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You have plenty of documentation available on https://help.gnome.org/users/ and https://developer.gnome.org/.

Ya know, this is a trend that is really beginning to piss me off. In the beginning, one of the best things about UNIX/Linux was that the documentation was all, always, locally-available. And, for the most part, to read it you just had to type "man whatever". Yes, manpages were not known for their readability, but they did (usually) have all the info you needed. Now, for so many projects, the documentation is all somewhere on teh Interwebs, or (at best) you have to find /usr/share/doc/program-version/ and, if you're lucky, there will be some documentation there.

Would it hurt GNOME/KDE/whatever devs to at least include basic manpages in their packages? Why can't aI type "man evolution" to see what command switches might be available, or to get some kind of tips?

GOML.

You have plenty of documentation available on https://help.gnome.org/users/ and https://developer.gnome.org/.

Ya know, this is a trend that is really beginning to piss me off. In the beginning, one of the best things about UNIX/Linux was that the documentation was all, always, locally-available. And, for the most part, to read it you just had to type "man whatever". Yes, manpages were not known for their readability, but they did (usually) have all the info you needed. Now, for so many projects, the documentation is all somewhere on teh Interwebs, or (at best) you have to find /usr/share/doc/program-version/ and, if you're lucky, there will be some documentation there.

Would it hurt GNOME/KDE/whatever devs to at least include basic manpages in their packages? Why can't aI type "man evolution" to see what command switches might be available, or to get some kind of tips?

GOML.

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Go to http://extensions.gnome.org/ You can fix your alt-tab there. :)

Problem is that nobody learns a "foreign" language in a day. The same happens with Desktop paradigms.

I think I would like to use Gnome 3 on a tablet, but on my desktop I could not (and I did tried). It simply broke all my day to day workflow practices.

And that sad decision to use the same library names prevented me to have Gnome 2 and 3 at the same time on my machine, what would keep me working productively at the same time I'm probing the "foreign" paradigms without compromising my deadlines.

I remember cursing aloud because the theme I chose had a flaw (the clock's font color became illegible when the clock's window loses the focus - the designer choose a too dark font color), and I took hours to figure out where to find the customization tool (changing font colors on "Advanced Options"?). I didn't get pissed with the color mistake (it happens!). I got totally mad because there wasn't a way to fix that the proper way - and I'm talking about a fscking clock on my desktop!

Another problem is that I don't consume content. I produce it. I don't want and don't need my windows grouped by application, but by context! I need multiple multiheaded desktops so I can switch tasks easily.

In the Desktop 1 with eclipse with my java project, a browser with the issue tracking, a OpenOffice with the Requirements and a PDF or two with specifications. On the Desktop 2, another eclipse for a python project that has a bug I need to fix, with another browser window logged into another issue tracker, and so goes on. Some little urgent task arises? Do it in the Desktop3, and then go back to where you was. And this I could not accomplish (easily) with Gnome 3 when it replaced Gnome 2.

Long story made short, too much hassle and no tangible return.

Gnome 3 could be a good thing, but the way it arrives on my desktop prevented me to discover that. I have bills to pay, deadlines to meet. I don't need and don't want a tool that prevents me to do my work the way I'm used to abruptly, without respecting that little human factor called "learning curve".

When did you last try it? You could try it again and then go to http://extensions.gnome.org/ and also add "gnome-tweak-tool" and you should be able to get a reasonable facisimile of GNOME 2 plus some other features. alt-tab behavior can be overridden. I"m not sure what you mean by multi-headed? I'm sorry that we destroyed your workflow. The two desktops couldn't be installed together because GNOME 3 was still using the underlying architecture. I agree it would have been nice if we could have created a different namespace for GNOME 2 and GNOME 3. It comes down to manpower I'm afraid and after 2-3 years of development on GNOME 3, it wanted out. :-)

You can use extensions to change the alt-tab behavior so it is the same as windows or other Linux based desktops. Just go to http://extensions.gnome.org/.

I do thank you for trying out GNOME 3 and sticking with it! You have every right to complain if it isn't working for you.

Are you talking about things like this?

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Problem is... RMS *is* rude. But he's (almost the time) right too. But he can be wrong sometimes:

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Thing is: dealing with RMS *is very hard*. I'm not saying you're lying or whatever, but at least in the mails above, RMS was being... how I can say... RMS was being RMS, defending his points of view without caring about people's feelings. This is not necessarily wrong, but this commonly leads to people getting angry with you.

(I know what I'm talking, I'm a bit like RMS too.)

It would help to understand what you're meaning if you could exemplify with a link.

Are you talking about things like this?

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Problem is... RMS *is* rude. But he's (almost the time) right too. But he can be wrong sometimes:

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Thing is: dealing with RMS *is very hard*. I'm not saying you're lying or whatever, but at least in the mails above, RMS was being... how I can say... RMS was being RMS, defending his points of view without caring about people's feelings. This is not necessarily wrong, but this commonly leads to people getting angry with you.

(I know what I'm talking, I'm a bit like RMS too.)

It would help to understand what you're meaning if you could exemplify with a link.

Are you talking about things like this?

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Problem is... RMS *is* rude. But he's (almost the time) right too. But he can be wrong sometimes:

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Thing is: dealing with RMS *is very hard*. I'm not saying you're lying or whatever, but at least in the mails above, RMS was being... how I can say... RMS was being RMS, defending his points of view without caring about people's feelings. This is not necessarily wrong, but this commonly leads to people getting angry with you.

(I know what I'm talking, I'm a bit like RMS too.)

It would help to understand what you're meaning if you could exemplify with a link.

Are you talking about things like this?

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Problem is... RMS *is* rude. But he's (almost the time) right too. But he can be wrong sometimes:

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

Thing is: dealing with RMS *is very hard*. I'm not saying you're lying or whatever, but at least in the mails above, RMS was being... how I can say... RMS was being RMS, defending his points of view without caring about people's feelings. This is not necessarily wrong, but this commonly leads to people getting angry with you.

(I know what I'm talking, I'm a bit like RMS too.)

It would help to understand what you're meaning if you could exemplify with a link.

You are free to peruse the FAQ. Read it first and I can tehn answer any questions after that. https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundat...

Well like most software, it evolves. Most of the work we've been doing is polishing up the design. You aren't likely going to see anything like GNOME 2 by default. However you can go to http://extensions.gnome.org/ and you can find ways to mimic GNOME 2. Some are quite interesting, and I know that someone is working on a wobbly windows again. GNOME 2 also evolved in the same way. You'll find that all the software around you is going to evolve in the same way as GNOME and GNOME won't look so foreign to you as time goes by. :-)

The correct term for that is "software" these days. Like it or not, that's how it is.

If only software would be the focus of the Gnome foundation. I had a look to check if it would be worth donating some of my cash to. One of the ways to see if your money is spent well, is by looking at the financial statements of the charity you're considering to donate to. I found old statements on their page (http://www.gnome.org/foundation/reports/). Their last financial report goes back to 2011...

According to the financial data in their 2012 status report, 25 percent of their spending went to "Women's Outreach" ($106,741 out of $409,400). While I have no issues with programs helping women getting coding internships, I'm pretty sure the Gnome foundation would not be broke right now if they focused on their mission statement: "The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software. ", according to their website: https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundat....

This looks like a self-inflicted wound, originating out of bad management and diversion from their core mission.

They don't have the 2013 finances up yet, but you can look at the 2012 numbers here on page 17.

Women's outreach was 0% of the budget in 2010, and ~25% in 2012.

Incomes
2010 $581,358
2011 $341,621
2012 $418,648

Women's Outreach
2010 $0
2011 $76,572
2012 $106,741

Total Expenses
2010 $371,755
2011 $435,375
2012 $409,004
 

As charming as your characterisation of /.s membership is, I'm more interested in whether or not there is any truth to the assertion that Gnome's funding was eaten up by outreach programmes. I managed to track down this article, so there does seem to be a certain amount of legitimacy to the claim.

You can actaully find more or less the same thing from GNOME themselves: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/CurrentBudgetFAQ. It states:

What is the problem? The Foundation does not have any cash reserves right now.

Why has this happened? The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) has proven to be extremely popular and has grown quite rapidly.... GNOME, as the lead organization, has been responsible for managing the finances for the entire effort. However, as the program grew, the processes did not keep up.

That being said, the original poster's sexism and cisgenderism is obviously out of line in any case, but it does appear the growth of this program (which undoubtedly is largely cis women) was a large factor in creating the current financial situation. They also except to have it resolved within a month or so and don't seem to be too concerned about it.

No report for 2013 yet, but check out page 17 of the 2012 report. "Women's Outreach" accounted for 1/4 of all expenses. It increased 40% from 2011, apparently it increased again in 2013. So Karen Sandler takes over in 2011, Gnome blows all their money on her pet political project, then leaves a week before Gnome announces that they're out of money and have to freeze all non-essential expenses.

No report for 2013 yet, but check out page 17 of the 2012 report. "Women's Outreach" accounted for 1/4 of all expenses. It increased 40% from 2011, apparently it increased again in 2013. So Karen Sandler takes over in 2011, Gnome blows all their money on her pet political project, then leaves a week before Gnome announces that they're out of money and have to freeze all non-essential expenses.

Seems to me that it's Gnome Foundation which is acting like a sexist dirtbag. They're driving/funding sexist "outreach" programs which are well beyond the scope of their formal charter, in which they disingenuously claim to be "a Meritocracy."

Seems to me that it's Gnome Foundation which is acting like a sexist dirtbag. They're driving/funding sexist "outreach" programs which are well beyond the scope of their formal charter, in which they disingenuously claim to be "a Meritocracy."

Have you checked out Gnome Flashback? https://wiki.gnome.org/Project...

I don't think they're doing a good job but I'll be glad to donate to GNOME 2.

I wish I could. Gnome Flashback is Gnome 2 with the gtk3 under it. It is very good. But you can not only support it... https://wiki.gnome.org/Project...

How do you think Poe's law applied to the post you responded to?

Outreach Program for Women is grateful to the following organizations

Outreach Program for Women is grateful to the following organizations and companies for their generous sponsorship of the previous round:
Equalizer: Wikimedia Foundation
Promoters: Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Mozilla, Open Source Robotics Foundation
Includers: Cloudera, Debian, GNOME Foundation, Linaro, OpenStack Foundation, Rackspace, Red Hat ...

Ceiling Smasher - $52,000 - 8 interns
Equalizer - $32,000 - 5 interns
Promoter - $19,000 - 3 interns
Includer - $6,250 - 1 intern

The sponsorship per intern includes $5,500 (USD) stipend, $500 travel allowance, and a $250-500 administrative fee for the GNOME Foundation.

You have plenty of documentation available on https://help.gnome.org/users/ and https://developer.gnome.org/.

You have plenty of documentation available on https://help.gnome.org/users/ and https://developer.gnome.org/.

You're missing the real picture. GNOME is running out of money because they spent it on stupid outreach programs for women and "trans-women". And now that the financial shitstorm is coming to light... the female exec director responsible for this debacle resigns

So basically men made it...men funded it. Women showed up later and demanded all the money be spent on them... and now there's none left. It's almost a microcosm of the Western nations economic woes.

Visual Studio Express is Microsoft's zero-cash programming environment. Why do you want a high-cost office suite with a lousy macro engine to be discounted to free when they already offer their actual development suite pro bono. It's upgradeable to more complete Visual Studio versions later. This will encourage Microsoft-centric code, but that can be avoided and it's less specific of a tie-in than VBA. C#, C, C++, and more are included.

If you don't want to be tied to Microsoft-specific tools even on Windows there are other options. Those include other office suites and other actual development tools.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have OOBasic and can be scripted with Python and Java if you really want. These things are zero-cash and open source.

You can use Lazarus and FreePascal (Wikipedia article about FreePascal) or Eclipse and Java/C/C++ if you'd rather. Or you could use Eric and Python. Or Padre and Strawberry Perl, complete with MinGW. Some of the IDEs are more or less general and language agnostic, while others are mainly narrowly targeted.

Don't forget MsysGit (git for Windows) if you're not using Cygwin and haven't already chosen a version control system.

Really, you could be teaching with a good programmer's editor rather than specifically with IDEs too. vim, Emacs, jEdit, Gedit, and others are applicable. Some of them are powerful enough to make that line between editors and IDEs very fuzzy.

What, exactly, would a free copy of Word get you that isn't already available?

Why not use http://extensions.gnome.org/ and then you can probably add the stuff you need to make it more what you are used to. There is also a classic mode which tries to mimic GNOME 2. Of course, there is always Mate. :)

So it's out for Windows, OSX, and ChromeOS . . . but what about normal desktop Linux? I'm hoping it's because they're spending a bit more time making the normal-Linux implementation follow the Desktop Notifications Specification that KDE, GNOME (and its diaspora) and others implement.

OneNote is kind of like a heavy-duty yellow sticky program, where you can link everything together incredibly easily.

So how does it compare to GNote (formerly Tomboy Notes), or to Cherrytree, both of which are GPL?

You need lots from GNOME project to get GTK3

Can you be more specific? GTK+ does not have a lot of dependencies to begin with, and most of them is not directly related to the Gnome project; GLib, GdkPixbuf, Pango, ATK and GObject according to the documentation [0]. The rest of them are external.

[0] https://developer.gnome.org/gt...

When we're running apps, we inevitably end up with using at least one QT app, at least one GTK app and probably in future at least one Aura app. These libraries have a huge level of duplication (e.g. each one will have a completely separately implemented file dialog). Add to this that each library will be used in several incompatible versions and you end up with serious bloat.

That's true, but how much can that bloat amount to? 20 MB? 100 MB? It won't be much relevant for today's standards. Code duplication is what happens regularly in the closed source world, where applications ship with a private version of all the libraries they use, and not only for the UI - with few people complaining.

Ive gotten the impression that the GTK3 folks werent terribly interested in hearing other people's thoughts.

This sounds like a serious problem; do we have any proper evidence?

https://mail.gnome.org/archive... - don't know if things have changed in the last two years.

LibreOffice - latest version, not the old one from your distro
http://www.libreoffice.org/ (install with dpkg -i *.deb)

Dia https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia (poor mans visio)
Lyx http://www.lyx.org/ (easy latex editor) with modern-cv to keep my CV up to date
Metasploit, Nessus, ettercap, wireshark, nmap, etc. just for fun

Avidemux, ffmpeg and VLC media player for everything related to video and audio
Gimp and Blender (latest version) for photo editing and 3D-stuff

That's the status on freebsd : https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho... , it's marked as NEEDINFO because we didn't yet take the time to try it out on that platform, but we of course are very interested in making Pitivi happen there as well !

The command line is great but sometimes a GUI comes along and makes things so much easier, especially to cherry pick.

gitg

For the longest time the man page listed a timeout parameter but the godlike gnomes decided to simply ignore the parameter, because they knew better...

I couldn't find a good bug but this should give you a hint https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665761

I guess the gnomes have taken alot of flak for gnome-shell but some of it is deserved and no excuse to act like total assholes. I wish Karen the best of luck herding these rude, stubborn cats...

Standard package of dbus should already contain the dbus-monitor and dbus-send commands.
If you want an easy tool, try D-Feet https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/DFeet?action=show&redirect=DFeet.

ps and netstat only show the current state. You need very different others tools to modify the state or to dynamically monitor the state transitions. From this point of vire, DBus if far more generic, coherent and cleaner than a lot of others tools.

You can also just run gtk or qt applications on the server and pass the output to the canvas in the browser:
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html

Or compile the gtk-library and -application with llvm/emscripten for asm.js and the gtk-html5-backend and run that in the browser. ;-)

Some have even run Wayland on WebGL. GTK and GTK supports the Wayland backend too. ;-)

As a 12+ year Linux users, I have to give Shuttleworth some rope to hang or prove himself. For example, back in Gnome 2x-3x transition days, Gnome panel was broken for widescreen devices like LCD monitors and netbooks.[1] Unity turned out a bloated for my taste, but I fully understand his frustration with Gnome. In the end, for heavy weight desktops, I prefer Unity over Gnome 3.

PulseAudiois fine for playing music, but a real PITA for many hardcore gamers[2][3] including myself. I found latency was terrible with Wine + PA and later saw the developers had an issue with PA too.[4] After countless hours lost trying to debug some PA issues, I lost all respect for Poettering. The only worse sound server that I’ve encountered is AudioFlinger, and at least that has the excuse of being optimized for battery life over latency. So like Shuttleworth, I'm skeptical about any of Poettering's work.

Now to the meat of the debate, Mir. It's clear X11 is fundamentally broken for modern desktop/GPUs. [5] It needs to die and I don't care if it is replaced by Mir or Wayland. I have been hearing about Wayland for years now, and only after Mir was announced did I start to hear about it actually reaching a usable state. I wish they'd work together but maybe a little competition will help us all to finally rid Linux of X11.

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

[2] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulse...

[3] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960195

[4] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

...b-but, you get to set your lock screen wallpaper now! The GNOME developers are allowing unchecked and rampant levels of freedom never before seen (in GNOME 3). Seriously, you know you're fucked up when you're touting something that's existed since Windows 98 is getting touted as a feature: https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.10/more-core-ux.html.en

Seriously, what's fucked is Qt moving to WebKit Blink and GNOME wisely sticking to WebKit 2 means 2 sets of WebKit running around seeing as most of us have both DE on Linux/FreeBSD [KDE 4.10.x/GNOME 3.8.x Debian].

...b-but, you get to set your lock screen wallpaper now! The GNOME developers are allowing unchecked and rampant levels of freedom never before seen (in GNOME 3).

Seriously, you know you're fucked up when you're touting something that's existed since Windows 98 is getting touted as a feature: https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.10/more-core-ux.html.en

You didn't refer me to anything. The only design page I came upon was this one, and it does not yet have any detailed plans for middle-click.

What makes you think that it isn't configurable? If you look at the commit diff (linked in the article) you might notice that it is a one line change to disable this functionality. That's because it is a configurable setting; the commit simply changes the default behavior.

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-enable-primary-paste

Just to prevent as much tedious unnecessary rageposting as I can, here's a mailing list post from one of the developers:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2013-September/msg00065.html

See, this whole story is blown out of thin air. Almost everybody commenting to this Slashdot story have shown themselves to be knee-jerk idiots with no capacity for critical thought. YOU CAN GO HOME NOW. Or better, finally fuck off and forget about all things GNOME. Both you and the GNOME project will be better off this way. Ah well, who am I kidding, this stupid shit has been going on ever since GNOME (and KDE, for its own part) was released.

From that link:

The middle-click will be used to start selections,

So how does that differ from what a left-click does? The document in question doesn't seem to say.

and provide text contextual menus (such as word definitions, sharing, etc.)

So how does that differ from what a right-click does? The document in question doesn't seem to say.

This is more "break the desktop in favor of tablet behavior" stupidity.

Yes, the document in question goes on at great length about Android, iOS, and Windows-8-for-touchscreen, which is of interest if you're trying to figure out what to do on a system with a touchscreen and without a mouse or trackpad, but doesn't seem particularly relevant if you're trying to figure out what mouse/trackpad buttons should do.

The decision is being made on the mailing list at desktop-devel-list@gnome.org .
You can read or subscribe at:
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list

From the commit ttile, they're heavily implying it's optional: xsettings: Disable middle-click paste by default

Looks like you just comment out one line. The difficult part will be recompiling.

None of that works: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/422/no-corners/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/

None of that works: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/422/no-corners/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/

Unity, first commit:

Committer: Neil Jagdish Patel
Date: 2009-10-15 10:40:35 UTC
Revision ID: neil.patel@canonical.com-20091015104035-ijthyaoq3rwqu8r7
[build] Initial commit

Gnome-shell, first commit:

tag name 2.27.0 (37b3bb8ab0012a3ba39e775d78772c652eacf804)
tag date 2009-08-10 22:37:47 (GMT)
tagged by Owen W. Taylor

And early development was done in SVN rather than git, so the true start date is much earlier. The first mock-ups appeared in April of that year:

    https://wiki.gnome.org/action/info/GnomeShell/Design/Iterations/AppBrowsingAlternative?action=info

The first public demo was at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit:

    http://blogs.gnome.org/marina/2009/07/05/gcds-and-the-gnome-shell-sneak-peak/

So relatively close, but Gnome-Shell was definitely first.

With Mir and Wayland, it isn't even close. The first commit to Mir was in Feburary of this year. Wayland hit 1.0 in October 2012.