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Also, SUN works with Gnome. They probably would have taken KDE if it weren't for the fact that they contribute to Gnome and have a greater influence to get things done that they want.

It all make perfect sense in several ways. I don't like that distrobutions don't standardize on some GUI, and that their isn't a greater level of compatibility between applications written for each. Choice is fine, just choose the distrobution that's optimized for your WM. Sure beats apt-get install gnome-some-obscure-name-for-package. The end user wants to choose a pretty OS that's usable, then install packages without worrying about what desktop they are for and if they have the libraries to run it.

> Gnome hackers are on the whole much more passionate about free software..

Look here and say it again. For them celebrating free software they on the otherhand spent a lot of time to commercialize and corporate it. On the back of all these stupid unpaid contributors that got cheated with the open source marketing hype.

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 fo

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 fo

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 fo

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 fo

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 fo

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 fo

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 fo

You mean like this? It's likely to be stable long before Longhorn is released, too.

Good ol Seth Nickell and Storage. WinFS-ish to be sure.

pubmed

golden path

bioconducter

public library of science

gnumeric

cluster analysis

etc. etc. etc.

What's the BFD ??? A lot of scientists are on the open source bandwagon and have been for years. Walmart's coming to town and the Ivory Towers are falling.

Would it be realistic to modify Glade to build the menus for a DVD? Perhaps the additional user interface element would be as simple as an additional file type as an option in the 'save as' dialog box (save as... DVD menu)?

I'm also eagerly waiting for better Gnome support in SuSE. I've compiled Garnome to use with my second account on my home computer, but it is just more convenient to use the KDE desktop because of the integration of SuSE "services" in it.

Sun spent a bunch of time and money toward usability studies and such, which ultimately contributed toward the GNOME "HIG" (Human Interface Guidelines). More info available at:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

There's a wealth of information under there. The Sun studies, conducted in March 2001, can be found here. I wouldn't be too "worried" if I were you.

Sun spent a bunch of time and money toward usability studies and such, which ultimately contributed toward the GNOME "HIG" (Human Interface Guidelines). More info available at:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

There's a wealth of information under there. The Sun studies, conducted in March 2001, can be found here. I wouldn't be too "worried" if I were you.

Evolution's contact editor allows you to annotate a contact with the dates of their birthday and anniversary. However, these dates don't automatically copy themselves into your calendar...you won't see them when you glance through your schedule, and an alarm won't fire to warn you of a friend's upcoming birthday...Clearly, this is a travesty."

Indeed it is a travesty. And a travesty that exists between Apple's Address Book and iCal apps as well. You can get round it using software like Birthday Shifter, but this really ought to be in the main app's functionality.

Cheers,
Ian

By the way, the study can be found here

While there is no doubt that Gnome is visually attractive, has there been any empirical evaluation of Gnome from a human-computer interaction perspective, i.e. a usability study? I've certainly never come across any such testing in relation to Gnome, which is worrying.

Don't worry so much.

>> who *exactly* should 'dominate' (desktop) linux development then, if not unix geeks?

> HCI people
> Don't see why not.

because they dont code, because they're expensive, because the thing that's 'holding' linux back isn't the usability or otherwise of the desktop interfaces (some of which run on linux, some of of which run on other Oss/ kernels)

> Jakob's contributions are as important as Linus'[s]

To the development of the linux kernel? phooo.

to the usability of the (CDE?) Sun desktop (droppped in favour of GNOME) ?????

I'm not under-rating Jakob, but he deosn't come cheap - who pays for his time?

I'm also, really, really, not arguing against HCI people. But if you want to make a difference, grab the and hack on them.

Don't write papers, or bring morals into it. Don't like it, change it, make it better. Aqua is 'fully HCI compliant', and I hate it. I can't change it.

With OSS software, I can. So can you. Do it.

>We'd get ignored no matter how we put it. Your point is?

That backseat drivers' views on 'Linux' (the kernel? the ''desktop''? what exactly does that have to do with Linux, btw?) are probably ignored for a reason

I'll repeat what Bruce Perens said - what *do* you like?

What Free/ free/ cheap desktop OS paradigms should we follow, and what exactly do these have to do with (your original point, and the one that made me respond) :

'One could also make the moral argument that developers who have contempt for newbies have entirely no right to the desktop. You could even take this one step further and say that any action taken against such developers (e.g. licenses, patents on innovative UI stuff, project wars, etc) is morally justified.'

One could reply to this that 'moral's have nothing to do with your thoughts on the 'Linux desktop' (which one? so many to chose from...) and that you should get back to 'your paper'

And for those with short attention spans. Remember when Red Hat tried to play the "consistency" game? The KDE group practically tore them a new one. Don't believe me? Google for that time period.

"Maybe we should consider some fundamental reorganisation. With everything split by application, each has its own way of doing things; what if there was some other way of doing things? What if application developers yielded ultimate control of their GUI to a separate project of some kind?"

It's called XUL. GLADE is something similiar. With some good front-end tools a reasonable compentent "designer" can worry about the interface, and the programmer could worry about everything else (kind of like the seperation going on in the web community).

The free community has already "addressed" the problem. Acceptance however is a different matter (remember the broha when Mozilla was being worked on, and how stupid all this was "We want a basic browser"?)

scripsit iggymanz:

Debian kernel, libraries and ports too old

$ apt-cache policy libgnome2-0
libgnome2-0:
Installed: 2.2.3-2
Candidate: 2.2.3-2
Version Table:
2.4.0-4 0
90 http://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main Packages
*** 2.2.3-2 0
500 http://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Gnome 2.4 hit Debian on 14 October. The timestamps on the 2.4.0 sources at ftp.gnome.org are 10 September. I wouldn't call that particularly pokey, particularly for ten or so architectures. Hell, if I were rolling my own on my old desktop I'd still be waiting for it to compile... ;)

There, I would like to point out why something like KDE exists to -reduce- bloat, paradoxical as you may think it.

First of all, a LOT of any given KDE app's functionality resides in the libs. Heck, you can write a simple Web browser in 10 lines of code... This means that to start that app you'll need to load all sorts of libs, which accounts for some of the ~25% more memory a full KDE desktop takes over WindowMaker, as the parent post points out.

Only, and there's the tasty part, once the lib is loaded, it's loaded for all the apps that will ever use it. Ergo: the more code is shared by apps, the less bloat you get down the road.

While this -does- mean you get a bit of an overhead at startup, any additional KDE app running takes up considerably less additional memory than a similar app re-coded from scratch.

I routinely have 10 to 20 browser windows (tabbed and not tabbed) open at a given time, with a mail client, newsreader, IM app, music app, a variety of applets, an IDE and countless terms, and the system doesn't even flinch. Try doing that with as many GUI apps all reinventing their own wheel.

Oh, and as for speed, turn off the eye candy and KDE runs all sweet on a simple Pentium (yes, I did try it).

Note, I name KDE here because that's what I use most, but the same can be said for Gnome (to a lesser extent maybe; last time examined the Gnome architecture it encouraged custom code somewhat more, which is not a bad thing either, mind).

On the same note, I guess it would be appropriate to ask the Gnome developers why Gnome needs five clocks...

Since Novell purchased us 3 months ago, we have increased our investment in all of our products, using Novell's resources. And we've been aggressive about driving open source and Linux throughout the company.

Here's a little evidence, all postdating the acquisition by Novell:

- My notes on our new desktop development center in Bangalore
- An article from the Times of India about our new developers there
- The freshly-published (today!) Mono Roadmap showing where we're going with the development platform
- The first entry in our new Evolution blog, describing the plans for Evolution 2.0, to be released early next year
- The announcement and wiki for the Brooklyn GNOME developer's summit we are sponsoring this month
- The announcement that our Exchange connector now supports Exchange 2003

And this is really just the beginning. As you can imagine, most of the super exciting stuff we are doing is behind the scenes.

From time to time since we were acquired three months ago I've heard people say things like "Novell bought Ximian just for XYZ," where XYZ has been either: Mono, our Exchange 2000 connector, GNOME, Evolution, Red Carpet, "the name," ...

I think it should be clear that this is ridiculous.

Yes, we will still support KDE on SuSE. However, we hope to use this opportunity to provide Linux developers and ISVs with a single stable platform for desktop application development.

Yes, we will keep the desktop distro free. We will even make things more free than they have been.

We're only just getting started. Stay tuned.

Sounds like what you want is GNOME.

.. we would all be running Dashboard and Storage.

Don't know.
But this is the problem : such a program is not obvious.

Oh. Looks like I had the name wrong. There's some general-media plugin that handles all sorts of media types and hands them off to helper apps. Well, here, this'll do the same thing here.

I never use it, because I *hate* animation on web pages. The first thing I do when using a browser on any OS is disable animated GIFs, Flash, movies, everything possible.

Rosegarden
Just one ?
And how can this reach Reason's level ?

I don't know whether it does -- I'm not a musician. It has some snazzy screenshots with music notes and whatnot, and it seems to be popular with creative types on Linux. If you want more music software packages, try PlanetCCRMA.

No, once again I am afraid the tools you mention are not even close to IB's level.

What are you missing?

Last time I checked, it didn't have a solver ?

Good news -- they've since added one.

I'm not a spreadsheet nut (a lot of spreadsheet stuff is easier to do with a regular programming language if you code a lot, IMHO). However, it does everything I've ever needed to do with Excel (which, to be fair, isn't a lot). There might well be major missing functionality that I wouldn't know about.

This one looks seriously good.

I've only used Illustrator briefly, but I remember it having a lot more palettes than Sodipodi, and fancy (not on the level of 2d CAD, but not bad) alignment functionality, and a lot of basic vector graphics functionality that Sodipodi doesn't have (like text-on-a-path). Ironically enough, the app here that you were most positive about is the one that I feel has the most glaring lacks between its closed source cousin (though it's still quite young compared to cousins like the GIMP...reminds me of the GIMP at around version 1). :-)

Query results are actually .NET objects,

You know about Glade, don't you?

The foot icon is in the lower left corner of your screen.

Oh, you mean this foot icon, not this foot icon.

It seems the signal to noise ratio of this discussion is terrible. People are bashing the site like there's no tomorrow, without taking into account what it's for.

This is a developer resource. Take this UI guide on the Sidebar. Excellent writing, and finally something which approaches what has made Apple keep the UI edge for all these years.

If an article was posted about the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines I suspect the crowd would be singing to quite a different tune.

Where is even the slightest bit of objectivity these days?

GNOME is readying for their 2.4 release, which they expect by spring. 2.4 promises an unprecidented degree of polish, and may well prove to be the release that finally reaches the point "normal people" can deal with it

Gnome 2.4 was released this September.
Check it out.

Some WinFS functionality is being worked on in the Reiser4 file system and in GNOME Storage.

"clippy a good idea? come on..."

check out this message in the gnome archives:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/1998-S ep tember/msg00817.html
clippy es una idea fantastica

Yes lets look at some of the innovations:

1. WinFS
Hmm, another layer on top of a file system to slow it down. MS's filesystem is already slow as a dog, How useful. We already know that that MS is 2.5 times slower as a file server then Linux with Samba 3ReiserFS 4, which is in final testing NOW beats the pants of any offering from MS in features and speed. ReiserFS 4 is sponsored by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and is architected for military grade security, ReiserFS. There is also a Gnome project that I believe is using GnomeVFS to have a similar function of a database on top of the file system for searching, etc. Ulike the offering from MS, you will be able to REMOVE it if you don't want it and it will probably be ready in a year. I don't remember the name or link for the project off the top of my head.

2. SVG.
Gnome has had SVG themes for a while now with an SVG engine in beta that will literally be out YEARS before anything from MS. The SVG engine draws all the widgets in GTK+ as SVG.
Some SVG themes
Even more SVG candy

3. .Net managed code.
Holy slowness batman! All this to have some bounds checking to prevent buffer overflows? This is already out for Linux Non-executable user stack

4. DRM
Yes, just what all the users want. Someone telling them what they can and cannot do with thier OS and what files they can and cannot run. Thanks MS for putting your customers before the big media compnanies.

GtkFileChooser: a replacement for GtkFileSelection with replaceable backends, many new API features, better user interface (UI is still a work in progress) [Owen Taylor, Federico Mena Quintero]

So far Linux seems to be ahead of them in development, I mean Storage Slicker and then theres xouvert , cairographics and project Y.

Preferences tree? XML backend?

Why this API reminds me of Havoc Pennington's GConf used by GNOME 2?

Everytime KDE is mentioned, gnome advocates try and convince me why is GNOME is better, when it is NOT! Here is a detailed description WHY GNOME SUCKS KDE RULES!

1) The file dialog.
KDE 0.x ALPHAs had a better file dialog than gnome! Today, the KDE one is the best file dialgog in existance, with influence from all desktops.

2) More apps!
KDE comes with over 150 Apps in the full install, with applications for all fields, plus its sleak integration with non kde apps (eg gimp, openoffice) make things more consistant.

3) Configureable as hell.
The KDE control center has loads of knobs/dials/sliders and boxes to fiddle with, yet keeps things elegent. In gnome, half the options don't exisit and you are rudley told "use gconf-editor n00b by gnome zealots" (not joking about this, telling the truth gets you a -1, troll and footnotes).

4) I-kandy!
The Kde eye candy is really powerful, with styles such as dotNEt, mosfet liquid, kermamik, Crystal and more. Looking at art.gnome.org reveals the same old theme in different colours. Since gnome dosen't provide a colour changing dialog for its widgets most "themes" are just colour changes. The Crystal from CVS is an Aqua killer, your eyes will want to love it.

5) Its development framework rocks.
Take a good look at kioslaves, kparts, dcop, arts and qt and see why KDE is a programmer's dream. Modern c++, wonderful IDE, powerful command line scripting. Gnome gives you obsolete c, with a bunch of kludge libraries such as glib, Orbit, bonobo to hack together a application.

6)The defacto choice on Linux. All major Distributions support it by default. This means Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros, ArkLinux, Jamd, Lindows, Slackware, Knoppix, Gentoo and more. How many gnome ones can you mention (Redhat, sure if you like using server distros as your desktop Debian, nope thats the old 1.4 branch Gnoppix, a retarded knoppix rip off.) Most distributions offer gnome as an unsupported alternative.

Also, the only reason why gnome was created in the first place is null and void. Now that Novell has taken over Ximain you can expect VENDOR lock in. Want groupware for linux? Thats $300 a seat.

Get the new Mandrake 9.2 and see the Quality of KDE vs the Sorry state of Gnome 2.4 (and, they STILL haven't fixed that ****ing file dialog), not to mention they REMOVED ALL THE FEATURES. Gnome 2.2 is probably the only gnome version remotley close to kde, that is, KDE 2.0, not the KDE 3.2. I tried the "brokenboring" alpha of it and when it is released this december it will finally put Gnome out of it's misery and kill it off the Linux desktop.

I beleieve you're thinking of GNOME Storage. Looks cool.

GNOME Storage?

This is an interesting turn of events. When discussing the gnome-storage project with people, they mentioned that M$ would be incorporating WinFS as an actual file system. And they wondered how the gnome-storage dev's were going to create a database upon a filesystem. But as it turns out M$ isn't making a new file system and for all we know they are lagging behind the great work done by Seth Nickell and crew.

Have your engineers been good enough to fix these ones yet?
Or should I continue to advise anyone who is doing any important statisical analyses (eg medical research, construction engineering or even any non-trivial finance) to on no account process their numbers with your number processing program
I call you for 9 years on crucial bugs in your most popular and best piece of software.
Gnumeric
OpenOffice.org
KSpread

Gnome Screenshots
KDE Screenshots.

Which ones look better?

The reason is that the GTK theming api is reatared and Pixmap based. The SVG hacks are awful too. KDE can use programmable themes, that are also more flexible and FAST too! Now go away and type (or your equivilent)

apt-get uninstall gnome
apt-get install kde-3.2-alpha!

By your logic they should be named GNU/Gnome

News flash, Gnome IS a GNU project.

Click on the Firebird throbber (that ugly thing in the upper right part of the browser that spins around when loading a page) - http://texturizer.net/firebird/ - Click on Download on the left under Home

Now, you're on http://texturizer.net/firebird/download.html - Scroll down to the tan box that says Testers.

There's a link there next to Linux: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firebird/nig htly/latest-trunk/MozillaFirebird-i686-linux-gtk2+ xft.tar.gz.

Hope this helps. Also, be sure to install the Bitstream Vera fonts.

Sure, strncpy() exists, but is has truly weird semantics in my opinion, I never use it as a no-overrun string copying function. For those, I prefer snprintf() if available, or just use glib and go for its g_snprintf() call. All of these, of course, are C. Oh, and for the size argument of these calls, I always try to use sizeof on the destination buffer, if it is an ordinary C vector. If it's on the heap, there's usually a variable holding the size from the allocation call anyway, and then that is used of course. Just my two hundredths of a currency unit.

And with this and this, you can have longhorn for linux! ;). Works on GDE only, sorry KDE folks.

And with this and this, you can have longhorn for linux! ;). Works on GDE only, sorry KDE folks.