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Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Gee, it's too bad that there are no OSS projects that focus on usability. I wonder what such a product would look like if the OSS community ever tried to focus on that.

Yeah, and there is no duplication of effort in open source

It's true that it's not just MS -- IIRC, the gnome keyboard switching applet had to be changed to not show any flags whatsoever after China got mad for the inclusion of the Taiwanese flag, and Taiwanese hackers got mad at Redhat for taking it out of their packages. There's a discussion on it here

Redhat removed the flag of taiwan from KDE to sell it to china[1]

I also seem to remember there being a problem trying to use the sodipodi flags in gnome, and the end result was that no flags would be included [2].

[1]http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/6/17315 3/329 Also do a google search for "redhat taiwan flag" for more information.

[2]http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2003-November/msg00267.html
and here for the whole thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2003-November/thread.html#00267

Redhat removed the flag of taiwan from KDE to sell it to china[1]

I also seem to remember there being a problem trying to use the sodipodi flags in gnome, and the end result was that no flags would be included [2].

[1]http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/6/17315 3/329 Also do a google search for "redhat taiwan flag" for more information.

[2]http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2003-November/msg00267.html
and here for the whole thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2003-November/thread.html#00267

infuriate...confd...remote network.

Am I the only one that's been through agony with gconfd?

I run KDE, but like a few Gnome apps like Firefox and Evolution.

And I run where my /home/me is NFS mounted.

And I frequently get hosed by

GConf Error: Adding client to server's list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org

I'm not root on this box and am suffering.

[Sorry for drifting - the keywords got me going...

Under this analogy, wouldn't female dogging about deviations from an English "standard" correspond to female dogging about deviations from specifications such as Single UNIX, LSB, or GNOME HIG?

Well, I could give yet another success story about K12LTSP, but I think you get the point that it's really cool.

One thing to keep in mind: if the machines will primarily be used for web-browsing, you should look into epiphany as a web browser. We've found that it's trimmed down enough to allow some extra machines to run off our LTSP server as compared to our results with other browsers (although we did not try firefox, so I wouldn't rule that one out either). It hasn't really given us any headaches, and the whole library staff and the students seem very happy with it.

Other positions have been "vented":

------
On Fri, 2004-08-06 at 22:06 +0000, Carlos Morgado wrote: > So Rui is sort-of-right, he's just picking on the wrong point or believing > it's blidingly obvious the "or" between Works and Program makes it possible > for a non free version for Evo to be released as long as the original patch > remains unchanged.

It's not an or that's the problem. It's:

A. B.

Two sentences. Neither of them acceptable on a GPL project.

A ~= We'll make it available under a DFSG (or whatever the current wording is) license B ~= Besides that, we'll be able to, at our sole discretion, license it in another kind of license.

B is totally legal, after all, they _are_ the new copyright holders. However, you're giving them copyrights without anything in return, like the reason why the GPL exists: to keep software Free.

The collection of all the rights without any promise to maintain the terms of the GPL is for all pratical effects a circunvention of the GPL.

Such a copyright assignment contract shouldn't be admissible in any gnome module (much less so blindly defended by any GF board member).

Rui
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From the "Evolution copyright assignment: Storm in a teacup" thread.

CC.

Recently, I was creating an OpenOffice.org document and needed a couple of diagrams.. After
searching through the menu for a few moments, I came across Dia.

Dia fits all of the listed requirements from what I can tell. Its interface and features are very
similar to Visio IMO.. In addition, It loads much much faster than Visio.

I created two mini-network diagrams quite easily on my first use. I exported those to PNG
(EPS is available in a couple of formats) and inserted/scaled them into my document.

Overall, I was quite impressed.

Yes, yes, we've all heard your FUD and lies before, so I won't go into those other points again, but here's your fucking man page just in case it would happen to be sheer stupidity or blindness this time, both of which you apparently haven't got any lack of either.

http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gconf/doc/ gconftool-2.1. It's not a bible, nor should it be, but it lists the options and what they do as well as few examples, what more could man page possibly need.

poorly documented my ass.

The GNOME terminal is really just a shell for VTE. (It may still be possible to build it with ZVT.) 90% of the bugs associated with the terminal should really be filed against VTE, the maintenance for which seems to be a low-priority task for Nalin Dahyabhai at Red Hat.

If you want to help, try testing some of the unconfirmed bug reports, or some of the patches, such as 143914.

VMWare is in a totally different class. VMWare _is_ an emulator/virtual machine and will _emulate_ hardware in software.

Because no matter what, it'll only ever be "as if" it's running on linux.

You need to understand what an API is to understand that Wine is not an emulator. An API is just a set of functions, etc that a program can use to do things. For example, in MS Windows, there is a function in the Win32 API called CreateWindowEx. Your program can call this function to create a new window. Under GTK+ for Linux, there is a similar function called gtk_window_new that your program can call to create a new window. Wine is just another API under Linux and Wine has the same CreateWindowEx function that you would find under Win32.

If the idea is to make it easy for new users, wouldn't a submenu system make more sense...such as Net-Browsers and entries for available choices?

The counterintuitive (but correct) answer is "no". Every time you insert another step in a user interface process, you introduce the opportunity for confusion and error. Instead of saying "I want to browse the net, so I click on Net Browser" now the user will say "I want to browse the net, so I click on Net Browser... uh, er. There's four different things here and all of them have weird names. Which is the right one? Do they all do the same thing? If I pick the wrong one will I damage anything?"

This is why there's one clock applet in GNOME 2, even though there were five clock applets in GNOME 1. And instead of being only one-fifth as usable, it's more like three times as usable. 99% of the time, the user doesn't want to add this specific clock right here, the one that tells time in octal and binary, they want to add a clock. And the other 1% of the time, they can RTFM.

• There are some small features in CVS that might be interesting though:
  * Visible preference that allows you to disable spatial mode

I'm confused as to why VNC has been integrated.

Look at the use cases for Vino, the proposed included VNC. Mark McLoughlin has done an excellent writeup.

If you follow GNOME development you'll notice the shift towards better integration into the other desktop applications. See: Evolution and GAIM speaking over evolution-data-server.

Mark's use cases answer your question.

1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in .gnome or something

3. Give me a default window manager with the ability to select focus-follows-mouse mouse

5. Choose: either a) reincorporate gecko into Nautilus for Web browsing or b) go lightweight and jettison Nautilus for the old gmc

6. Create a base distribution of official GNOME applications from a lot of the GTK stuff out there, based on which authors agree to follow a rigidly follow a GNOME style guide and use the GNOME API rather than just GTK, so that there is more desktop consistency

7. Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)

8. Give me an "advanced mode" to turn on all kinds of extra GUI configuration bells and whistles like keybindings, autoraise, MIME types, etc.

Disclaimer: I, myself, prefer the browser-based file manager. So I'm not a "spatial fanboy". But I do think spatial is the right way to go for a total newbie. (I routinely work with directories nested deeply, but newbies tend to have few files and probably will only use one or two directories.)

Is there a fucking guide somewhere that says, "Hey, here's why spacial rocks and here's how to use it effectively."

Here are two such guides.

About the Finder...

This article, if you read all the way through it, will convince you. It might not convince you that spatial is for you, but it will at a minimum convince you that the spatial fanboys are not all insane.

The Spatial Way

This is a good article that covers the basics. At the end it has a list of things you can read to find out more, and some of them are really worth reading. I especially liked the "What were you thinking?" thread; my favorite single email from that thread is here.

the fact that I have to open up the gConf editor just to turn that ridiculous, annoying, FUCKING RETARDED default off is insanity.

I concur. The GNOME developers have realized this as well, and the next release of GNOME will have a preference someplace you can actually find it.

But, I have to say I understand where they are coming from. They feel that if you have outgrown spatial, you are a power user, and if you are a power user, you won't be scared to run GConf. And it really isn't hard to change the option using GConf.

(I'm a dual pane junkie myself.)

I use Nautilus, in its "browser" mode, as a sort of dual-pane browser. I have two or more Nautilus windows open, and I use them to copy and move my files.

One of the points the spatial guys make is that it's easy to shuffle your files around when you have multiple windows open for multiple folders. That's true, but I just open as many Nautilus windows as I wish, and then set them where I want them.

steveha

The Gnome Documentation Project is also looking for people. In fact, pretty much every largish project in the free software world seems to be looking for documentors.

You might want to try jhbuild or garnome then. Jhbuild will let you build either a specific version of Gnome, or CVS HEAD, garnome is more release-oriented. There is very little to be gained by building "by hand" (typing ./configure && make && make install). I haven't done much modifying of jhbuild, but garnome makes it easy to pass options to configure/make etc.

-Mark

Looks like things are (hopefully) getting better with GNOME 2.8. Just released GNOME 2.7.4 seems to have first implementation of the new MIME system which was proposed and described here.

I'd be interested to see a hardcore Newton fan actually make a list of what it would take to get him to switch to something new.

Suppose the Oqo ever emerges from vapor as something you could actually buy. Then put a Linux 2.6 kernel on it, and your choice of desktop (KDE or GNOME). In some ways this would be better than a Newton (faster processor, color screen). How would a Newton user like this? What essential Newton features are missing?

I understand that the Newton used a "data soup" more than explicit files. Is GNOME Storage anything like this?

steveha

The latest development release of Gnome has the new MIME system, based on the one discussed at freedesktop.org. This is supposed to put a stop to the idiocy that was the previous file association brou-ha-ha.

You can read about it here.

I would just love File Types to work properly.

Then you will be happy with this.

The Gconf/Windows registry comparison is wrong. The only thing is that it contains configuration data stored in one frontend. This interview with Havoc Pennington might clear up some of the misunderstandings.

I'd recommend everyone who wants to be a part of the UI debate to read the Gnome HIG before talking - that too contains information about both how and _why_ Gnome looks and acts like it does.

I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion. And, there are tools in Gnome that are very powerful, yet very simplistic. Look at it this way: Most often, it's not the tool, it's the user. Having more features won't make the user more powerful. It will make the average user less powerful and confused, whereas the power user will have no problem using the simple interface. I consider myself a power user, and I've been using Gnome since 2.0. In every part of my life, as a programmer, student, musician, whatever - I prefer simplicity to advancedness. Because something simple created to perfection will always be better than something advanced. This is what Gnome gives me now - Simplicity and concistency.

This new project surprises me a little bit. It's not because it's a good thing, but because I'm amazed that this man actually has the opportunity to gain support anywhere. I always try to be objective and understandable, but in this case it's not possible: Ali, or oGALAXYo, tends to troll around on osnews, and formerly the gnome.org mailing lists, accusing people, and generally being angry, and when people tell him to stop he replies with yet more accusations of how people attack him. He's kinda like Dave on Paradise Hotel (Yeah, I've seen it a couple of times).

I have absolutely no faith in that Project GoneME will do anything successful for the Desktop users. Especially when led by a man who in one post love a part of gnome, then two days later hate it - or suddenly hates Gnome as a whole and loves KDE. Then, all of a sudden, KDE is the wrong part. I'd love to see a roadmap for this project. And I'd love to see it change every day.

First of all, it complains massively about simple things as button orders, things that users don't notice on any other plan than an intuitive one - and he says things about f.i. esound (yes, it needs to be replaced) that are just cluttered with ignorance - a sound daemon has its use, ask any distributor.

Oh, and Gnome has a bugzilla. That's the place to tell anyone if you've found a bug or feature missing.

To end this post, I'd just like to say that I'm not a Gnome official in any way. I do support and participate in the community, but many people seem to think that everyone talking about Gnome positively belong to the Gnome set of developers, and often end up talking negatively about Gnome because of things that _are not part of Gnome at all_.

Reverting the button order just because inferior systems do it differently is a very bad idea.

By the way, fonts are fonts really. You've got TrueType and PostScript mainly and they tend to work cross platform. There's no need to have "Linux" fonts. Now if you meant "open source" fonts, that would be a different matter.

A quick scan of Apple's HIG netted the guidlines related to how to place options in a dialog box, but not the why.

Perhaps more relevent, I found this post from the Gnome project's usability lead detailing why a right to left ordering should be easier to use. I'll note that I was wrong and it isn't exactly related to Fitts' Law, but it is a very similar concept.

Either way, it's clear that there's been a lot of thought and planning put into this - it wasn't an arbitrary decision. It *seems* unnatural at first simply because most people are accustomed to the Windows style dialogs. The problem is, by growing accustomed to them, they generally seem to believe that it's the best way of doing things, without ever really considering what the actual meritts of either system are.

"I think, if you reflect, you'll find that you've missed the point. neither I nor the article mentioned having all the distributions use the same packaging system."

Sorry, my mistake.

The "'unified' method" issue is a valid one. Yum (an others like it) have made some progress to this end (yum talks redhat/mandrake rpms as well as debian pkg -- it also goes a long way to resolve dependancies and conflicts automatically). Wrapping yum in a gui would be nice. I would say that the problem is not with "installing programs", but with package management (packages may or may not contain "programs").

I think, however, that many people get the terms "Linux" and "Distribution" confused (as well as "Desktop Environment", I suppose), and when someone says "Linux as a Desktop OS", they are really referring to a "Desktop Linux Distribution". Even if Windows and MacOS used the same kernel, you wouldn't (necessarily) expect the user experience to be the same. I suppose (which is your point) running the GNOME Desktop should have a unified interface to system-level configurations (including package management) across distributions, but that (hopefully) is what GNOME System Tools is all about.

Perhaps you should read the bug report more carefully then. Of course adding the setting alone won't change any application but the setting is a pre-requisite for making the button order configurable. It's the first step that has to be taken and only if this setting is available in GTK+ will patches to application be accepted.

I can only speak for The GIMP project but we would accept a patch that makes the button order dependant on a GTK+ setting. We would definitely not accept a patch simply changes the button order back.

If you are an XP user you'll be accustomed to many Windows placements and ideas that have been carried over to KDE (start menu, placement of things in general). However KDE is cluttered and there is no central document that KDE developers can refer to in order to achieve proper usability. So they usually end up having applications with a lot of clutter. If you are familiar with usability tenets you'll know that giving users too many choices is the same as giving them none at all. Every option you give a user is a choice he has to make. Sometimes he doesn't want to make a choice, he just wants to get stuff done.

Gnome has the Human Interface Guideline'. The document is a comprehensive guide which can be used to do "higification" on an application. I find that most Gnome applications tend to follow the HIG and the result is a more consistent desktop. It takes some getting used to for Windows users though because things aren't "in their place". However once you spent a week using Gnome you find it hard going back to Windows. Many say the same about KDE but my personal opinion is that Gnome is despite being different than XP and will need a bit more getting used is the more usable Linux desktop around.

For anyone moving from Windows to Linux I recommend you arm yourself with patience and a good friend that can coach you through the change.

Well, "Open Source stuff" is doing exactly that. Witness xpde, a group dedicated to re-creating the XP desktop. And of course the gnome and KDE groups are hard at work replicating a great deal of Windows.

Looking good as in:

screenshot 1
screenshot 2
even more screenshots

Don't confuse what the article creator was using (default looking Gnome) with what you can make it look like, and how you can make it preform.

I have to admit, I've been using Slackware since 7.1 as my desktop OS. I was a total n00b when it came to linux, and it took me a week or so to get my X display setup and lovable, but it was a head-first dive into linux anyway. Slackware had most of what I needed; Mozilla for mail and browsing, KDE for a desktop (even though Steven seems to lean towards GNOME), and Gimp for the pictures. I just had to add OpenOffice for the wordprocessing and rlpr to print to our OpenBSD print server. But the thing that saved me the most was the beloved documentation in /usr/doc. Almost every How-To was stuffed in there! I'd recommend it for any newbie that wants to go hard-core fast. I can't wait to try Slackware 10, but I'll probobly wipe out my boxen first (as I've been using the -current branch for so long).

gconf == regedit

Glade is language independant. As long as there is libglade for mono it should work very well.