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"My understanding while talking to David Reveman this past week was that the complexity of keeping a compositing manager as a separate process from the window manager was too high (too much bookkeeping that made it error prone, and there were some fundamental problems that he could not solve). So some time ago he abandoned his effort to patch Metacity and have a separate composition manager, reduced the complexity and eliminated a lot of bugs and the source of these bugs. That is what David explained to me, but I can only understand about 50% of the technical stuff that he talks about, so keep that in mind." http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2006-February/msg00120.html

I've been waiting a long time for this. And this, and this, and this.

I'd sure like to see 3d GTK+ widgets and window decoration, all following the same global illumination, complete with specular maps and all the advanced pixel shader techniques available the desktop could become truly beautiful.

You can have a desktop linux NOW. Fetch a modern commercial distro (http://www.ubuntu.com/>Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc) or any of the free ones and you'll have an excellent desktop with little issues, if any.

    The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux and want something that feels like their WinXP desktop. If you're looking for that, yes, there's nothing like it now and probably won't be for a while. If you want an useable Unix desktop, there's a lot of excellent ones arround.
    You have a wide choice of desktops and window and managers, and there's a lot of excellent software for them. A linux desktop is useable today, and by anyone - i had Ubuntu on a desktop for a while and my mother, who's 'computer-imparied' had zero issues using it. Besides being unable to find the blue E icon ;)

You don't appear to be the only one who's had, um, problems with her:

http://blogs.gnome.org/view/bolsh/2005/08/30/0

http://www.martianrock.com/?p=130#comment-1676

I sympathise; I've noticed - and it's just a generalisation - that open-source application forums/mailing lists tend to be minefields compared to industries one. I've posted countless, sometimes dumb questions about Microsoft Word on various groups over the last 13 years, and didn't once get a snippy remark. Having recently moved to DocBook, my experience with the forum for one particular associated application has been chastening; to say I was patronised was an understatement.

P.

Well, libraries are shared, sure. But libraries can be bloated.

I mean, it's nice that people explains that all that memory that processes use is shared between processes, but the linux desktop platform couplement (kernel libc Xorg qt libkde app) is far from being perfect. Just take a look at the upcoming gnome 2.6.14: Too many performance improvements in the sahred libraries, right?

Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice is probably a better alternative to Adobe Photoshop on the Linux desktop. It is nicely integrated in KDE and its codebase is cleaner than that of GIMP, so it is easier to add features at a fast rate. In fact, even GNOME devs have been amazed by how fast it's growing.

What version are you using? GIMP has had a preview for unsharp mask since at least version 2.2.

Although I fully support any effort Google puts into widespread usage of *nix systems, there are a couple organisations that are way ahead of you (and Google) when it comes to your three points: freedesktop.org has already been and continues to standardise the desktop frontends and backends so that your desktop environments will work great together and not even your typical Windows user would get confused by it. Then there is KDE who have made such huge advancements in your fancy-shmancy integration and synergy that I'd be more worried for Apple that they won't be the holder of the "fanciest desktop environment as perceived by the general public" award anymore. Of course, there is GNOME, and although it's become a very good desktop environment for beginners to computers or those who just want things to work, it does have many artificial limitations in how you can control it, so I recommend KDE to those who want any sort of control over their GUIs.

Simple Windows Tools? Well, there's always a hex editor... (I kid, I kid!)

Seriously, it's not as difficult as you might imagine. Even your grandmother could whip something up in Visual Basic, though I don't recommend it.

The path of least resistence here is to grab a copy of Visual Studio, then get yourself a beginners book on Windows programming. Just go to your local book store and you'll find a whole shelf of them. (And not a single book on data structures or algorithms in sight. Grrrr...)

If you're a sucker for a bit of punishment, (but believe you can follow the documentation well enough) just use web tutorials and the online docs to guide you through the process. The Resource Editor will do most of the work for you, so you only need to worry about interfacing your code with the GUI components. (Easy, peasy. :-))

Your last option is for the case that you're familiar with GTK+, and don't have Visual Studio available. (A real masochist you are, aren't you?) Grab a copy of cygwin and install all the dev time tools. (Compiler, BinTools, GTK-devel, etc.) Keep a copy of the GTK Reference up, and you should be good to go. Just remember that you'll need to distribute the cygwin.dll file with your application. Otherwise your users shouldn't notice.

It has already been cloned, projet page: http://gnome.org/

There is a "maybe not quite there yet, but usable for simple tasks" Visio-like program called Dia. I've been trying it, earlier versions weren't usable, but the version that comes with Fedora Core 4 is pretty good. I expect good things from it in the future.

Isn't going to happen until Microsoft starts being a platform neutral software company again. I have an older pre-Microsoft version and it rocked. Too bad Microsoft killed (oops, integrated) it with Office.

Dia http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/ as replacement works for me. Windows port available.

Hey Microsoft /. patrollers, ask upper management if its worth selling me nothing or selling me a $40-$100 standalone version of Visio for Linux? I'm not a thief and I won't upload my copy.

Enjoy,

/etc/init.d/ scripts: Debian doesn't have a nice way to turn these scripts on and off and monitor their status via a command-line tool. Red Hat's system here was very good.

user management: I use LDAP for user management; others use SAMBA and other stuff. But adduser isn't a shim that can interface to any of these back-end data-stores -- it can only do /etc/passwd.

ideology: Debian's ideological bent can be a real pain for those us using the distro for its technical merits. For example, Debian pulled SSL support from all the GPL network services that link to libssl in a fit of ideology that no other distro has had.

package management: Yeah, apt-get's dependency resolution logic is very cool. Other aspects of the system aren't so cool. Apt-get, aptitude, and other front-ends don't share the same back-end data-store, so if you mix and match these tools, you get inconsistent package data.

And it's nearly impossible to force-remove a package (just delete all the damn files and forget about it!) if the associated removal script fails.

I guess Gnome users are still stuck with Firefox, or at least I don't know of anything else that's better than it.

If successful it will make Linux the #1 client OS, surpassing Windows and totally change the tech dynamics in 2/3 of the world.

Those aren't the numbers that matter for 2006. The main reason operating system market share matters is because people build products on top of these platforms. The buying power of the target recipients of these $100 laptops is very low because they are poor and they are children.

The OLPC project will be very influential on the future, however. The main goal of the project in the first place is to help educate these poor people, which hopefully will bring them out of poverty. Then the operating systems they use will actually matter.

When you combine the education they are receiving with the internet access they will eventually get, many of these people will be able to contribute to the open source software that they're using to make it even better. It will be interesting to watch the open source community change as these maps change.

(how many Linux fans that you know would run a closed binary?)

DRM is a suprisingly quiet topic on the GNOME mailing lists at the moment. I say surprising because GNOME is committed to using Gstreamer as its media framework... and the company that does most of the development work on Gstreamer has announced that it is using it's recent injection of corporate financing to go full-bore DRM: See the blog post of Christian Schaller here.

I suggest reading the blog entry and making note of all of Schaller's blather about Sun's "Open Source DRM" -- note particulary his deliberate avoidence of the terms "Free software"... a concept on which his company is built. Free software and DRM are fundamentally incompatible. Open source isn't incompatible. How so, you ask?

Well, a later blog post pretends to answer some questions raised. I say "pretends", because actually he dodges most of the questions. The most notable part of this blog entry is found in the comments -- where Schaller reveals that Fluendo's DRM will be implemented by "code signing" and a chain of trust. A quite clear statement that unless you get Gstreamer from Fluendo, you can't use any of their DRM codecs... if you recompile GStreamer yourself, forget it. How is this Free software exactly. Isn't Fluendo violating this spirit of the GPL (again, on which the company is built), if not the letter. Yes...

Furthermore he adds this somewhat enigmatic comment: "What happens outside GStreamer is of course a different issue, and here there are work happening at the distros to come up with solutions." Naturally, I think any Linux users would like to know what he means by that. My conclusion is that some Linux distros are quietly working on their own "signed" Linux kernels with a Microsoft-type Secure Audio Path. I'd love to know which distros are busy selling out Free software, but as usual Schaller flat-out refused to expand on his comment or answer any questions -- not even from GNOME developers.

Given that Gstreamer is the future for GNOME, and increasingly likely to be the future for KDE too, I think we are owned a few more details.

DRM is a suprisingly quiet topic on the GNOME mailing lists at the moment. I say surprising because GNOME is committed to using Gstreamer as its media framework... and the company that does most of the development work on Gstreamer has announced that it is using it's recent injection of corporate financing to go full-bore DRM: See the blog post of Christian Schaller here.

I suggest reading the blog entry and making note of all of Schaller's blather about Sun's "Open Source DRM" -- note particulary his deliberate avoidence of the terms "Free software"... a concept on which his company is built. Free software and DRM are fundamentally incompatible. Open source isn't incompatible. How so, you ask?

Well, a later blog post pretends to answer some questions raised. I say "pretends", because actually he dodges most of the questions. The most notable part of this blog entry is found in the comments -- where Schaller reveals that Fluendo's DRM will be implemented by "code signing" and a chain of trust. A quite clear statement that unless you get Gstreamer from Fluendo, you can't use any of their DRM codecs... if you recompile GStreamer yourself, forget it. How is this Free software exactly. Isn't Fluendo violating this spirit of the GPL (again, on which the company is built), if not the letter. Yes...

Furthermore he adds this somewhat enigmatic comment: "What happens outside GStreamer is of course a different issue, and here there are work happening at the distros to come up with solutions." Naturally, I think any Linux users would like to know what he means by that. My conclusion is that some Linux distros are quietly working on their own "signed" Linux kernels with a Microsoft-type Secure Audio Path. I'd love to know which distros are busy selling out Free software, but as usual Schaller flat-out refused to expand on his comment or answer any questions -- not even from GNOME developers.

Given that Gstreamer is the future for GNOME, and increasingly likely to be the future for KDE too, I think we are owned a few more details.

You mean "elves". I doubt they want to validate GNOME's influence any further. ;)

Languages are arbitrary, one can create compilers for any language to run on any platform(s), its a matter of taking the symantics of the language, and using a lexer and parser to generate intermediate code, which then can be translated to assembly code for the target platform (of course there is more to an actual compiler).

Ideally, this would be true. But this isn't just a language. It is a language (and a framework) developed by MS with the intent on killing the competition.

Killing them any way possible.

So just saying that a language is not PRO because of limitations to the OS, which actually is not true for C#, is ignorant.

Writing code that won't run without the blessing of some "overlord" is ignorant.

If non-MS implementations of the language can be killed via patent or other IP litigation, then using the language is ignorant.

As a contractor, writing code for a living, I would never consider using a language that isn't portable (to the extent possible). I want to be able to solve problems for as many clients as possible.

Not just the ones that MS says I should be able to...

Maybe you are just knocking M$ and trying to troll, but take a look at the Mono Platforms if you want to know more.

Sorry, but I'm not going to waste my time with any MS technology until it is clear that I can use it where ever I want without worrying about being sued for licensing fees.

It simply isn't worth the risk.

That video is not XGL. It is quite impressive and it can give you an idea of what XGL could look like, it is not XGL but is Luminocity and it is taken from http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots. Read "How Luminocity Relates to Other Stuff" to get more info on Luminocity. Read the interview with KDE's Zack Rusin: "Beauty and Magic for KDE, with Zack Rusin". Download the demo video of Zack's XGL hacks: http://vizzzion.org/stuff/xgl_wanking.avi 16MB. If you want to read more about XGL then read aseigo's blog entry or Zack's blog.

That video is not XGL. It is quite impressive and it can give you an idea of what XGL could look like, it is not XGL but is Luminocity and it is taken from http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots. Read "How Luminocity Relates to Other Stuff" to get more info on Luminocity. Read the interview with KDE's Zack Rusin: "Beauty and Magic for KDE, with Zack Rusin". Download the demo video of Zack's XGL hacks: http://vizzzion.org/stuff/xgl_wanking.avi 16MB. If you want to read more about XGL then read aseigo's blog entry or Zack's blog.

Here is a video demo of the types of effects which become possible with XGL. Note the translucent video playing while being warped and composited with the background window, and simultaneously being displayed live in miniature in the workspace pager to the right.

OS X's "genie" effect, Windows Vista's "frosted" window effect, *real* transparent terminal windows, crazy animated wallpapers, they will all be possible with XGL. But eye candy is not the only use of XGL; it makes possible long-overdue improvements to the Linux desktop experience. OS X's Exposé window management tool will be possible to duplicate on Linux. Window resizing is smoother in the experimental XGL window managers because window borders are drawn synchronized with their contents. Window moving is also faster because window contents are cached instead of drawn on demand. Best of all, all this eye candy will require *less* CPU power than it takes today to draw a screenfull of antialiased text, because OpenGL brings the full power of today's 3D cards to bear on your existing ordinary everyday applications. Today when you're surfing the web your GeForce or Radeon is sitting idle while your CPU draws all the text and graphics. XGL will put that power to work, freeing up your CPU and allowing way more eye candy to boot.

(Note that this video is only a demo and *not* a proposal to make wobbly windows the default in GNOME or KDE. I don't want to see those replies with rants about how you hate eye candy, and you think Linux should have stopped improving after it could run TWM with Emacs in an XTerm on your Pentium 133.)

http://live.gnome.org/Luminocity
There. Fixed that link for you.

This is exelent news, but what about Luminocity. Still rooting for this fella...
http://live.gnome.org/Luminocity/

Ohhh yeah, that's right!! I'm giving it way too much credit... I forgot it's C using structures right? So GNOME isn't really OO at all. That's advanced technology for ya!!

At one level, it's C. So is Mac OS X, and probably every other operating system. All of the interesting work being done in GNOME in the past couple years has been in Python and C#.

This doesn't change the fact that you were trying to put down GNOME by saying that it's "based on C++". Uh, no, you lose.

After you've demonstrated that you have no clue what a theme is ...

I'm trying to understand how a theme could make GNUstep look like a Mac, because for any definition of "theme" I've ever heard, it can't. Just because you can come up with a theme with bitmaps vaguely similar to Aqua, doesn't mean the result will look like Aqua. Features like full-screen double-buffering aren't the sort of thing you can put in a theme, and they're an integral part of the Mac.

as for Expose... well.. it's bloody useless so we didn't implement it. I have a Mac (I am, in fact, a Mac developer) and I find Expose to be the most useless thing I've ever seen.

Among all the Mac users I've ever met, it's considered one of the nicest things about the Mac these days. You can stick your fingers in your ears, but that doesn't make it any more true.

Deny it if you like, but the real reason GNUstep hasn't done it is because implementing Expose on X is really hard. You basically have to hack up the X server.

I do, they are javascript.. mainly... which I suppose means it shouldn't suprise me too much that KDE and GNOME are (once again) implementing a copycat technology based on ideas created by another company instead of actually coming up with something themselves. Not that any other open source project is any different.

The only thing they're doing is copying the file format -- KDE and GNOME (and other systems) have had Dashboard-like features years before Mac OS X did. Heck, Mac System 1 had desk accessories.

If you want to diss open source projects for copying Apple's nice features, you'll look pretty biased unless you also diss Apple for copying the nice features from open-source projects. Where would Mac OS X be without a web browser, web server, email client, email server, file sharing, printing, 3d graphics, or a kernel?

GNOME and Mac OS are both nice systems, and both are getting better all the time, largely by borrowing ideas from each other. That's how progress works. To think that either one simply can't do something the other does, because it's written in C++ (when it's not, even!) is just absurd.

The names listed in your Gnome menu are not the names of the applications. A while back the Gnome devs recognized that Linux applications have stupid unintuitive names so they decided to give the core programs used in Gnome easy to identify aliases. It's not called "Firefox Web Browser", it's called Firefox. "Totem Movie Player" is an alias for Totem. "Text Editor" is an alias for gedit. There is no Linux app called "Instant Messenger", it's Gaim or Gabber. Go down your list of Linux names and what you find almost every time is an instance where the Gnome devs thought that the real name of the application was too stupid and non-intuitive to be listed by name, so they created an alias for it. This is the entire point of the original article: most Linux applications have stupid names.

Wow, where've you been? In 2.0 and later, you click Actions -> Log out. They've changed the menu in 2.12, so now you click Desktop -> Log out or System -> Log out*. In either case, one of the choices in the window that comes up is to shut down the computer: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/original.php?rel ease=469&slide=76

*- Honestly, I'm not sure of the difference. I see the "Desktop" menu on my Arch Linux GNOME panel, whereas the Ubuntu screenshot I linked to has a "System" menu. I wonder if Ubuntu's is modified at all, though that seems only reasonably likely.

$ aptitude show libgtk2.0-0 ...
Uncompressed Size: 4608k

Sorry, but what's wrong with http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/

Especially with such helpful definitions like this one:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkTree Model.html#GtkTreePath

Tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it?

Sorry, but what's wrong with http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/

Especially with such helpful definitions like this one:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkTree Model.html#GtkTreePath

Tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it?

until Gtk+ gets a really GOOD documentation

Okay, d.g.o is still a pain to use and still has some old stuff, but the API reference should qualify as "good documentation". GNOME core libraries are basically all documented - except libgnomeprint/libgnomeprintui, which have large gaps - and if you don't find enough documentation, Just. File. A. Bug..

until Gtk+ gets a really GOOD documentation

Okay, d.g.o is still a pain to use and still has some old stuff, but the API reference should qualify as "good documentation". GNOME core libraries are basically all documented - except libgnomeprint/libgnomeprintui, which have large gaps - and if you don't find enough documentation, Just. File. A. Bug..

Sorry, but what's wrong with http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/, with every supporting library also document at http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/?

Though when things get really tough and I absolutely have to know the little details, I like to hit the source http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk%2B/gtk/ instead.

Sorry, but what's wrong with http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/, with every supporting library also document at http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/?

Though when things get really tough and I absolutely have to know the little details, I like to hit the source http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk%2B/gtk/ instead.

Sorry, but what's wrong with http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/, with every supporting library also document at http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/?

Though when things get really tough and I absolutely have to know the little details, I like to hit the source http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk%2B/gtk/ instead.

Are there any cross platform (linux, mac, windows) GUI RAD tools ala Builder, yet?

Congratulations, here is your bounty!

That's one way to get around the payment. ;)

So what?

That's so what.

You have to read the fine print.

You are completely off your rocker.

You may have hidden under a rock for the whole discussion, but this is a good summary, if you want to catch up...

You're actually pretty funny, considering it's actually MS who spreads FUD... with things like the SCO case.

But if you think C#'s meager sugar is worth the risk... go for it. I'll find it funny to see how it turns out...

Yes and 80% of the world are morons

Excellent statistic. I believe i will add that to my test of the '4 out of 5 statistics are made up' theory.

Where do you want to point and click today?

are you trying to say that you can't point or click in a Linux environment?

OO.org is dog slow Linux, faster on windows. but still slower then Excel.

note 90% of the time I need a Spread sheet I'm in Linux and use OO.org any way.

I'm no developer but I *do* like GNOME so you might want to check out: The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines They've got this whole interface thing down to either an art form, or a fascist manifesto, depending on who you believe.



NeverEndingBillboard.com

Icons with text aren't i18nable. Check this out.

Perhaps this is some indication of general impedance mismatch in open source.

I have had somewhat similar problems with Evolution. It is a great email client, however currently it doesn't work with two out of total of three POP3 e-mail accounts I actively use, which is a shame. I have reported the bug ( http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311656 for details if anyone cares), but for whatever reason it hasn't been accepted. (Blaming the problems on the e-mail provider is absurd)

Now, I don't want to make a big deal out of it, and after all I am not paying for anything, so I don't really have the right to expect anything, but I can't pretend to like it either. To be honest, it annoys the cr*p out of me. There is a great product that I'd love to use (and I've been trying really hard to use), but it has an awful bug and they refuse to acknowledge it and there is nothing I can do about it. That is what makes users vengeful and bitter :-)

The memory leak/CPU hog bug in Firefox is not as serious, but seems fundamental and has been around for ages, so it is really amazing that nobody's doing anything about it.

...and if you are looking for a GUI builder, GTK has a nice one:

http://glade.gnome.org/

Just associate the .glade files in Eclipse with Glade. Something really cool you can do with Python and Glade is use libglade (http://www.jamesh.id.au/software/libglade/) to dynamically generate your GUI from the .glade file.

Indeed, there have been countless iterations of different UIs throughout the history of graphical computing. Linux alone has dozens of disparate DEs and WMs. Fluxbox, FVWM, Window Maker, Enlightenment DR16, XFCE, KDE, and Gnome are among the most popular and most current and stable examples. Keep in mind, of course, that the 'nix desktop is experiencing a huge evolution right now, with projects such as ToPaZ (storyboard) and Luminocity, Appeal with Plasma, SymphonyOS' Mezzo desktop, and Enlightenment DR17.

Indeed, there have been countless iterations of different UIs throughout the history of graphical computing. Linux alone has dozens of disparate DEs and WMs. Fluxbox, FVWM, Window Maker, Enlightenment DR16, XFCE, KDE, and Gnome are among the most popular and most current and stable examples. Keep in mind, of course, that the 'nix desktop is experiencing a huge evolution right now, with projects such as ToPaZ (storyboard) and Luminocity, Appeal with Plasma, SymphonyOS' Mezzo desktop, and Enlightenment DR17.

Another thing: you are wrong about the RHEL versions. Neither RHEL 3 nor 4 were affected according to my research:

According to RedHat, RHEL 4 (link is a pdf) came with Gnome 2.8. The Gnome 2.8 Userguide lists the ability to edit the menus by going to the URI applications:/// in Nautilus.
If RedHat neglected to include a launcher in the menu that starts a Nautilus window with this URI, it's IMHO not Gnomes fault.

The best I find for RHEL 3 is this, which says RHEL3 contained Gnome 2.2. Its User Guide lists the ability to edit menus by going to the "Start here" folder, then clicking on "Applications" (which, IIRC, again openened the applications:/// URI)

Another thing: you are wrong about the RHEL versions. Neither RHEL 3 nor 4 were affected according to my research:

According to RedHat, RHEL 4 (link is a pdf) came with Gnome 2.8. The Gnome 2.8 Userguide lists the ability to edit the menus by going to the URI applications:/// in Nautilus.
If RedHat neglected to include a launcher in the menu that starts a Nautilus window with this URI, it's IMHO not Gnomes fault.

The best I find for RHEL 3 is this, which says RHEL3 contained Gnome 2.2. Its User Guide lists the ability to edit menus by going to the "Start here" folder, then clicking on "Applications" (which, IIRC, again openened the applications:/// URI)