or technical needs Dia offers a few features that can help (though being more technically inclined has a less helpful interface for just drawing pictures). GIMP is, like photoshop, primarily a photo and image manipulation (as opposed to creation) tool, and is great for working on, touching up, combining, etc. images, while its tools for raw image creation are a little lacking (which is reasinable given that that is not what it is designed to do.

Jedidiah.

I love GIMP, but I am still waiting for GEGL and/or 48 bits per pixel (16 bits per channel per pixel) support. I conduct scientific research and the thought of trowing away extra data to work in the 24 bits per pixel space is unnerving. I mean most digital cameras support 48bpp pictures now using the RAW format which is supported by linux.

K-Meleon (Windows), Camino (Mac OS X), and Epiphany (Linux, BSD, etc). They use the Gecko renderring engine, but cut some bloat and render the interface using a native GUI rather than via XUL.

ReactOS does NOT use MSFT fonts! The fonts are "Bitstream Vera fonts" from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstre am-vera/1.10/ So do not spread BS around.