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Considering how Dell feels about other operating systems other than Windows, I'd say its in their culture.

So I imagined this? [kde.org]

It's not listed on the KDE Language Bindings page, so I assume that the work is either not complete or not going anywhere.

KControl->Regional & Accessability->Keyboard Shortcuts. Go to town.

That lets you redefine common keystroks, not all of them, just as I said.

Right-click on the input field. Choose from a wide variety of ways to autocomplete, including a keyboard navigatable drop-down.

Which does not include normal ol' bash-style tab completion, which is what I asked for.

I say many, many Gnome dev's complaining about how crappy the File selector dialogue was in 1.x and even 2.0. As a result, there are many "standard" gnome apps (whatever that means) that coded up their own and thus *don't* get the benefit of any changes. That's what happens when your base infrastructure does not measure up.

Yes, some people didn't like it because it wasn't like Windows. I cut my teeth on the Mac OS, and don't have a problem with it. Furthermore, please name a few of these "standard" gnome apps that "coded up their own" open/save dialogs, because I certainly don't remember any.

The file dialogue box is not a KPart, please try and keep up.

Sorry -- you're right. He mentioned them in close proximity.

To parrot your particluar "style" of argument: "read: stagnant, inflexible, and one of the most complained about parts of earlier gnome releases"

He bitched that it hadn't changed, and I pointed out that it had. If that's your idea of "stagnant", I'm sorry. There's yet another version in the works.

Glade is a way to *build* an interface, not a way to make sure that the resulting interface is consistent with other Gnome apps. I'm starting to doubt your ability to read and comprehend.

And it has standard high-level GNOME widgets, like the GNOME Window, which *does* make for consistency.

It's dead simple to run KDE with kwin, many people prefer windowmaker and kde.

That's funny. An ex-roommate gave windowmaker up because of compatibility problems.

The fact that the language it's coded in affects your choice appalls me, but that's neither here nor there.

I don't give a rat's ass about the language it's coded in. I care about whether I can extend the goddamn thing to make things work *exactly* the way I like. For example, I like my thumb button to raise, focus, and start doing a drag on a given window, not passing an event through. AfterStep lets me hack up somethign vaguely correct. Sawfish lets me do it right. I like Window-Arrows to move me from viewport to viewport. I like using *viewports*, which means windows can lap from edge to edge. I like Window-Shift-Arrows to move me from viewport to viewport, keeping to raised window sticky. I like Window-Right-clicking a window to pop up a menu to let me screw with the window, and Window-Enter to remove the window frame and maximize (or restore) the window. Kwin doesn't let me have exactly this environment, so to me it's not good. I don't believe metacity does either. Sawfish does.

Odd, I didn't see him complaining about Nautilus's lack of web browsing, as much as pumping up konq's ability to have multiple panes with multiple different views, built in previews, customizability, etc. Could you please restrict yourself to attacking what he wrote, not what you are projecting on him?

I had to *guess* what features he meant, given that he did no more than allude to "missing features" through the whole damn article without specifying what he meant.

kfm *evolved* into konq, the only point that they even threw out major pieces of the code was during the transition to kparts.

So they salvaged some code.

kwin is a direct descendant of the original window manager.

I don't use kwin, but I know one person that uses KDE, and that doesn't seem to be his take.

KMail, the same.

Last I heard, it was getting thrown out in favor of KNode.

This was addressed already in another response, but basically, you can't name a major app that hasn't been ported, because there aren't any.

There are precisely two KDE apps I use or care about. licq and kcheat. Half of those are not ported.

Furthermore, most of the major GNOME stuff has (gasp) been ported to GTK/GNOME 2. Yes, it takes a bit. There was also a transition time for the major KDE apps. I didn't see the KDE people saying "what a mess we have" when KDE was in transition, but the fact that sodipodi is gtk1 and gimp is gtk2 *at the moment* seems to give them a wonderfully smug feeling.

I'm sorry, you'll have to be more specific. What are you refering to here?

He said that GNOME has had multiple panels. GNOME 1 came out, then GNOME 2 came out. They were *not* competing, though I guess one panel was made with gtk1-based widgets, and the other with gtk2-based widgets.

He was right in every instance where he made a definitive statement,

He made a hell of a lot of misleading ones.

told his bias upfront (*everyone* has bias, but now you *know* his), was more knowledgeable than you appear to be,

Because he likes KDE?

You, on the other hand....

Me? What about me? I wrote an article pointing out flaws in his article. I reacted to all this. You don't see *me* posting articles to LinuxWorld entitled "KDE 3.1 Sucks A Lot" or similar, as he did with GNOME 2.2.

Plenty of alternate language-bindings have emerged for Qt and KDE, so nobody is limited to writing in C++.

Quoting KDE's site:

The level of functionality provided by the bindings vary, from those that only allow you to access a small subset of KDE to bindings that almost rival C++ native code in scope.

Vary? Almost rival? What they aren't coming out and saying is that KDE doesn't have any real interop standard, so wrappers have to be separately written and maintained for each language. Therefore they'll always lag behind to some degree, and you only get complete access from one obsolete, brittle, painfully stupid language, and the chance that KDE apps in decent languages will be able to interop with each other (not just the wrapped portions of the framework) is just about zero.

>if QT closes the source etc, won't the community always have the last GPL'd version, still free?

Actully, if TrollTech makes QT closed source, or stops developing QT, the last open source version of QT will be released under a BSD style license.

See http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p hp for more information.

So I imagined this?

Read "I can't reconfigure any keybinding in any app, as GNOME lets me do, due to the fact that KDE's approach is less flexible."

KControl->Regional & Accessability->Keyboard Shortcuts. Go to town.

*I* use the keyboard to move around the system. I want good tab completion (including partial). GTK provides this.

Right-click on the input field. Choose from a wide variety of ways to autocomplete, including a keyboard navigatable drop-down.

Umm....gee, you mean *exactly like the GNOME file selector*? Read as "I read KDE developer propaganda, but have *no* idea how GNOME works."

I say many, many Gnome dev's complaining about how crappy the File selector dialogue was in 1.x and even 2.0. As a result, there are many "standard" gnome apps (whatever that means) that coded up their own and thus *don't* get the benefit of any changes. That's what happens when your base infrastructure does not measure up.

One of the nicest things about KParts is how easy it is to use from a programmer's perspective. *Every* toolkit I can think of has a easy-to-use standard open/save dialog. The Mac had it back in '84, for chrissake. Has this guy ever written a line of software?

The file dialogue box is not a KPart, please try and keep up.

Yeah, *there's* a good way to ensure consistency. Keep changing the fucking file-picker each minor release. It was changed in the last major release. Just because KDE can't keep a single consistent interface doesn't mean that GNOME should fall to the same problems.

To parrot your particluar "style" of argument: "read: stagnant, inflexible, and one of the most complained about parts of earlier gnome releases"

What is this guy, *stupid*? All the higher-level GNOME widgets (see glade) are precisely consistent. That's what they're *there* for.

Glade is a way to *build* an interface, not a way to make sure that the resulting interface is consistent with other Gnome apps. I'm starting to doubt your ability to read and comprehend.

That's funny. I'm using sawfish as we speak. Perhaps that's because *GNOME* doesn't suffer from WM compatibility problems out the ass. The change was made because most users don't code in Lisp. The ones who *do*, like me, install sawfish. Not *that* complicated, except evidently for this guy. Also, if he doesn't like the simpler metacity WM, why the hell does he like the *ass simple* KDE window manager?

It's dead simple to run KDE with kwin, many people prefer windowmaker and kde. The fact that the language it's coded in affects your choice appalls me, but that's neither here nor there. And what, exactly, does KWin lack that makes it "ass simple"? I.e., what can your window manager do in Gnome that kwin + KDE can't do?

I.E. it is not also a web browser. No shit, friend. Some of us don't consider the pinnacle of a desktop to be cloning a dumb decision that was made by Microsoft *completely* for political convenience.

Odd, I didn't see him complaining about Nautilus's lack of web browsing, as much as pumping up konq's ability to have multiple panes with multiple different views, built in previews, customizability, etc. Could you please restrict yourself to attacking what he wrote, not what you are projecting on him?

Of course, KDE did *exactly* the same thing over its major releases, but apparently that doesn't count.

kfm *evolved* into konq, the only point that they even threw out major pieces of the code was during the transition to kparts. kwin is a direct descendant of the original window manager. KMail, the same. Konsole, the same. I could keep going... And his point is that Gnome has a very "oops we screwed up lets start again from scratch" mentality, that is not nearly as prevelant in KDE. The only thing even close that I can think of, is the current discussion on if and how to replace arts for kde4.

Tell me when the *KDE* application base isn't spread out over KDE 1, 2, and 3. I still can't find a newer version of Kcheat, buddy.

This was addressed already in another response, but basically, you can't name a major app that hasn't been ported, because there aren't any.

Read as "KDE sucks to code for in anything but C++ and reasonably supports only *one* file manager, WM, etc"

I use apps and code in PyKDE, it does not suck. There is *nothing* in KDE to keep you from running nautilus or kruiser or endeavor or.... Same with the window manager. As long as the window manager supports the *standard*, they'll work with KDE. On the other hand, there are major benefits to be gained by running the standard ones. Why (or how?) should that be different?

And where the hell did he pull multiple panels from? Just figured that he could toss a couple lies in there to flesh things out?

I'm sorry, you'll have to be more specific. What are you refering to here?

In conclusion, this is a pretty pathetic article. The author was wrong, showed bias, wasn't knowledgeable about what he was critiquing, and occasionally pulled stuff straight from his ass.

He was right in every instance where he made a definitive statement, told his bias upfront (*everyone* has bias, but now you *know* his), was more knowledgeable than you appear to be, and left his ass alone. You, on the other hand....

slashdot.org
newsforge.com
theregister.co.uk
my university's daily newspaper (no link!)
fark.com
the smirking chimp
dr. fun
the daily vault (although i review there once in a while)
google news
daily rotten
lwn.net
crackmonkey archives
the dot
kde-look.org
corona's coming attractions
snopes' update page
doc's weblog

And I think that's about it for a daily basis.

Various sources show Apple's market share to deviate between
2.8% market share and
and 10%

Now, let us analyze these numbers in order to form an educated opinion on the matter.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/01/19.1.sh tml tells us that Apple shipped
roughly 1.5 million computers. Let us realistically look at this number.
Assume
that 1.5 million computers were shipped to 1.5 million unique customers, so there are
at least 1.5 million Apple customers for the year 2002.

The truth is, the way technical progress is going, most customers upgrade their computers
at least twice a year, so now we only have 500,000 unique customers. However, if you
spend some time on the apple use groups, you will realize that out of 7000 people registered
in those groups, four out of five users only pretend to be Apple users for the coolness factor.
So, applying the same logic, gives us 100,000 true Apple users out of 500,000. The number of shipped
computers does not reflect the simple reality, that about 20% of all bought computers are
returned back to the company, so that makes 80,000 unique customers left. The people who buy
Apple computers and actually use them is even lower. Only about 70% of all bought computers are
put to some real use, which leaves us with 56000 customers. Out of 56000 50% are constantly stoned,
you can confirm this with the Switch testimonials from the Apple site, just look at their faces,
listen to what they have to say.... Ellen Feis, need I say more?
28000 sober users is still a
large number, Apple should be proud of the numbers of their true followers. Of-course, you have to
take into account that about a third of all Apple computers are sold outside of the USA, which
makes it impossible to say anything reliable about the customers outside of the country, so lets just
discard these, and this leaves us with a healthy 20000 customer user base. About half of all
computers are connected to the web, which makes them the true computer users (the rest are superficial
and do not deserve our time) so 10000 still sound pretty darn good for a company named after a fruit.

About 10% of all Apple users leave in Texas and 10% in Utah, and since we do not consider these
people to be civilized enough to use anything more complicated than a toaster, let's only focus on
the true, sober 8000 power users. Out of these 8000 customers about 20% has switched to Microsoft
products after success that MS displayed with their innovative and pattented UnSwitch compain.
So
we still have 6400 users. In general, Apple users to be very vocal in expressing their opinions, which
puts their already fragile health in strenuous conditions, such that they seem to have a
disproportionaly high number of heart attacks and strokes when compared to the general population.
So, out of the surviving 400 users (which is still a great user base and a market share) 50% are
female, and seriously, seriously, can females be considered computer users? I mean they must do
something with the computers they bought, probably most females bought their Apples as gifts and
decoration items.
Out of the remaining 200 men, US-Statistics Office reports, 120 were charged with
criminal offences of varying gravity, 40 were found to be linked to Al-Qaeda and a group of 12 were
last seen four months ago going North.
28 people left to account for. I personally know 20 Apple
users, out of which I consider 10 to be total A-holes, so they don't count.
18 rock-solid, head-strong
Apple followers, of-course from this number we have to exclude the blacks, the atheists, the homos,
the vegetarians.
This leaves us with 1 user. We have identified this truly great, unique individual
who, on his tremendously powerful sholders carries gigantic burden of sustaining profitability of this
money making machine, who some of us love to hate and the rest call Apple corporation.
We are here
to conduct an interview with this incredible person, with this true follower. He gratiously accepted
our interviewer. The interview took place in the house of this incredible person, the spectacular

97,000,000 dollar mansion located on the shore of the lake
Washington.
-I really like Apple, I use iMac and PowerBook daily, they never failed me. - These are the customer's words from the interview. -The only thing I don't like about the Apple computers, is that their keyboard lacks the Windows button on it, everything else is great!

Here a fair point you make is masked by the way you express it....

One quote from a gnome list:

True, but the mac used the shift key for discontinuous selection. I'll need to change ctrl to shift when I'm get around to forking Nautilus. Just one more M$ism to hunt down and kill (sigh)

... and another from google ....

My choice after I quit film school was either to be a script writer for porno flicks or a linux UI designer. And to tell you the truth, there's hardly any difference.

I'm sure you mean well, but having studied Psychology (which I have also), and read some materials makes you better informed about usability, not an expert.

Also, if you want to see the state of Linux usability improve, talking on mailing lists is fine, but there's talk and then there's action. Have you sat down and written written patches for the GNOME HIG (there are plenty of bugs against it in bugzilla, no coding needed)? Have you taken an application and gone through filing HIG bugs? Have you learnt basic coding and fixed some applications yourself?

In general, Linux usability won't improve by people debating it on Slashdot, it'll improve when people take the initiative.

At every step of the way the world of open source and free software has done everything possible to keep us out of the process.

Sorry, that's not true. Go look at the gnome usability lists. They have several professionals on board, and some of the core coders have read up on plenty of HCI material.

usability.kde.org

Hey, I just wrote KNewbieControl, especially for you:

$ kcmshell LookNFeel/{background,kwindecoration,style,colors, fonts,screensaver}

Well, I was impressed anyway.

Offtopic but...

I found this and I thought I would share with /. readers using Linux:

1000 TrueType Fonts for Linux users

I'm sure there are plenty of projects out there that use Qt. Qt has been around for a very long time, and is quite mature. This isn't something that just sprang up overnight.

SCP also has never been implemented in a browser for file transfers.

Yeah? Go fish! Does require version 3.1 though.

Gecko's Bright Future
Gecko is the engine in the current Mac OS X client release

Uhhmmm... No, it's not.

If he's got this wrong, what else has he got wrong?

why is it seen as a bad thing to ANYBODY?

Grudges. KDE is based on Qt, which wasn't Software Libre when the first version of KDE was released. (Which is why GNOME was started.)

Also, as an example, I came in on the scene only five years ago, after Trolltech made Qt GPL. Oddly enough, I'm still annoyed at theKompany, because I installed Kivio on my laptop so I could build circuit diagrams on my laptop. Come to find out, I have to buy the electronic schematics before I can use them in Kivio. Granted, they have the right to charge for extraneous material(which these extra stencils are), but I find, as a (P)oor (C)ollege (S)tudent, that free as in Beer is really, really advantageous. So I'm annoyed. I was really looking forward to built-in Python scripting, and, IMO, Dia needs work before I can use it with much comfort.

For the complete set of electronics symbols, at an average of $6 per stencil set, I'd probably be paying out $60 this week. And if I wanted any other users on my laptop to be able to use those stencils, it's another $60 per person.

And, as a final answer to your question, I gaurantee you I'll get at least one down-mod for badmouthing either GNOME or KDE office components. (Though I might not get modded at all as this is a rather old article now.)

Not having worked with .NET, I don't know the proper terminology but it's a knock-off of the default look for cross-platform .NET widgets.

So you have a bizarre czar at your bazaar?

You don't get it do you? XRandR is not vaporware! I am not saying "it should be fixed any time soon now", I am saying it WILL be fixed by the next release of XFree86. Support for XRandR WILL be included in the next release of GNOME and KDE.
Want more proof? Look here, here, here, and here.

Comments like yours are so typical: denying the entire existance of a project just because it's a work-in-progress. You're exactly like the people who said fontconfig is just talk and vapor, one day before fontconfig was suddenly released.

I hope you reported that at the KDE Bugs database, then.

That's because there's not such war. I found this explanation somewhat convincing. Not a war, at most a contained set of incidents.

• Download konstruct
  
• su to root
• tar xjvf konstruct tar.bz2
• edit gar.conf.mk and set the prefix to /opt/kde3
• cd meta/kde && make install
• Wait about an hour for it to compile
• export varibles and place in your bash profile
• be happy

• "the user don't know what a window manager is",
• "the user don't know what themes are",
• "the user don't know what a homedir is",
• "the user can't compile a kernel",
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop",
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

• "the user don't know what a window manager is",
• "the user don't know what themes are",
• "the user don't know what a homedir is",
• "the user can't compile a kernel",
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop",
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

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 for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

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 for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

Join the KDE Usability team. http://usability.kde.org/

"Gratuitous alternative desktop environment suggestion: don't let applications save user documents to 'just anywhere' like Windows does. Then, create a user-level system browser that keeps the user out of the stuff that is irrelevant to them."

Already done. You can customize the paths that Konqueror's tree view pane shows, and insert your own structure (as an admin). Of course you can still manually enter the path, but with KDE's kiosk mode you can completely restrict opening and viewing files to the home directory of the user and maybe the CDROM mount point. Everything else is none of his business.

"And don't even get me started on a standard for program installs. Currently, a Windows install can put crap in the following places:"

KDE has been doing this since v.001. The apps that are installed are sorted in categories like Network, Internet, Utilities, System, Settings, etc. Only apps that don't fit a specific category (like a CD burner frontend or a cookbook database) are in "Applications".

The infrastructure is there, now we only need distributors to use it. The current SuSE (and probably other) distributions begin to understand that a system menu with 1500 entries is not really what a new user wants, and put the most important apps on the desktop as well. (Office, Web-browser, Home directory, and a couple others)

Good on them. GNOME 1.4 was a mess, sorry, but it was. Did you actually read those usability studies? One of the participants actually laughed out loud when they saw the choices available for a clock applet: "Clock", "Another Clock", "JDBC Binary Clock", "AfterStep Clock".

4 clocks! The mind boggles. They didn't "neuter" it, they brought it back under control and introduced some sanity into it.

This is part of the reason that KDE looks like crap under RedHat -- since all the cool stuff was taken out of Gnome, and RedHat wanted Gnome and KDE to look very similar, guess what happened to all the KDE features... *poof* gone.

That's nonsense. Name me features that were removed. No, making the default browser Mozilla instead of Konqueror is not "removing features", as far as the end user is concerned, it's adding them.

It really seems like KDE is doing the right thing..

Right with regards to what? Don't get me wrong, KDE is doing a fine job in providing a featureful desktop, but loading up on the features and preferences is not the right way to go for most users if you ask me. See the new improved and cleaned up control center? What, pray tell, is the difference between:

"Theme Manager", "Style", "Icons", "Colors", and "Window Decorations".

OK, so the last 3 are fairly obvious, but what do the other two do then? I've used KDE dammit, and I can't even remember. I think one of them is buttons/controls theme, but I don't really recall, and it's hardly obvious is it.

1: Yes! In other words, have something that works for overwrite always work consistently. Then paste-current-selection is welcome gravy--but not otherwise. And it's still far from true of current distros even in their default state.

It's not an issue of the distribution, it's an issue of the applications and of the underlying toolkit, etc.. If application X doesn't have cut/copy/paste operations, it's probably because the developer didn't bother implementng it or the widget they're using doesn't support it.

The KDE User Interface Guidelines suggest in the predefined shortcuts section, and the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines suggest in the standard application shortcut keys section, that Ctrl+C be used for "copy", Ctrl+X be used for "cut", and Ctrl+V be used for "paste"; however, I don't know whether they suggest that those operations exist in the first place.

They also don't suggest what to do in those (probably rare) cases where using those keys for those purposes wouldn't necessarily be the best idea. I'd vote for a right-mouse-button menu that offers Cut, Copy, and Paste; I'm not sure why Microsoft didn't do that in the NT 5.0^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows 2000 Command Prompt window - perhaps that's fixed in NT 5.1^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows XP.

2: For developers, yes. But for users, they could care less about such terminology.

OK, as long as "developers" includes anybody who writes documentation - and anybody who tells their friends how to use the system, etc..

I.e., the users would care about the terminology if it confused them, for example if it let them to think that selecting text on the screen automatically caused it to be copied to the clipboard, so that if they used Ctrl+V the stuff they selected, rather than the stuff they last copied with Ctrl+C or cut with Ctrl+X, would be pasted, and so that they thought that selecting stuff automatically discarded what they'd copied to the clipboard in favor of the new stuff.

1: Yes! In other words, have something that works for overwrite always work consistently. Then paste-current-selection is welcome gravy--but not otherwise. And it's still far from true of current distros even in their default state.

It's not an issue of the distribution, it's an issue of the applications and of the underlying toolkit, etc.. If application X doesn't have cut/copy/paste operations, it's probably because the developer didn't bother implementng it or the widget they're using doesn't support it.

The KDE User Interface Guidelines suggest in the predefined shortcuts section, and the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines suggest in the standard application shortcut keys section, that Ctrl+C be used for "copy", Ctrl+X be used for "cut", and Ctrl+V be used for "paste"; however, I don't know whether they suggest that those operations exist in the first place.

They also don't suggest what to do in those (probably rare) cases where using those keys for those purposes wouldn't necessarily be the best idea. I'd vote for a right-mouse-button menu that offers Cut, Copy, and Paste; I'm not sure why Microsoft didn't do that in the NT 5.0^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows 2000 Command Prompt window - perhaps that's fixed in NT 5.1^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows XP.

2: For developers, yes. But for users, they could care less about such terminology.

OK, as long as "developers" includes anybody who writes documentation - and anybody who tells their friends how to use the system, etc..

I.e., the users would care about the terminology if it confused them, for example if it let them to think that selecting text on the screen automatically caused it to be copied to the clipboard, so that if they used Ctrl+V the stuff they selected, rather than the stuff they last copied with Ctrl+C or cut with Ctrl+X, would be pasted, and so that they thought that selecting stuff automatically discarded what they'd copied to the clipboard in favor of the new stuff.

In addition to providing the best web browser for Mac users, one of the goals of Safari is to provide a fast and efficient HTML rendering engine for Mac application developers. Apple is actively preparing a Safari SDK that will be available later this year.

In other words, all good things come to those who wait, so be patient! :)

I landed the new table code from the KHTML trunk in WebCore today. Meanwhile Lars is working on a new CSS parser on the KHTML trunk that we'll be taking back into Safari once it's baked a bit longer.

So, onto something more positive: what's the state of SVG in KDE?

As far as I know early stages. Check out the KSVG project, they are about to release ksvg 0.1.

I assume that KDE already has or is working on SVG too. It's a logical step. Heck, they *could* just use this lib if they don't already have one.

KDE has KSVG.
It's pretty advanced too and supports scripting.

Comeon, havn't you seem KDE3.1 or Gnome Or OS X , Nice big fat ICONS with frilly bits on the side, even though there an inch and a half square you still can't work out what there ment to represent.

Think I'm joking?
KDE 3.1
Gnome
Mac OS X (couldn't find non-quicktime screen shorts!

ohh and this mac[dot]com possibly the worst designed website in the world.... Nothing's hot so you have to move the mouse randomly around the screen looking for an address poping up in the status bar....
Backup == Umbrella?
Well done, top marks.

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 for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

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 for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

I just discovered Konstruct with the KDE 3.1 release and I'm very impressed. It's a collection of Makefiles that allow you to use these two commands to install KDE 3.1:

cd meta/kde
make install

That's it. It downloads, checksums, extracts, compiles, and installs everything in the right order. I set it to running (installed a libpcre-dev package when it complained) and let it go overnight. When I woke up in the morning I logged out and logged back in and bam, I was using KDE 3.1. Very slick.

I was worried that since I had KDE 3.0 installed from packages (RPM's from Mandrake 9) that it would have trouble getting everything installed and working smoothly from sources, but I didn't have to do anything.

There are other subdirectories that let you do the same thing for koffice, quanta, and several other parts of the new release.

http://konsole.kde.org/konstruct/

So Iinstall KDE instead

Kalzium and Katomic are two useful kemistry programs, which will help blow up this shit called gnome.

Gnome 2.0, WTF were they thinking?

Get a proper desktop enviorment!

Ahhhh those horrible buttons and icons , the KDE team should have picked a cleaner default configuration, colours, buttons and window decoration..
Gah! I agree 100%.

I've had a couple of quirky tab issues, but nothing too bad.
If by "quirks" you mean "bugs" then *please* report it at bugs.kde.org.

From the FAQ
Here

Is the German government sponsoring/supporting the project?

To be very precise the project is _not_ "funded", "supported" or "sponsored" by the German Government. This would missrepresent that fact that the Kroupware project is a regular commercial business contract after we've won the tender to deliver a solution for the groupware needs of the BSI (compare answer 1.1). The participating companies organise the open development of this Free Software aiming to create the best technical result for the BSI regarding the contract.

What do I do with the two computers I already have? Or my laptop for that matter?

You could donate them to a good cause. You said that you like to support what you believe in, so why not support KDE (if you like that kinda thing)? I'm sure there are other worthy causes as well. Perhaps a local school could use them as servers?

If all else fails, you can email me, and I'll give you my address. I'm always willing to take in lost hardware.

-Jon

You can check out the merges the KDE folks have made to CVS from code apple supplied with Safari here

Why does konqueror have to use something different?

WTF is Enterprise-Class Print Management supposed to mean? Is it a big ship that moves print jobs around in a network?

;-)

goto KDE on FreeBSD. He makes a comment that they are getting it ready for the ports. I've been cvsuping the ports every 5 minutes. :)

You mean like this?

> Is there a site which explains the basics like qt/kde and how to smoothly upgrade ?

There is a pretty nice KDE requirements page here. It tells you what you need to install for 3.1 and what is recommended. After that, in order, install arts, kdelibs, kdebase, and you should have a functional KDE desktop. Then the other packages can be installed pretty much in any order.

It'll take quite a while (fetches and builds everything from source), but it is just a single make command to build everything, so you can set it off and walk away.

Got a build running now, will let you know how well it goes. Halfway through kdebase, been running for a couple of hours on a 1GHz machine.

I just installed kde 3.1, looks great, feels great, yet one feature missing from kmail that I've been waiting for the longest time: filtering with imap mailboxes. It would be so nice to have this feature, without the need to switch to a different imap server, that supports filtering. here's the bug thread: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40647

A quick scan through the new features is almost like reading about the new features introduced in a previous version of Windows.

I don't see that at all.

• Internet Explorer doesn't have a download manager.
• Windows doesn't have anything even close to quanta.
• Windows doesn't come with a large selection of games or educational tools.
• Windows doesn't come with an advanced editor like kate.
• Internet Explorer doesn't have tabbed browsing.
• Explorer doesn't transparently browse remote filesystems over ssh.
• Explorer doesn't let you edit meta-data in things like jpeg files.
• Windows still doesn't have support for multiple desktops
• Windows still doesn't have a taskbar as functional as KDE's
• Windows still doesn't have decent scripting of gui applications.

It seems to me that I use virtually all of these features on a regular basis. Yes, some of them have been done before. Yes, a lot of the features are available via third party software in Windows. But this doesn't mean that KDE is copying Windows. It means that people using KDE and people using Windows need a lot of the same features.

There have been a number of interoperability improvements, for instance palm and exchange compatibility, but this isn't the same as copying windows. It simply means that KDE is trying to be as compatible with your other systems as possible.

There is a feature guide that details a lot of this.