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nautilus without gnome

You should be able to just put
 
  gtk-icon-theme-name = "<themename>"
 
into your ~/.gtkrc-2.0.

Epiphany, a browser that I like but don't think is good enough yet.

Epiphany, a browser that I like but don't think is good enough yet.

If you use the actual GNOME browser, then you won't get this braindead behaviour. If you insist on using Firefox, etc, then you can disable it in about:config, search for middle and play with the options there.

http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/images/epip hany-search.png

So Epiphany uses Gecko. That's great. But when will they get rid of the silly separate button bar? They should trim the buttons, make them compact move them to the same bar as the address box. Why have they not kept pace with modern browsers like Firefox and Safari GUI-wise, and instead have taken to the original layout of Internet Explorer 3.0? It doesn't make any sense. It's not any easier to use when the button area is cluttered with functions better relegated to the menus. And its less usable for everyone when there's no google search box.

I don't get it; why did the GNOME team decide to use a space-wasting, cluttered UI in Epiphany? Why not a simpler layout in the vein of Safari?

I like the new look of Nautilus in browser mode:

        http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/images/naut ilus-browse.png

But what about a column view like the OS X Finder has?

        http://arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/ima ges/column-view-big.gif

The feature that I want is: efficiency.

Gnome is great at turning a fast computer into a sluggish one. Just because you have all of those CPU cycles doesn't mean that they have to use them, especially when lots of them seem to be wasted.

For instance: if you look (strace) at a typical gnome program when it starts up, it stats zillions of files; many of them more than once. This is why startup is so sloooooow.

I agree that it's about time, though: I'm saddled with a 4-year-old Vaio notebook until my new Powerbook ships, and running GNOME 2.10 with 128 MB of RAM is just painful. With XFCE 4.2 at least I can load Firefox and Evolution simultaneously without the hard disk constantly thrashing; under GNOME I had to resort to elinks and mutt just so that the system was usuable.

... s/icons/wrinkles

Bring on the spat of posts telling me I can change the icon theme, as of course I do, but I'll say it again: Gnome needs a new default icon set.
The icons in most of those screens are sadly still as dull, muddied, venerable and depressing as they were 6 years ago, when I first tried Gnome.

The forward and back arrows in Nautilus seem to have absoutely no graphical correllation with the rest of Gnome's visual landscape (except the Refresh icon). The ~/ icon still looks like a little squashy mushroom house from a childrens novel and the icons in the menu editor (for menu groups) have no internal correlation other than they exhibit a tongue-and-cheek dig at futurism. Who actually thinks of a typewriter when looking for 'office', let alone a bricklayers tool when thinking about development?. Is this theme targeting a 50+ demographic? For icons so small, that aliasing really eats into their form and lastly the colour space of the icons seems all over the place, as though to solve the lack of a common palette they have simply mixed Khaki greeen into everything. This one thing KDE has really sorted out.

From what I have seen of Gnome desktops over the years, these default icons have a life expectancy of about 2 weeks (especially that home icon). Why not finally lay them to rest - or just move them down the theme list, far away from 'Default'?

It's referring to nautilus's spatial tree file view.

Oh, wait. No. If I suggested that I'd be doing what you did - posting completely random and off topic suggestions because of distant similarities with the topic at hand.

Inkscape.app runs fine on my Mac (10.4.2), but it looked ugly. I decided to do what the developers of GimpShop and load an Aqua-style skin, Glossy P http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/571. It does a fair approximation of the Aqua appearance, and believe it or not, it helps: makes the contrast between Aqua and X11 less jarring.

To load Glossy P, open the app bundle, navigate to /Contents/Resources, create a directory called /share/themes/Default, and put Glossy P (which untars to a folder called Gtk-2.0) in there.

It would be nice to have a native Aqua version, but porting GTK isn't trivial. There has been a long-running effort to port GTK 1, which looks awful (hardly different from an Aqua-themed X11) and barely runs, and a more recent effort to port GTK 2, which is still in the early phases. Given this situation, I'll gladly use an X11 version in an app bundle. What a good idea! And, Inkscape 0.42 runs much better than previous versions.

Sorry but I can say exactly something else.

Look across Gnumeric for example and look at it's options. Someone wrote a bugreport about Gnumeric not following the Toolbar changes for icons, text besides icons etc. These things are even keyelement of the HIG in the version 2.0 and the bug was marked as 'not a bug' and closed.

Later on I dived into the Preferences of Gnumeric and found various really braindamaged settings that people should even care less about. E.g. DPI settings. I mean DPI ? Which normal user know what DPI is and why should it rely on an application ? Usually the DPI is set through the X server during startup or should be set globally in a small application but not through the app again.

There are plenty of other issues around GNOME, mainly small issues that summed up makes a big issue out of it. I think the people who haven't thought correctly about their applications and their architecture are the GNOME people.

KDE otoh has everything nicly and tightly integrated, the things work. Ok I agee sometimes stuff can be simpler for the user but then the stuff works, their applications behave consistent, the applications makes a solid and function experience and don't look like it's hacked up in a hurry.

Sorry to say but you don't really know what you are talking about. It's impossible to get everyone working on GNOME to pull on the same rope, as long as this ain't possible as long we are stuck in problematic issues around GNOME.

The bug that was marked as 'not a bug'.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311349

Here another bugreport that explains why 311349 indeed is a bug, including references to the HIG and other stuff.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311655

This is just one small example of many examples that I can easily throw and demonstrate.

Sorry but I can say exactly something else.

Look across Gnumeric for example and look at it's options. Someone wrote a bugreport about Gnumeric not following the Toolbar changes for icons, text besides icons etc. These things are even keyelement of the HIG in the version 2.0 and the bug was marked as 'not a bug' and closed.

Later on I dived into the Preferences of Gnumeric and found various really braindamaged settings that people should even care less about. E.g. DPI settings. I mean DPI ? Which normal user know what DPI is and why should it rely on an application ? Usually the DPI is set through the X server during startup or should be set globally in a small application but not through the app again.

There are plenty of other issues around GNOME, mainly small issues that summed up makes a big issue out of it. I think the people who haven't thought correctly about their applications and their architecture are the GNOME people.

KDE otoh has everything nicly and tightly integrated, the things work. Ok I agee sometimes stuff can be simpler for the user but then the stuff works, their applications behave consistent, the applications makes a solid and function experience and don't look like it's hacked up in a hurry.

Sorry to say but you don't really know what you are talking about. It's impossible to get everyone working on GNOME to pull on the same rope, as long as this ain't possible as long we are stuck in problematic issues around GNOME.

The bug that was marked as 'not a bug'.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311349

Here another bugreport that explains why 311349 indeed is a bug, including references to the HIG and other stuff.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311655

This is just one small example of many examples that I can easily throw and demonstrate.

"you are free to browse the source code of TargetAlert to see what it does and to learn how it works; however, you are not allowed to copy or modify the code and redistribute it.
...

TargetAlert will not have a "traditional" open-source license in the future because I do not approve of how it has been copied and redistributed as a different Firefox extension in the past."

Leaving aside GNOME/KDE preferences, Evince http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince has become my .pdf viewer of choice by a long chalk

..nearly has a seizure when he discovers that the commercial development licence for KDE is $3300 for one platform. (You're much better off using Gnome based Linux distros and doing development via cross-platform APIs like wxWidgets).

Because, you see, the development cost is $0 for using the Windows API (link to the Windows SDK download) and $0 for Visual C++ (link to the command-line compiler).

And for the cost of one KDE development licence you could buy 22 OEM copies of Windows XP Pro at $149., or 35 copies of Visual C++ .NET 2003 at $95 if you wanted an IDE to develop in (although personally I'd go with Eclipse and MingW32).

Who's expensive now?

"no one has a real true standard to enforce anywhere."

"A standard way of doing things are key to appeal to a large audience."

Freedesktop standards
Gnome HIG
KDE Guidelines
If I use either KDE or Gnome, I very rarely use applications that don't match the environment. My desktop of choice is Gnome, and I've found it much more consistent than the windows GUI.

Windows User Experience

Office (XP anyway) is really inconsistent. I normally use Microsoft Word, in which every new document opens in a seperate window. However in Excel, the new documents actually open in a new window inside the main excel window, but they create another application button on the taskbar, giving the illusion that it's opened in a seperate window.

Sometimes I've had 1 document open that I've not edited, and 1 that I have edited. I'm used to Office bugging me to save documents even when I've not edited them, so when I hit the big "X" button on the window, and it asks to save, I just click "no" because being a human, I don't read messages that I expect to say something, stupid I know. I lose my work.
I'm not the only person this has happened to either...

I know I'll probably get modded troll or something...

Imagine notification of software updates.

Good example - two of the feeds I'm subscribed to are the Gnome FTP server (notifying of anything new uploaded), and the kernel site.

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/LATEST.xml

http://kernel.org/kdist/rss.xml

Very handy if you're interested in keeping track of latest releases. Security advisories are another useful one.

KDE favorite for OpenSolaris project, read more here

http://blogs.gnome.org/view/calum/2005/07/18/0

Cygwin is not free. From http://cygwin.com/faq.html

The company, whom I work for, develops and sells closed source software. I contacted redhat for the details. The "buy out" license is prohibitively expensive. We ended up using a proprietary package because it was cheaper.

I use a lot of open source at work. cygwin, inkscape, Gantt Project, umlet, and dia to name just a few. But I use open source at work only as a consumer. I do not package any of the code in the company's products. At work, I use open source as a user, not a developer. Home is a different story. I code to plenty of open source there. None of that goes into work, however.

There is also a request in GNOME bugzilla to implement this in GTK+.

When will we get a vector-based Linux desktop?

They have icon themes, there's talk of Cairo, and all that Luminocity good stuff, but when, oh when, will we actually have a fully scalable desktop?

Hell, I'd be happy if I could just have a file manager, console, and calculator that were resolution-independent. How far off is that? There seems to be no central clearinghouse for this sort of information.

--grendel drago

Usability experts tend to believe that reverse order is more intuitive and faster.

As seen on the Macs and in GNOME. More about GNOME's decision to go the Apple way here : http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2002-Feb ruary/msg00317.html

There are no established guidelines for UI development on Linux, at least none that are stringently adhered to.

This is not true. Each desktop has its own human interface guidelines.

Gnome HIG
KDE HIG

Sure you'll find the odd app that doesn't adhere to these guidelines, but that's the exception not the rule. Almost all the apps I run look consistent. And I bet you've seen the odd app on windows as well. Yes you know which one. The one with these massive buttons and different colors everywhere. :)

Wtf man, GTK2 interface but Windows button order? Get a clue

The article describes a replacement system for rendering. It will improve the rendering pipeline for COMPOSITE. For screenshots, you need to find a composite-oriented desktop.

KDE, and possibly Gnome are good examples. As composite rendering is still experimental, screen shots may not be available.

Linux pwnz j00 serves as a functionary of the Linux Centralized Command Center (LC3). It is the leading informant of ill-informed users. Many of which don't know how to read.

1. Bdale Garbee, CTO Linux HP
2. Eva Hildrum, Director General, Ministry of Transport and Communications, Norway
3. Bruce Perens, Acting Exec Director, Desktop Linux Consortium
4. Bob Stack, CTO Commonwealth of Massachusetts
5. Sun
6. Red Hat
7. IBM
8. ORiely
9. Developers from around the world co - operating to make GNOME kick ass.

Top billing in that crowd is impressive. So it seems Norway has more in common with Peru than meets the money blinded eyes.

OpenDocument sounds great, but is the spreadsheet specification insufficient? Apparently Gnumeric will not be adding support for it[1]. Is KOffice supporting it for spreadsheets?

I want to see an open format for documents, including spreadsheets, so I'm concerned that OpenDocument might not be sufficient.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/mortenw/2005/06/16/0

I say FUD. HP is doing plenty to support linux, as well as development. They sponsor:

- Gentoo ,GNOME,
- Linux International
- Free Standards Group (the LSB is a workgroup of these guys)
- the OSS Institute
- OSDL, Kernel.org
- etc.

HP has many people hacking the linux kernel. Of course, IBM is doing great stuff as well, but you sketched the situation in a much too black & white way.

And definitly rhythmbox

"But it's the themes copyright thats important, not Gtks."
Which is why I stated:
1) What GTK+,GNOME or KDE themes are NOT licensed either as GPL or a more liberal open license that allows screen shots?

"The GPL, by the way, has nothing whatsoever to say about screenshots"
Because of the design of the X-client server protocol interface, screen output can be considered normal program output of data. But should you choose to inteprete the GPL license in that way, all a publisher would have to do is attribute the theme and application and make an offer ot supply a copy of source of the theme package according to section 3 of the GPL license.

Extra notes
B1) The GPL lisence is a grant which extends further rights to the recipiant, so (B1) is still valid.
B4) if (1) (2) (A) and (B1-3) are correct then how is B4 Irrevelent?

Nice to see work being made on KPDF. Last year, KDE's document viewing infrastructure was ahead of GNOME's disperate GPDF and gnome-gv. There was the beginnings of a common document front-end with kviewshell, kdvi etc. However I don't know if they've managed to finish unifying it.

Perhaps inspired by this work though, the gnome people have thrown evince together: a UI-focussed front-end for document types.

As other has already stated, JPilot works as a Palm Desktop. It looks classic, but pretty stable. And you should check Ximian Revolution which is a nice mail client with lot of features (similar to Outlook) with Palm support. It's bit heavy application, but that would be no problem unless you are using 6 years old PC.Stick with these two.

Mozilla Thunderbird and Sunbird, which I always hope they can, do not support Palm yet.

Yeah, exactly. Acutally there's a whole section on Microsoft's User Interface Design and Development (website) about User Interface Text and how to write proper sentences/etc for the dialogs used by the windows applications. There's similar information in the GNOME HIG 2.0, however it seems even redhat developers themselves don't quite follow these in their installer. :(

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

Once OSS programmers will stop puking dialogues at my face with [yes] [no] [cancel] buttons at every occasion, that will be the time I might consider GNOME or KDE a usable desktop*

I'm glad to inform you that you can start considering right now, then.

Once OSS programmers will stop puking dialogues at my face with [yes] [no] [cancel] buttons at every occasion, that will be the time I might consider GNOME or KDE a usable desktop*

I'm glad to inform you that you can start considering right now, then.

Like a browser is a viewer for HTML'ed content, KDE/GTK+/GNOME applications are also viewers for the Themes. .The majority of KDE and GNOME themes are GPL'ed. I do not know of any non-GPL'ed GNOME Themes for a start. All the themes on Fedora are GPL'ed.

The GPL applies to the source and binaries of the Themes. However, in the same way that you can run GPL'ed applications on propriety platforms such as Solaris, because of the design of the theme system, can even be used by non-GPL'ed applications. In the same way, either the X11R6 Xserver display or the applications themselves are also viewers for fonts. All the fonts shipped with the X.org implentation of X11R6 can be freely used in screen shots and printing.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

It's for desktop software, not system daemons, but this is basically how GConf works. Applications that use GConf are also notified by gconfd when a configuration value has changed--this makes writing applications really sweet. :)

Maybe that depends on what features I need to be productive/satisfied. Personally, I don't need anything iTunes offers that I can't get from XMMS or Helix. Although I don't do music mixing, I would try Audacity as an alternative to GarageBand.

A better example for my situation is Visio; the only alternative I know of is Dia. It has a long way to go, but I am looking into helping out by designing icon sets. For me, I'm frustrated enough by the current state of Dia (added to my desire to be GNU/Linux only) that I'm willing to help to scratch my own itch. That's just how free software should be made, I suppose.

The Gnome WebKit browser has already existed for some time.
One is called Atlantis http://www.akcaagac.com/index_atlantis.html/
Or you may build Galeon with WebCore http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?threa d_id=5818624&forum_id=42686/.
In addition it seems that WebCore has been imported into the Gnome CVS for some reason (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-webcore/)

I just tried opening an Excel document with oocalc in the way you described. Works as (I) expected.
You may want to try out Gnumeric. I heard it's a nice Excel replacement.

If you're really looking for fast you might want to try something like Gnome Office instead of OO.o. And yes Gnome Office has a windows port. From GOME Office AbiWord has a native Windows port (which is super speedy) and Gnumeric uses GTK+ and is therefore slightly slower.

This only seems to be for Mozilla/Firefox, but since Epiphany (GNOME's browser) uses the Mozilla/Gecko core, are we Epiphany users also at risk?

Dvorak's on to something when he said people who prefer aesthetics could now buy a Mac to run Windows on it (though the reverse will most likely not be true, i.e. you can't run OS X on non-Mac hardware) - left unsaid is, of course, that some people will buyh these machines to run Linux instead.

Targeting a Mac will be easier, sure - some developers will probably buy a Mac and dual-boot (or virtualize) Windows or Linux on it, so there will be more Mac developers.

Thing is, most free software types won't consider OS X free enough - I'm switching back to Linux, personally; and a lot of OSS running on OS X share code with their Linux/Unix/X11 counterparts. Adium uses Gaim as its engine. Dashboard is based on WebCore, which is forked from KHTML - porting it back to KDE would not be too hard, and guess what, there is a GTK port. If efforts like gDesklets flounder, we can possibly port Dashboard wholesale to Linux.

Firefox and Thunderbird runs better on Linux (seriously. Try them on both platforms), and if Dvorak thinks OpenOffice is not user-friendly, he has not tried running it on a Mac yet. Oh, John, OO.o looks much better on Linux than on Windows too - if you're running the 1.1.x series, the Windows version does not have all the UI improvements that GNOME and KDE developers from Novell, Red Hat and others throw into it.

Lots of fun things are happening in the OSS world, especially on the desktop front - Sun and Novell are doing usability testing, Gtk# is making waves, in fact, F-Spot is the best photo-library tool I've seen, certainly looks faster than iPhoto and has cool things like Flickr integration built-in. Don't count us out yet.

Firefox renders slower and requires more CPU power to render pages than IE. This is true on all platforms, even my IE running in WINE in Linux displays pages in less time than in Firefox. I don't know if Safari is faster, but for older machines I know Konqueror is. Firefox loves memory and CPU and uses them both a lot. I don't think this is a gecko problem, as the newest mozilla displays faster than Firefox. For older machines I prefer to use Epiphany and Opera. The rest of the time I use Firefox because despite its resource problems it is my favorite program ever (based on looks, extensions, use of tabs in a mannor I prefer, etc.). I would never use IE again because its lack of tabs drives me nuts in seconds. I mean, I have a 2.6 GHz CPU and half a gig of RAM to mostly browse the web, so I care not if Firefox is actually using a good percent of those resources.

Red Hat is currently by far the biggest supporter of Gnome, the only company that ever claim close was Ximian. Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Gnome including developers, HIGs, user studies, quality assurance, and general advancement of the free desktop.

Um, don't forget Sun, and a number of other projects and companies, my friend.

http://foundation.gnome.org/about/

Yes indeed, it's very important that they block software patents. But I'm very optimistic on this one, because Europe is a place where there are many people directly involved in Free software. I mean, for instance, all these KDE and GNOME European developers must have some weight in the battle against software patents.

Accessibility has been the main focus for recent release of KDE.

A few links to relevant pages:

• The KDE 3.4 Announcements which stresses improvements for partially sighted people.
• The KDE Accessibility Project
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)LARS
• The GNOME Accessibility Project
• The Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group

The general tendency is close cooperation between the various projects. No songle project currently offers a complete accessibile solution on Linux, but by combining the different solutions, a lot is possble, and closer cooperation will make even mor ethings possible in the future.

A lot of this cooperation was kicked of at the Unix Accessibility Forum last sumnmer, which the KDE project organised as part of the KDE World Summit.

We are currently busy organising a follow-up event during LinuxTag 2005.

Olaf Schmidt, co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project