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RTFA. The real issue is that duplicating the name is causing system conflicts for those with both installed.

Nor is this the first time something like this has happened between KDE and Gnome:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632044

[...] it's just really bad practice to have two applications named the same anyhow. even if they *are* seperate distros.

If you read the original email, the concern is that those who have both KDE and GNOME installed on the same installation (of their Linux distribution). Therefore, there will be real people who will have two menu entries in their menus. Slashdot has succeeded, yet again, to hype up and bring unnecessary attention to an issue that isn't as drastic and fought over as the post makes it appear.

[...] it's just really bad practice to have two applications named the same anyhow. even if they *are* seperate distros.

If you read the original email, the concern is that those who have both KDE and GNOME installed on the same installation (of their Linux distribution). Therefore, there will be real people who will have two menu entries in their menus. Slashdot has succeeded, yet again, to hype up and bring unnecessary attention to an issue that isn't as drastic and fought over as the post makes it appear.

Some negative reviews of the project's concept:

* Richard Fontana: http://opensource.com/law/11/7/trouble-harmony-part-1
* Bradley Kuhn: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html
* David Neary: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/07/06/harmony-agreements-reach-1-0/

It's also possible to use a computer soully with a refreshable braille display device, though it gets aggrivating, and there's no way in hell I'd do it for a week.

On the Linux side of things, the accessibility is far worse than in Windows, but Gnome provides a lot of the same types of keyboard navigation mechanisms as Windows (Orca doesn't work on KDE, sadly).

That's not fair, object orientation isn't strictly a language feature, it's also a generic pattern. Gobject is a C library but is object-oriented. Most object-oriented scripting languages are implemented in an underlying object-oriented C. Method(object, arg1, ...) and object->Method(arg1, ...) are equivalent, particularly if object is an opaque type not in the header.

We could even cite the crazier case of Objective C or Objective J[avascript], where every method call becomes a call to a runtime of msgSend(object, methodNumber, args...).

This seems like a total hackaround to force a language into a box it wasn't meant to fit in, though in the case of Objective-C, objc_msgSend() is implemented in a few dozen lines of ASM and can be compiled to a direct dispatch for the non-dynamic case.

You may want to check out Devil's Pie if you run a GNOME based desktop. I assume there would be a similar utility for KDE but I haven't actually looked. It seems an uncommon but easily accomodated use case.

Tracker ( http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/index.html ) is relevant to your needs. It stores relational information about your data. So for example, if you have an id3 tagged mp3 album, it will store the artist as an entity x, and the album as an entity y, and it will store that each of the mp3 files are a part of y, by x. In the same way, it stores authors and publishers as entities for pdf's. You can address this data store in the ordinary `desktop search' way (there are some search GUI's available), but more interestingly, you can use sparql to query the data store (allowing you for example to ask for all documents dated before 2000, by an author whose full name contains "Knuth").

Tracker comes with some data miners that crawl your data (e.g. using full text-search, and meta-data extractors) to build up the data store, but in your case it might make sense to enter your organization of the data into the data store yourself (using RDF). This would allow you to use the Tracker infra structure to access your data afterwards.

An interesting comment on this comes from Jeremy Allison on the blog of an Openoffice.org developer (found via Dave Neary's blog):

This is about copyleft vs. non-copyleft licensing

Finally the argument about which style of licence is best will be settled once and for all! :)

At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward. However there are GPL-esque projects have proven popular with companies (e.g. KHTML/Webikit) so it is far from clear which side will prove more popular. I'm just happy that at least there's something open source that lets me open MS Office documents in a reasonable manner - in 1999/2000 it was a lot more painful.

This decision was done without consideration for OOo community:

http://ooo-speak.blogspot.com/2011/06/statements-on-openofficeorg.html

Seems to be pushed more by IBM than Oracle:

http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2011-06-01.html

I know GNOME's Help Browser is extremey painful, but I didn't think it was malpractice.

Yes. Empathy

I just finished trying out gyache/gyachi (Yahoo! Voice and Video chat, open source) and it doesn't work nearly as well. Also, it just runs the proprietary codecs using the relevant wine source code, so it's not truly open source.

It does not "need" it. My system has 1GB of RAM, and is only using 512MB of that right now with Ubuntu 11.04 (in "Ubuntu Classic" mode) with 5 tabs open in Chrome, as well as Spotify and a text editor. Everything is running smoothly even with the single core Atom processor at 1920x1080, even though the netbook has crappy integrated graphics (ie I got it before ION was introduced).

As others have indirectly pointed out though, XP is old. Look at the requirements for previous versions of Gnome and you will see they're far lower than XP requirements. In fact I found this comment about Gnome 2.0 on the Gnome website:

Bradley Shuttleworth
Just installed it smoothly on a P2-233 with 96 Mb RAM. Nautilus fires up a new window in under 5 seconds (which, given that Nautilus took longer than that in 1.4 on my Gigahertz laptop, is a pleasant change).

(And to brag, its faster than Windows XP on my laptop, too... XP takes a shine longer to fire up Explorer, and various other tasks are slightly faster.)

http://www.google.com/chat/video

Best part is it you can voice/video chat with non-google users including non-google jabber servers with Empathy

http://live.gnome.org/Empathy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)

I think the issue is deeper than that. From what I understood, Shuttleworth has been butting heads with the Gnome developers for quite some time. They're constantly removing functionality from Gnome every release and they are very reluctant in having Gnome comply with standards agreed upon at freedesktop.org. The functions in Unity were supposed to be added to Gnome as an added bonus, but the Gnome developers rejected the idea. App Indicators were also rejected. One of the developers' excuses for not including libappindicator in their builds was that it didn't integrate with gnome-shell. Huh? It doesn't integrate with gnome-shell because it was never added in the first place! The drama doesn't stop there. There's a ton of things the guys at Gnome just refused to do that would help unify Linux, but they simply refused to do it. Canonical just had enough of it and decided to drop Gnome and focus on Unity. You really can't blame them. Canonical has tried for many years to come to some sort of agreement with the Gnome developers, but to be perfectly honest with you.... They're assholes. Read all about it here: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/07/has-gnome-rejected-canonical-help/

I'm a PostgreSQL contributor. Oracle can't buy my copyright. There are dozens of other code contributors just like me in that regard, working for many companies. It was possible to buy MySQL because most of the code was developed by MySQL Ab, and copyright assignments required for contributions to be merged. See Some thoughts on Copyright Assignment for more details. That's not the case for PostgreSQL.

Furthermore, the PostgreSQL community has already been through the process of having a single corporation "buy" many of the top contributors, when a company named Great Bridge hired many of them. The disruption to the PostgreSQL community of Great Bridge failing was such that even starting in that direction is actively rejected now. So even if a company did start gobbling up developers one at a time, they would face increasing resistance at obtaining the remaining ones.

F-Spot... easily replaced by... gThumb

I'm actually enjoying Shotwell. It's also a good advertisement for the Vala language, which seems interesting.

None of the core GNOME apps use Mono besides Tomboy (the others aren't "core apps" and are considered "extra" or even "third-party" apps). You can run GNOME without any of them installed, and they all have reasonable replacements that don't use Mono (Rhythmbox, Gnote, Shotwell, GNOME Shell's search bar, etc.). Rhythmbox is actually quite good; I used to be a Songbird and Banshee fan, but I tried Rhythmbox and, while it doesn't have every single feature under the sun, it's nice to work with and not nearly as buggy as Banshee was to me.

Sounds like gnome shell to me. http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Development

Don't be stupid. Sumatra uses MuPDF, which is GPL-ed.

By the way, Evince has been running on windows for over a year now.

Code written to allow per-workspace wallpaper in GNOME as part of a Summer of Code 2008 project:

http://gsocblog.jsharpe.net/

Result?

Ignored by GNOME.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543596

Thanks, GNOME.
Thanks, SÃren Sandmann.

Never mind GNOME, why would Google be paying for that??

Code written to allow per-workspace wallpaper in GNOME as part of a Summer of Code 2008 project:

http://gsocblog.jsharpe.net/

Result?

Ignored by GNOME.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543596

Thanks, GNOME.
Thanks, Søren Sandmann.

Evolution was a bit lost for a while. Red Hat has picked up the ball and Novell has agreed to cooperate. It is a more diversified open source project than it used to be.

They have changed major components the last years. This is not finished yet, but the worst is gone.

Evolution 3.0 Planning
Evolution Planning

Evolution was a bit lost for a while. Red Hat has picked up the ball and Novell has agreed to cooperate. It is a more diversified open source project than it used to be.

They have changed major components the last years. This is not finished yet, but the worst is gone.

Evolution 3.0 Planning
Evolution Planning

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/plain/data/images/gimp-splash.png?id=GIMP_2_7_2 No lies:P

Wahahahaha!

The dominatrix is a goat in a leather bustier, not what I had hoped for.

Nevertheless, thanks for posting it Alexia.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/plain/data/images/gimp-splash.png?id=GIMP_2_7_2 No lies:P

Global menu: It was sort of OK, I guess, for the original mac.

Now we have 24" and 30" screens. You can have apps in all corners of the screen, and you're supposed to mouse all the way up to the top left to access a menu?

Create one problem, and then start applying bandages everywhere: Mark's answer? Create menuless apps.

Newsflash: Not every application can be as simple as an iPhone 99 cent doodad.

And say goodbye to discoverability. Say hello to the old-style right-click menus of Gimp and Dia that everyone always complained about.

Oh, and that "document-centric" interface that hipsters are always talking about? How do you (clearly) discern which to which window a menu applies?

The farther he goes from being a usable alternative to Windows (as opposed to Bizarro Windows), the farther Ubuntu goes from being able to fix Bug #1 ("Microsoft has a majority market share").

Car analogy: It's as if the Japanese, during the 70s, hadn't presented a car with 4 wheels, steering wheel, gas + brake pedals, but some sort of weird contraption with the driver in the back or something.

A few questions:

1. 1. How well does nautilus work in Xfce? Doesn't launching nautilus also launch the Gnome DE?
2. 2. Is it compatible with Gnome applets (the ones you put on the panel)? I don't know if there's a FreeDesktop standard for that which is implemented by Xfce. I'm particularly interested in the Tracker applet.
3. 3. Does Thunar performance degrade over time? Nautilus is fast in opening a folder with a lot of files in it when you first launch it. But after a few days, it gets more and more sluggish and then takes a few seconds to show you a folder.
4. 4. Does Xfce have a UI panel thing for virtual desktops?

1. 1. Nautilus works fine as long as it has been set up to launch with the --no-desktop --browser options. That of course is left up the the distros to take care of. You can always create a bash alias and/or modify the nautilus.desktop file. I am sure there are more ways to fix it as well.
2. 2. No, Gnome applets are not compatible with XFCE. However it can run any application designed to minimize to the tray. You can also load wmdock into a panel so that it is possible to run dock apps like afterstep, fluxbox and openbox do. As well as XFCE panel applets
3. 3. There is good news and bad. The good news, the performance does not decrease over time. The bad news, it is always slow opening up a folder with more than about 15 subfolders in it.
4. 4. Yes there is a virtual panel applet, it s called the Workspace Switcher.

The GNOME 3 UI looks very similar to the Android 3 UI. Maybe the GNOME team is trying to "bridge the gap" and bring a smart phone style user interface to the general purpose PC market. Unfortunately, this strategy will most likely fail due to the differences in input method. The PC keyboard+mouse system is vastly different than a smart phone multitouch screen system.

A few questions:

How well does nautilus work in Xfce? Doesn't launching nautilus also launch the Gnome DE?

Is it compatible with Gnome applets (the ones you put on the panel)? I don't know if there's a FreeDesktop standard for that which is implemented by Xfce. I'm particularly interested in the Tracker applet.

Does Thunar performance degrade over time? Nautilus is fast in opening a folder with a lot of files in it when you first launch it. But after a few days, it gets more and more sluggish and then takes a few seconds to show you a folder.

Does Xfce have a UI panel thing for virtual desktops?

I just noticed that on gnome.org it says "Hosted by Canonical" at the bottom. Isn't it great how they're getting along, what with all the drama? :)

Yes, it is. Of course, I notice that there's no Ubuntu release on their download page ...

????

Copyright © 20052011 The GNOME Project Optimised for standards. Hosted by Red Hat.

Hmmm. Which page was that on? The bottom of the Gnome 3 page says:

Copyright © 20052011 The GNOME Project
Free to share and remix: Creative Commons CC-BY. Optimised for standards. Hosted by Canonical.

Here is the GNOME 3 Design History page. In short, they wanted to get rid of the hacked-together nature of GNOME 2 while innovating at the same time. They wanted a more integrated desktop that didn't get in your way, and for the most part it succeeds :)

You do realize that GNOME 3 has an extensive design history, yes? They did lots of usability testing, and just because the interface isn't exactly "familiar" does not instantly mean that they changed it for the sake of change. Please, do some research next time and read the GNOME Shell design documents.

About half way down the release notes:
"Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, has been given a fresh new design for 3.0. The new interface is clean and elegant, and the new places sidebar makes it easy to jump to important folders. The Connect to Server dialog has also been redesigned in order to make it more efficient."

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.0/

Is the new page for GTK2 docs a horrible textvomit for anyone else? Did they break this specifically for this release?

The press release link is a moving target. It's now: http://www.gnome.org/press/2011/04/gnome-3-0-released-better-for-users-developers-3/

Read the release notes in your favorite language here: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.0/

Actually press release link: http://www.gnome.org/press/2011/04/gnome-3-0-released-better-for-users-developers-3/

We don't want to be the subject of an experimentet about how we "should be working."

This, above all else. I don't mind having default settings that suck for the way I want to work. I mind incredibly when the options to fix it are deliberately removed. KDE 4.0 was kind of annoying in that a lot of things didn't work. Honestly, I was OK with that! Even if it wasn't ideal at the moment, at least they were moving in a direction I liked, and things that were missing were absent because they hadn't been added in yet. In contrast, I've never seen a stance as arrogant as Gnome's nearly-constant claims that I'm Doing Stuff Wrong and that they know best. For the most trivial of examples, consider the missing settings option in gnome-screensaver. Short explanation? "Kiss our butt. Our way is correct, end of story."

Gnome is dead to me. My inner conspiracy theorist finds it easy to imagine that Miguel got that Microsoft job, and his private title is "Fracturer Of Linux Desktops".

A. I hate tools bars! If they are really necessary, PLEASE allow me to hide it/them.

The panel at the top of GNOME 3 is very, very small. If you're bothered by that, you might have a problem. I don't see a reason why it should need to be hidden.

B. I had to use gconf-edit to set focus on mouse instead of click to focus. Ridiculous!

Ask about it on #gnome-shell IRC or the mailing list; figure out their reasons for not implementing it and see if they might be able to implement it in a later release :)

C. Adding an extra click to launch an application is NOT intuitive. Its like START/REALLY START?

What exactly do you mean? As in, clicking the activities overlay? You know that there's many different ways to launch applications, yes? Just tap the Windows/Super key and move your mouse over to your favorites list on the left. Just as fast as an auto-hiding dock to me, if not faster. Also, you can search for an application by opening the overlay (again, use the Super key, it's much faster) and just typing. Full keyboard navigation in the search and everything; just like GNOME Do.

D. Automatically compressing desktop spaces when the last application in that space closes is very frustrating. Start 20 or so apps in various desktops and get everything just how you like them. Then add an extension to Firefox and you need to restart it. And watch your carefully laid out desktops contract. :( Now you get to start Firefox in the bottom desktop instead of desktop two, where it belongs! What are you supposed to do, start all 20 apps again and get them all the way you want, every time you need to restart Firefox or Thunderbird? REALLY?

I believe there's an extension designed specifically for this kind of behavior. It's available in the GNOME Shell Extensions repository (auto-move-windows).

E. It is obvious and understandable that GNOME 3 is getting a lot of development right now. But it is VERY frustrating to users when significant changes are made to the GNOME configuration data bases and config files. You may carefully set up back ground and theme choices to have your entire desktop fail to load because of an incompatibility with an updated GNOME preference. Lets please settle on configuration choices before final release, pretty please?

Change is expected; this is like upgrading from Windows XP to Vista. Some things are bound to break or get changed. If you find a bug, report it :)

A. All users may really not want the exact same things showing on the top tool bar. On a smart phone we have limited space, but even there users have choices. On GNOME # desktops everyone has a long, boring, and almost empty tool bar. (and it won't hise! Oh wait, I already said that) Why?

It's designed to reduce distractions and be minimal (so it'll fit well on a netbook as well as a Desktop, etc.). Most other things you'd need are in the "message tray" in the bottom-right, which only shows up when you ask for it by moving your mouse to the corner.

B. You cannot, and MUST not assume that all users will read a howto web site, or take a class on Gnome 3 before trying to shut down their personal system. That is the only way to learn how to do it properly. (Hold the ATL key down while in your personal menu to see Logout change to Shutdown, and press Shutdown to see Reboot ...) Sad ... Other things like running and app from the desktop/window manager, need training before it can even be guessed at. (ALT F2) Just a bit arbitrary, don't you think? "Hey we need to allow a command input somehow. Lets just stick it on ALT F2, that's not used yet is it?"

3. New features, or features that have not been done before or

I knew violent video games were entertaining, but I didn't realize that they were taking development time away from Empathy http://live.gnome.org/Empathy. We need things like Empathy to communicate effectively.

You can even put videos or code into them which will be executed

Only in viewers that support them (Adobe reader). Seriously, FF could reuse a ton of evince code and be close to done very quickly.

Using gconf to set a default size in certain versions of GNOME Terminal is broken

I'd say "using gconf to set a default size in certain versions of GNOME Terminal would be a crock even if it weren't broken"; the moral equivalent in Mac OS X would be requiring that you use the defaults command, or the plist editor if you want a GUI, to set the default terminal size in Terminal.app.

but looking at the gnome-terminal 2.33.90 shows a "Use custom default terminal size" (yeah I know that page talks about Ubuntu but the option was there in a Fedora 15 Alpha live CD too). gnome-terminal 2.30 and peering at gnome-terminal's git suggests the option would have gone in around 2.31.

It looks as if they broke it while fixing another bug, and finally got around to putting it back. I don't remember the ability to set it ever being broken in Terminal.app (the UI for it changed when they did a rewrite). Unfortunately, I haven't yet freed up enough disk space to add an Ubuntu 10 VM on my Mac to my other N VMs.

But hey - Slashdot ain't a bug tracker so here might not have been the best place to ask (even if you did work at NetApp)... :)

I was really just snarking about the CLI-in-the-GUI on a non-OS X desktop environment.

You'll need gnome-terminal 2.31.1 or above for search in gnome-terminal.

Speaking of gnome-terminal, how the fuck do you set the default window size? In Terminal.app, you just resize and Shell -> Use Settings As Default.

Using gconf to set a default size in certain versions of GNOME Terminal is broken but looking at the gnome-terminal 2.33.90 shows a "Use custom default terminal size" (yeah I know that page talks about Ubuntu but the option was there in a Fedora 15 Alpha live CD too). gnome-terminal 2.30 and peering at gnome-terminal's git suggests the option would have gone in around 2.31.

But hey - Slashdot ain't a bug tracker so here might not have been the best place to ask (even if you did work at NetApp)... :)

I do understand all to well what you asking for, and you'd think that it would be a fairly commonly found need, but apparently it's slim to none of anyone creating an all-in-one media manager. I too have a pretty large media collection consisting over about 1.5 TB of video, 80 GB of music, 30 GB of pictures, 28 GB of books, and other misc media. How to keep any sanity with it all has proven to be tasking.

While I'd love to know if you do find a good solution for it all, maybe some of the better solutions I've found will help you out or point you in the right direction. All of the following are open source Linux solutions that are pretty commonly found. I use Gallery to manage all my photos and even my self shot video, which is a pretty powerful and easy to install web based system. Couldn't really ask much more for organizing, managing, and making your collection available from anywhere - but still protected if so desired.

For my movie collection the best thing I found was Griffith, which is far from perfect or ideal, but is still young and they are making great strides with it's development. You can use one of a pretty long list of sources, which automatically grabs the majority of any movie details, downloads the poster and whatnot, but more importantly makes the information cross-reference friendly. So you can search for movies by director, or actor, or key grip if you want. Nice too that it imports and exports, although not in an ideal format.

The finally for music I kind of jump around between Clementine, Banshee, and Rhythmbox. All three are excellent players that handle a wide range of searching and playing ease, as well as recommending similar styles, genre, downloading covers and lyrics, etc. One key thing I absolutely have to have it mapping to my "extra" keys, which all three do. The Erognomic 4000 keyboard by Microsoft is about the only thing I've really liked that came from Microsoft, and I love it - even though way over priced. LOL

Oh if there were only a way to smash these together. Maybe if I find some spare time I'll start on a project doing just that, although "extra" time is tricky to come by these days...months... well last few years. *sigh*

You want something that allows you to search upon semantic data, for example for authors, title or other content.

I use Tracker for that, and it works fine.

I don't know how well this would actually work, but it would be nice to develop a web frontend using tools like glade or QtDesigner rather than what I do now with Haml and jQuery.

Then you want aspx with Visual Studio.

Firefox 4 might not work, but generally yes: http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/16/yo-dawg/

Or using traditional application development tools to build a web app?

I like the Web, but I have to admit, GUI toolkits tend to be quite a bit better. I don't know how well this would actually work, but it would be nice to develop a web frontend using tools like glade or QtDesigner rather than what I do now with Haml and jQuery.

I'm very skeptical, though -- there are ways the Web is currently better than many desktop apps. Even ignoring issues like bandwidth and performance, would this give me an app which properly supports things like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and the back button? Is it just drawing to canvas, or does it take advantage of native stuff?

From the video, the answer seems to be "no, and it's just drawing to canvas." If that's the case, I take back everything I just said, and I hope this is never deliberately used to build a web app. Still a cool idea, though.