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Core Developers Discuss The Future Of GNOME
Jon writes: "George Lebl and Maciej Stachowiak, GNOME core developers, recently attended the Australia Linux Hacker's conference, Linux.conf.au. Check out the article LinuxWorld Australia is running based on their talk at the conference. It looks at the future of GNOME and other interesting tidbits. Also, check out this link to see summaries of other talks - including Alan Cox's '
Classified Progress Report and Briefing.'" The GNOME folks indicate that Nautilus could be the default file manager as soon as next month :)
Now the issue is multimedia support - once again, Gnome will come up to speed somewhere in the two year lag range. Its interesting that I note that most uber-smart unix geeks I know are just throwing in the towel and running an SSH client from windows into their BSD boxes. Why? Because they're tired of seeing "plugin not suported" when they try to do anything interesting on the web.
Yes, using c for an object oriented coding is kind of f*cked up. That's why (at least I think that's why) the GNOME dudes are developing Inti, a c++ application development platform that has a gtk-based GUI toolkit that's supposed to make writing consistent GUI apps pretty easy. I suspect that the moment it gets real stable, it'll supplant a lot of the Gtk C coding being done right now.
So, does this mean that future versions of GNOME could actually work better and be easily removeable, or is that too much to ask?
I am really looking forward to stuff using the X Render extension (anyone have any examples of anyone using it? Docs on how to use them? I so want real transparent terminals...)...
The RENDER extension is definitely being used, by Qt. KDE's CVS version of Qt now includes patches to make it do font rendering. The great thing is that this is all at a very low level, so it's completely transparent to the application programmer. All of my KDE applications have well-kerned, well-hinted, fully anti-aliased proportional fonts. The same is possible with gtk+; in fact I'd heard that someone had it working at one point.
As far as docs, I don't believe there is much right now. There is an incomplete Xft manual page for the library dealing with the font stuff (basically renders fonts in truetype and feeds them to X using the render extension). There is also probably likely to be something at the render mailing list.
Real transparent terminals...as I understand it, that requires a seperate extension. Render creates the option of alpha blending, but it takes something else to do it on the window level, rather than on top of an opaque window.
With a nod to the existing reply, I'll add that if you must use an OO language, use the bindings. I for one use GtkAda all the time, and bindings exist for other OO languages as well.
> And the other thing is speed. Lord good gravy gnome is slow.
Speaking of GTK+ rather than GNOME per se,
- it is counterintuitive: I would expect to have local control over the theme, and
- it is inefficient: performance is horrible when you try to push all that graphics down the pipe.
IMO, the #1 priority for GTK+ (and for GNOME) should be to remodel their system on the way X behaves.--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Correct me if I'm wrong, but... Windows doesn't pregenerate thumbnails, so it *also* has to load the full image and then scale it down for the thumbnail. This should incur pretty much the same lage than loading an image viewing program. Unless, of course, the image viewing program is very heavyweight, but it's your choice which one you use.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
GTK-- available at gtkmm.sourceforge.net. It's a C++ version of GTK+. 'nuff said.
=)
-Andy
Notice how "Organises my files" is not one of the things that people are excited about when it comes to (almost any) file manager. No, they get excited about the themes, or the HTML engine, or the integrated AIM client with full support for teledildonics.
Personally i am getting just a little fed up with all of these do-it-all applications. I want a file manager that manages my files, a web browser that browses the web, and an ftp client that sends and recieves files over FTP. I do not want them all in the same damn application!
Have software developers gone nuts? What happened to the Unix pholosophy of lots of small tools that can be pluged together? Why is it that as soon as the developers get hold of a GUI they go mental and start layering IPC protocols on top of each other, integrating everything into one huge application that does it all, and basically forget that these tools are supposed to be there to do a job, and do it well? I don't need and HTML engine in my file manager, I use a web browser for that. All the HTML component does is add bloat (Even if it's not loaded, the application still needs code to support it), and uses my memory. This seems to apply more to Open Source software than it does to commercial, although Microsoft is also guilty of this in many ways too.
Please, for Jebus' sake, can we get back to small, lightweight tools, and stop integrating everything?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Isn't that the filemanagers have some way to go, or that silly apps tell me KPACKAGE NEEDS TO BE RUN AS ROOT! rather than asking me for the password, or that one is more or less favoured by closed source developers, that Ximian installer force installs all its packages, or that one is more or less free than the other.
Its that they both ignore each other. Half my apps don't work properly. The standardized drag and drop doesn't work across in any distribution with the latest GNOME and KDE, dragging from Konqueror to the GNOME desktop doesn't work. Neither does any other cross app drag and drop.
* Drag and drop is broken
* I have 2 sets of mime types
* My KDE panel applets won't launch in the GNOME panel, and vice versa
* When I add an application the the kpanel, it doesn't appear on the foot menu, and vice versa
* KDE and GNOME don't even include apps from each other on their panels
* Childish KDE developers write a GNOME theme importer which calls GNOME `legacy' and childish Eazel developers make Eazel services showcase any app for any toolkit, as long as it isn't KDE and QT.
* QT and GTK are themed using different engines, with no reason why.
Thisn isn't competition. This is insanity, artifically partitioning all my apps. Neither desktop will win. No OS uses a single partition.
Imagine a Windows user clicking Start to reveal `MFC applications' `VCL applications' etc. End users don't give a fuck about toolkits and never have. Why is the KDE team writing KPhotoSuite? Why shouldn't KWord work really well with the GIMP?
Windows uses more than one toolkit. It just does it well. For God's sake, stop partitioning my desktop. Write a combined style guide for GTK and QT based apps. Make sure both toolkits use the same theming engine, and have a similar range of widgets aviable.
And for God's sake, stop using your brilliant minds to hurt each other and combine them to actually make Linux a useable desktop.
I'll have hope the first time a Linux developer actually writes a software installer and doesn't call it `gnorpm'.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
While I love GNOME's user interface (Up-From menus, auto-hide menus that don't hide just because a window pops up and wants the focus, customizeability, etc) I don't like how monstorous it is. I have a 750MHz Athlon with a 7200RPM Hard drive... GNOME only takes a couple seconds to startup on my system, but that's beside the point. It is a large download, it handles simple tasks the hard way, and it's not nearly as good as it should be.
As much as I like GNOME, it needs a fresh code-base that is simple and elegant. First get the panel working, then the icons, then the backgound, filemanager (a small.simple,easy filemanager like MacOS7's) and just some minor things! GNOME should be small tight code, it really doesn't need to do a tiny fraction of what it does. Everything is about having one program you want to run and needing 20 libraries to run it.
Mod me down for ranting if you must, but any desktop should feel like GNOME to a user, but it's code should do only what it needs to. A new GTK which has only what it needs, and everything should go right on top of that, no other middlemen, no other libraries should go into it. Small tight simple code... themes should be an afterthough, as should be everything else that is a nicety not a necessary feature. The GNOME trash can is a great example of how simple their desktop should work. There's an easy and simple way to do everything.
Sure thing, I doubt I'll ever run Nautilus on my Pentium 150 Laptop ( which I hope to keep for the next four years ). This is why if some Gnome developer would come out with a light-weight Gnome-compliant file manager (heck, also a slightly improved version of GMC would do it) it will have my grazie forever ( well, maybe until I change the Laptop ).
Ciao
----
FB
Many of the improvements are the result of user experiences with GNOME. "The application launch feedback program is designed to indicate that a program is in the process of being loaded," said Stachowiak. "We've had complaints about people clicking on the Netscape launcher 10 to 15 times before the program appears on the screen."
Well, if that's not taking user feedback to heart, I don't know what is. It takes a long time to load apps and users get impatient, so lets make a loading box to sooth them (instead of putting some work into making apps load faster).
Why does it take so damn long to load? What's going on that could possibly need 10-15 seconds? Come on, on a modern PC, that's enough time to transfer about 100 megs from a modern disk drive (or over 100 Mbit/sec ethernet), enough time to do an unimaginable number of computations, even in floating point. Only two types of things take time in the modern computing world:
- network latency, usually 20ms to 300ms
- software bloat, anywhere from 100ms to well beyond anyone's patience for software
It's refreshing to see that the gnome developers are keeping a keen eye on being lean-and-mean, NOT!Ok, maybe this message was a bit of a troll, but I'm still a bit pissed about having to upgrade the RAM on a machine where I installed Redhat 6.2. 64 megs of RAM and I was getting quite a bit of swapping running gnome with netscape, xmms, ssh, and several terminals. With this sort of attitude towards bloat and slowness, it sounds like gnome will continue the trend of software getting slower more rapidly than hardware getting faster, just like another OS & windowing environment vendor that we're all familiar with...
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Well, I've got 50% for you: In gmc, drag a filename onto the command line, and it will paste the text for you. At least, it did it for me within the past two minutes. Sorry about opening the cmd line, though.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Linux is a kernel, not an OS nor a religion - me
You're suggestions have nothing to do with the GUI. A file dialog should look as similar as possible for 90% or apps. Why? So that there is consitancy (something that usability study after usability study shows true ... read the old Mac UI Design guide). And the filesystem is part of the OS, not the GUI. How could the GNOME or KDE projects make the Linux filesystem flat? All they can do is try and display in a nice fashion the filesystem that they are running on.
If you want to complain about drag and drop you should at least recognize that GNOME is using the xdnd protocol, KDE wrote their own. So all motif apps and xt apps should dnd with GNOME fine. Get the KDE people to work with the X standard.
... wrappers over Win32. Try using QT on windows and see what I'm talking about.
Embedding panel applets in each others panels would require using the same component model. I don't think either the GNOME or KDE people are going to switch anytime soon. And furthermore, who cares? Who actually has both panels running at the same time? And which applets exist for one but not the other (and if you want it, write, don't bitch at other people to write software for you).
The menues and mime parts are a pain.
For the themeing stuff, again, GNOME uses GTK, KDE uses QT. Why don't motif apps use GTK or QT themes? Cause they are different widget sets. This is life. And if you ever really used different widget sets under windows, you would know that there isn't a perfect blend. You're examples don't cut it either. MFC and VCL are basically the same things
I won't disagree what working together isn't a good thing, but when you different people who want different things, it isn't always possible. And 95% of end users aren't ever going to switch anyways. I personally use GNOME over KDE and I don't think there is one KDE app installed on my system. So I don't worry about it. And I think you'll find that gonna be the case more often then not.
Hey, thanks. I dunno why I didn't get that one on my own.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
I must have missed the part in the article in which the Gnome developers are 'dissin'' their own project. What I saw was a brief explanation on what was motivating improvements, and how the 1.4 was aimed at those improvements. Perhaps I am rising to a troll but as far as I can tell this was anything but an example of anyone dissin' anything.
.99p16 but I avoided X for a long time. My experience with gnome, X 4.02 (with Matrox acceleration) has made me a fast clean easy to use desktop. I doubt I will ever abandon command line, but maintaining multiple machines with X is a pleasure at this point.
The only thing I can think, is that the reader here prefers over aggrandized marketing lingo to what is generally self-effacing programmer attitude (in which we learn that programmers always say it is broken even if it isn't 'broken' so as to avoid expectations. as opposed to marketers who never say anything is broken but call bugs features.)
I personally have enjoyed gnome lately. The apps are functional and the toolkit seems to be making it easier for developers to produce some pretty professional looking apps. In combination with Debian (using apt-get) I have been able to keep up to date with gnome and easily added new apps as I heard of them. There is alot of work to go but there seems to be a lot of action. I have been continuously running Helix (Ximian) Gnome desktop for over a month and it is far more stable than any other gui I have ever used. Gimp-print outputs without flaw... And Gimp itself is a rock of stability. The Sawfish desktop is quick and very flexible. Infact running recent Gnome with nightly builds of mozilla, xemacs, eterm, gimp, gpilot, gphoto and xmms has been a pleasure.
Yes there are bugs, and I am an expert user (and thus can pretty much figure out just how I mangled everything, but given a month or two at this rate, and I think ya'll will be suprised.
I am really looking forward to stuff using the X Render extension (anyone have any examples of anyone using it? Docs on how to use them? I so want real transparent terminals...)...
As to Nautilus, well I am still a strong advocate of the command line where file management comes in. Still occasionally I call up the file manager... Certainly not the worst I have seen. Nautilus seems nice looking, and I guess it will appease folks who don't understand cp and mv, but bash with filename completion means I move damned fast when I want a file.
Anyhow,
I am not a 'normal' user with experience since Linux
d
That's rather a harsh way of saying it, but it has some truth. Microsoft Windows does have some pretty good ideas when it comes to ease of use sometimes. Being able to click on an image file and immediatly see a corresponding thumbnail is rather conveniant. This avoids a possible lag whilst waiting for the image to come up after double clicking. Maybe when 1.4 comes out, I might be able to convince some of those around me that GNU/Linux has everything they need! Mind-you this does very little for all those that prefer the command line. ;)
I haven't used Windows in over two years. Back when I did I distinctly remember that MFC and OWL (I don't know what VCL is) had different File Save dialogs. The standard toolbar icons were different. etc...
.desktop and .directory files? What about the new WM specs? What about XML emerging as a standard file format? And more that I can remember off the top of my head. And more in the works.
KDE and GNOME are voluntary projects. The people who work on them are volunteers. You can't fire them. And you are not their boss to tell them what the can or cannot do. The last thing freenix needs is a UI Police, arbitrarily setting standards and confiscating noncompliant CVS trees. That kind of thinking is antithetical to Free Software. This is a Free Market of Software. It's Laissez Faire. It's radical libertarianism that takes great pride in tar and feathering any who would set down rules. There are standards in this world, many standards,. And quite a few of them compete with each other. Just like in the real world. If you don't like this chaotic situation, and would prefer a regimented world where everyone does what they're told, then stick with Windows.
That said, the solution to your problem is easy, as long as you keep the fundamental volunteerism of Free Source in mind. If you want the KDE menu to be a part of the GNOME menu, and vice versa, go do it yourself! Or find someone who can and convince them to do it for you.
This isn't Windows. Don't expect it to be.
All I see is a standardized drag and drop that's been bandied about for a couple of years and doesn't work consistently. And symlinks in the menus.
Huh? What about standardization of
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Oh, I definitely prefer my houses to be built out of atoms. But I also prefer them to be prepackaged into objects, instead of having to install them one by one.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Has anyone pointed out that Disuss is not a word?
The problem with copy constructors/casting constructors is that you don't even know they are being called. If I use your library, and I make an assignment, I'd actually have to look at your code to see if a function call was made. If I pass something as an argument, again, I'd have to look at the code to see if a cast constructor was invoked. That is a big, big problem.
Engineering and the Ultimate
This is not true. A remote app is running on the remote computer. It has no access to your system for security reasons. Instead of being a client to the LOCAL X server, it is a client of the REMOTE X server. It does not have any access to your filesystem, and doesn't even know what your username is on your local box. It certainly would look nice, but its just not possible.
At my work, we use NFS-shared home directories, so when I run apps on other boxen, they do show up with my theme. Obviously, this is not the case with root, which is local to each machine.
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IMO gnome just doesn't have all the 'drag and drop goodness' of KDE. It just doesn't seem as integrated.
With Nautilus (and withOUT gmc, blech), I believe gnome will stand out even over Windows- If they integrate it well enough.
My vision is of Nautilus becoming the desktop environment, so that image/document viewing is seamlessly a part of the OS. And since mozilla is already loaded with Nautilus, opening a web page will be as rapid as with m$ (since gnome would be "cheating" in the same way).
Last I looked and tried GTK with Drag and Drop, it was nightmare. Unless you are a gtk/gnome monger, forget it.
And the other thing is speed. Lord good gravy gnome is slow. Its bloat with fudge added in. Waiting for hardware to get faster is not a way to make your software improve, efficiency wise.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Hmm, I have 2.2.18-RAID here, and it's happily running 2 raid-1 partitions... that box rebooted the other day due to a 2 hour long power outage (30 minute UPS) and came right back up happily.
/dev/md0. Just make absolutely sure you never boot a raw device that's a member of your mirror and everything will be OK.
Newer LILO versions are pretty good with this, so yes, even my / is on
Setting the partition type to 0xfd and letting the kernel figure out the rest is just too easy.
So, what's the problem exactly?
I'm sorry, but you can already write GTK+ programs in object oriented languages. There are bindings for c++, Python and even for Java now.
And slow? Gnome using a proper theme engine instead of Pixmap, is pretty snappy, and it definitely not worth using sentences like "Lord good gravy gnome is slow" over.
While the "Drag and Drop" argument might be valid (not all Gnome applications are created with enough concern over D&D), the rest of this comment is a troll. It does not deserve "insightful".
The foot menu is way cooler than the K menu
I am testing nautilus, and it's great, except when you remotely access the computer. Over my school's network (from engineering building to dorm), it is soooooo slooooow.
Something really funny happened today. I was using Netscape 6 under GNOME (like I still am) to play Yahoo Chess (java). One of the five people I played wanted to talk. I announced that I was using Linux. I said, are you using windows? It was pretty obvious. He said yes, why? Then I talked about the advantages of Linux. I distracted him! After the very next move I got his queen. Ha ha freaknasty!!!!
Linux is cooler than sliced bread.
When, oh when is this little piece of received wisdom/ FUD/ whatever going to die?! Joe User doesn't give a flying hoot what his desktop looks like, so long as he gets his job done. Remember, 99% of office workers don't choose the OS and UI they work on; that decision is made by fuck-knuckled IT middle management types who believe everything they read in Microsoftie ZD rags and whose only criteria for buying software is how many tick marks are under that product's column in the executive summary feature matrix chartjunk that inevitably appears in these publications.
IMHO, the developers of KDE and GNOME are rip-off merchants too freakin' lazy to do their own usability and whenever they're taken to task on it, they respond with lame excuses like `the market wants it to look like Windows' or `Microsoft spent a gazillion dollars last year on usability testing, so flat toolbars/ office assistants/ Outlook bars/ HTML filemanagers/ Dumb UI Idiom of the Month must be The Right Thing'.
As to what `the market' wants, just what is your market these days, Mr. GNOME, Mr. KDE? The very real and very visible Linux community who have renounced Windows and all its works and pomps or some imaginary `Joe User' market segment that you plan to steal out of Microsoft's clutches with a product that looks exactly what they have already and spend copious amounts of time bitching about? Get real.
This is either a troll, or an emotional outburst devoid of any rationality. I'll assume the latter.
...
I have 2 sets of mime types
My KDE panel applets won't launch in the GNOME panel, and vice versa
This sort of interoperability is being worked on even now as we speak. Don't expect overnight perfection. If you look at the history of KDE and GNOME, you'll find that the developers desire this compatibility and have been slowly but surely implementing it.
When I add an application the the kpanel, it doesn't appear on the foot menu, and vice versa
It's one thing for the main root menus of the respective desktops to recognize the menus of the other, and display them. I expect this interoperability very soon. But you're talking about *panels* here. Switching between panels is going to be a rare occurance. And the process of adding an item to a panel takes approximately 8.5 seconds.
QT and GTK are themed using different engines, with no reason why.
Plenty of reason why, if you would just use your head. Both of these toolkits are distinct from each other. They are developed by distinct groups of people. And their theming engines have distinct goals. QT themes are more powerful than GTK themes in some ways, and GTK themes are more powerful than Qt themes in others. I for one do not want a theme engine based on the lowest common denominator.
Imagine a Windows user clicking Start to reveal `MFC applications' `VCL applications' etc.
Apples and oranges. My KDE menu most certainly does NOT distinguish between Motif, Qt, Fox, FLTK and GTK applications. KDE and GNOME are desktops, they are not widget toolkits. To make the proper analogy, imagine a Windows user clicking the main menu to reveal "Windows applications", "DOS applications", "BeOS applications", "Mac applications",
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If Linux could do this, it truly would be a world-class OS. But it might require the kernel coders to get out of their 70s system designers' rut and start thinking about some tough new problems whose solution isn't immediately apparent.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
when you select view as thumbnails in winme/2k (theres a way to do it in 98 useing folder properties) it displays all the imgs win supports as thumbnails, and creates a thumbnail file thumbs.db, even on a large set of very large files it only took seconds to do on a k6-2 500, and even less time on my new k7 -900
it's the past plural of dis, which means to belittle or make fun of.
example: I disuss your mom because she was a ho.
Thank-You!
Personally, I don't think most people like a Windows environment; I don't think they're bothered either way about their OS or UI or whatever, so long as it doesn't interfere egregiously with their real work. I don't think your average office worker engages at that sort of level with their computer. They don't "like" Windows any more than they "like" Xerox photocopiers or they "like" Canon fax machines.
My point is: there are a lot of ease-of-use issues with modern UIs that companies are either unwilling or unable to do anything about, issues that are more or less "invisible" to people who use computers a lot because, hey, "that's the way computers work". But these issues cause new and casual users no end of confusion. Take the distinction between a document in memory vs. a document on disk and the whole business of "saving" things as an example. This is totally non-intuitive to a casual user and is really a relic from the days when RAM and disk space were scarce. "Saving" a document is the interface equivalent of having to do your own memory allocation in C; there are times when you need that kind of power, but there's awk and Perl and a score of other languages for the times when you don't need or want to think about low-level shit like that.
What about so-called "common dialogs" like File Open? I've seen plenty of holy wars on the "best" design for such beasts. But common dialogs are a hack that go back to the first MacOS when the Mac was single-tasking and apps therefore had to have a miniature version of the shell hacked into them. Common file dialogs are a throwback of the GUI Stone Age. If the GNOME and KDE developers took one second out to really look at them, they'd see them for the vestigial growths that they are. Instead they've got one eye on Redmond and the other eye on Cupertino and these anachronisms persist to plague users.
Or how about hierarchical filesystems? Casual users find them very confusing, especially if some rogue program warps them from their accustomed area into some ill-explored cranny of the directory tree. Hackers and scientific types find it easy to move around hierarchical classification systems; mere mortals are apt to have trouble with them. Nor is a tree structure the ideal way of representing all types of information. Why do you think the Web took off and gopher died? Partly because the Web is hyperlinked but gopher was strictly hierarchical.
What I'm saying is, there's plenty of avenues of exploration out there that could make some for truly user-friendly interfaces. We could really wipe the floor with Windows and MacOS if we just broke out of the imitative mindset.
OTOH, I thought I'd mention it, since the Linux community has so much more bandwidth than me, but so few new ideas.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
GNOME and Enlightenment are not at all the same. Lovely troll. Have a nice day.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
When the core developers of GNOME are dissin' their own project, it's time to switch to KDE.
"Linux currently satisfies all the needs of the real world"
That's it, guys. No more.
It is now up to the Linux masses to change the real world so that we have new kernels to compile.
Is it a co-incidence that there is a new president in USA, renewed fighting in Mid-east? Seems a good time to launch a new world. All we need now is a catchy slogan...
Brave GNU World?
Just reminding people (probably dropped off the /. front page by now) there's another article about this great conference here.
Congrats Aussies, who knew we could put on such a great conference?
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Um, why do you say that?
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read it. A seminal work. Absolutely indispensible if you're designing a 128K monochrome single-tasking computer with 400K floppy disk storage. Things have moved on.
[grits teeth, tears hair] Listen to yourself for a moment. The Linux filesystem is flat! It's just long chains of bits encoded in the magnetic domains on the surface of a ferrite-coated disc. It all depends on your representation. A dinky tree control with cute folder icons is no more "real" than any other representation of your filesystem. We could make the filesystem look like a level out of Quake if we wanted to.
See, you're exhibiting precisely the sort of behaviour I complained about in my previous post. You're folding your arms and saying, `we can't do that because no-one has ever done it that way before'. It's a good thing that there are people out there who don't listen to people like you or I'd be sending this by smoke signal...
I know KDE and GNOME are mostly volunteer projects, even ifn the majority of the core developers are being paid for their work. I'm not going to fire them, or flaming them, I'm providing feedback into what I think is a serious issue irn order to to achieve their stated goal of an easy to use Linux desktop.
Ah, the typical Slashdot `DIY' response. I can't do it myself. Nor do I have any intention of doing so. If Linux is to ever be accepted by mom and pop, which Eazel, Ximian, the GNOME and KDE foudnations / leugues, The Kompany, etc. all set out to to do, they will have to accept the plain reality of life that mom and pop don't know C and never will.
Being a little more educated than mom and pop, I still contribute by doing documentation for various projects. But no, I won't be helping GNOME or KDE beyond giving feedback in the near future, as I don't gave the time.
Or find someone who can and convince them to do it for you
Um, what do do you think this is?
Image thumbnails built into the file manager may be nice idea for some, but for (many) others, it is not worth the performance hit or the code bloat. It is good to have snazzy extras as options, which if not enabled will never be loaded, and thus will not take up system resources or introduce potential security problems (not to say that this particular thing does either of these, but there are examples...) GNOME's primary goals should be simplicity and elegance, not (potentially poorly implemented) extra features which slow down users.
Firstly, you haven't used Windows in more than 2 years if the common dialogues look different in VCL apps.
The last thing freenix needs is a UI Police, arbitrarily setting standards and confiscating noncompliant CVS trees.
Um, no. This is what destroyed closed source Unix, and pretty much everyone acknowledges this is what will destroy just about everything else. Chaos is not a part of Free software development. We have CVS bringing order to revisioning, we have the LSB bringing standards to distriobutions, and we have the FHS bringing standards to file locations.
That kind of thinking is antithetical to Free Software. This is a Free Market of Software. It's Laissez Faire. It's radical libertarianism that
takes great pride in tar and feathering any who would set down rules.
No, they don't. They get on ther mailing list for the standard amnd flame away, giving their input into the standard, so we can settle on something.
There are standards in this world, many standards,. And quite a few of them compete with each other. Just like in the real world.
Sorry, but its plaionly clear lack of consistent UIs hurt the free desktops more than their competition with each other enhances it. Both KDE and GNOME, and QT / GTK, will both exist. If anything, I'm encouraging the competition - for both players to realize they won't win out over each other, and the must accept the fact people won't always use their respective widget sets. I'm not saying the competition must stop, I'm sayign the current way of competing, which hard the UI experience and halves a users avliable apps, is hurting Linux as a desktop.
If you don't like this chaotic situation, and would prefer a regimented world where everyone does what they're told, then stick with Windows.
Er, no. I wouldn't prefer a regimented world. I'd prefer standards theres a difference. And as for sticking with Windows? Fuck you.
Nautilus could be the default file manager
Doesn't Nautilus require Mozilla libs?
More bloat, yea.
Not any closer to pulling me away from WindowMaker.
Uh, dude, this is 2001 - those articles are from 1999, and so are like 13 and 17 months old, respectively ...
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
Two things:
1) The HTML engine isn't in your file manager - it calls out to mozilla
2) Most of the components are separated
3) Yes, most developers went nuts a long time ago
4) Nautilus looks like it will do a great job of managing files. I especially like the "tag" concept - you can tag files with various markings, and then search by those markings - very nice.
Integration is good and bad. We'll see how well it works.
Engineering and the Ultimate
"...all the needs of the real world"
Yeah, right. And you'll never need more than 640K.
I really don't know why open source developers get caught in this trap. For corporations, the reason seems clear to me. Most major software houses seem to have long term plan of making a profit by conquering the world ;), but I don't know why open source developers do it.
I'm happy that the company I work for is only trying to take over managing your geographic data, and not your whole desktop.
Two is not equal to three, not even for very large values of two.
This is either a troll, or an emotional outburst devoid of any rationality. I'll assume the latter.
...
Sorry. I've spent a week talking with Eazel employees and KDE developers at the conference and the outlook so far seems pretty bleak.
"I have 2 sets of mime types
My KDE panel applets won't launch in the GNOME panel, and vice versa"
This sort of interoperability is being worked on even now as we speak. Don't expect overnight perfection.
Really? According to Marciej and George, who I asked personally about this item at their talk at Linux.conf.au, while the mime types issue *may* be being worked on some time in the future, the Panel applet interoperability is something we *might* expect for GNOME 2, but not something the GNOME team are really working on.
If you look at the history of KDE and GNOME, you'll find that the developers desire this compatibility and have been slowly but surely implementing it.
Really? All I see is a standardized drag and drop that's been bandied about for a couple of years and doesn't work consistently. And symlinks in the menus.
"When I add an application the the kpanel, it doesn't appear on the foot menu, and vice versa
It's one thing for the main root menus of the respective desktops to recognize the menus of the other, and display them. I expect this interoperability very soon.
Again, the KDE and GNOME developers I asked about these things generally put it on the very bottom of their things to do list.
But you're talking about *panels* here. Switching between panels is going to be a rare occurance. And the process of adding an item to a panel takes approximately 8.5 seconds.
I meant menus. Sorry.
"QT and GTK are themed using different engines, with no reason why."
Plenty of reason why, if you would just use your head.
But I won't `use my head', I refuse to, because neither will any end user. End users don't give a damn about toolkits. They just want to know why they have to learn to save files in Gimp and how to save files in Kword, because they're `different'.
Both of these toolkits are distinct from each other. They are developed by distinct groups of people.
Really? So are MFC and VCL. They just work together seamlessly...
And their theming engines have distinct goals. QT themes are more powerful than GTK themes in some ways, and GTK themes are more powerful than Qt themes in others.
Then take the best bits and combine them. Sorry, any inherent powerfulness in themes [not the biggest demand from most end users] should be much less on a UI developers list of priorities than consistency of user interface. AFAIK all non-Unix based User Interface engineers acknowledge this, with guides to UI consistency available for MacOS, Windows, and Be.
I for one do not want a theme engine based on the lowest common denominator.
Well, I'm sorrry, every other UI designer does, and useability testing reveals consistency works.
"Imagine a Windows user clicking Start to reveal `MFC applications' `VCL applications' etc."
Apples and oranges. My KDE menu most certainly does NOT distinguish between Motif, Qt, Fox, FLTK and GTK applications. KDE and GNOME are desktops , they are not widget toolkits.
There are KDE and GNOME specific widgets, but I was talking about QT and GTK [without stating it, I thought it would be obvious].
To make the proper analogy, imagine a Windows user clicking the main menu to reveal "Windows applications", "DOS applications", "BeOS applications", "Mac applications",
Um, no. If I was a troll, I would say something a little more blunt here. But I won't. Those QT, GTK, and Motif apps are alll native Linux binaries. I think it is you who is comparing apples and oranges. I love Linux, and use it as my primary platform. But if we never acknowledge its deficiencies, it won't improve.
I think you have your heart in the right place by defending a good OS against criticism. But it is due criticism based on widely accepted wisdom of UI design which if heeded will improve the platform, IMHO.
every month? or every 6 months?
"...who knew we could put on such a great conference?"
I DID!
Also, a (possible) new control centre for Gnome 2.0? Sounds interesting, anybody got anymore information on this?
Why yes, all my base are belong to you.
How did you guess?
Just what I needed...
A file manager that plays mp3's, browses the web, zooms in, displays the actual text of files within the icon, contains the nuclear launch codes, has support for themes, is very configurable....
HEY!!! Did that just say what I think I said? Yup, I guess these open source blokes have finaly gone a bit too far with this "World Domination" thing.
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/21/161722 6&mode=thread
It boggles my mind that they have people with story posting power who don't read the frontpage. Do they really understand what is going on? Where they hired because of their great skills? Or are these story moderators friends and family, I'll equipped to post? Thoughts?
"...all the needs of the real world"
:-)
I guess those people expect a working raid subsystem (one that actually works after rebooting) must be living in some kind of alternate reality
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
There is another article about this conference <A href http://www.linuxtoday.com.au/r/article/jsp/sid/238 936> here</A> at Linuxtoday.com.au
On behalf of desideria's family, I would like to announce some sad news. It appears that several minutes ago he had a stroke; the result of something the doctors called an "oxymoronic inquiry stack overflow failure". We aren't entirely sure what that means, but they said shock therapy might help. We'll keep you posted.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Narrator: "In their ongoing battle to slashdot sites out of existance, CmdrTaco and his minions, Jamie and Timothy find themselves in a dire predicament."
CT: "That linux.com.au site seems to be holding up very well. Any ideas men?" Jamie: "This business is getting harder and harder. How can we see our power manifested unless we can slashdot some sites. Don't they know who they are dealing with?"
CT: "Obviously not. Our only solution is to post the link again." Timothy: "Wait commander, won't the hordes of lemmings who read the page more than once a day realize that you posted the same story twice? They won't beleive it."
CT: "You're right, a bit too obvious. Why don't YOU post the story."
Jamie: "Excellent idea, then, when they are slashdoted, I can post a story claiming they were CENSORED."
Narrator: "Meanwhile, far from the geek compound in homes and NOC's across the world, geeks and wannabe geeks experience a strong sense of deja-vu, and wonder at the effects gallons of Jolt has injested while sitting a climate controlled room. The ones who realize what is going on on the other hand are a bit quicker in the future to minimize slashdot when their PHB's walk by."
I guess if the good discussion has already happened, we should just have some fun.
I'm mainly a KDE user but use Gnome apps sometimes. One thing that really annoys me about Gnome is how they clutter a lot of hidden directories in your home directory. Contrast this with KDE which has a .kde directory and a .kderc file. I don't see why a better hierarchy can't be setup in Gnome also so my home directory stays pretty clean. The reason it is annoying is that if my enable "view hidden files" in the home directory, the config files for a bazillion gnome apps make it hard to browse through.
i think his point was, that a lot of gnome users don't use kde apps, not that most users use gnome.
"Ein ueberzeugter Mensch ist ein groesserer Feind der Wahrheit als ein Luegner."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
This is very true. Where I work, we switched from a text-based system to a GUI system, and EVERYTHING SLOWED DOWN. Our customer service people HATED it. It took infinitely longer to point and click than to just type. These aren't computer specialist, these are regular customer service/order entry people. They are just trying to enter orders, and with point and click it took forever. I'm not trying to knock off GUIs altogether (they work well for many things), but it is true that not everything requires one, and they don't necessarily make things easier.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Does Linux still have trouble scaling to more than 4 processors? I'm not trying to bait flamage, but I remember an article here a while back about how win2k blew linux away on SMP performance
0 1 - just my two bits
I recently tried out Nautilus, and replaced GMC with it -- and it ROCKED! The problem was that the packages it came with would not work with evolution, which is by far more important. Until those get synchronized and I don't have errors composing mail, i'm not going back to nautilus -- but nautilus is defintely what's missing from linux/gnome.
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Go to the foot menu.
Browse a submenu.
Do you notice you really have to be SO PRECISE to get into the menu without it closing just because you're one pixel off (namely, above) the menu?
Can the submenus be adjusted higher so that they REALLY ALIGNS with the menu items that bring up the submenus?