Slashdot Mirror

One answer:

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web
browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the
small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup
performance as you can see reflected in the data at
http://www.apple.com/safari/ .

Quoted from here.

Good Software is not about more features! Good Software is about doing it safely, reliably and securely. Good software is about doing it well, not doing more.

Adding more features will only make the software worse. More bloat, less easy to understand and use, needs more hardware, and the documentation usually lags behind as well.

Writing software is an art form. It is an exercise in restraint and thinking before you do it, not in gluttony or adding more crap to already crappy software. The world is full of bad software with hundreds of little understood and under-documented features. I'd rather have small, well-documented and reliable software, thank you very much.

The email between the Safari team and the KHTML and KJS developers helps explain why they did this. Links to the email correspondence can be found at this KDE News posting.

Basically, the codebase for Konqueror and KHTML is very small and easy to work with. They had also done a lot of work with KJS prior to working on Safari. They did in fact make some changes to make the renderer more like Gecko, in addition to a whole lot of performance and bug fixes. It also looks like they put in support for Netscape-style plug-ins (or something) but I don't think that is part of KHTML.

There is no benefit from picking a product that is cross platform, since that is not the goal of Safari. In fact, that would add more cruft and complexity to the code when Apple developers have to go through it. I don't at all see how Mozilla has better industry support. Who is supporting it? Apple would have to support a Safari based on Mozilla anyway since it becomes an Apple product. Not sure what you mean by add-ons. If you mean plug-ins, it looks like they already have Netscape-style plug-in support (although I could be wrong). All those toolbar add-ons and weird things that put post-its on your web page are only for IE as far as I know.

> Why kHTML? Is it faster than Gecko, or easier to hook into, or something?

Yes, and Yes, and also the fact that it's one-tenth the size of Gecko (and even more if you consider other Moz-related APIs such as xul.)

Keep in mind that the Apple engineers who made Safari are no stranger to Gecko; the Safari team includes the author of Chimera and XBL (David
Hyatt), and one of the guys who originally took Mozilla open sourced (Don Melton). Gecko just didn't fit into what they wanted. In terms of other (non-Gecko) open sourced engines, there really isn't any better one besides khtml.

There's a nice article on kde.org that links to a communication between Don Melton (Apple Safari Engineering Manager) and Dirk Mueller. It also has links to Apple's changelog for their development of Safari.

I notice that on the Safari page, Apple are claiming it supports XHTML. khtml does not support xhtml properly - does anybody know if this is an addition by Apple, or merely a mistake (XHTML support involves more than simply chucking it through a tag soup parser)?

Specifically, does it throw a fatal error on this testcase (it should if it supports XHTML)?

I'm curious how they're boasting such impressive page load speeds compared to the other browsers

Oh that's easy, considering the amount of code involved. You see, one of the main arguments in favour of KHTML was its small size - like 140.000 lines of code. I'm guessing, but that's probably a fifth of the Gecko codebase. Read it up in this mail to the kfm-devel mailing list.

Looks like they even got some former Mozilla people working on it... :-)

From: Don Melton @apple.com
Subject: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 11:31:10 -0800

Hi,

I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact information. Perhaps you already recognize some of those names. Back
in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source. David Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but
also the inventor of XBL. Darin Adler is the former lead of the Nautilus file manager. Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup
performance as you can see reflected in the data at http://www.apple.com/safari/ .

How did we do it? As you know, KJS is very portable and independent. The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my
team prepared called JavaScriptCore. But because KHTML requires other components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ
(and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components. KHTML and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore. We've also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance improvements to KHTML and KJS.

Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half the code in Safari, are being released as open source today. They should be available at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore / very soon. Also, we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and
additions to KHTML and KJS. I hope the detailed list in that email will help you understand what we've done a little better. We'd also
like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list. Please advise us on which one to use.

We look forward to your comments. We'd also like to speak to you and we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this purpose.

Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.

Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

--
Don Melton
Safari Engineering Manager
Apple Computer

From: Dirk Mueller @kde.org
Subject: Re: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
To: Don Melton @apple.com
[......]
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:18:19 +0100

On Die, 07 Jan 2003, Don Melton wrote:

> I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser
> built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
> making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my
> development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
> excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to
> open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back
> to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue
> among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I hope so too. I'm deeply impressed by your detailed changelog and by
the changes. A few of the changes have already happened in "our" developing
version and many of them were on our TODOs. For example just about this
weekend I was working on improving the kjs garbage collector and now I read
that you apparently already fixed the issues I had with it. Seems to me like
a huge christmas gift. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Especially I'd like to hope that we could set up a mailing list where we
could exchange ideas, patches and bug reports. Also a common testsuite for
regressions would be nice and probably help us a lot in developing KHTML and
KJS further. Ideally the plan should be, and I hope you agree, to use a
common codebase for the backend.

> Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

We've forwarded it to kfm-devel @kde.org.

From: Don Melton @apple.com
Subject: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 11:31:10 -0800

Hi,

I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact information. Perhaps you already recognize some of those names. Back
in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source. David Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but
also the inventor of XBL. Darin Adler is the former lead of the Nautilus file manager. Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup
performance as you can see reflected in the data at http://www.apple.com/safari/ .

How did we do it? As you know, KJS is very portable and independent. The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my
team prepared called JavaScriptCore. But because KHTML requires other components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ
(and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components. KHTML and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore. We've also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance improvements to KHTML and KJS.

Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half the code in Safari, are being released as open source today. They should be available at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore / very soon. Also, we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and
additions to KHTML and KJS. I hope the detailed list in that email will help you understand what we've done a little better. We'd also
like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list. Please advise us on which one to use.

We look forward to your comments. We'd also like to speak to you and we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this purpose.

Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.

Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

--
Don Melton
Safari Engineering Manager
Apple Computer

From: Dirk Mueller @kde.org
Subject: Re: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
To: Don Melton @apple.com
[......]
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:18:19 +0100

On Die, 07 Jan 2003, Don Melton wrote:

> I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser
> built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
> making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my
> development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
> excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to
> open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back
> to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue
> among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I hope so too. I'm deeply impressed by your detailed changelog and by
the changes. A few of the changes have already happened in "our" developing
version and many of them were on our TODOs. For example just about this
weekend I was working on improving the kjs garbage collector and now I read
that you apparently already fixed the issues I had with it. Seems to me like
a huge christmas gift. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Especially I'd like to hope that we could set up a mailing list where we
could exchange ideas, patches and bug reports. Also a common testsuite for
regressions would be nice and probably help us a lot in developing KHTML and
KJS further. Ideally the plan should be, and I hope you agree, to use a
common codebase for the backend.

> Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

We've forwarded it to kfm-devel @kde.org.

A log of the changes Apple has made to KHTML was just posted to a KDE mailing list: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=10419691231632 6&w=2

well, erm.. here it is..

Here's why.

Quote:
"When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus."

I too cant believe they used KHTML. I think they use Gecko.

nope .

A new Apple web brower based on KHTML(!) name Safari. Allegedly the fastest Mac web browser in existence. Open source to boot, they are releasing their updated source to the community. Check out the QuickTime movie where they bookmark Slashdot! The new 17" PowerBook G4 - made with aluminum, only 1 inch thick. "AlBook" doesn't have the same ring to it though. A new 12" PowerBook G4which is the smallest "full-featured" laptop ever. And a new presentation app named Keynote which looks like a serious PowerPoint competitor. Built specifically for his Steveness. Pretty exciting MacWorld when all is said and done.

I'm an advocate of Linux on the desktop, too. I can't wait to see it. But from the perspective of an *average user*, I'm still convinced that it isn't ready. We *need* the average user to feel *more* comfortable working at a Linux desktop than a Windows machine, especially since he's gonna have to deal with a Windows world trying to suck him back into its comfortable embrace... at least until we've finished the takeover of the desktop.

This is good. I cannot corroborate it using a pre-compiled distro. Why am I using a pre-compiled distro? Because that's what Joe Sixpack is gonna be using. More optimization is needed, and more carefully made binaries are required from the major distros; especially Red Hat in the current #1 off-the-shelf position.

I think part of the problem is that we need developers to try actually using the pre-compiled binaries of their works which end up being shipped with the Red Hats and the Mandrakes of the world.

Most of them have formatting problems, cannot handle inline images (properly or at all). Table support from Word 2000 is lacking. I know this is a serious pain in the ass to reverse engineer, but it merely frustrates end-users who are already gonna be pissed off about having to learn something new when their company moves to Linux.

You're not Joe Sixpack. "How come it says I cannot save my file in /bin? Huh? I didn't log in as root, whoever that is." Screams of RTFM or "Get a life" would abound on mailing lists or IRC, whereas a 1-900-DRONE would calmly answer, explain, and the user would be supported. Sure, the example I cited is an operating system issue instead of an application issue, but it's a problem every bit as simple, stupid and pervasive.

KMail is great, the only programming complaint I've had with it is that it silently dies if it runs out of disk space. But the spellchecker is right out of 1995. We have to match feature-for-feature to be adopted. You're not going to sell Linux/KDE (or Linux/Gnome or OpenBSD/AfterStep or whatever) by screaming from the hilltops, "ALL THE FEATURES OF WINDOWS 3.1!" in a Windows XP world.

Evolution was too slow to be usable on my PIII-500. That's insane. It's just an e-mail client, not a genome sequencer, for Gawd's sake!

It's a good start, yes.

But the biggest problem is that if a feature which an Excel user would take for granted is lacking, it's a negative perception. Most users will already resist the change to something new and "strange".

We've grown up with the idea of piping the output from one program to another; it's the Unix way. But it's *not* acceptable on a desktop system. You don't do your spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc, then save it in some format that Gnumeric handles so that you can use the point-and-click data analysis tools, then open int up in OpenOffice again. If you're paying a secretary $20/hr to do this, it doesn't take more that a few months to make back what you would have spent to install Windows on the machine.

I don't know how well Evolution handles e-mail. My main machine is over the hill, but easily captures video from my TV card in real-time. I find it hard to believe that responding to e-mail in Evolution should require such a fast computer as to be unusable on a machine which will capture NTSC video at 29.97FPS with 16 bit stereo sound with 0 dropped frames... (unless I open Evolution while I'm capturing video).

Mozilla is great. It's fast, attractive, and it works well. The only problems I have with it are fault tolerance (delete your JRE without telling Mozilla, then try to use a website infected with applets; it crashes with no warning), lack of ability to send a mailto: link to anything other than Mozilla's mail client, and the inability to tailor the browser string to be whatever I want without recompiling (at least one website I *have* to use will ban you if your browser doesn't say "MSIE" in its string).

For sure. This is a good step. But part of the problem is with the overall look of it. Red Hat 7.3, for example, with probably the biggest marketing department in the Linux world, comes with a highly saturated eye-straining blue background.

Contrast this to the relatively neutral backgrounds of Windows and Mac environments, and it looks more like we're trying to sell a product than design something useful out of the box.

Even XP's default meadow is less eye-straining.

If some Joe Sixpacks can't figure out how to move the Windows taskbar to someplace they like better, do you really think they'll change the backgrounds and skins to something less displeasing? The desktop's defaults must be *neutral*, *inoffensive* and *non-eyestrain-inducing* out of the box with *every* distribution.

Who do you call when you need support with OpenOffice or xine? I haven't tried either; I've got the luxury of being able to pursue the source code.

I do know that at one of my former employers - a huge defense contractor staffed by engineers and computer scientists - we spent a lot of our IT budget on calls to Microsoft looking for support on how to create PowerPoint slides with embedded video and other dead-easy things like that.

Sucky as that may be, it's reality for lots of organizations. We have to address that.

Sorry. $299, according to the Microsoft website, for Windows XP Professional, in single units, as a standalone operating system instead of an upgrade.

It remains that the purchase price is a very, very small part of the total cost of ownership.

This is true, but let's stop kidding ourselves about it being ready. It's not ready for the desktop yet.

Linux has made amazing strides since its inception a mere 10 years ago. It's already a secure and stable server operating system, with mature tools for sysadmins.

But it's still at workstation space. We can take heart; it's more usable on the desktop than a $30,000 Sun workstation, but it's still not ready to supplant Windows yet.

The biggest obstacles are not the Linux kernel, or even Linux itself, of course. The obstacles are a fast, feature-filled and stable desktop metaphore (be it KDE or Gnome or whatever) with good *USER* applications readily available. (Don't even bother sending me flames telling me that vi is the greatest word processor ever made because Joe Sixpack isn't gonna even gonna figure out how to bring up the help screen.)

I can't wait to see what it's like 20 years from now.

I've been waiting 15 years to see the end of Windows.

Correct Link

Why not this one, though?

What can we look forward to this year? Off the top of my head:

• XFree 4.3 - featuring 24bit with alpha channel animated cursors, expect to see lots of cool themed cursors on the X11 theming sites. New in this release also is the R&R extension, allowing on the fly resolution switching. No, we don't have transparent windows in this release, this currently is being held back by performance issues and internal rearchitecting. Nonetheless, everybody likes eyecandy, and this release will satiate our appetites at least for now.

• GNOME2.2: Lots of goodies in this release, including Fontilus (drag and drop font installation/preview), a Network Neighbourhood style view, more font config options (as seen in redhat8), unified theming system, startup notification (but done properly this time), and more. It also features....

• GStreamer! Now with KDE bindings too, hopefully 2003 will be the year that Linux multimedia gets started. Although still some way from 1.0, some parts of the gnome2.2 desktop will be using GStreamer. Just bear in mind if you write apps that use it - it's not API stable yet. In particular, it'll be boosted by ....

• ALSA, which sports better support for sound cards and a cleaner architecture, as well as a whole host of other cool things. If only somebody would get off their ass and write a mixer/resampler server shim between libasound and the kernel, the message "another program is using this device" could be banished forever. But as far as I know nobody has picked up the gauntlet. ALSA is of course part of .....

• Linux 2.6 which will be released sometime in June/July apparently. Some key desktop enhancements in this, including low latency and preempt, which is a step forward for desktop responsiveness. Think: it always feels like there's no CPU load. Kind of.

• KDE 3.1 (I hadn't forgotten ;) which other than being a lot more secure now, sports tabs in Konqueror, better support for freedesktop.org standards, new default (pretty) artwork, folder icons that represent the folders contents, desktop sharing built in and a whole load more

• The Gimp 1.4 - much better looking now, with revamped user interface, better text support, a vector tool, named cut/copy buffers and support for more plugin langauges.

• More usability work both in and out of the desktop efforts. Expect to see the HIG mature and lots more apps become compliant, already non-GNOME apps like Gaim and XChat are getting higified (if you try their devel versions you'll see what I mean).

• Probably lots more I've forgotten about...

Mmmm, toys :)

Yes, that's correct. Because Microsoft couldn't design a working translation scheme, you have to wait for them getting their act together until you can apply your service pack - which can take over a week.

That's probably why Microsoft doesn't want to do so many translations. If you have a good translation system, it's easy. Even one person or a small group of people can easily translate big software packages: look here but when you have to maintain 10 year old code which was written by people who either left or were assigned to other tasks or management, you have to translate every service pack and fixpack all over.

I wonder how much this Nynorsk translation will cost Microsoft ;-)

For translating KDE programs into Turkish I ( and %99.9 of other translators ) use KBabel which helps you edit GNU style *.po files.

Comments from GNOME knowledable people is also welcome--does GNOME have a similar page of statistics on translations as KDE?

:Peter

The GNOME Translation Project

KDE i18n project

Translation howto for kannada - This is a howto I wrote yesterday for people wanting to translate their language into kannada(an indian language spoken in karnataka). But the concept applies to all indian languages & other languages too to a certain extent. [OK, I confess some self interest is involved here :-)]

Actually, kannada support came first on windows XP thanks to the karnataka govt support & since MS & Adobe developed opentype fonts(must for complexity of indian languages), but thanks to the Pango team, we hope to have support before MS does. And many state govts in India are also pressurising MS to bring Win XP in their languages and already bengali,hindi & tamil(kde is fully translated into tamil.) are in the works. But, we hope to set it right, soon.

This reminds me of another heavily fragmented software community.

Who is Linux's worst enemy?

Let's face it, they stole it from Apple. When will they be forced to use their own interface? Sheesh, even free projects like KDE and Gnome have been able to come up with their own look and feel. How hard could it be for a commercial software company with full time programmers?

And when does Apple get paid reparations for this theft of look and feel? I just think that if Sun gets theirs, Apple should be able to, too.

First of all, here's a link to the story on The Dot, and Dirk Mueller's explanation. In summary, the Hackademy Audit Project discovered some bugs in KDE 3.0 some time ago, which have been fixed in 3.0.5 and 3.1RC4 (which was not released to the public). However, this also started a KDE-internal security audit, which, while not being completed yet, warranted a delay of the release. As soon as the audit is completed, a security fix release for 3.0 (3.0.6?) will hit the servers, along with patches for 2.2 and KDE 3.1. If you are interested in what exactly has been discovered, I suggest looking in the KDE mailing list archives.

First of all, here's a link to the story on The Dot, and Dirk Mueller's explanation. In summary, the Hackademy Audit Project discovered some bugs in KDE 3.0 some time ago, which have been fixed in 3.0.5 and 3.1RC4 (which was not released to the public). However, this also started a KDE-internal security audit, which, while not being completed yet, warranted a delay of the release. As soon as the audit is completed, a security fix release for 3.0 (3.0.6?) will hit the servers, along with patches for 2.2 and KDE 3.1. If you are interested in what exactly has been discovered, I suggest looking in the KDE mailing list archives.

First of all, here's a link to the story on The Dot, and Dirk Mueller's explanation. In summary, the Hackademy Audit Project discovered some bugs in KDE 3.0 some time ago, which have been fixed in 3.0.5 and 3.1RC4 (which was not released to the public). However, this also started a KDE-internal security audit, which, while not being completed yet, warranted a delay of the release. As soon as the audit is completed, a security fix release for 3.0 (3.0.6?) will hit the servers, along with patches for 2.2 and KDE 3.1. If you are interested in what exactly has been discovered, I suggest looking in the KDE mailing list archives.

Probably referring to valgrind which is nice, and is both better in some respects and worse in others (than purify).

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"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

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 attitude.

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"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

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 attitude.

Since the betas and RC are now going to be exposed to the world for longer, are the security holes going to be disclosed so that we can take some action to secure our systems that are running these pre-release builds?

I'm not going to karma whore and give you links to the holes themselves, but this is a good place to start. They disclose holes as they happen; it's open source. Systems that choose to run thes pre-release builds accept such risks anyways.

Is purify available for Linux?
Use Valgrind

What about the KDE Usability Project?.

Usability Testing of Athena User Interface
Voices from the Open Source Revolution
KDE Usability - First Steps

A few of these books grace our desktops here at work.

I'm not going to try to defend the notion that a Linux desktop has a lower TCO than a Win 2K desktop, because frankly I doubt that it does. Linux requires admins which, unlike MCSEs, aren't churned out by the dozens by your local community college.

The problem I see here is that most of these Linux vs. Windows TCO studies hinge on the idea that you are replacing a Windows 2000 desktops with a full-fledged Linux desktops, and that's the wrong way to do it.

I'd like to see a unbalanced TCO review of what the City of Largo, Florida has done. Basically, they've got 800 very cheap thin clients (230 concurrent) running X-Windows applications (KDE, etc.) off of a couple big-ass terminal servers. Very similar to the Linux Terminal Server Project, and very cool.

There are so many businesses paying $200 for Win 2K Pro and $350 for MS Office just so their employees can send email and dabble in Word or Excel. It's insane. They could be saving $550 per machine in software costs alone! Not considering the fact that the thin client hardware costs much, much less than the average desktop. And there's essentially zero administration costs on the clients. Let's see a TCO comparison on that.

I'm starting to get off-topic, but I'm excited about the project so what the hell. I'm currently doing a little in-house pilot of the same thing at my employer. I've customized the KNOPPIX bootable ISOs to basically be X-Windows thin clients. You just pop the CD in a machine, reboot, and you get a KDM login box for our terminal server. Very, very cool. Even free server licenses from Microsoft couldn't persuade me to drop this project.

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"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

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 attitude.

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"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

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 attitude.

According to the FAQ (and most people you'd ask today), KDE stands for "K Desktop Environment". However, the original Usenet post announcing the formation of the project refers to it as the "Kool Desktop Environment". A Google Groups search confirms this.

I'll never forget my first boot into the 1.x series many, many years ago.

From that day on, I never looked at a computer the same way. Whenever friends would talk about the latest cool games or case modifications, I was never really interested; what truly grabbed my attention was exploring the depths of the Linux kernel and just learning, learning, learning.

The rest is, as they say, history. I've gained a lot from using Linux, moreso than any other person or thing that I've used so far in my short life. With that being said, I decided to donate, once again, to Linux and its related movements just as a simple "Thank You" for all the time and dedication that so many, like Linus, put into the Free/Open software movement.

Here are some quick donation links:
- FSF
- Mandrake
- KDE
- Apache

Lots of information there, and access to pre-built KDE-CVS snapshots (that is, if they built correctly). They have a handy script that gets the latest built snapshot and installs it for you. Bless pkg_add(1)'s little heart. :)

Well, I for one do. This is not another desktop environment. This is a new way to do graphics on unix. No more client/server. IMHO this could be a giant leap for linux on the desktop.

The problem with programming at the lower level, like Xlib, is that it takes 2 years to get the first version of your program out. Then you move on to Xt and now it only takes only 1 year. Then you move on to Motif and it only takes you 6 months. Then you move on to Qt and it only takes 3 hours. Of course you want it to look slick so you use kdelibs.

Well, there's Python, Perl, Java, C#, Ruby, and C++ according to the KDE docs. Not bad, but pretty lame that it can't even do a single functional language, much less Objective C.

Gtk has Ada, C++, Perl, Python, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Erlang, Guile, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, Objective-Caml, Objective-Label, Pascal, PHP, Ruby, TCL, TOM, and XBase bindings.

GTK+ has a native (not a preferred) language specifically chosen because it's least-common-denominator. The Qt people evidently didn't see compatibility with less-used languages as important, so they snubbed everyone else.

Qt uses the STL.

Really? When did they lose the QString and QVector class and other ugly warts?

And it's bigger because it does a heck of a lot more than widgets-only GTK+

Which is a *bad* thing, violating the UNIX design principle of many small parts, each the best for its job. I frequently use glib even in projects that I'm not using gtk+ in -- I find it makes C a joy to use. You can't do that with Qt -- it's all or nothing. I don't want a bloody "platform" on my computer. I got my fill of that with JVMs. Qt is bloated, and far more so than gtk.

GTK+ manages with the LGPL because it is a free beer library.

Okay, I miswrote. My point has not changed -- if you want to put it that way, Qt is not a free beer library. And that's a sorry state of affairs.

The impression I got is that Qt pretty much exists to pander to ex-Windows types, who are used to coding in C++.

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"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

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 attitude.

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"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.

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 attitude.

A similar problem exists on the D-Link DI-704P router/firewall. Essentially, any http request not formated exactly as the router expects causes the router to stop handling packets for several minutes. I reported this bug to D-Link, but was told the problem does not exist, despite the fact that other people were able to recreate the problem! KDE Bug #40538 has the details as the konquer browser triggers the problem.

The problem is solved.

This post shows the K of KDE to stand for "Kool". I remember reading elsewhere that the K was used due to its proximity to the L of "Linux", therefore making the assertion that KDE is closely linked to Linux. Unfortunately, after a brief Google, I haven't managed to find it.

[Trillian] wouldn't be worth using if someone wrote a Win32 native GUI for GAIM. Too bad GAIM wasn't started on Qt...

Homework: Port Kinkatta or Kopete to Windows.

Fair number of UI changes, some good, mostly irrelevant, but it's interesting. Wonder if it's real.
well shit!! I can't believe m$ and they're dumbass code monkeys actually want to do something as far as increasing asthetics now that they have a working OS. They should've done it when they had a shitty ass unstable os and added 10000000 features and look where they could be now!!! bill gates and those dipshit microsoft fags are such cocksmokers1! they should die!