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No offense, but this arrogance is exactly why Linux has insignificant desktop market share.

Sorry to interrupt you on your high horse, but talk about jumping to conclusions. "This arrogance" is demonstrated by some poster on slashdot and somehow this is representative of the "Linux community". Give me a break.

It took her long enough to figure out Ctrl-c Ctrl-v; she doesn't want to learn another behavior.

For most modern X apps, ctrl-c/ctrl-v work just fine. See for example the Gnome HIG.

Its neat to see Sun employees popping up on various mailing lists more often. Also, the Gnome HIG is an invaluable resource, contributed by Sun. I say give them the benifit of doubt for now.

<a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10 686">bug report</a>

"Just a question, though, are some of the changelogs ESR mentions available for easy download? The kernel changelogs are easy to find, but what about the changelogs for emacs, Gnome, gzip/gunzip, and all of the other GNU software?"

Does someone know better web-CVS repositories than I can find in a 3-minute google search?

[*] EMACS ChangeLog on the web

[*] GNOME ChangeLog on the web

[*] GZIP: Download it

[*] Other GNU software? See Savannah

Bonus points for anyone who can link to the Internet Explorer changelog...

Am i actually helping, do you think?

You'd think so, but often it doesn't make a difference. For example, take a look at this bug. Seems to apply only to GNOME users (and gnome-terminal users at that), but pretty scary..

If anyone is interested (or still reading this thread) I found it at http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/debian.

Gstreamer is a complete open source media framework. It is being adopted by the KDE and Gnome desktop projects, making it the defacto standard for media applications in Linux/*BSD.

Gstreamer's plugin system is ideal for making a proprietary codec such as Real available to open source players, without having to open source or give up control of your codec. The benefit to you is that all of the codecs supported by the current Gstreamer plugins would be available to Helix player, without any additional work by your developers.

Gstreamer developers have approached the Helix developers and offered to cooperate in the past, but received only an absurd response about "splintering".

Cooperation between Helix and other media frameworks would be mutually beneficial. Lack of cooperation only ensures that Real's codec will marginalized on Linux and eventually obsoleted.

Gstreamer is a complete open source media framework. It is being adopted by the KDE and Gnome desktop projects, making it the defacto standard for media applications in Linux/*BSD.

Gstreamer's plugin system is ideal for making a proprietary codec such as Real available to open source players, without having to open source or give up control of your codec. The benefit to you is that all of the codecs supported by the current Gstreamer plugins would be available to Helix player, without any additional work by your developers.

Gstreamer developers have approached the Helix developers and offered to cooperate in the past, but received only an absurd response about "splintering".

Cooperation between Helix and other media frameworks would be mutually beneficial. Lack of cooperation only ensures that Real's codec will marginalized on Linux and eventually obsoleted.

Gstreamer is a complete open source media framework. It is being adopted by the KDE and Gnome desktop projects, making it the defacto standard for media applications in Linux/*BSD.

Gstreamer's plugin system is ideal for making a proprietary codec such as Real available to open source players, without having to open source or give up control of your codec. The benefit to you is that all of the codecs supported by the current Gstreamer plugins would be available to Helix player, without any additional work by your developers.

Gstreamer developers have approached the Helix developers and offered to cooperate in the past, but received only an absurd response about "splintering".

Cooperation between Helix and other media frameworks would be mutually beneficial. Lack of cooperation only ensures that Real's codec will marginalized on Linux and eventually obsoleted.

This site has some good screenshots of Gnome 2.6.

Pretty much imagine Fedora Core 1, only with a "My Computer" icon on the desktop, Nautilus behaving like Mac OS 9, and everything being a hell of a lot faster.

I use Mandrake, and Dia has been installed by default ever since there was a Dia.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/

Bah, frankly I'm tired of people modding things like this "Insightful".

Are you completely ignorant to reality? The Internet is like the real world: there are bad places, but there are also good places! If you get flamed down at an IRC channel, big deal. Move on to a good channel where people are willing to help you.
Saying that everybody in the Linux community tells you RTFM just because someone from a certain channel said that is like saying every human is a thief because a certain human is a thief. It's a completely wrong generalization.

An excellent Linux support forum would be the ComputerTotaal Forum (Dutch). People have been very helpful to me ever since 1999. People will Linux software and hardware problems are never flamed down.
Just take a look at the GNOME and KDE mailing lists. Do you see RTFM anywhere? I don't.
Take a look at the GNOME support forums. Where do you see newbies getting flamed down?

In other words:
Stop spreading the RTFM-myth!

Engineers design programs that work for them, not for end users.

I'm not so sure about that. Check out this this article by Alexander Larsson. He seems to be saying that the new GNOME UI is the engineer's perception of what new end users like. Here's a quote:

People have argued (and I'm inclined to agree) that the object oriented methaphor (hereafter called oo), is easier to understand for new users. The argument is that the direct graphical representation and manipulation makes it easier for people to understand the concept of directories.

There may be additional reasons for their choice of the spatial interface. I hope so, because in my experience, the typical end user is much happier with the traditional navigational interface. I would wager that most of us hate pop-ups of any kind.

I also agree with the above posters who said that such a dramatic change from a previous version should have been optional in the new version.

Yes. Sun has done some very productive usability studies that have directly affected GNOME. That is why GNOME is the usibility masterpiece that you see today. Check out a few of the studies here.

In addition to to opening up a new window for every folder, the folders "cascade" so if you need to get somewhere fast, your screen slowly fills up with folders you have NO USE FOR.

The folders should cascade only once, the first time you ever open the folder. From that point onward, whenever you re-open that folder, it will appear in exactly the same screen location as the previous time it was closed. It will also retain the same window size, and window backgrounds (images, colors, etc) can also be per-folder (though how to do this isn't particularly well documented ATM). This is what "spatial" is about. So you'll only get a "cascade" of windows if you never bother to move the windows into a sensible location.

Put another way, if your windows are always cascading, it's your own falt! (Note "always"; the first time Nautilus opens a folder, the placement is at the discretion of the window manager.)

In addition, there is no location bar where you can "jump" to a place you want

Press Ctrl+L, and you'll get a dialog box that lets you jump to any place you want. It even supports file-name completion! This is also available as a menu item, though I forget what it is.

nor do you get a sense of where you are in the file system.

Please see this image: nautilus-parentfolders.png. The "menu" in the lower-left corner of the window gives tells you precisely where you are on the filesystem, as it contains the full path of the folder. Furthermore, clicking on any of the menu entries will open the specified folder.

And good luck even if you do have a sense of where you are because there are no forward back or up buttons in sight to allow you to get anywhere (I know there is a hidden menu, but it's hidden, it may aswell be a keyboard shortcut for how easy it is to use from a GUI perspective).

I don't consider that menu to be hidden. It also lets you jump up to any parent directory, so this suffices (somewhat) as a "back" button.

All of this reeks of hijacking of the OS by some disgruntled designer, aka a former BeOS dude or whatever. I don't mind you making a BeOS style file browser dudes, but seriously.... make a fork of gnome.... don't just hijack gnome (at a 2.6 release, not some early design stage, a mature 2.6) to your own ends.

Spatial navigation has been around since the original Macintosh, and has a number of proponents. You might find this article useful. As for research, there has been lots of research done in the 80's, and spatial was the preferred approach. This is why "direct manipulation" is so prevalent in desktop environments today. Or have you never used Drag And Drop?

I've had a look of the latest KDE via the SUSE Linux 9.1 LiveEval CD and it's fantastic. I've never liked Gnome (never bothered with it) and looking at the screenshots and "features" it now seems further behind KDE than ever. Gnome is now completely dead to me and isn't Novell dropping it or something?, which is a shame if it means KDE guys will work less hard.

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

I'd be interested in getting copies of any file that you have trouble with to see how Gnumeric fairs. Getting good test cases can be very helpful. Our confidentiality policy can apply if desired. Please contact me.

Thanks

If you're looking for analysis tools in a spreadsheet Gnumeric has alot to offer. Here's a screen shot of just some of the available utilities. The additional worksheet functions (above and beyond MS Excel) are also quite useful.

If you're looking for analysis tools in a spreadsheet Gnumeric has alot to offer. Here's a screen shot of just some of the available utilities. The additional worksheet functions (above and beyond MS Excel) are also quite useful.

Um, those are screenshots for an older version of gnumeric for gtk1. Here are some much more recent screenshots, using gtk2.

It's really quite nice to use under gnome2.

Also, the theme of your desktop affects the appearance of every gnome2 application, so the screenshots are dependent upon the theme used in taking the screenshot.

an interface that user's will find more easy to use and adapt.

That's exactly what GNOME is.

Those screenshots are out of date. By about 6 years. Try some newer ones.

Why would I want a computer with a smelly foot on it?

Yes, because no-one is going to make things if other people can just take a copy without paying.

She's saying that for desktop "the timeframe is more like the next two years". I just don't see this happening. There's too many usability issues with Linux desktop today.

I really would like to see some serious co-operation with KDE and GNOME teams, for example, to get their software working more uniform way, and more importantly - to get OS developers realize that they need to focus more on usability and some common interface guidelines instead of just adding new features on every new release.

w[h]ere's the open source clone of ActiveX

Well, it's actually called the GNU Network Object Model Environment

I think a killer Open Source project would be port Java over to the CLR. To be really evil and fun, make it a JVM->CLR rewriter. Of course, Sun will sue you like mad, but that not why it wouldn't happen (it helps MS too much), but it would break Sun's hold on Java a bit more. Especially with Mono in the mix.

XAML is nicely balanced and really seems like the first truly usable markup-based GUI language (XUL was close, but not close enough. I think it'd be much more popular otherwise).

Avalon is nice, not totally groundbreaking, but it does kill bitmap-based windowing, and I haven't seen anything that suggest that Linux world is pulling that trigger yet. (X being a obstacle in the way) Apple did, and the results speak for themselves I think.

Finally, WinFS is very, very cool stuff, even as vaporware. I'm not surprised they had to scale it back, because what there are doing is nothing short of rethinking the file system from the ground up. This is a bold thought to take seriously. The notion of extensible metadata alone is powerful. (Before, file metadata was fixed.) Add in searching, extensible relationships, etc and you have something worth paying attention too.

Can someone comment on how XAML compares to Glade? What would be the barrier to making a system to used Glade files loaded over the web to make GUIs on the fly (which with XML-RPC or SOAP could hook into web based back-end)?

considering....

heh... your sig, "Current Linux desktops won't succeed because people DON'T WANT endless choices" is funny. You know there's a whole Linux desktop that understands that principle? It's called GNOME - maybe you've heard of it? :-)

As for installers, that's a breeze compared to building something like RPM, which is already done. Give it time - it'll come. For now, the consumer is not a primary target for Linux - limited application environments are, like call centers. The much drooled after Home Desktop will come, but it's at least a year or two off.

Yeah, its about Sun claiming to be supporting the open source community, while simultaneously refusing to do anything for said community.

I have a feeling that Miguel de Icaza is simply working to promote Microsoft. We should simply ignore him
This post is very enlightening. The section on "An upgrade to the the development platform" says it all. He claims that the Microsoft APIs are a mess, which is of course true. Then he goes on to say that this whole .NET thing is to make everything better. Does he honestly believe that!!!??? MS made the mess of their APIs to ensure vendor lockin (just like the old comm UNIX vendors) and this moron Miguel would have us believe that Microsoft would not do this again.

He obviously believes or seems to believe all the "silver-bullet" marketing crap of the .NET platform.

Has this shithead never used a LISP environment before?

Miguel is either an idiot or an MS funded malefactor. There is no other option. Just ignore him. He will go away one day.

I think the grandparent was probably referring to Epiphany rather than Nautilus.

There are plenty of others. For Speech synthesis, you are probably looking at Festival. For Voice recognition, you are probably best off looking at IBM Viavoice for linux. GNOME has gone a very long way with the Accessibility toolkit and will continue to push down the accessibility path - for example, take a look at Dasher for an interesting app to aid writing for impaired users. There is a lot more on GNOME Accessibility to read.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re installing Mono on Linux, you might do well to use the GARNOME packages; that way, you're building everything from source to be installed under its own prefix, and thus avoiding dependency hell.

What people don't realize is that Qt is actually a massive foundational library...

Yes, a lot like wxWidgets.

Wow, they just described glib2+libxml2! Doesn't it surprise anyone that we'd rather reinvent the wheel than reuse someone elses code? Opensource innovation at it's best!

Yeah, I've got the karma, bring on those blowtorches...

Depending on your take on "non-trivial", there are several projects built with mono and C#: Muine, the music player and F-Spot the personal photo manager, off the top of my mind.

The point is just that Mono is not a toy. Of course, it's not silver bullet either, but compared to C, it sure allows the developer to focus on the important logic of his applications instead of juggling with memory pointers.

The "new feature that you're never going to use" marketing potential aside:

QT isn't even free software. It's GPL'ed on X11 and the Mac - but not the most popular development platform: Windows. Expect to pay $1550 per seat for the privilege of developing there. Because no GPL version is available for Windows. Don't expect to port to Windows without paying the Trolls.

The price instantly puts the toolkit out of reach for smaller development houses - and merely makes it insanely bad value for money for larger shops. For that price you can get an entire high-end computer AND a bunch of Microsoft software development tools (although if you were paying attention to Slashdot yesterday, they just released their compiler for free). It's bad value for money on all fronts.

For those who want actual freedom with the SDK they use, I would recommend that you try wxWidgets.

If that's not suitable, try one of: GTK, Fast-Light Toolkit or even the Fox Toolkit.

But please, for the sake of your code - anything but QT.

Actually, Sun has done some usability testing for GNOME with actual users. It was fairly limited in scope, but it was pretty helpful in crafting the HIG.

Sun did studies like the ones you are referring to and contributed the results back into Gnome. Sure enough, I found a reference to this on the Gnome.org HIG website.

Your original comment makes it appear that you have not used a recent version of Gnome (2.4 or 2.6) because it that project a very prominent example of how free software can have a focus on usability and still provide useful applications. You really ought to try it out if you haven't lately.

I would, but I do have higher priority things to contribute to at the moment. You appear to have assumed I don't spend time contributing to free software. The assumption is poor. But I tend to contribute in areas where my particular specialist skills return the greatest reward for the community. These are usually things where there's only a handful of people with the right skill combinations.

That's not a religious argument. It's just and argument of practicality.

If you look at the arguments actually involved, you'll find that's not the case. Another poster helpfully linked to the GIMP project's discussion on this. Note comments 6, 11, 13, 15, 21, 26, and 28, which actually try to tell people not to implement it.

This is the problem with religious blindness. Telling people they have to (or must not) do things a particular way or accept things in a particular way because "we know it's better", when in fact it's really a matter of preference. I have a preference for MDI for some tasks. Image editing is one.

Indeed, MDI for image editing can make sense. To some extent, this is already what many people are doing by dedicating a virtual desktop to the GIMP (except that the menu bar and status bar cannot be shared between all windows and other space-saving features of MDI are not available).

Most of the commercial image editors use some kind of MDI model becauses it makes sense: working with images often requires several images of different sizes to be visible at the same time and it should be easy to work on all of them without accidentally clicking on other windows. At the same time, most users prefer to avoid having dozens of "tasks" (windows) visible in the main task bar, so grouping all image windows into a single MDI container can help.

As a GIMP contributor and one of the few supporters of an MDI option for the GIMP, I encourage you to have a look at the lengthy discussions in Bug #7379. But please do not add comments to this bug report unless you really have something new to add because most of the issues have already been discussed for too long.

Even with their update, the entry level Macs are still not even remotely competetive with today's cutting edge Intel machines. Apple fanatics, I don't understand why you continue to waste your money on such machines. Take a look at the configurations of the following machines:

Apple eMac
1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 256MB DDR SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA/100, SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
17-inch (16-inch viewable) flat CRT
ATI Radeon 9200 32MB
Mac OSX
= $999

Dell Dimension 2400
2.4GHz Celeron, 256MB DDR SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA/100, DVR+RW optical drive
17-inch (16-inch visible) CRT
Intel 3D Extreme Graphics
Windows XP
= $679

I specced the Dell to be similar to the high-end eMac. Suprise, suprise - it's $320 cheaper. The Intel equivalent is even $120 cheaper than the low-end $799 eMac! What's up with that?

But if we go ahead and spend the extra $300 on an Intel based machine, we get some really flashy upgrades that start to compete with Apple's high-end G5 offerings. For example, we can easily get a 3GHz hyperthreading Pentium 4 (which is 2 processors in one - an effective clockspeed of 6GHz assuming 100% efficiency running parallel tasks). For example:

Dell Dimension 4600
3GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading, 512MB DDR SDRAM
120GB Ultra ATA/100, DVD+RW optical drive
17-inch (16-inch visible) CRT
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 128MB graphics card
Windows XP
= $998

Ta-da. Conclusion: Apple is still really bad value for money. For the same price as an entry-level Apple system, you could get a significantly powerful workstation capable of handling anything you throw at it - including games. If you're willing to go a step further and build your own machine from components (gasps from the Apple audience), you can get an even higher specced machine for about the same money.

An ultra-high end computer is $1000 if you're willing to shop around. Nobody should settle for anything less, or for overexpensive, underpowered solutions like eMacs. You don't even have to run Windows if you don't want to. Gnome and KDE await you on Linux and FreeBSD (on which Mac OSX was originally based).