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Plan 9 offers a completely usable, modern desktop.

Plan 9 is a research operating system. I like Plan 9's architecture, file system, and many other ideas. Plan 9's goal is to further extend the notion of Unix's "everything is a file" idea. Everything, even the windowing system (rio), is a file. Plan 9 also vastly simplifies systems programming (compared to Unix). Plan 9 is a wonderful research operating system that I would love to tinker with and explore.

However, it isn't a desktop replacement for Windows/OS X users or even for Linux or BSD users. There is no office suites (or even a word processor unless you love text editors and TeX or troff), no browser on the scale of Firefox or Konqueror, no music/video players, nothing that 99% of the world uses with a computer. Besides, I'm pretty sure that users are more comfortable using this desktop, these desktops, or especially this desktop before they use this desktop. For even the most ardent *nix hackers or computer scientists, Plan 9 would be something they played with on the side (kind of like Minix or an operating system that they're working on), and Linux/BSD is their main OS.

I like Plan 9, but it isn't a desktop OS; it's a research OS. However, Plan 9 is a very innovative operating system; I wish that the major OS sellers (I'm talking to you, Apple and Microsoft) would be a bit more cutting-edge in the architecture of their OSes rather than just appearances (even though Apple has done very well since the bought NeXT; they have a hybrid kernel, for one). Plan 9, L4, the MIT exokernel project, and other projects look very interesting, and I would like to see them in use.

But if it's not where you can find it easily, it might as well not exist.

DRM built in to Gstreamer (and hence, GNOME).

That being said, I can't deny that the work is being done. If anyone's interested, here's a link to the announcement. The short version seems to be that "we have no control over if people will be using DRM anyway, so we're implementing it in the hopes that it will never be used, just so that GStreamer won't be dumped over lack of DRM support".

Actually DIA works well too. Its free in both sense of the word. Works as well as Visio.

The most major one (with no fix that I'm aware of) is that starting a new GUI program from a terminal window doesn't give focus to the new program. This makes things like xmame -fullscreen impossible to use.

This is due to Metacity's (the window manager) "experimental strict-focus-approximation feature" recently introduced upstream:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326159

There is a modified Metacity RPM package available for FC5 which has a patch to configure the window focussing behaviour:

http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/metacity/fc5.html

...on whether Negreponte is a novice or not. If he is, then yes, he's very possibly out of luck, since software designed for novices needs more functions by definition, and thus, has to be bigger.

If on the other hand he already knows a thing or two, (or isn't afraid of learning) then he will find that minimalistic systems are actually one of Linux's primary strengths, at least in my observation. He could probably use this as a base, and then for X use apt-get to install ROX Filer, metacity, (as a background for ROX) and fbpanel as his start menu. Or, if he wants most of that done for him, he could install FVWM instead of metacity and fbpanel, and still use ROX as an explorer clone. Mind you, this is only one possible option, and most people reading this would probably think I'm insane and ask why I don't simply advocate fluxbox/xfce etc. This is a problem with myriad possible solutions.

He'd probably also need to install gtk for Abiword etc, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. There are also any number of lightweight image viewers around as well...he should check freshmeat. For web browsing, there's also dillo.

Hence, what he wants is more than possible. He might have to do a bit of surfing, but then again, with the magic of apt-get, he probably doesn't even need to do that.

If you cared to click the link you could have seen that for each language, you have both developer-libs and desktop percentages. For example:
Hindi: dev 99.84%, desktop 93.39%
Tamil: dev 73.38%, desktop 65.81%

Now clicking on 'desktop' for Tamil you have the details for each app. Indeed, GAIM is not in there because it's not an official GNOME app, but you do have Epiphany and Nautilus (the GNOME equivalents to Konqueror), or Ekiga (previously Gnome-Meeting), or Totem (movie player), ...

Of course the KDE stats don't take into account *all* apps written for KDE either...

If you cared to click the link you could have seen that for each language, you have both developer-libs and desktop percentages. For example:
Hindi: dev 99.84%, desktop 93.39%
Tamil: dev 73.38%, desktop 65.81%

Now clicking on 'desktop' for Tamil you have the details for each app. Indeed, GAIM is not in there because it's not an official GNOME app, but you do have Epiphany and Nautilus (the GNOME equivalents to Konqueror), or Ekiga (previously Gnome-Meeting), or Totem (movie player), ...

Of course the KDE stats don't take into account *all* apps written for KDE either...

KDE is the leader when it comes to supporting the popular Indic languages like Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.

If you could link to some statistics it might be interesting to see.

According to Gnome's website.

Gnome v2.14

Hindi: 94.10% complete.
Tamil: 66.64% complete.
Benglai: 80.33% complete.

According to the KDE's website:

Kde stable:

Hindi: 57.06% complete.
Tamil: 66.13% complete.
Bengali: 23.93% complete.

That could be the case because up until 2.14, Gedit could open, but not save over VFS. This shortcoming has been fixed in the latest release.

It also has a "Text Encryption" plugin for Gedit, which allows you to edit an OpenPGP message and encrypt, sign, verify a sig, or decrypt the current file contents. Rather useful. (Noted about this on my blog.)

Well, according to your own Human Interface Guidelines, you shouldn't be using a foot icon at all!

mail me a version that looks nice and fits in on Slashdot. So far all
I've ever got was either ugly or B&W (read:Dull)

Hi all,

Please consider this email a formal request from the GNOME Foundation.

We, being the GNOME Foundation, as well as many GNOME Foundation members and
contributors to the project, have contacted you numerous times over the last
four years regarding the use of the old GNOME logo on Slashdot. We've posted
comments on Slashdot stories covering GNOME. We've been very nice about it.

Please update the icon used for GNOME stories on Slashdot. We have used this
logo since 2002, when GNOME 2.0 was released. It has been a *very long* time
since the marble foot logo represented our project. We're now at GNOME 2.14,
so we've shipped seven releases since the new logo was adopted. In that time
you have posted over 120 articles in the GNOME category on Slashdot.

We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal
to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our project. We'd like to
see it used.

Thanks,

- Jeff

From: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/200 6-March/msg00002.html
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2006/03/20/0
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/logo/

Hi all,

Please consider this email a formal request from the GNOME Foundation.

We, being the GNOME Foundation, as well as many GNOME Foundation members and
contributors to the project, have contacted you numerous times over the last
four years regarding the use of the old GNOME logo on Slashdot. We've posted
comments on Slashdot stories covering GNOME. We've been very nice about it.

Please update the icon used for GNOME stories on Slashdot. We have used this
logo since 2002, when GNOME 2.0 was released. It has been a *very long* time
since the marble foot logo represented our project. We're now at GNOME 2.14,
so we've shipped seven releases since the new logo was adopted. In that time
you have posted over 120 articles in the GNOME category on Slashdot.

We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal
to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our project. We'd like to
see it used.

Thanks,

- Jeff

From: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/200 6-March/msg00002.html
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2006/03/20/0
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/logo/

Hi all,

Please consider this email a formal request from the GNOME Foundation.

We, being the GNOME Foundation, as well as many GNOME Foundation members and
contributors to the project, have contacted you numerous times over the last
four years regarding the use of the old GNOME logo on Slashdot. We've posted
comments on Slashdot stories covering GNOME. We've been very nice about it.

Please update the icon used for GNOME stories on Slashdot. We have used this
logo since 2002, when GNOME 2.0 was released. It has been a *very long* time
since the marble foot logo represented our project. We're now at GNOME 2.14,
so we've shipped seven releases since the new logo was adopted. In that time
you have posted over 120 articles in the GNOME category on Slashdot.

We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal
to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our project. We'd like to
see it used.

Thanks,

- Jeff

From: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/200 6-March/msg00002.html
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2006/03/20/0
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/logo/

If you stick with Exchange on the backend and just want to replace Outlook then Evolution is probably your best (if not only) choice as it implements most of Outlook's functionality. It also support other mail client standards like IMAP and POP3 of course, so will seamlessly integrate with any almost other backend mail server too. Packages for UNIX are readily available and the Windows port is also stable, and although there isn't a pre-rolled installation package just yet, that can't be too far off.

That windows border looks just like Gnome's Metacity theme. Nice.

http://art.gnome.org/themes/metacity/1171

Anyone who would want such a huge spreadsheet needs help. Typically, the problem is improper organization or lack of more appropriate tool. Better tools would be databases or batch processing of data streams. Help them early because the problem only gets worse with "advances" like this.

I've seen worse abuse of spreadsheets. The most God awful sheet I ever saw had tons of macros. They each got data from different sources, one still used a modem to call a local high school's weather station, and the results of each had to be "checked" by hand. That spreadsheet was part of the process used to set the local price of electricity. It had grown, like a cancer, for years. This is what happens without proper IT support. Far from being enabled and helped, the victim was lead down a path of inappropriate tools to a giant cluster.

Had the company used free software, they might not have had to fire their programmers. Someone convinced them that "computer programming was not a core business." That's true, but neither is accounting and the "off the shelf" solution they were sold instead will cost them many times more than their own staff. For all their money they could have had things that work right.

Yes, you can run *nuke + jabber + openoffice + openxcange +..... but do they work together? Can I set up a *nuke site which links into jabber and openexchange and openoffice, so that I can see inside a document whether the creator and other relevant people are online, and have versioned discussions with them?

With Outlook. I can even get someone's telephone extension by right-clicking their name in an email. Outlook 2003 also tells me when they're free by checking their calendar.

These aren't really features in Outlook itself; this information is provided by the Exchange server that your organization is using. If you were to use Outlook outside an Exchange environment -- say, for checking your personal email from home -- you wouldn't have these features either.

Outlook's advantage in this case is simly that it supports using an Exchange server, while most other mail clients do not. For business use, Exchange is valuable, but for personal use it isn't really applicable, and there are other approaches, such as iCal files published on the web, that are better-suited to the less-centralized patterns that personal communication often follows.

btw, Evolution

Now there are some aspects of Gnome's simplicity I like, but Gnome-Screensaver's attitude towards its users is a little worrying. Configuring a screensaver isn't hard - you could do it Windows 9x for heavens sake. This seems a little retrograde, and I hope this kind of attitude doesn't begin to colour the whole project.

Like all Linux desktops, Ubuntu has limitations. It lacks applications such as Photoshop, Framemaker, Pagemaker, Visio, Access, Quickbooks, a PDF converter, legal DVD players and most importantly income tax preparation software. Without those applications ported directly to Linux, Ubuntu remains a mid-level desktop.

• The GIMP satisfy virtually all "photoshop" needs (maybe not some small part in some graphics shops, but otherwise you're bitching without real knowledge).
• I don't do much in the area of Framemaker or Pagemaker, but most desktops will do fine with the functionality present in OpenOffice.org Draw
• Visio has some nice features, but I've lived for years with Dia managing a network of almost 200 equipments in a variety of multi-level networks
• Access is b0rked by design. PostgreSQL and MySQL are on Enterprise level, and they're at your feet on most GNU/Linux distributions
• PDF Converters? Have you tried printing? Go there. Notice the Create a PDF Document option...
• Legal DVD players? Write your congressmang, senator, whatever favorite politic of choice and influence and tell them how wrong DMCA is.

One of the main features I'm looking forward to in FC5 is the inclusion of Beagle

In that case you should upgrade beagle to 0.2.3, and here is why http://planet.gnome.org/ search for "joe: yes I also want to know about the leak". His site doesn't seem to work now

The other Free Software options:
http://www.konqueror.org/
http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/
http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/
http://www.caminobrowser.org/

And the non-free ones, like Opera is...
http://www.apple.com/safari/
http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/

There was a patch posted to gnome's desktop-devel-list recently that adds 256 color support to vte (the terminal widget used by gnome-terminal). The maintainer indicated a desire to include it in the next version (after 2.14).

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2006-February/msg00430.html

-Mark

How do you get gnome-terminal to display bitmapped fonts? I'd like to give it a go for comparison purposes.

Also if you have the time, and if your UTF-8 file does not contain sensitive information, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ and attach the file.

Well, if you ask the users, GNOME Screensaver definitely needs more. Since the developer is refusing to listen to the users there are already people forking it.

See if there are any supportive comments on this app in these forums and bug reports (besides the developers of course):
Thread where early 2.14 users first noticed how lacking this thing is.
Bug report where the developer dismisses any screen saver that needs configuration as broken, despite the arguments given here and here.

And since the solution for many of these dissatisfied users (as mentioned in some of the threads above) is to uninstall it and put Xscreensaver back on, Xscreensaver obviously isn't that broken or confusing.

Check here for more info about Gnome-Terminal 2.14 improvements and other Gnome 2.14 improvements

Seems the linked linux.com article is little more than a summary of the GNOME Release Notes linked from the yesterday's "story"... :(

If you want to see some follow the next link: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.h tml

Rejoice (since 2.12):

Clipboard

GNOME now remembers data that you copy, even when you close the window from which it was copied. This long-standing problem has finally been solved without the performance problems usually associated with clipboard daemons, by allowing applications to explicitly request the use of this feature.

So, does eye candy get any closer to Mac OS looks?

It can be changed globablly via one's gtkrc, but it's up to the applications themselves to provide an "alternate" button order (which most don't, save a few stock GTK+ dialogs).

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkSett ings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-alternative-button-orde r

It's worse than that...when I looked at http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero , my first impression was that it was full of terrible ideas. It also looked like people were just reaching for ideas that needed to break 2.x, but maybe that was just because the criteria for being added to that page included breakage (the stuff that sounded more reasonable was mostly moved to other pages for possible inclusion in 2.x). But seriously...here are some of the suggestions:

Make GNOME a standards organization instead of a software development shop

Does that not seem like a sure-fire way to kill the project to anybody else? "Uh...we just decided not to develop software anymore...we're just going to approve or disapprove of other people's stuff."

Make GNOME truly-cross platform- i.e., make apps and environment work on Windows.

Er...doesn't Windows sort of already have a desktop environment? I can see making apps portable....but what purpose are they really going to serve by porting the whole desktop?

There are also long, tedious discussions of moving from "applications" to "objects"...i.e. making the desktop centered on the document. People talk about this a lot it seems, but it always seems to me that it makes a lot of sense for some types of applications, and no sense at all for others. I don't have a document in solitaire, just for the dumbest example. And then there's talk about changing from a "desktop" metaphor to an "assistant" metaphor, with contextual text input and later voice input. Ok, it worked on Star Trek, but this concept just gives me the heebie jeebies when I think about it actually applied to real computers. I can just feel the suck from here.

In any case, there's more, but my point is just that I also don't see a reason to break from 2.x, and I think that most of the reasons that have been suggested are cart-before-horse ideas that suck. The only thing I saw on that page that I thought was a good plan was a rich-data-storing clipboard application, and I don't see how that requires breaking 2.x; furthermore, I'd just be happy if they would copy klipper...I don't care much about clipping anything but text, but the cut/paste management is the one thing I still miss from KDE.

Actually, Gnome terminal is now the leader.

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.h tml

Ever since a company called Fluendo joined the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board, GNOME is obligated to use GStreamer (a software product sponsored by Fluendo) as its audio and video backend. This wouldn't be bad, if it weren't for the fact that GStreamer uses Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to handcuff users and leave them at the mercy of the entertainment cartel. In order to do this, GStreamer is denying its developers the right to license their constribution under the GPL, so that Fluendo can sell closed-source, proprietary DRM plugins that let the MPAA and RIAA control the users' viewing habits.

GStreamer has hurt the multimedia effort on Linux and the Free Desktop because they stole talented developers from mature mutimedia projects such as Xine, MPlayer, and VideoLAN, all of which were started before GStreamer and all of which have strong copyleft protection by being licensed under the GPL. In other words, GStreamer further fragmented the Linux multimedia developer base purely for the selfish, immoral purpose of ramming DRM down Linux users' throats.

Ximian, a company instrumental in founding GNOME, sold out to big business in 2002 by switching Mono's license from the GPL to the weaker MIT X11 license. Instead of helping out the myriad of established multimedia apps such as Kaffeine, AmaroK, and KMPlayer, Ximian started a whole new app called Banshee, whose only claim to fame is that its license (MIT X11) allows linking to proprietary DRM plugins.

These are just some example of an increasing problem GNOME is experiencing: it is pandering (and in some cases outright selling out) to companies that don't necessarily have the users' best interest in mind. One can say that the whole reason GNOME was started was to allow proprietary software (including draconian DRM) to use the hard work of open source developers.

KDE, on the other hand, is licensed solely under the GPL because the toolkit it is based on (Qt) is also GPL. KDE is also committed to preventing DRM from infesting their user's computers: for KDE4, they are building a multimedia framework called Phonon that does not depend on GStreamer, but which can use any number of backends, including DRM-free ones.

mate, i've been using gnome since pre 1.0 days and i haven't really used kde since 1.x days but i'll tell you this for free: if gnome 2.12.* is significantly faster than current kde then we better forget about world domination plans! :-D at least for those parts of the world with less than 1024MB of ram. i use breezy at home and its pretty sluggish with 512MB. granted, there's 3 of us on one box :-) but nevertheless, we're all using gnome so a lot of memory should be shared. but i have faith and i know dapper will sort all of us out!! :-D i'm really impressed with the work on performance that has been done of late. if you wanna follow it, just go to planet gnome, people blog daily about performance.

Go to
http://gnome.org/start/2.14/
in firefox type / Source Tarballs - pick your choice and download


OR

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/xxxxxx/2.14/

Replace xxxxxx with either of:
platform
desktop
bindings
admin

Go to
http://gnome.org/start/2.14/
in firefox type / Source Tarballs - pick your choice and download


OR

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/xxxxxx/2.14/

Replace xxxxxx with either of:
platform
desktop
bindings
admin

including users who manage their own computers.

...Also noteworthy are that British and Canadian English are supported.

A good overview:
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/

If you're running ubuntu dapper, it updated to 2.14 wednesday. It isn't really immediately distinguishable from the previous version but then, if you are also running xgl/compiz, who the hell cares?

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=916

-rcmiv

HA! HA! I have the cube!

If you look at the gnome hig: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/
You will see, that the menu entities should not be the name of the app, but something the users understand. e.g. firefox is shown as webbrowser etc.

I think that's great. Just a while ago Dapper got a new urine-colored Human theme, and - all due respect to the people who put their efforts into making Ubuntu better - frankly, it's just horrible. If the release is delayed, they have a lot better change to fix the theme.

Another thing i'd really like to see in dapper is the new NetworkManager 0.6 with its WPA and OpenVPN goodness. "Automatic network detection and configuration management" is high-priority target for dapper, and the new features in n-m 0.6 are needed by many users.

• ThoutReader
• EVince
• OpenBerg.

Evolution involves the death of weaker individuals before they can breed. With soap (the yardstick of civilisation), surgery, rescue helicopters, dentistry, wheelchairs etc, weaker individuals aren't killed off so easily before they can breed.

Any alternatives when OpenOffice.bloat panics?
http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/200 5-March/002423.html

Grapher, perhaps? (208K download)
http://students.washington.edu/bellc/grapher/viewp ic.php?pic=screenshots/gph0_93/gridlock.gif

Or Gnumeric? (15M)
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/images/gnum eric-sample.png

Which still has nothing to do with the original point.

...Length of time of Debian's existence and larger user base are one of the things that make your Google comparison dubious...

As pointed out in my post, to which you have just replied, there are distributions that have been around for less time than Gentoo with more requests for help, and the user base works to the larger distributions advantage. If a question has been asked already the answer is (hopefully) there.

...There are other things for other distros, for example the different users that Ubuntu attracts...

Ah, still twisting and turning.

You have to read between the lines. no you wont get exact figures here, but if one distribution was so much worse than the others it would show somewhere. But it doesn't.

...I used the Internet to establish that there existed people that had a problem with the reliability of Gentoo, not establish numbers...

But you would have if you could. I can establish there exists people that have a problem with the reliability of any distribution you care to name. 2003 seems to be a year you favour so try this. I bet this person ranted on and on how this was by far the worst distribution he had ever used. It's probably the policies, nothing wrong with apt. Something more up to date? Here you are. And of course Debian never causes people problems.

So what does this prove? Only that no distribution is immune to problems, not that they are significantly worse than any other. Numbers would do that. Surely with such an awful distribution there is a plethora of sites for you to choose from, like this one. Oh, hang on, they quite like it.

http://l10n-status.gnome.org/ [gnome.org]
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/HEAD/index.html
[gnome.org] Translation stats for Gnome/Gtk+.

http://i18n.kde.org/stats.php [kde.org]
http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/index.php
[kde.org] Translation stats for KDE.