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A User's First Look at GNOME 2.0
Gentu writes: "OSNews has just published a review of the Gnome 2.0 desktop environment and its verdict is not so positive. The author feels that the new version is limited in many ways and with a UI not well designed."
Maybe it's time to become the INNOVATORS, rather than copying the Win32 line of User Interfaces, which frankly, are getting stale.
Take a look at the visual inventiveness of Mac OS X for starters. There's a GUI that's worthy of the 21st Century.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
In my personal opinion WindowMaker is the best wm, but it is still a clone. Check out this promising distro.
Wherever you go, there you are!
So does Gnome allow cut-n-paste to work consistantly between all X applications yet ?
The reviewers comments about theme management menu choices seem very sound to me. As a long time user of Linux on the desktop I often find that default menu layouts for Gnome & KDE are confusing and unintuitive.
I'm also less than keen on what I have experienced of Nautilus so far and hearing that turning it off presents a naked desktop doesn't do much for my confidence in this product.
*sigh* I guess I'll be waiting for the next release before upgrading.
A little planning goes a long way...
Some of the issues he brings up seems valid. That said, I run Gnome2 and I don't recognize many of the problems he brings up.
:)
First, for me, Gnome2 is far faster than Gnome1.4. This goes for most individual applications, as well as the desktop overall.
Lack of options: Well, yes and no. There has been a serious attempt at providing sensible defaults for a lot of stuff, and hide away rare and/or strange options into the gconf system. While some people like being able to tweak their desktops to hell and back, for many users it is just plain confusing to have as ridiculously many options everywhere as Gnome1 had. Note that for those serious about tweaking, gconf is there for your time-wasting pleasure.
Gedit: I've tried repeatedly, but I am unable to duplicate the marking thing he talks about.
Galeon has continued to work flawlessly for me, as have all other Gnome1 apps I have. he mentions that he does not have a Gnome1 installation; that may be an explanation as to why Gnome1 apps do not work...
As for 'scattered settings' - huh? I get all settings neatly in the 'Desktop Preferences' menu. That certainly includes things like xscreensaver settings and pretty much everything else he gripes about in this area. I do not have a 'Desktop theme', as he seems to have, but just the 'theme' option - as it should be.
I get the feeling there is something rather wrong with the reviewers setup; something like an incomplete install, or a mix of older and newer packages or something like it.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"Possibly this is the reason why there are not many Gnome applications yet ported to the new framework, neither the Gnome itself includes many applications or preference panels as it used to."
I'm prepared to accept that the author of this article may not have English as her or his first language, but this sentence seems to display a lack discontinuity of thought that's not confidence-inspiring for the rest of the 'review' (or opinion piece as it seems to really be)...
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
I crashed GNOME in 30 seconds...
I am a great tested of crappy code and magically can get new releases of large GUI's to barf and die usually in less than a couply minutes of testing. How do i do it? Usually by thinking of things that the programmers did not bother to test or I was suspicious of.
When I first booted a fresh version of RedHat, virgin installed with GNOME selected and running, upon first waling up to it I got the thing to crawl over and barf in 30 seconds.
how... well in this instance I wanted to see if it could do the things a Mac could do (the Mac OS has hundreds of innovative file system technologies not ever normally found in Unix-like systems). I am not referring to Mac OS X at this moment by the way. So what i did was use a mouse to select a directory in GNOME and copy it two levels down into its child descendent and the retarded thing had no recursion detection, something the MAc had since 1984.
I laughed my ass off.
Then I asked 2 people that liked GNOME why it had no way to use GNOME standard tools to change screen resolution (somehting that Windows and Mac people do easily without resorting to awkward ugly tools)... the two appologists for GNOME admitted that GNAME was not really meant to be that useful and was not finished and I should wait for GNOME 2.0
now after all this time I get to play with GNOME 2.0 and its 3 times crappier than even the semi-crappy Mac OS X, but much crappier that I had hoped.
I think Linux people cant imagine a world where computers are easy for their own genetic mothers to use, or old doctors or old lawyers. All 3 groups allegedly IQ of over 110 in this case, yet averse to command line awkward hostile OSes.
Apple is relieved that GNOME 2,0 misses the mark.
and not all the apps have been ported...
its bound to be a bit rough and buggy (and it is.. im running it atm!)
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
If you're the kind of person who decides which desktop to use based on reading a few reviews or asking your friends, then maybe this review is for you. Good luck.
If you're like me and you like try things for yourself, then you're probably already downloading it, and you probably already know that you're more different from the average person than you think, and you already know that you are constantly surprised by how much you disagree with reviews of this kind.
Seriously, I would recommend that everyone tries gnome 2.0 if you have time.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Windowmaker loads in a fraction of a second on my 300mhz uniprocessor box.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
> Maybe it's time to become the INNOVATORS,
> rather than copying the Win32 line of User
> Interfaces, which frankly, are getting stale.
How is it getting stale? Do you have any mind-blowing new ideas that counter well-established knowledge about the usefulness of GUI widgets as we know them today? Let me remind you that a good feature of a GUI is to be useful, not to be innovative.
> Take a look at the visual inventiveness of Mac
> OS X for starters. There's a GUI that's worthy
> of the 21st Century.
While the GUI of MacOS X might be "inventive", I find it extremely cumbersome to navigate, dreadfully slow, overly full of bells and whistles pointless animations, non-intuitive, obstructive et.c. In short: a real pain to use. While the animations might be funny to look at the first time, and the GUI looks very sleek, it generally reduces productivity. Most of the work devoted this GUI, is clearly meant to improve visual appearance, and not usefulness.
It appears obvious to me that people claiming the MacOS X GUI is intuitive have either not really tried it themselves, or never tried anything else. In the same manner, stating that "GNOME and KDE are more or less the same" shows that you haven't really tried both.
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
- people who managed to tear off a taskbar by accident, and could not figure out how to put it back in place,
- people who managed to switch off a taskbar by accident (this evil M$ Word
...), and could not
figure out how to switch it on again,
- countless other examples
...
Many, perhaps most, users use their PC only occasionally, are not familiar with configuration options, cannot 'fix' even the most trivial issues, and would rather need a well thought out configuration that cannot be modified by any means.Something I'd like to know is...
How well does Gnome2.0 work without Nautilus? I've never been a big fan of Nautilus and so always removed as much dependence of Nautilus as I feel safe removing from my instalations of Gnome. I've noticed that as I've updated Gnome, that Nautilus has been more and more integrated. For instance Gnome tries to get you to use nautilus to navigate to different control panels, Fortunately I was able to dig up the Gnome Control Center utility last time I updated. Anyways, with Gnome now using a new and incompatible GTK do we lose the gnome control center in favor of the not so nice Nautilus interface?
It's a shame if we have to use Nautilus. One of the reasons I liked Gnome so much was that you weren't really forced to use much of anything. You didn't have to use Sawfish(or now metacity) for your window manager and you didn't have to use GMC or Nautilus(I prefer an XTerm window for the most part)
Thanks for any light you may shed on my questions. And excuse me for being a lazy ass and not doing to much research b4 asking;-)
Steve
The usual response anyone criticises a free project - defensive indignation.
Accept it, dickhead! Learn from it! It appears obvious to me that people refusing to accept that GNOME 2.0 has problems haven't really thought about the goal of Linux on the desktop for the average user, just defending it at all costs.
Your post was as stale and boring as the "start menu".
> Accept it, dickhead! Learn from it! It appears
> obvious to me that people refusing to accept
> that GNOME 2.0 has problems haven't really
> thought about the goal of Linux on the desktop
> for the average user, just defending it at all
> costs.
Aaagh! You're driving me nuts! How can you possibly think that I like GNOME 2.0 based on the post to which you are replying? The fact is that I think GNOME is far more cumbersome than MacOS X.
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
Yeah! Lets be original, stop to copying Win32, copy MacOSX !
He didn't even know enough to hide the Sade before taking the screenshot.
Software usability and aesthetics matters. That is what keeps Apple in business and Jef Raskin on the history books.
I very much highly doubt that any free software will ever be able to have a "great" UI because the politics involved would be very large.
a stable desktop
easy to configure, out of the box solutions for multimedia
applications with fast response times
So far gnome seems to implement only the latter, while KDE scores points in the first two departments. KDE is becoming faster though. And yes, win2K (and possibly MacOSX) seems to own all these points, but is not
free, open source. as gnome and KDE are.
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." Albert Einstein Nazism and Fascism got their strength in nationalism. What is different with your arguments for using GNOME?
Reading this review of Gnome reminded me of the days (about a year and half ago now) when I was still trying to use Linux and Gnome (somtimes KDE) as a desktop machine.
Nothing coherent about the UI design, hunting around to find configuration panels, getting messages that tell the user to download this package or that package (which leads directly to Dependency Hell).
These days, I use Mac OS X. Sure, it's UI isn't perfect. And I know, it's an apples to oranges comparison, Free Software to commercial. But man, do I ever enjoy using a coherent desktop with one place to change settings (System Preferences). No fuss! No muss! I'm far more productive.
And my Linux server continues to hum away in the basement, quietly powering my website.
Life is good.
By this point, I expected about a hundred Linux jockies on here personally attacking OSNews for this.
Anyway, sounds like Gnome 2 is a lot like Gnome 1... very amateurish and lacking the 'polish' of the commercial OS's, especially where the help files are concerned. At least the fonts are better and Nautilus seems workable but from reading the review, it's nothing to write home about.
You are way off base here. I have been using linux since '93 and saw all of the great advances in Window Manager design. Going from TWM -> FVWM -> elightnment -> windowmaker each went far and away improvements to usability and features. OSX is now my favorite UNIX desktop. It takes windowmaker and nextstep to another level. Plus it is all scriptable with applescript. Applescipt is like having shellscript for GUI... very slick. As for performance every new iteration of 10.1.x releases have shown alot improvements, evem on older hardware.
#=-weo-=#
that got described accurately in the software industry. Don't use the .0 version.
The short of it is that it's still a tad beta, and still needs work. It looks gorgeous, but then again, I'm a Gnome user (KDE feels too bubbly to me, and I can't find a theme to trim it. yes I've looked on a couple of sites). it still needs to be tweaked. I'm sure the Ximian guys will have a very solid version in not too long.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I've been using Gnome-2 betas/RC1-2, and found that I must erase/rename all the standard Gnome configuration files (.gnome, .gnome2, etc.) in order to avoid problems and see the default desktop that the developers intended.
---
About time someone who actually cares about UI gave an honest review of GNOME. After all these years, it's still bloated, buggy, full of nasty dependencies and ugly (though it's improved somewhat on those last two). I use *NIX as my daily desktop OS, but it's for the power, not the GUI. I would never recommend it for a desktop machine to anyone other than advanced users, who are already doing it anyhow...
Until someone comes up with a small, integrated and well thought out GUI environment for *NIX (and no, I don't consider Aqua all of those things), I'll just have to stick with blackbox, as it pisses me off the least.
It is my opinion that with the release of KDE3 and all the hooplah, gnome developers were more rushed than ever to get this thing out the door and satisfy all those "is it ready yet, ok now is it... ok must be ready now" people. I think with the next release things will get better, lets not forget what the first official release of KDE3 was like. buggy
Rule the world. Yes the statement is a bit confusing, but one does get the meaning from it.
/. readers argue the content rather than the delivery...
As for Opinion piece, it *is* a review, where the revier gives an *opinion* of her experience with Gnome 2.0...
Please ppl, why can't
well, Hitler was Austrian. But Mexico is neither of those things. Apparantly neither is America. If people weren't so scared of little to nothing, we'd still be free.
stay away from any version of anything that ends in a X.0 (except mozilla is the exception to this rule, and execptions to rules only proove the point...
I guess I may be doing something different than you but my experiences have been fantastic. The improved UI is cleaner. The text looks great. A major theme of this release was to remove bloat, clutter, and unecessary options. Gnome 2 is far more elegant than previous versions of gnome. It's much faster on my pentium 500 than gnome 1.4. There is much improved user application consistancy. I have been running snapshots for several weeks. I have not had so much as one panel crash, and Eugenia claims to have done it several times? Is it possible this was a bad install? I'm not claiming that this release is perfect but I will say its my preferred desktop, anf that I have had wonderful experiences with stability and performance. It might also be worth noting that there are several applications not included with the main release. They just arent production quality yet, I suggest waiting for gnome 2.2 If you want all the infrastructure changes and the user visibile changes planned. The only issue I have with Gnome 2 as a whole is the removal of the menu editing, but I respect the descisions behind it. It was not ready and not of the quality the gnome2 release team was willing to endorse. But it will be. Keep in mind no product will get better without reproducing bugs, and reporting them. If you want something changed or fixed, download gnome2, test it, join the chat on irc and help make the software better. Get your feedback into the community of developers so they can make even better successive releases.
For the love of god, don't copy Mac OS X! It will inevitably be awful, ugly, make a thousand geeks cum in their pants, and annoy everyone who's actually used OS X.
For example: Check out the Mail.app tries-to-look-alike in GNUStep. Most people think that it's a reasonable clone of Mail.app from NEXTSTEP. It's not by a longshot. The thing is butt-ugly, misses all of the GUI tweaks that make the latter a sheer delight, and feels like it's going to completely give up and go away at any time. I hate most Linux GUIs. They all seem to be unacceptably fragile and have the artistic sense of an unguided tractor. I simply feel that if I click too much the program is going to crash. That's not a feeling I want in software on which I'm going to rely.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Of course I expected something like this, but some paragraphs just made me angry. I will _not_ waste my time and pick on every single misinformed statement in this article but try to keep it constructive... *counts slowly up to ten*
"smooth resizing (with medium success, I might add - when compared to MacOSX and BeOS 6-Dano's algorithms/techniques),"
Just as a sidenote, this is probably an issue of X, not Gtk. I just tried Gtk2.0 on DirectFB and that just flies. Too bad there is no real windowmanagment using Gtk on DFB yet, I would love that.
"For example, the memu panel, merely includes 3 options. Same goes for the other setting panels (when available), they lack the flexibility and number of options found in the previous version of Gnome."
You got this wrong. The main philosophy of Gnome 2 is, that less is sometimes more. The idea is to create an enjoyable user experience by default instead of letting him choose between "six equally broken ways to do it" (great quote from Havoc Pennington). That's why there are much less preferences, not because there is anything yet to be ported (preferences would be the first thing to be ported over).
Later you state that exactly this would be a good thing.
"I found this default configuration, bone-headed, at best. The panel on top only includes an 'Applications' and 'Actions' menu, then you get a huge unused space and then, at the right most side, you get the clock, and a menu which is equivelant to a chooser/finder as found on MacOS. It was a matter of time, before I deleted my bottom window list and embedded it on the main panel"
Why is this "bone-headed"? I'm sure everyone at Gnome would be happy for some reasonable arguments, so it can be changed to the better. The default makes perfect sense to me. The menu at the top left (where else), clock on the topright. In between there is enough place for your launchers and applets (not "wasted" space like you put it) and at the bottom there is the taskbar. I don't see the merits of having a taskbar "integrated" into another bar, why should this be more intuitive? Or is your argument that two panels are waisting screen estate? Some clarification would be nice.
"People will always argue that we are lucky that there is an option to do so, but the main point is, that the default configuration is what most people use. It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of users actually change (or have the right to change, in a business environment) their desktop and add/remove icons, themes or configurations. If the default configuration is not intuitive, most people will still live with it."
You just discovered the one big idea behind Gnome 2. If you think a default isn't right, provide some logical arguments please. I suggest to read the Metacity README file, it's very interesting and the same philosophy basically applies for the whole GNOME project. http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/metacity/README
"My only problem with Nautilus was the inclusion of GTKhtml 2 as the main HTML renderer. GTKHtml is still extremely buggy. Its font sizes chosen are making the webpages unreadable, while it can't browse links that have relative destination even if these links are on the same server (eg. comment.php instead of www.osnews.com/comment.php)."
That is because Nautilus is _no_ webbrowser. It's a filebrowser (just because Windows and KDE have a combined File/Webbrowser doesn't mean Gnome has to as well). And there _is_ a difference between viewing a HTML page and browsing the web. GtkHTML is fine for the beginning to view HTML pages. Later there will be a Galeon component integrated into Nautilus.
"The other important problem is the largely unfinished Help included. Only a handful of topics are discussed. A shame really. A commercial company would have never ship an OS or desktop environment with no real Help files."
And neither will Ximian.
"If this is how open source works, there would not be a chance that I would recommend any of this to my friends or family. Of course, such things prove right the people at MSNBC saying that Linux (and the rest X-based OSes) is not ready for the desktop. I am only here, to my dismay of course, to prove their conclusion right."
This is the part that made me angry. Just as with proprietory software, there is "free" (as in no cost) Free Software and commercial Free Software. When comparing commercial proprietory software to Free Software, you have to compare it to commercial Free Software of course! So you should rather look at Ximian, they are doing a fine job. So far they are mostly targeted at buisiness consumers though, because it's not really appropriate for home desktop users anyway. But it will one day and when it is, there will be a company making it "complete". To draw the conclusion from a free Gnome 2 release targeted mostly at developers to "Free Software isn't able to deliver commercial quality releases" is just plain unfair. Even comparing Free Software to commercial software is showing a complete lack of understanding because Free Software _is_ by definition commercial software because anyone is allowed to make money from it. But not everyone does. And you can't expect anything from those who don't!
I completely agree with you that Gnome 2 lacks a lot in features, etc and I guess that most Gnome developer will also agree with you. Gnome is really a new base, removing a lot of old crap and trying to make things "right". It will grow from now.
It's your best right to say that you don't want to use something that is still lacking as much as Gnome 2 does and that you wouldn't recommend it to Joy User but I'm really getting angry when I see this mindless bashing of their efforts.
Small Nit with the author:
"It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of users actually change (or have the right to change, in a business environment) their desktop and add/remove icons, themes or configurations."
What planet is this individual from? The one thing I have noticed is users seem to always change their desktops, some to awefull combinations IMHO.
You are invited to join the Berlin (soon to become Fresco) project at http://www.fresco.org/. We are going very slowly these days, but we are trying to do something new. We can do all (even more) then MacOS X can with our architecture. Of course lots of stuff is missing. We are not ready for even the most adventurous of users, but we could definitly need some developers.
Regards,
Tobias
Regards, Tobias
I too found OSX to be cumbersome, but definatly not slow, at least not on a newer machine (in this case, on my TiBook 667DVI or even my wife's G3 500 Firewire 'Pismo' Powerbook). After a couple weeks, it is definatly an easy to use OS and years ahead of Windows (PreXP) and KDE (which I use on my fBSD machine) in usability.
Just like any new OS, it takes time to learn. Unlike jump into FreeBSD, this was fairly painless and resulted in at most mild frustration.
tinfoilmedia
I will reply very briefly:
... but we'll leave that for later.
...) Actually I do not understand why a USA flag is on the moon. I think it's time for an Earth flag, but I fear I'am quite alone here.
- First, not everybody here is from the USA. I am myself spanish, and I am living in the Land of the "hatemongering people" (Germany, not Austria you *$#!), who are actually very nice and openminded.
- Although the United States tradition has a lot of things to praise, it is far from perfect. And freedom of thought is actually not so strong there. I read today about an article in which they explain how the USA forces its people into religion by its very hymn! (something which apparently is being discussed in court)
- I could talk about things like Kyoto, steel, Israel,
- America is not the USA.
Why don't we walk together instead of trying to look superior? I fear that someday we (the humankind) will meet another civilization, and we will introduce ourselves as "Hello! I am American!" (or Brasilian, or Russiam, or Chinese
Nationalism is a VERY BAD THING!
GNOME-1.4: Still hard to figure out when you first sit down on it.... I personally had trouble changing an Emacs icon to use Xemacs and ran around looking for a "property list" for it... I think you have to manually edit some text file is what someone said... I stopped using GNOME immediately.... That's no way to do a GUI IMO.
:)]. There are also a few UI issues like the Author of this article suggested but I must say that people want a snappier [speedwise] desktop and don't want the power of an industrial strength server just to run their desktop. [note: I love KDE... I have committed code to KDE... this is as objective as I get :)]
:)].
:)
KDE3.x: Slow... very slow. Too many virtual functions need to have code relocated at runtime. Luckilly This site is addressing some fundamental linking issues with C++ [among other things] on GNU tools. In fact the GNU tools are starting to be built with some of these optimizations now as was evident on my RedHat box at work. FreeBSD needs to try to do the same since its my main development platform [luckilly its a dual Athlon MP 1600 so *nothing* seems slow there
I spend most of my time on Mac OS X. The concept of being able to run the Microsoft Office Suite [which I actually don't yet on my Mac] on a Unix environment with 75% or more of my favorite tools either in place or on their way is very attractive. Let's face it nothing does DOC like Word [thank god!] and for compatibility purposes with all of my coworkers there just isn't a real substitute for everything it does. We use the revision control built into Word and other things so please don't offer Abiword, StarOffice, OpenOffice or KWord as alternatives. You can suggest till your blue in the face but you can't make my company change its stance on what tools must be used.... Its a fight not worth fighting based on my experiences with the alternatives out there. [I write a lot of stuff in LaTeX now... then I cut n' paste to Word when I have to... Time consuming and stupid yes but I don't have Word for OS X yet...
I never got around to experiencing BeOS first hand but I heard it was a thing of beauty... There has been a fair amount of talk about adding the BeOS file system to OpenDarwin's CVS but I don't think anyone has committed the time to it yet.
Advice to KDE: Please please please don't get too bloaty... [application duplication seems to be a bit of a problem there... Why does the standard source distribution have to include these things anyway?] I love IOSlaves and KParts and think they are uber-cool but the end user doesn't give a shit about any of that because it doesn't directly enhance their experience... just gives the developer a woody.
Advice to GNOME: As a developer I do not agree with C as the tool for doing Object Oriented Code... especially when the manner in which things are being wrapped up is very C++ like. GTKmm has a long way to go before it can do what Qt can last I checked so I think that if you code for GNOME and want full access you must use C [correct me if I am wrong please... its been a while and I want to be as fair as possible]. I have to agree with some of the Author's UI comments if his experience was authentic and correctly reflects the actual situation. I still think GNOME is prettier than the KDE defaults but there are very good things coming in that respect it seems from what I have been able to follow on the mailing lists. [again I am unfortunately biased due to my KDE involvement].
Advice for OS X... yes.. sometimes you just have to realize that indeed your shit can also stink. The only major boo-boo I remember was the iTunes installer clobbering some linux partitions... That was naughty but obviously not a test case for Apple 'in-house' or it would have been caught. Live and learn! I understand some people have trouble with the lookupd for OS X dropping out on them from time to time [though I haven't seen this myself yet.] but that's not really a UI comment is it? Hmm, I guess keep doing what you're doing and maybe think about allowing users to pick schemes other than Aqua or Graphite in the appearances menu. Don't rush it though... I love the quality thus far and can deal with a minimal set of choices when it keeps the UI simple and straighforward [yes I still use the single button mouse on OS X because its actually possible to do so due to a good UI design around simplicity.]
I'd invite comments and criticism if I didn't know already that I was in for it.... so go ahead and get your shot in... I don't care - its only slashdot
Dave
I use OS X as my client now
why ?
it has a port of X (windows)
and it has THE best terminal app IMHO
other things are that fonts are far nicer than anything that I could get under X even when using the sgi font server
oh and ssh is in the box (alright then a update )
regards
john jones
The major element of interface design, from my point of view, it to allow a cohesive, interated interface to all windows. My wife and I made a deliberate effort to expunge all Microsoft products from our house, mostly on ethical grounds.
We are 100% legal with no stolen software or Copyright infringement in any way, not an easy task, I am sure you will appreciate. The trick for us is to have and interface that my visually impaired wife can use easily. Our first problem was the cursor, we have an nVidia based card and it insists on using a hardware accellerated cursor and we cannot get it to go larger. I know about the "Option "SWcursor" "on"" setting, it's broken, hangs my box.
The second problem is that the cummunity points us to "screen magnifiers" which are useless because we still cannot find the cursor in the first place. On the plus side our use of KDE has allowed us to integrate Ctrl++ shortcut everywhere to enlarge the font on any window, including the same shortcut on Mozilla completes the feel.
Our abortive attempt at Gnome did not give us the same feeling of completeness as KDE, whilst the shortcuts are not as all pervasive as we would like, it is at least a step in the right direction. Gnome, for us, has some way to go.
However, the good news is, we know that every few months the rules change and something new appears, sometimes the purpose of a journey is not to arrive.
Man, if I could mod this one up I would. Can't imagin a world where their mothers could use linux, that says it all right there. To bring Linux to the desktop, they would have to move to a new OS, can't be lemmings.
Yes, I use Linux. Mandrake 8.2 currently as well as FreeBSD at home with OSX and WinXP.
Now, this one should be modded down.
tinfoilmedia
GUI, stable, easy to configure, fast response times?
/.
I don't think you have to expect many combinations of more than half of those items in linux in the near future. The further toward the right, the more difficult they seem to become.
Windows 2000 comes closer (not XP, that's too much idiot-oriented - the only positive change I found in XP so far is a shorter boot time, and the negative changes outweigh that far too much).
I'm not going to comment on OsX for a simple reason: I try to resist the temptation to discredit things I don't know anything about with arguments based on the air under my skull.
I wish more people would do that on
Because it is on some points totally wrong. For instance, the speed-issue and the "no central place for configuration issue". Everyone else reports a speed-increase, unlike this reviewer.
The central place is just wrong. The dialogs the reviewers seem to suggest is kept "all over the place" is in reality in ONE place. No, there is no unified control-panel GUI for GNOME 2.0, like gnomecc in GNOME 1.x or the KDE-panel. This was changed because almost everyone hated the unified dialog, and actually it has some pretty large usability issues as well.
In GNOME 2.0 the configuration dialogs are seperate windows, much like in Windows. But the dialogs are ALL reachable from a centralized place (Like Windows 2000 and 9x, unlike Windows XP)
Secondly. GNOME has taken a very far step towards KISS (Keep it simple stupid) unlike some comments on here seem to suggest. Some of the comments seem to be based on the review, and not from actual usage.
The reviewer tries to make himself out as a GUI-expert, something he doesn't seem to be at all.
There are ACTUAL GUI-experts and usability exports working on GNOME. Of course there are still lots of little mistakes and bloopers in the GUI. But some comments here, and from the reviewers seem to suggest that this isn't thought of AT ALL. Which isn't the case.
When it comes to Galeon running. The reviewer states that he does not have GNOME 1.x libs installed, which could be why Galeon (which currently is a GNOME 1.x app) won't run. Even if he does there were several issues with earlier versions of Galeon with GNOME 2.x, which can be solved by upgrading Galeon. The reviewer doesn't state what version of Galeon he uses. This is thus most likely a Galeon issue, rather than a GNOME 2.0 issue.
The reviewer does have some valid points though. Especially a shortage on help-files.. though it isn't as bad as the reviewer seems to make it out.
One of the worst parts though is the notion that in GNOME 1.x you could turn off Nautilus for speed, but in GNOME 2.x you're left with a naked desktop if you do.
First. Turning off Nautilus for speed should be rather unnecessary except for people really short on memory.
Second. Of course turning off Nautilus gives you a naked desktop. Nautilus is the desktop-manager. Turning it off removes the desktop (apart from the background-image). This also happened in GNOME 1.x, except some GNOME 1.x installations was totally screwed up in the way that it ran BOTH Nautilus and gmc (the old GNOME file-manager) at the same time. And thus if you turned off Nautilus, the old gmc-desktop was shown. This meant wasted memory because you ran two desktop-managers at the same time. I'm a bit disappointed that there is actually an option in the GUI to turn off Nautilus, which will be difficult for Newbies to actually turn ON again.. but that is a seperate issue. People desperate to get rid of Nautilus, could do it via gnome-session-properties, and actually, as of GNOME 2.0 I don't see the point apart from feeling 31337.
GMC was never ported to GNOME 2.0 and probably never will, because it frankly made much more sense to just fix Nautilus speed-wise. Which has been done, and will continue.
THERE ARE NO MENU EDITING CAPABILITIES
How in the *blue fuck* do you release a window manager without the ability to change the menus! That's AWFUL, and there is absolutely no excuse for this. Gnome 2.0 should not have been released.
Yeah yeah, the speed is great and Nautilus is now usable. But expect a lot of shaking-up for Gnome in the next 6 months, becuase the UI blows and the configs are impossible and you've seen all of the other [correct] posts about how the devolopers need a REAL ui expert.
Berto
"This is the part that made me angry. Just as with proprietory software, there is "free" (as in no cost) Free Software and commercial Free Software. When comparing commercial proprietory software to Free Software, you have to compare it to commercial Free Software of course!
This is the *EXACT* attitude that will prevent Linux from ever being a desktop replacement. Saying it is unfair to compare a free solution to a commercial one when that free solution is trying to replace it is absolute hogwash!
Unless you compare yourself to the other solutions that the majority of people are using, commercial or free, you don't have a leg to stand on. You have to give desktop users a reason to switch. The only reason to switch most users will see, is what they see on the monitor. Its all in what Gnome or KDE will provide to give users incentives to switch. If they don't do that, or rely on a 'commercial' free solution, no one will ever run a desktop linux.
I don't buy the line of thought, "Well a few configurations changes and my mother can use this OS now." The point is, will she want to?
1;
UI designers laugh at lots of things, most of them completely irrelevant. In this case, the author is complaining about some baroque scheme for the theming UI. But theming is optional--you don't need it. People play around with themes when they are bored; it might even be bad if the theme configuration UI is too slick.
Gnome 2 does not come without its problems. I do not have sounds on my Gnome 2. I think that Gnome 2 assumes that you have Gnome 1.4 installed,
That's an issue with packaging, not Gnome2 itself. The same goes for many of the other grips that the author has.
The new version removes the flexibility found on Gnome 1.x and it does not introduce anything really new or spectacularly interesting in its UI design.
If the translation of this is "it has fewer options to confuse users and it didn't change its look or feel significantly so that people don't need retraining", then that sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Overall, I didn't see a single substantive or informed criticism in the article. There probably are plenty of things wrong with Gnome2, but we'll have to wait for a more careful write-up of those.
Also, you can't expect too much from any desktop that follows current paradigms. Windows and MacOS have plenty of warts and problems, too. Overall, in my experience, Gnome and KDE are no worse.
I agree, I am using KDE 3 w/ the default Redmond style and .NET widget style. I turned off most of the bells and whistles and there are _many_ ways to tweak it and make it faster. I took me a while to figure out some of the tweaks because there are so few linux-tweak websites though. Now if only some of the native Gnome apps could be ported over to QT 3 and KDE libraries, and I could find a better file browser I'd be set. Konq tries way too hard to integrate everything into it adding too much code and slowing the app for features I don't want. Sometimes it seems in copying windows they take the bad with the good when they could be leaving out useless annoyances in exchange for stability and speed.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I'll try to be a bit more constructive in my criticism this time:
Aqua's keyboard navigability: It's well known that keyboard shortcuts will improve your efficiency when using a GUI. Every single part of a GUI should be accessible via the keyboard, so that experienced users can be as effective as possible, using these. These shortcuts must act consistently throughout the entire GUI, and properly marked (like underlining the character that is part of a shortcut in menu items). Moving from one widget to the next, scrolling, opening menus, starting applications et.c. should all be possible via the keyboard. Text widgets would also benefit from having more shortcut keys, like ^U for "kill line", ^W for "erase word" et.c. In many of the applications of MacOS X, most of this functionality is non-existant.
Multiple desktops: it's obviousely an advantage to be able to have multiple workspaces running at once. Users not wanting this feature can easily refrain from using it or disable it (or not enable it). Aqua does not provide this feature at all.
Configurable look (themes): if you for some reason can't stand the default look of Aqua, or want any other color than blue or gray, you are out of luck. As far as I've been able to tell, there's no way to change the appearance of GUI widgets (beyond the colors blue and gray), as opposed to virtually all open source widget sets I've seen. You might argue that themeability slows down the GUI, but that can easily be resolved by providing a binary interface (i.e. styles are dynamically loadable libraries) like KDE does (and Mosfet Liquid and Keramik use).
Scriptability: You mention AppleScript, and claims it is like having shellscript for GUI. No it isn't: you are bound to use that specific language. They could easily have supplied a network protocol (like KDE's DCOP) or any other more generic interface. Since they didn't, everything has to go to this dreadful language. Any experienced programmer would instantly fear "an easy-to-use, approachable, English-like language".
Stupid messages: "You need to click here to continue" (why not just friggin' do whatever needs to be done, instead of requiring user interaction at every possible step?), "An error has occured" (did you ever hear about strerror()?) and similar. While many of these aren't severly obstructive, they are nevertheless very annoying signs of sloppy programming and interface design.
Widget usefulness: in certain applications (most notably the QuickTime player), completely untraditional widgets are used for the sake of visual appearance. Many of these widgets seem like they're designed to be handled with a physical hand, and not with a pointing device and keyboard (like knobs and switches).
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
Well, I would tend to agree with you, but Apple loves to send out their lawyers everytime they even THINK some one is copying their GUI design (remember the AQUA theme fiasco?). I don't think any developers are willing to invest time and effort to incorporte "OS X-like" ideas into their work just to have Apple's lawyers tell them that they have to scrap the whole thing under threat of "look and feel" violations.
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
As a user who have about 3 years of Linux experience, what I need is just X, some window manager that let me have 10 virtual desktops and switch between them easily (quite a few does now), and some pretty widget libraries (gtk or qt does their jobs, although tk and others are okay too). So gnome (or kde) has never meant anything to me other than a lot of potentially useful libraries. The included applications are of little use. If the configuration is difficult to use, I configure my window manager only once, anyway.
Well, you just can't please everybody. If you copy windows, people complain that you are not innovating. If you do something original, then people say it is non-intuitive and hold it against you.
I've got a mind like a steel trap - it's got an animal's foot stuck in it.
GNU/Linux, BSD et al will simply never make it to the desktop. Both KDE and GNOME have constantly failed in designing a good GUI (in case you'd wonder, yes I've used them both, alongside with Win9x and MacOS 9 - the latter got the lead in usability, but that shouldn't be a surprise). Keep in mind that the guy who wrote this review is not even an average user. A real Joe user wouldn't even have bothered to write a review given the poor shape of the thing.
Designing a good GUI requires everything that a geek doesn't have: notions of ergonomy (this goes for graphics too - GNOME icons may look very cool, but their ergonomy is disastrous) and psychology, the ability to sit on behalf of the user, and most of all, not the slightest care about how it works behind the hood.
Before KDE/GNOME can reach the "usable" qualification, both need a team of GUI designers whom the programmers will *listen to*. The rare persons who have some qualifications in this respect are constantly being bashed by coders who say "That's not how it's supposed to work [in the code]". Said coders therefore don't understand that even if their code is well written and would deserve some note in software engineering courses, it fails at its primary mission: meeting the users' needs.
The second biggest problem is the existence of GNOME itself. While it was kind of justified given the licensing problems with Qt at first, it has been obsolete from the day when Qt got GPLed. But geeks have their pride. Too much pride. Result: code duplication, well designed toolkits of all sorts but still no consistent GUI on either side.
In 5 years, Microsoft went from the somewhat clunky but usable win3.x series to the very usable (even apart from the "but-it-comes-preloaded-everywhere" argument - that's one I don't buy, sorry) Win9x series. In 5 years, the MacOS GUI has evolved very little - an evidence that it was built from the ground up with usability in mind (MacOS X is another matter, but I bet the guy who made it is certainly not the one who did the Mac0S 9- GUI). In 5 years, what has most evolved in our two main contenders are the toolkits. Who cares?
Since it doesn't work in lynx i doubt the developers will be fixing this bug..
Actually, I've experienced quite the opposite. I used to run Gnome 1.4 and Ximian and I just switched to KDE 3.0. Result: better all around. You can tweak it to just the features you like. It is *really* responsive. And I run this on a crappy 400MHz... In all fairness, I used to make fun of KDE (too cutsy, etc.), but after using it for about a month, I don't think I'll go back to Gnome. Take it for a spin. You'll be surprised how smooth and friendly it is.
And fast. No joke.
my 2 cents.
there's no place like ~
www.enlightenment.org I'd say that E is one of the most innovative desktop environments i've ever used, even with it's resource hogging nature. I'm waiting more for e17 than any other user environment. and yes i do realize that it isn't a fully fledged "desktop environment" and can't really be compared to KDE or Gnome, but it still looks pretty spiffy.
as a KDE supporter and very-very-very part time developer I am pleased to hear this experience was positive for you.
Uh, OS X is a GUI of the 80's, NextStep anyone?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
From the review:
which is which and what each does? Good question.
Is that really a good question?
-... ---
although they get the most press (and, possibly, development time), kde and gnome aren't the only window managers. i still like windowmaker a lot. it's all about choice.
What's with all the "my WM starts faster than yours" hoo-ha I'm always hearing?
Doesn't anybody actually *use* their computers? When I start (kde) I leave it up for days (on a laptop, no less) and I *use* it. I write code, lot's of it. I write mail. Etc etc.
However, I can't help but wonder, what do you types do? Do you just grab a stopwatch and repeatedly time how long it takes to start different WMs? Is the whole goal of modern computing to provide the most obscure functionality as fast as possible? As nice as fluxbox and windowmaker are, I'll take KDEs rock solid APIs and frameworks any day, even if they take ~30 seconds to start on my little thinkpad. But of course, *using* my computer isn't very l33t of me, is it?
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
This sounds more like somebody that doesn't know much about writing (learn to use commas correctly!) who performed a bad install on a Redhat 7.x machine. Some of the problems described are obviously just RH's Gnome 1.4 setup conflicting, which is no big surprise. And many problems sound like he just didn't bother thinking while using the system. Whoever came up with this idea that "we shouldn't have to think to be able to use a computer" should be beaten with something large. You have to think to use any other machine, right? Even I have to spend a moment thinking about what darkness setting I want my toaster set at. Part if living is thinking about things, people!
Posted from the wireless couch.
The panels work ok, but there are some serious quirks. If you make a panel with no menu, and you remove the hide buttons... you can no longer configure that panel. Only way I found to fix it is to add a menu to another panel, drag it to the menuless panel, then you can use the menu for configuring the panel. A pretty large oversight if you ask me.
The other extremely annoying panel problem is... on logout/login, the panel completely forgets the order of the launchers on it! If that's not a huge oversight, I don't know what is.
Now for my biggest gripe. Sawfish 2.0. Someone was smoking some serious crack. I don't mean to be mean, but it has absolutely been destroyed. It is completely useless. It plain sucks, terribly. First of all, it's crashy, very crashy. See the bugzilla database on gnome.org, serious crash bugs in sawfish 2.0, definately NOT release material. Second, sawfish was designed with extreme configurability in mind, every aspect of sawfish is meant to be configurable, but now they have completely removed 90% of the configuration options. They supposedly tried to choose sane defaults, but with something as configurable as sawfish, that's simply not going to happen. There are some serious problems with the default settings. The new sawfish control panel... what can I say, it plain sucks. The tabs are across the top now, and you have to use the dumb little arrow buttons to scroll across the stupid things. This makes it an extreme pain to search for settings.
No favorites menu. I always found this very useful, I always put all the little utilities I often use in there. It's gone, and there is no equivalent replacement. Now your stuck browsing through the damn apps menu. A very poor decision in my opinion.
Now those problems are all extremely annoying, time draining, and basically make gnome 2.0, simply put, not ready for prime time. It's simply not release quality at this point, not even close.
There are some positive aspects though, quite positive actually. Fonts, gnome2.0's font rendering is really, really great. Fonts are rendered very cleanly, not blurry looking, and not jaggy, they look very good. Speed, despite what the reviewer was saying, gnome 2.0 is pretty speedy, speedier than 1.4. It loads up really quick, probably 4 or 5 seconds on a reasonably fast machine. The menus are much less cluttered by default, a plus in my book, they were simply full of junk before. GTK+ 2.x is much better. The default theme actually looks pretty good, file selectors work better, save dialogs don't wack the filename when you change directories(!).
All in all, I have to say that I'm pretty disapointed. It's not a lost cause, but it seems to me that gnome may be heading in the wrong direction.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I agree with you on some of your points, but others are pretty touch and go.
1) While multiple desktops are handy, saying that they're 'obviously' an advantage is abusing the term 'obvious'. Obvious to who? You? Me? The average X11 user? Joe Sixpack with his iMac? Your grandmother and her iBook? Adding an extra UI 'feature' like that (by default) is just confusing to the average person. The Mac tries to present a simple, friendly interface, and such a thing would be decidedly confusing to anyone that thinks Nascar is a sport. People that want it will find a way to get it. Such a UI enhancement is under development by independent developers right now.
2) Themes are not actually useful. Anything other than purely aesthetic themeability (ie. the theme changes nothing other than some colours) is bad, in terms of UI design. The reason why everyone copies Windows' UI is because it's familiar. Uniformity of interface is a BIG DEAL.
If you're just talking about colours, is it really that big a deal? I'm just reading my mail and ssh'ing to my mail server. I don't care what the window dressing looks like, that much.
3) You think that programmers only like hard-to-use, unapproachable, syntactically impenetrable languages? I would argue that Smalltalk is easy-to-use, approachable and occasionally 'English-like', and I don't have any problems with it. I've never used Applescript, but as an experienced programmer, I don't think you should be making generalizations like that.
4) I agree that modal panels are foolish, but Apple has sort of met the user half-way. Ideally, what Apple would do is USE that fancy alpha-blending UI, and drop a translucent panel down explaining the situation while it did the right thing. The panel wouldn't change the focus of anything, and the user could easily ignore the panel while it hung around, and work right through it. However, if you ever talk to an ordinary user, they hate having their machine do things without telling them. They LIKE feeling a bit involved. If you pop up 20 modal panels with an 'okay' button on them and nothing else, they'll get irritated, but they want to feel like they're in charge. If the machine starts going off without them, they start to resent it.
More or less, I agree with your assessment, like I said. I didn't see the parent, but I'd assume that it was trying to defend Aqua.
Aqua is a fine interface, and it's clear that a fair amount of design went into it. Personally, I think that THAT is the real lesson that we should take away from it. It doesn't do everything perfectly, fine, but at least it wasn't just thrown down by a programmer that was too lazy to actually read some interface books, which are what the Windows, KDE and GNOME interfaces feel like to me. I use (and like!) GNOME, but it's clear that almost none of it is thought out to any greater extent than 'Windows does it this way, and X11 does things this way. Let's go!'
and I compiled it with -03 and -march=i686 using gcc 3.1.1-CVS on my Mandrake Cooker
Using a buggy compiler on a buggy distribution to compile gnome, and then going on to rant about the result like this, I'll say he/she has an agenda here which I dare not mention.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
Why not? UNIX has been copying NeXTStep for years :) Seriously, go look sometime at just how many UNIX windowmanagers have, somewhere in their design documents, "our goal is to create a NeXTStep-workalike wm for unix.."
windowmaker- described by google as "A NeXTSTEP-inspired window manager featuring support for GNUstep"
AfterStep - just plain blatant
BlackBox - described by enlightenment.org as "NeXTStep-like windowmanager"
For years, the unix community has made it clear they wish they were using NeXT's desktop. Why not just continue that?
Apple just needs to realize that you cant own the way something looks.... My attempts to copyright the color green have been failing so why should they be able to succeed
This is how you know you're a geek the power goes out and you are unemployed and unemployable. Yes I know I can't spell
With all this talk of computer interfaces being called desktops, why doesn't someone come up with one that actually works like a real desktop?
On my real desktop I have various objects: a computer, pictures of my wife and kids, a printer, a telephone, a rolodex, various folders with documents for projects I'm working on, a cd holder, a file cabinet, a calendar, a clock, etc.
My computer "desktop" emulates some of this reasonably well. What it fails miserably at is how it keeps my projects organized. What I DON'T have on my real desktop are folders organized by the application that generated them. What I DON'T want is a file manager. I want something like a project manager as the primary interface between the computer and my actual work. Is there such a thing?
I've found that in the 2.4 kernel series, whether or not one is using a kernel with decent virtual memory mgmt. completely dominates differences in performance across machines and choice of GUI environment. Attempts to resolve different people's perceptions of speed should focus on whether they are really doing an A/B comparison, particularly with respect to this kernel issue.
I don't leave my computer at home on 24/7 because
a) It's noisy
b) It seems like a waste of elecricity to leave it on when I'm not using it
Therefore, speed of start-up is quite important to me*. I leave my computer at work on all the time because it gets put on the render farm when I'm not using it.
* One of the things I love about WinXP is the hibernation feature - turn the computer off - it saves the memory and powers down - turn it on, it restores it to exactly what you were doing before you turned it off.. lovely!
This distro looks great. Last year I tried to achieve the same doing it myself. You know, installing a stripped down RH with WindowMaker and then adding as many NEXTish apps as possible. Thanks for the link.
This is an ironic statement about an Apple interface. Pick up a copy of Togzanini's "Tog on Interface." The original father of the Apple GUI is religiously against keyboard shortcuts, claiming that their apparently accelerating effect is a user illusion as the mind is distracted by the complexity of hitting the keys.
I laughed myself silly when I read it, but that was a key component of Apple's earlier design philosophy for Mac OS.
Well The GUI-experts that the Gnome project is using should go back to school...who the hell puts the Yes button on the right in a dialog?? Is't this the total opposite of how things were in Gnome1.4, and competely counterintuitive? I find it so anyway.
Look, I'll admit that I really like GNOME as far as desktops go. More often than not I end up just using blackbox or evolution or windowMaker, but I do like the GNOME desktop and I've been looking forward to the 2.0 release. Anyways, I'd like to offer the thought that it's too soon to be judging GNOME 2.0. A lot of the apps aren't ported to it yet. Distributions aren't shipping it yet. A project like Gnome isn't like Mozilla where you expect everything in one package. There's a lot of other projects, not officially part of Gnome that go together to make it. When all these parts have been put together and companies like Ximian and RedHat start shipping a complete Gnome 2.0 product, then I'll start getting critical with it. Until then, I think it's too early to pass judgement.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Ok, that was quite a list. I'll bet someone has replied as I type, but here are some replies.
Keyboard. Hmm, try turning on 'full keyboard access' in System Prefs. You can now hop around the UI using just the keyboard. As for delete word etc. try emacs equivalents (work in all cocoa apps at least). There are alternatives as well. I just use those since I devote brain space to the damn things.
Multiple desktops. space (http://space.sourceforge.net) does a little of what you want. However I agree, Apple should add it themselves.
Themes. Colors are ok, but I generally against the ui makeover that some apps seem to delight in. They usually just cover for faults in the original UI. (not an original pov, I should add).
Scriptability. I think you should look at scripting again. There are many languages for scripting, including (IIRC) javascript. They just hook into AppleEvents which provides the underlying functionality. They can also go over the network (see sharing - allow remote apple events).
Stupid messages. I'm surprised by this, since Apple are generally pretty good at this. But they aren't perfect. I think asking whether it is ok to continue is fine, but I don't know the details of the case you cite.
Widget usefulness. Let's hear it for the volume dial on QT 4 (was that the one?). Terrible. They seem to have been fixing these (QT has certainly improved). The worst offenders seem to be Apple's own media apps, which is pretty bad.
I think some of your points are valid, but OS X is generally pretty good. They seem to have half an idea about this stuff.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
I'm not trying to start a flame war here. I just think that it's time for me to express my opinion on this matter.
I've been tinkering with gnome and kde since pre kde 1.0 days. I have always preferred gnome to kde. Not because I thought gnome was prettier, but because I could get the functionality that I wanted out of gnome and couldn't get it out of kde.
With the advent of kde3 and gnome2, I will be switching from gnome to kde. Is kde3 slower? It doesn't feel slower to me than gnome1.4. Is kde3 prettier? I think mosfet's liquid is stunning. Can I get kde3 to do what I'm used to doing in gnome1? Not 100% but closer (maybe 90%). Can I get gnome2 to do what I'm used to doing in gnome1? No. I'd say about 50%.
So, from a functionality point of view, gnome1 wins and kde3 is a close 2nd, with gnome2 a distant 3rd. From an aesthetic point of view, kde3 wins, and flip a coin between gnome1/2.
So I'm switching to kde. IMHO, gnome is just not going in a direction that I like.
Remember, this is my opinion. I'm not trying to incite a flame war. I'm just a lone user letting the gnome developers know that they just lost me.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
The American flag is on the moon because america went there. In case you havent noticed countries are in competition with each other for just about every thing. Don't whine because you don't like the fact that so far the US has been winning.
Out of curiosity, what kind of tweaks did you give KDE to get it so responsive? I keep reading about how fast kde3 is, and I run it at home, and don't seem to notice the difference from kde2-kde3. In my opionion, kde1 was fast. I'm running the default RH 7.3 install on my AMD 700MHz, 768MB RAM.
:-)
The one thing I find real annoying, is clicking on any folder. It seems to take a while to load, since I'm guessing it's loading part of konqueror. Why not cache this in memory when kde loads, so when you click on a folder it pops open. If there is a way to do this, or a website with kde performance tweaks, please point me in the right direction
Nautilus has a "Use Nautilus to Draw the Desktop" option. You could argue about whether its a misbehaviour of a file manager to absolutely conquer the root window. Some people like to use their own programs to paint whatever they want on the root window, instead of a nautilus pattern.
Gmc and Rox are able to put folders on the 'desktop' without preventing xsetroot from working. On the other hand, you can go ahead and use nautilus just fine without its big root window.
That would be even better - by far.
It appears obvious to me that people claiming the MacOS X GUI is intuitive have either not really tried it themselves, or never tried anything else.
As someone who uses Mac OS X extensively after much Windows and X experience, it appears obvious to me that anyone complaining about OS X's GUI was too attached to the horror that was OS 9. The animations can be turned off, later versions of the OS will be faster, and you're simply speaking nonsense about it being obstructive or non-intuitive.
America: first to play golf on the moon.... ;-)
true, quite a feat
Yes, we all know amreica is very forward in the tech area and other areas. But please stop whining about other people being jealous over you. Stop generalising so damn much.
and moderators, this is offtopic, but I *did* mark that out in the subject field.
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Before using Mac OS X, I used Linux for a couple years, and then found NeXTSTEP and OpenStep. Mac OS X hasn't annoyed me since DP4. I used OS X as my primary OS for about a year, until I recently switched back to Linux for a number of reasons, none of which had to do with OS X sucking or falling short.
Most Linux GUIs do suck. I've used Mac OS Classic, OS X, Linux, and *STEP extensively. Naturally, NeXTSTEP 3.3 is the epitome of all that is good (except POSIX compliance). Mac OS X is in the second place. BeOS wouldn't probably be up there if I ever had used it for anything.
If all these GNOME and KDE people are set on ripping something off, we'd all be better off it they were ripping off OS X than Windows. However, poorly copied OS X features could be quite disasterous. Far more than poorly copied Windows features.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Multiple desktops are such an obvious advantage that I can't believe they aren't as prevalent as overlapping windows. Its all about being able to categorize when I organize. I am amazed that this wouldn't be considered obvious.
Themes are useful to people who spend alot of time in front of their computer. Changing the appearance without breaking the pattern of functionality is stimulating. It prevents a form of "highway hypnosis". Its fun. Its pretty.
Your parent posts' keyboard shortcut concern is also of concern to me. Keyboard shortcuts are essential.
I've tried them all. OS X was my main OS for a year. As a desktop, I'd rank it #1 over the other available desktop options. I didn't find it a real pain to use, not 10.1 at least. DP4 was. I found it visually appealing, yet productive. Nothing wrong with that.
You may not like OS X. That is swell. However, it doesn't mean that it's cumbersome and annoying for everyone. Simiarliarily, there are many of us, including myself, who find GNOME, KDE and Windows a helluva pain in the ass to get anything done with. I've used them. They suck. Doesn't mean they can work well for you.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Agreed: I was saving money to buy my first apple because of OSX, then bought an Athlon in disgust over the AQUA theme fiasco. It was the attitudes of online apple chat enthusists that drove me away as much as apple's stance. I decided they weren't something I wanted join.
As one who has used Gnome, KDE, clasic and new mac os, most flavors of windows, and more, I still have to say that mac os x is the best. it's not the fastest, but it is intuitive. Maybe if someone would keep the interface the same, or more acuratly, document expectations and figure out where grandma would look for something, then we would have a better gui.
i use redhat kde 3 at work on a 1GHz athlon. It *feels* slow (subjective I know..). At home I compiled gentoo with gcc3.1, p3 optimisations for a 700Mhz machine, with the gentoo kernel (preemp and low latency patched) and it absolutely flies! Its even faster than nt4 on the p3-800s that we have here.
What does this and preceding pots have to do with the topic of the story? Gnome 2.0, anyone? God, I get tired of this off-topic wrangling... :-
Huh? In one paragraph, you say that Mac OS X isn't intuitive. Then you say it is.
Indeed, I don't find Mac OS X's GUI to be much like Mac OS 9s. Ask any old-school Machead, and they'll tell you that it's nothing like OS 9, it's too much like NeXTSTEP. Ask any ex-NeXTie like myself, and we'll tell you it's too much like OS 9. It's somewhere in between. If it just stuck to pure NeXTSTEP or pure OS 9, more people would probably like it. OS 9's memory management is hell, but it's quite intuitive.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
As for performance every new iteration of 10.1.x releases have shown alot improvements, evem on older hardware. I tend to agree..currently with 10.1.5 is speed has been tremendously improved, my G3 powebook, roars with the latest patch. It gets better, with the next iteration 10.2. The review of gnome is harsh, but I think they need to hear it or how would they change it for the next release. One problem is that usablilty was never big so to speak. Maybe its time to get volunnters to do such..
Mind you, I'd seen the Lisa, so I had some prior exposure. The OS took almost no time to learn how to use. It that's not what an "intuitive interface" is, then I don't know what the words mean to you.
... well, they take time to learn.
... and progress has been made, but to some degree it's probably inherrent.)
OTOH, it was limited. The power included was amazing. It was also amazing how long it took me to figure out why cut and paste was a good idea. And I can't even remember what I used to do instead.
It must have take hours to learn how to use that early MacPaint. But that was during the same day that I first used a mouse.
Still, as intuitive as it was, it was limited. To make it easier to learn the mouse was reduced to a one button mouse. But this limited it's flexibility (not it's power, but rather the number of steps that it took to do something).
As the versions rolled by, the Mac interface got slightly more complex. But only slightly. After version 7.5 I pretty much stopped using it, so I can't talk about the more recent versions. Perhaps OS X isn't as intuitive.
However: There's always a trade-off in OS designs. (Well, several trade-offs.) If you design a maximally simple OS GUI, then it will take a lot of work to do something that wasn't one of the builtins, and it won't be customizable. If you build a maximally customizable GUI, then it will take time to learn how to use it, and different machines will do things differently (on the surface). Probably both end points are bad choices. The Mac leans toward the simple side. It's fast to learn, but limited in flexibility. The Linux GUIs lean toward the complex. They're flexible, customizeable, and
Not note that I'm not claiming that there aren't subsets of the two GUIs that aren't equivalent. But those are subsets. Even the cut and paste on the Linux GUI is more complex than that on the Mac. And more flexible. And less automatic (this is being worked on
Both of these choices are defensible. More people come to Linux already knowing the basics of what a GUI is than came to the original Mac, so there's less pressure toward maximal simplicity. Except that there's an idealogical pressure that says "Any GUI command should be translateable into a shell command." The Mac didn't have this constraint. (And it showed when they tried to back-patch in a scripting language [AppleScript].)
Original??? It can be good to be original. More often it means making a new series of mistakes. E.g., I prefer to use tried and true sorting algorithms. I don't go around inventing new ones. I'm not being original. But I can use libraries, and numerical analysis routines, and run-time estimations (well, it's a sort of around 50 cases, so I could use a bubble sort, but it's easier to just use the one built into the languae).
Originality is vastly overrated. It's something that should be used when it is needed, but one should always remember that using it is expensive. It takes longer to write the code, it takes longer to debug the code, it take longer to explain the code, it takes longer to.....
User-friendly is a much better concept than originality. The catch is, if you don't know who your use is, then you don't know what friendly is. And remember, the user base will change. Always. So it's also a concept of limited use. (N.B.: limited doesn't mean none. It means it only handles certain situations, so you need to be careful how and when you use it.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
GNOME 2.0 has been rushed out of the door, just like GNOME 1.0 was.
The 1.4->2.0 development cycle has been a lot longer than originally anticipated, due to a big influx of developers (Thanks Sun!) and lots of core systems changing quite radically, coupled with some pretty piss-poor project management (now where have I heard THAT before?). In the mean time, KDE has been gaining a very large amount of traction as the most popular Linux desktop, and Sun has been wanting to push Solaris 9 out the door ASAP.
So GNOME had to release now, really, if they had any hope of keeping the users they have and for Sun to get Solaris 9 out approximately on schedule.
KDE underwent a similar change about 2 years ago, in the 1.1.2->2.0 transition, and not everyone was convinced then that KDE would survive, but it did, and look where they are now. Of course, KDE had the advantage of doing it first - although KDE 2.0 was far from perfect UI-wise, it had a considerable lead on GNOME in changing to a component-based architecture, so there was a very big Unique Selling Point for it at the time which GNOME 2.0 does not now have.
It took KDE 2 further major releases to turn the framework they built into a really nice desktop, and I suspect it will be similar for GNOME. The big question is whether the framework that was built for GNOME 2.0 will be good enough for their future plans... time will tell.
Personally I'm sticking with KDE3 for now. There are certainly issues with KDE, mostly in terms of speed and size, which themselves mostly stem from the choice of C++ rather than C, but these are being fixed one by one. KDE3 is now quite snappy, actually quite a bit faster than GNOME 2.0 on my Debian machine once you've got past logging in (all those double-buffered GTK+ 2.0 widgets are smooth and dandy, but they sure as hell ain't fast). Also, right now, KDE absolutely has the edge on both functionality and usability. Konqueror in particular is way out in front - indeed, for me at least, it's the best file manager on ANY platform. Nautilus is good, don't get me wrong, but Konq is breathtaking.
I'll reassess the situation when GNOME 2.2 is out. 2.2 should be the first mature release of the new framework, then we'll really get to see whether it's good enough to compete. I'm hopeful, a lot of the new framework looks good but either needs loose ends tidying up or needs someone to use it properly. Let's keep our fingers crossed. KDE is a class act to go up against though - they crank out the releases on time every 6 months, they seem to have a consistent vision of where they're going, they know where their flaws are, and they have yet to make a serious error. GNOME can't afford any more releases like this one if it wants to stay in the game.
Scriptability: You mention AppleScript, and claims it is like having shellscript for GUI. No it isn't: you are bound to use that specific language. They could easily have supplied a network protocol (like KDE's DCOP) or any other more generic interface. Since they didn't, everything has to go to this dreadful language. Any experienced programmer would instantly fear "an easy-to-use, approachable, English-like language".
Way to do your research, lil buddy.
The AppleScript system is open. In fact, AppleScript just happens to be the default language Apple gives you to use within their "Open Script Architecture" (OSA).
For example, you could use JavaScript to tie into all the hooks AppleScript can. There is an older list of other OSA languages available as well.
As an experienced programmer, I find AppleScript useful. When I'm scripting a bunch of Mac apps, the english-ness and gimpy-ness of AppleScript has never bothered me. Why? Because I'm not doing any "real" work. If I'd like to do a combination of "real" work and scripting apps, I could easily use a language from the above list, or call the script events from C or a C module access by a real language.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Sorry the first paragraph was supposed to be a quote of the parent post.
Blackbox.
Now on Windows too!
Blackbox4Windows - http://www.desktopian.org/bb/
Bluebox - http://bluebox.lokai.net
While I'm a user of hot-keys in Mac OS 9, X, and elsewhere and generally a keyboard navigation proponent, people can build up a muscle-memory for mousing as well. I'm not one, but I've known plenty of people, especially graphic designers (who seem to be more visual than myself) who work faster going to menus than I do by using hotkeys. Not because mousing is inherently faster, but because their muscle memory of using the mouse for certain operations is more developed.
Goes both ways.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
You're not alone, although it does seem to be a minority position. I'm with you, anyway. And I'm an American, yet.
How about desktop as a personal web-portal? It should have configurable/editable portlets in customizable layout.
Of course I would like to have an access to backend of such portals and therefore XUL/RDF of Mozilla is the way to go.
Some of portlets will be gnome-panels displayed in any customized locations (not olnly top/bottom/left/right).
Less is more !
The correct way for such a dialog, by the way, is to have [Cancel] [Ok]. Not [No] [Yes].
This is UTTERLY, hopelessly off-topic, but I felt the need to comment...
.sig is a quote from chumbawamba, with the speaker asking that someone "give the anarchist a cigarette". While it IS possible to grow your own tobacco and roll your own smokes, aren't the vast majority of cigs made by gigantic, nasty, corporations? Does anyone else see the irony in this? :)
Your
The Free desktop that Just Works
> As someone who uses Mac OS X extensively after much Windows and X experience, it appears obvious to me that anyone complaining about OS X's GUI was too attached to the horror that was OS 9.
I've used the older (pre-OS X) macs extensively and have always found their supposed ease-of-use to be a myth.
I like a clean desktop with no icons. This is why: I like to drag all the stuff I'm working on to my desktop, then put the important pieces away, and then do a quick drag over everything and "delete" and then I'm all set to begin another task. I don't have to drag carefully avoiding the home/trashcan icons. Also I know that everything on the desktop is related to what I am doing. I also like an icon-free desktop for the purely asthetic reasons: no clutter.
I can do this with both WinXP, and with KDE3. I cannot do it with Gnome, unless I remove the desktop itself, which of course defeats the reason for running a high resource consuming desktop manager in the first place. I have never understood why there isn't some way, even if it is difficult to get to (as it is on WinXP and KDE2/3) get rid of all the desktop icons under Gnome1/2.
--
Just another lone user crying out in the wilderness.
The animations can be turned off
Huh?
I use OS X. I use it because i like the functionality, i like the power it gives me, and i like the stability. I hate the interface. I hate it. And the only reason i hate it is that the animations and gooeyness can't be turned off.
Kindly explain to me how i can turn off real-time window resizing? Or even better, make it so that it's only realtime with a modifier key? That's the most sluggish, useless animation of all. It's useful sometimes, but the rest of the time it gets in the way and makes a basic UI task clumsy.
I have sight problems. I have *REAL ISSUES* trying to use an interface in which everything is blurry and antialiased and soft fuzzy gray. I get headaches, and my eyes start unfocusing uncontrollably, when i use Aqua for too long. It helps a lot that there are (technically illegal) third-party themes that i can download and install. Once i do that, 99% of my problems go away. However, i still have wierd, semi-dislexic moments where my eyes tend to go very slightly unfocused after a long time in an os x window, because of the borders between windows. The window borders in os x are very very faint gray lines with shadows. You can turn the shadows off, but there is no way to make the window borders thicker or darker. By any themeing method. At all. How can i turn that off? How can i get thicker, darkgray/black borders? OS9-style draggable borders would be best of all.
I like the transparent menus. But they just take too long to open. I want to be able to click on a menu and see it immediately. How can i turn off the menu transparency and windows, and make it so that they are a simple overlay rather than being rendered as seperate windows within quartz?
I access my computer over VNC a lot. VNC has this bug that causes it to screw up hardcore with some viewers when exposed to the throbbing OK button animations. How do i turn this OK button animation off, for my benefit when i am in VNC?
If i could just click a button and go back to the system 7 visual interface with OS X's power&stability, i would. But apple doesn't give me that option. Themeing may not be "useful" to most people, but for me it's NECESSARY to be able to turn off those omnipresent horizontal gray lines with text on top. It makes me angry that Apple takes such a paternalistic attitude toward this. No, people don't "need" complete interface control (though i need some). But when you get down to it, people don't "need" computers. We use computers because it's more enjoyable than using typewriters, pen&paper, etc. Apple is making that experience painful for some people by choosing to use an interface where whether you like it or not is a matter of opinion, and then not giving people the power of choice, when they have a perfectly good themeing architecture they refuse to release the specs to. At least with WinXP, you can go back to the non-bubbly interface style..
My question is, what factors are causing the speed differences, and under what circumstances can KDE become noticeably faster than Gnome?
You're running up against the weight of history on the Mac GUI, which so far has proven pretty successful. Most of the common commands are accessible via keystroke and are the same in every program. Multiple desktops is not a huge requirement with Mac users, nor is the configurable look.
The one part I don't get is "Any experienced programmer would instantly fear 'an easy-to-use, approachable, English-like language'". Why? Because it's not arcane enough? Because people might actually understand what you're doing?
Go work on your own interface. Leave ours alone.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
GNOME-1.4: Still hard to figure out when you first sit down on it.... I personally had trouble changing an Emacs icon to use Xemacs and ran around looking for a "property list" for it... I think you have to manually edit some text file is what someone said... I stopped using GNOME immediately.... That's no way to do a GUI IMO.
Rightclick on icon -> Properties -> change "Command: emacs" to "Command: xemacs".
Don't tell me you couldn't find that out!
Both MacOS X and Windows 95 based interfaces have a 1-3 hour learning curve for a new user (and many more for mastery), and both are cumbersome to use if you're used to the other.
The main purpose of GNOME and KDE was to emulate a familiar interface to lessen the learning curve. Since appx. 95% of users use Windows, that was the chosen interface to emulate. If Linux (or any other *NIX) wants to draw new, less technical users to their platform, they either need to spend millions of dollars on user studies and design their own interface from scratch (Apple and Microsoft did this), or else copy a well known interface where the work has already been done.
The goal of these interfaces is to put everything where the majority of users would expect to find it. Do I put Cut and Paste under Edit, or under Tools? This may seem pretty straightforward, but sometimes you have cultural or regional differences to deal with. You think Cut and Paste should be under Edit, but Down South, they always put them under Tools. Since the majority of customers are Down South, what you think is intuitive and the right place to put the options actually is culturally incorrect for the majority of users. Then you have those Westerners, where Cut is slang for raping sheep and the proper term is Slice for them. You then need a regional dialect translation for the Westerners.
UI design, especially when you don't know your customers (e.g. a general use OS) can be extremely difficult and costly. It is also very difficult to do a good design without doing filmed or observed studies of new users. Without studies, there may be no indication of why users get frustrated or what they get frustrated on using your new interface. I've observed film from a study my company did on a software product that my company thought was fairly intuitive, but users thought it was horrible. One interesting fact from our study was that women gave up more quickly than men. The theory is that women tend to have an idea on how something should be done, and if that doesn't work, they give up on it (in our case they would say they don't know how to do it, and ask directions), where men will try 5-6 different things before giving up and asking directions. On the average, though, only a slightly higher percentage of men figured out the task assigned without asking for help (~6% difference, both were under 20%). Men had a tendency to get closer to completing the task on their own, while women tended to get the task done faster.
Just some food for thought.
Multiple desktops are such an obvious advantage that I can't believe they aren't as prevalent as overlapping windows.
I agree -- Apple or Microsoft could almost sell a $99 upgrade with that feature alone.
Seems stupid, but most users have never seen any Unix GUI and have no idea that the feature exists. So nobody demands it, and the mainstream OSes have never added it.
IIRC, That's not what Tog said. He's all for common and consistant keyboard shortcuts -- he's just questioning the value of being able to press Alt+Shift+F12 to reach every obscure function.
A good example is the Windows key shortcuts on Windows. Most of those should be icons (and some of them are) and it wouldn't slow anyone down.
Although, I notice that Apple has finally given in and provided MS/IBM-style Alt-key keyboard access to the menubar. This might have been an accessibilty requirement, and a good comprimise between too many and too few keyboard shortcuts.
i thought she was not right.
i compiled it, and must say its really buggy shit. a shame for every linux developer.
Ah, so your descision of computer purchase was decided because you didn't want to belong to a certain sub culture?
Here's at tip: Stop caring what other people think. You don't have to 'join' them, become one of them, you know.
Yeah, the same "ACTUAL GUI-experts" who created the Metal look and feel for Java's Swing and then wrote an article about Metal's "UI design." They don't understand the difference between graphic design and interaction design.
Sun (the primary mover on the gnome-HCI stuff) doesn't get UI design, dude. They're Unix geeks. Always will be. The KDE people have a much better grasp of HCI issues; too bad they're hamstrung by X Windows.
Yes / No, Ok / Cancel, it's all the same. You have to stop and read the dialog box. Take a clue from Mac or Mozilla on this one, make the buttons more meaningful.
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This is (presumably) why IE6 has a "lock the toolbars" option, enabled by default, which turns off the drag handles on all the toolbars. This way, you can't accientally move one out of place, but if you want to move one, you can still do it pretty easily (and then re-lock them again afterward).
Furthermore, if a curious user unchecks the option and suddenly sees drag handles appear on the toolbars, they'll experiment with them (having in mind the fact that they've just "unlocked" the toolbars) and probably figure out pretty quickly how toolbars can be rearranged.
I think this is a great feature. Provided that the default toolbars are OK for most people, having them start out locked prevents accidental reconfiguration, without sacrificing configurability for people who do want to change them.
All that remains, I guess, is the question of whether the default toolbars really are OK for most people. Personally, I see no need for buttons like Favorites, History, and Print; Favorites already has a menu, and the others are used infrequently enough that their menu commands are enough; I don't need toolbar buttons taking up screen space. So my IE toolbar consists of the back, forward, stop,and reload buttons, and then the address bar collapsed onto the same line. I would consider this a "sensible default", but I imagine others might think the browser is lacking in features or something when they don't see a Print button. So this area, the default settings, is really where the decision comes in as to whether the UI caters to "experienced" or "inexperienced" users.
Another item-- he claims not to be able to move the menu panel. The menu panel is always at the top. That's what it does. If he wants a panel on the side, he create a new "edge panel" on the side, and remove the menu panel (it's easy: right-click, select "Remove this panel").
Most of the other criticisms presented in the review were both misspelled and untrue.
The only one that was at all accurate was that GNOME2 has fewer options, which is actually (in most cases) deliberate. The insane number of options in GNOME 1.4 were a frequent cause of confusion and in many cases caused difficult debugging for real problems.
Anyway, I would suggest that people interested in GNOME 2 find a second opinion, or better yet, test it out for themselves (Ximian ships snapshots through Red Carpet).
a.
RedHat is probably the distro which is least likely to get you a decent KDE user experience -- mainly because they don't care about KDE. Indeed, lack of KDE was what lead to the creation of Mandrake (sadly, they've moved back toward GTK+ config apps in the newer releases).
After using RedHat and Mandrake for years, I finally tried out Debian, and was shocked at how quick KDE 2 felt -- subjectively at *least* twice as fast.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Funny, I tried to find them myself (on RPMFind, and I don't think they've been released yet. If they have been released, then they're not on RPMFind or, as of this morning, Red Carpet.
Does anyone know what's up with Ximian GNOME 2?
Finding God in a Dog
From the American Heritage Dictionary
;-) 3. Mockery; jest (I think that you just used it that way :-) 4-7 don't apply
Sport (sport, sport) n. 1. An active pastime; recreation (NASCAR is certainly active...some people, including me, find watch it for recreation) 2. A specific diversion, usually involving physical exercise and having a set form and body of rules; game. (Well, as I said, I use it ofr a diversion,it has a set form and a body of rules, although NASCAR won't let anyone see them
Seems to me that the dictionary concurs that NASCAR is a sport....Don't know how that applies to your argument though.
Nautilus sucks. Get over it. I have 512 megabytes of ram and I refuse to use Nautilus. The promises of a speed increase in Nautilus would mean something if: a) it hadn't been promised a half dozen times already; b) its fans and apologists were more receptive to the criticism that it's bloated. I want to see some benchmarks for using gtk apps with Nautilus vs. gmc, or using xfce or ice or flux/blackbox or whatever. And don't bother trying to argue that GNOME is so much more than a mere window manager, because when it impedes the use of apps, it is absolutely less useful than the mere window managers.
If gmc or some sane alternative doesn't get ported to 2.x, then GNOME will vanish from this desktop. I'm in no ways 31337 and I don't really want to spend weeks and weeks trying out other window managers, but speed and above all configurability are important: why else would I be using GNOME?
Really? The KDE team has much better grasp of HCI? Then why is Konqueror riddled with confusing options and have menus longer than a arctic winter?
There are extremely many UI-mistakes in KDE, and they seem to become more and more instead of less. For instance, new features are seemingly added without REAL concern wether the features will clutter the interface or not.
At least GNOME is moving in the right direction.
Yes, I've heard of strerror(), but should the average used have heard of it? Absolutely not.
It's always funny to hear Linux users try to critique a GUI. The phrase "out of touch" comes to mind...
kde is 4 years old. gnome is less.
The one part I don't get is "Any experienced programmer would instantly fear 'an easy-to-use, approachable, English-like language'". Why? Because it's not arcane enough? Because people might actually understand what you're doing?
I think this can largely be attributed to languages that have proven to be failures that have this trait.
Read: Visual Basic
I will vouch for easier to read languages. You cannot make a language very similar to English as English is not an entirely logical language, it has too many oddities that can conflict without proper context. I won't get into that...
What I will say is that I like this aspect of Perl. Although Perl has many shortcuts and ways of making the code look very cryptic and arcane, this is avoidable and personally, I find Perl to be a very refreshing and easy to read language in comparison to C or C++.
But that's just my opinion.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Most of these do exist. Command arrow moves that direction to the largest extent possible (beginning/end of line, beginning/end of document). Holding shift at the same time selects the text. Option does the same movement, but by the word. Many developers choose not to use these shortcuts, but that is hardly the fault of the GUI. (indeed, Apple has gone out of there way to make Cocoa easy to use and design to their standards).
Wrong again. You do not need Applescript. You only need to use an OSA (Open Scripting Architecture) compatible script. Applescript just happens to be Apple's branded solution that they (duh) ship with the machine and support.
This whole complaint translates to "It doesn't do things the way that I'm used to *wah**wah*"
Many of your complaints seem justifed to me, i.e. themes and multiple desktops, but I think that on the others you should learn more about the OS (and the conventions/metaphors behind it) before you complain. Different doesn't mean worse
"I think we should tax people who stand in water! " - Mr. Gumby
And why? Because a desktop is not a framework. Calling it "GNOME desktop" does not change that fact.
A desktop needs copy/paste for arbitrary datatypes. On a desktop there shouldn't be a need to associate icons with programs. A desktop shouldn't need a "menu editor" either. And you shouldn't need to associate programs with file extensions.
A GUI should be more than a file viewer and an application launcher. A GUI should not abstract the system. It should do the exact opposite: it should make the system more concrete and transparent.
The present generation of Linux GUI frameworks is very bad in many ways. It is certainly worse than Windows. And Windows is pretty bad.
Linux GUI frameworks are a bit like cargo cults. The idea seems to be to take some widgets and some icons, and place them on the screen in a familiar manner, then to wait for the graphical user interface to emerge.
It doesn't work that way.
I am a very happy GNOME 1.something user. So happy, in fact, that I will not install GNOME 2 until Galeon requires it. But I would not call this highly idiosyncratic GNOME 1.x system a desktop in the sense that Windows or MacOS are desktop systems. Rather it is a Unix system that can display pictures. Which is exactly what I need.
But I can't help laughing. Every time somebody coins the phrase "GNOME desktop". Because it just isn't.
"Some people like to use their own programs to paint whatever they want on the root window".
If you're talking about stuff like "Xsnow" it works with the latest version of Xsnow.
Besides, I don't think cutesy hacks for 31337 people are that big of a deal.
Gaute
I admit, I havent seen Gnome 2.0 myself, so i'm not that qualified to comment, but i'm coming from a different angle.
Why be so quick to debunk criticism? We're all VERY quick to point at flaws in M$, and other evil empires' software.
As far as i'm concerned criticism is neccesary and healthy. It can be reviewed, considered, and if the result merits changes being made for the benefit of better software for us all, then I am all for it.
I for one am very keen to see Open Source software reach levels that surpass, in every aspect, commercial software. It's going to be a long journey, and if criticism is ignored, we'll never get there.
I don't believe the reviewer was 'having a go', just that they were genuinely dissapointed in a product they WANT to see succeed same as the rest of us.
Multiple desktops are such an obvious advantage that I can't believe they aren't as prevalent as overlapping windows. Its all about being able to categorize when I organize. I am amazed that this wouldn't be considered obvious.
... my first multiple desktop experience was Solaris CDE and even though I hated almost everything about it, I loved that). I know a guy that got quickly hooked on linux (but for some reason kept wiping it) and his biggest problem going back and forth between Win and Lin is that windows only had one desktop!
The only problem here is that it isn't obvious until you use it (I can attest to that
MIKE
Beware the JabberOrk.
There have already been many replies to this, but here's my two cents anyway.
Every single part of a GUI should be accessible via the keyboard, so that experienced users can be as effective as possible, using these.
I don't accept this blanket statement. While there is a case to be made for full keyboard access to the UI for movement-impaired users (see "Full Keyboard Access" under the keyboard prefs pane), I think the jury is very much out on the subject of whether the keyboard is a good interface at all. There's no question that too much keyboarding is related to repetive stress injury. Being even more dependent on the keyboard than we already are could very well turn out to be a bad thing, not a good thing.
Multiple desktops: it's obviousely an advantage to be able to have multiple workspaces running at once.
You say "obviously an advantage" when what you mean is "I like it." Some people like having multiple workspaces or desktops. Personally, I don't. I prefer overlapping windows, so I can see what I'm doing without having to shuffle things around. So this issue boils down to personal taste.
I don't think "I like it better another way" is a very valid user interface design critique. And before you respond with "they should have given me the option," please remember that a good user interface is not one that gives the user every possible option. Simplicity is a virtue.
Configurable look (themes)
We'll argue about this forever. The bottom line is that lots of people spent a lot of time designing the Aqua user interface. They designed it to be easy to use and visually appealing. What possible motivation would Apple have for implementing an interface that lets little Jason from down the street make all of this windows black and purple and change the "File" menu to read "Zeppelin Rules!"
As a person of strong aesthetic opinions, I consider Apple's refusal to include an API for modifying the interface to be a good deed, worthy of praise.
All the rest of the comments in your post have been responded to elsewhere more or less as I would here, so I'll just skip to the end at this point.
Everyone has their opinion about GUI's....personally I hate XP's new menu system...it doesn't make any sence...but you can figure it out if you spend a few minutes on it...same thing can be said for gnome or KDE or OSX.
This person hates Gnome 2.0 because it didn't get installed/upgraded correctly...perhaps they should've waited for a distro to install it for them before they braved the waters just so they can have a review of it.
Help files...will be provided by distros.
Menu editor...Mandrake and others have their own menu editors
sound problems...problem with your install
Galeon not working....problem with your install
You don't like the default setup...then change it stupid.
Most "bad" reviews of both kde 3.0 and now Gnome 2.0 seam to be from MacOSX or WinXP die hards. They install Gnome or KDE on their distro expecting it to work like the previous gnome or KDE they had on there. All of these people fail to understand how the system works. They see WM like they see Windows. WM will have a few rough edges...they will be fixed by distros.... WM are not OSes. They are pieces of clay for others to make molds out of...and they will.
Scan the dialog as follows: default action, cancel and then the alternative actions. Supposedly the eye/brain is fastest when scanning the dialog buttons in that order.
You see the Cancel and Default Action buttons first because they're nearest to the edge of the window. Those are the buttons you'll need most of the time and are certain to be there. In the rare case that you need an alternative action you can still read the rest of the dialog, being the alternative actions. I don't think the Cancel and Default Action button order is that important though. I figure that having the allignment and button order realligned to the left, this would be OK too. It's just that there is a tradition of alligning to the right (except for Windows who allign to the center, causing it to be hard to find the most important buttons first). I bet the GNOME UI team probably came up with more reasons :).
When alligned to the left, this makes it slower to find Cancel because it's at a variable distance from the borders. When alligned to the right, the opposite is true.Default Button and Cancel are the most frequently chosen options and are the only ones that are always there (except for a one-buttoned dialog but those are pretty easy :p), thus they should be the first ones scanned (knowing from Apple research that the eye is trained to jump to things such as the border of a window).
Until Nautilus can display all the entrees in /dev I can't see myself switching.
I am going to re-invent the wheel, and this time I will make it round!
Ah, you got me. I'm really not concerned about breaking xsetroot. What I am most concerned about is my favorite cutesy 31337 hack: `locate xscreensaver/atlantis` -root. There's something about having fishies swimming around behind my windows that soothes my soul.
From the link:
Graphical Boot-Up (no confusing Linux kernel messages)
I happen to like all those kernel messages!
But other than that its cool enough.
Yeah, if only X had an XDrawUsableGUI() command.
Wow, you hit it right on the nose. :P.
Every time I hear the claim that linux (and its apps) are sooo much mmore stable than windows I chuckle to myself and remember when i logged into my rh install and my gnome panel refused to start ever again
or the many times times i've seen silly spelling mistakes and grungy-looking unpolished apps...or the many times i've crashed gnorpm, pan, package manager, rh user manager, and literally dozens of other apps.
And also the biggest windows complain of "dll hell" is the thing that makes me roll on the floor histerically when I can't even just install the gnome base rpm without having a dozen dependency problems and needing to update/add those dozen libraries...pot. kettle. black.
I agree that its free but don't go around saying things that you know aren't true.
These crappy apps that aren't tested and make it into all the popular distros really make a bad name for those many other stable apps like apache and xmms for a couple examples!!
why run from Vincenzo?
Scriptability: You mention AppleScript, and claims it is like having shellscript for GUI. No it isn't: you are bound to use that specific language. They could easily have supplied a network protocol (like KDE's DCOP) or any other more generic interface. Since they didn't, everything has to go to this dreadful language. Any experienced programmer would instantly fear "an easy-to-use, approachable, English-like language".
Please learn a bit more about the OS before bashing it. You are not limited to AppleScript. Ony OSA compliant language can be used. After a few seconds searching google, I see you can write AppleScripts in Tcl, f-script, python, to name a few.
Look at Apple's OSA page.
Mod parent up!
Yes, it is. I spend 10-12 hours each day sitting in front of a computer screen. Reading dark text set on a light background may be fine for paper, but when that light background is essentially a glowing white light bulb, your eyes REALLY have to work hard to keep that black text in focus. Personally, I enjoy not needing glasses, and so I use a theme (gtk) that uses a dark grey background with light-grey text (or when forced to use Windows at work, I at least tweak my editor to look similar). This has the effect of SERIOUSLY reducing my eye strain.
So yes, colors are quite important, and though Aqua may look nice for the average user, it's not such a good them for programmers (and I would do my best to change it if my mac could actually run OSX - as it stands, I'm running a light-on-dark theme in OS 9).
-xris
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
I'm guessing this is because of build time optimizations? Maybe I'll grab the source RPM's, and see what can be done with them.
You bring up some good points, but I have to disagree with you that Themes are not useful.
People need to be comfortable in their work environment. a simple desktop background and customizable colours and fonts can be very important. It is especially important to have customizable colours and fonts if the user has less than perfect vision or uses the computer for extended periods of time. Not everyone sees the same, so having only one option that worked fine for the programmer who designed it is not sufficient. I know people who cannot sit infront of a computer for any exteded period of time unless the backgrounds and fonts are in certain specific colours, not because they like those colours but simply because those are the colours that are least straining on their eyes (and believe me they are not the colours I'd pick for the same effect)
go into nautilus prefrences and uncheck nautilus manages the desktop
Well, I do the same. However, my window dressing is so entirely unimportant, it doesn't even phase me. My emacs has a dark background and a lighter foreground. That's what I'm staring at, so that's where the high contrast colours come into play. There's just not enough interface on the screen to stare at all day long for a programmer to care. The embedded editor in Project Manager can be changed to have whatever colours you want.
If you're telling me that not being able to change the titlebar and panel colours in OSX is causing you eyestrain, then I'd have to say that you're spending too much time staring at the 'compile' button.
I guess this is where it becomes obvious that no two people are alike because I find OSX to be nothing short of amazing. I came to Macintosh from 8 years of doing things the MS/Intel way and now have used it for a couple of months at home. I think that means I don't fall into either of your two groups (never tried it, never tried anything else)
I think it's really quick and can't begin to see how anyone could find it "dreadfully slow". I would say this is because I've been running it on a dual gig G4 but then I just recently installed it on an older Biege G3 that I put a 500Mhz processor in and it's quick there too. Granted the initial boot up is slower but once it's finished firing up it's fast.
I've also spent some time with Gnome & KDE and I do agree with you that it's silly to say they are more or less the same. They are very different. Niether touches OSX though for pure ease of use for me.
OK, why did they make the screenshots deliberately blurry?
At last, we LINUX geeks have an interface that rivals Micro$soft's in crappiness and unwieldyness. Now linux will take off on the desktop.
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
Interfaces should be internally consistent, but there's no reason why my interface has to be identical to yours. That is, I agree on the importance of all my applications behaving the same way. But I should be able to edit things like key-bindings, location of buttons on window decorations, colors, typefaces, etc.
There is a benefit to having default settings be consistent across platforms (e.g., Windows-like keybindings or appearance because that's what most people are used to). The one thing Havoc Pennington was right on about in his rant on usability was the importance of good defaults, because not everybody really cares about or wants to tinker with their interface settings. They should be treated well by whatever is handed to them. But I should be able to customize my environment to suit my needs and preferences. I should not be bound to whatever the average user feels comfortable with.
Those that just want a consistent default interface aren't hurt by themeability. Those that have found a non-default way that works better for them are hurt by a lack of themeability.
> You mention AppleScript, and claims it is like having shellscript for GUI. No it isn't: you are bound to use that specific language
It's actually much more powerfull than shellscript, as it can manipulate objects other than text files. The architecture is completely open and documented. There are numerous other languages available, only the basic object model is fixed. The whole fully factored and recordable cross application scripting thing blows shellscript out of the water.
Heh, OK. I thought that was the case, but thought I'd make sure. ;)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Did you read the post?
The part about it depends on who your talking to.
Multiple desktops are not obvious to a newbie. The desktop is not obvious to a newbie.
If somebody is unfamiliar with a computer - then I would say that multiple desktops are not obvious to them.
I am amazed that you are amazed at that.
2) Themes are not actually useful. Anything other than purely aesthetic themeability (ie. the theme changes nothing other than some colours) is bad, in terms of UI design. The reason why everyone copies Windows' UI is because it's familiar. Uniformity of interface is a BIG DEAL.
If you're just talking about colours, is it really that big a deal? I'm just reading my mail and ssh'ing to my mail server. I don't care what the window dressing looks like, that much.
I disagree here. Colors do have a psychological effect. It is a good feature to let the user choose which color please him best. WinXP's default color scheme is illogical. It's way too bright and distracting. It was essential to be able to change them.
I could say that this feature can be forgotten if the colors are sober and don't distract from the work that need to be done (BeOS was like this IMO).
I am confused about the fact that nearly this entire discussion has been spent on OSX. I came to read this article on users opinions of Gnome2. I use Gnome 1.4 and am looking for some solid feedback as to the stability, speed and configuability of Gnome 2. If all I can base Gnome 2.0 on is this articles author's point of view, I will undoubtedly NOT upgrade.
----- PLEASE POST YOUR LIKES/DISLIKES ABOUT GNOME 2.0 BELOW -----
The common mistake that you're making here is figuring that it isn't possible to make an interface that requires little to no customization, and yet suits the needs of everyone. What needs do you have over an above the average user? Why isn't it possible to give all users that interface without taking something away? What does the power user require that is MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from what the average user needs?
A big part of the problem with UIs is that we settle for too little. More design and more work on the part of the UI engineer could make a lot of problems go away.
For a better idea of what the devil I'm talking about, pick up Jef Raskin's book, "The Humane Interface".
Yes or No?
Please explain why...
make a comparison between Berlin and Jaguar. I've been watching Berlin for YEARS and it's not coming along very fast at all.
you both have seen the light. that makes 3 of us :P :P :P
You mention AppleScript, and claims it is like having shellscript for GUI. No it isn't: you are bound to use that specific language.
Sorry, you're wrong. There was a product called "Frontier" that implemented AppleScript's functionality with syntax reminiscent of the C language.
They could easily have supplied a network protocol (like KDE's DCOP) or any other more generic interface.
They did. It's called Apple Events, and it's been in Mac OS since 7.0. The Open Scripting Architecture (which describes an app's object model to a scripting system) has been around since at least 7.5.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm not gonna argue with you....unclench dude
that is all
it's much faster and I use it. try it out.
At the core of OSA are AppleEvents which are an RPC like communications mechanism. Using an app's published AppleEvent interface you can create the appropriate AppleEvent (some struct and params), bundle it up and send it to the application. When working with AppleScript the user just sees the AppleScript interface to the underlying AppleEvents. AppleEvents were even object oriented, in a strange mangled C kind of way.
However AppleEvents and OSA seemed relatively complex when they came out in early '90s and with the Mac's limited customer base few people have come up with alternative languages based on the technology. The most famous is Dave Winer's Frontier which started out on the Mac but has since evolved into a cross platform SOAP, XML-RPC, web focused product.
Just trying to set the record straight. :)
Highlight the text with the left mouse button, centre-click to place the selected text.
So how do you select which text you are going to replace without destroying the previous selection?
And how do you copy something other than text, such as an image or an audio clip?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Open Mozilla and go to slashdot.org. Select some text and don't do anything else. Open gedit, *press the middle mousebutton*, and voila! The selected text is pasted.
Well, if I "don't do anything else", then how do I select the text that I want to replace? And how do I do it if I have a physical disability that makes the keyboard much faster for me than the mouse?
(Replied semi-redundantly because the Slashdot Messaging System does not notify users of replies from Anonymous Coward, and this AC reply made a good point.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
DO ANY OF YOU FRIGGN' READ!!! This a DEVELOPER RELEASE OF A NEW API NOT A NEW DESKTOP. WAIT 2.2 TO BITCH ABOUT UI problems..
Older solutions required X to keep seperate the background area and the icons, which had to be done by making each icon a seperate shaped X window. This was tremendously slow and required the program drawing the icons to send a lot of information to the X server. And there was no antialiasing of the edges and serious limitations on what you could draw.
A program that just thinks it has a big window and can draw anything into it is *much* faster, and will always be faster no matter how many new features are added to X. So instead these programs can now read a desktop image stored on the server and merge their own display with it to make the window.
Older desktop image programs that do not know how to communicate this information to these new desktop programs will not work.
I think the point that was being made here is that English and other human languages are great for communicating with humans, but they are just not structurally appropriate for writing programs. A programming language should be concise and clear, and must be absolutely unambiguous. Human languages are not, by nature, any of these things. The requirements that the two kinds of languages are designed to meet are completely different.
The problem with English-like programming languages such as AppleScript and COBOL -- both of which I have used -- is that they are designed to solve the wrong problem. It is assumed that end users cannot understand programming languages because they are syntactically obscure. This is, of course, crap. You can teach any person of average intelligence the syntax of C in a couple of days, possibly excluding the irrational mix of pre- and postfix pointer notation. Given a couple of months, that person could have a pretty good grasp of the ISO/ANSI specification for the language. But even if Joe Average could go on ANSI Jeopardy and answer, "Alex, what is dereferencing a NULL pointer?" he still could not write a complex application.
And that's really it -- knowing a programming language no more makes you a programmer than knowing English makes you a novelist. Having an English-like programming language like COBOL will not make it possible for non-technical management to look at source code and understand what's going on. All English-like syntax accomplishes is to very slightly shorten the initial learning curve for the syntax and the syntax alone, while it becomes a real pain in the ass later on once you understand algorithms and data structures and all of the meta-linguistic knowledge that is the real meat of writing software.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Maybe because we absolutely hate icons sitting on the "desktop"? Btw, it's not a "desktop", it's THE BACKGROUND. It exists because there has to be something behind everything, not for any other reason. I don't want cute little icons or other stupid stuff taking up memory and doing no good besides annoying me.
I don't know where all these people who think that they're God's gift to the rest of us have come from to attach themselves to Gnome, but GET OVER YOURSELVES. Not everyone is the same. Hey, speaking of which, I just checked that link that you have. That site isn't in English. Why are you using some other language, to be 31337? Everyone speaks english, stop using all those other languages, they just cause confusion. Really, english is the most widely spoken language, by far. Everyone else who wants to cling to some other language is probably just a backwards, arrogant, snivelling pimple-faced socially inept pre-pubescent teenager who is of no consequence in the world and God hates them.
I hope tha tyou get my point.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I really and truly haven't seen any OS that gives each user a unique configuration.
Both GNOME and KDE, desktop environments for UNIX compatible systems, store the users' desktop preferences in ~/.* (that is, hidden files in the users' home folder). Windows 2000 and XP do something similar: it stores settings in C:/Documents and Settings/$USER/.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Funny, Windows seem to address all of your points (except maybe the Stupid messages) quite well indeed...
The average user requires toolbars, menu's, and other stuff to help him navigate through the application. The power user typically desires a maximum amount of screen real estate for his work, thus disabling most toolbars and other fluff.
Personally I love that I can put all the options _that I use_ on the menubar, in visual C++. It frees up valuable space for the code.
On the other hand, I do not use 99% of the features of developer studio (no HTML, no form editors, no database connectivity, just plain C++), so I am more than happy not having to look at those particular controls.
Some people argue that this makes my configuration less accessible. That's ok because it boosts my productivity, and besides, that's why it says "personal" in "personal computer"...
Hmm, I might be wrong, but Eugenia surely sounds like a girl's name to me (I happen to know somebody by that name). The male's corresponding spelling (at least in most western/european countries) would be "Eugene". ...
Couldn't resist
google search for vern or sdesk
Don't believe me? Come get in a race car with me sometime and find out. True, I don't run NASCAR, but auto racing is allot more strenuous than most computer programmers think.
And while we're at it, stop the stereotypical comments. Most Southerners enjoy NASCAR; that does not make them stupid. The fact that I enjoy NASCAR doesn't mean that virtual desktops are confusing to me no more than raising hogs and chewing tobacco makes it more difficult on me to grep a source tree.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
BTW, the panel bugs are already posted, hopefully I won't have to logout till the next panel release ;-)
I'm really looking forward to Metacity. It looks to be shaping up really quickly. I think screwing with sawfish for the gnome 2.0 release was a *BIG* mistake, they should have either held off on the release till metacity was ready, or left sawfish alone and released with that.
I expect Gnome 2.x to rock at around 2.4, just like 1.x did.
I should have mentioned in my other post, Nautilus has *really* shaped up nicely. I can't stress that enough, it's quick, extremely pretty, userfriendly... If you use Nautilus a lot, you'd probably do well to upgrade to gnome 2.x now or real soon, despite the quirks.
For anyone using gnome 2.0 now, you might want to stick with sawfish 1.x for the time being, 2.x is way to crashy.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
Where's your fifty million dollars worth of research, cmkrnl?
Currently, I'm rebuilding kde and qt from the SRPM's, with: 'rpm --rebuild --target athlon qt*.rpm kd*.rpm' Maybe that will speed things up a bit.
Obviously you are american (== speak only one language that sounds vaguely like english) :-)
Try learning another language well, you will discover that languages are not interchangeable. Some things just can not get expressed in english (or french or german). It's just like programming languages: Some are better for the task at hand then others. So if everybody just spoke english we would use a whole lot of nuances, even complete ways of think! That would make the world a poorer place, maybe not for you, but to the rest of us that got a bit of education while we grew up;-)
Regards,
Tobias
Regards, Tobias
Have you ever heard of sarcasm? :-)
My entire point is that language is a perfect example of where the whole push for "one choice" falls so short, and is so obviously wrong.
And on the matter of programming languages, didn't you see the essay where Havoc Pennington criticized xchat for being scriptable in not just one, but four different programming languages?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
A lot of people in the linux community say:
"GUI design is a BS field of study, people who point out usability flaws that make UI's confusing are whining, the fine manual is perfectly understandable, the problem is people don't want to learn, and saying that fill-in-the-blank free software interface isn't ready for joe end-user is merely spreading M$ FUD."
And that's okay. They are welcome to feel this way.
As I am more than welcome to come up with new types of public licenses that enforce usability. For right now, take this as nothing more than a silly rant written by some random poster on slashdot. Take it with a grain of salt and a Big Gulp-sized jar of Malox. But, if my licenses ever do make slashdot and people starting yelling and bitching about "Anti User-Hostility Public Licenses", then those people need to understand that their attitudes created the necessity for such licenses.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
It's well known that keyboard shortcuts
will improve your efficiency when using a GUI.
I heard that the studies on this indicate that keyboard shortcuts seem faster to the user but actually take longer (for the average user, at least).
sheesh, better get your own facts straight before critizing someone else
Your comment echoes a number of standard arguments against the Aqua, and while I don't agree with all of them, there's no point in covering that territory again.
However, I think you missed a number of positive elements to the full OS X user experience that are missing from most other desktop environments, which might help to balance the evaluation somewhat.
First, we have the Dock, borrowed (though not without modification) from NeXTStep. Some people love it, some people tend to just ignore it, but personally, I find one feature it has to be *extremely* useful: dynamic icons for applications. The most commonly-seen example is the Mail app, which overlays a small red circle with the number of unread messages any time new mail arrives.
Second is my favorite "window dressing" feature of Aqua: the drop shadow applied to each window. It's a subtle thing, which I didn't realize the value of until I installed a hack that removed it -- suddenly, I lost what I had gradually come to rely on as a stable visual clue as to which window had focus.
Third is the standard design for toolbars in (Cocoa apps, anyway) that allows drag-and-drop addition or removal of commands, and a browser-like selection of displaying just the icons, just the text labels, or both. That means that since I like preserving screen real-estate, but still use a toolbar in some apps, I can switch things to only a text label, while my girlfriend, who uses OS X but isn't a hardcore techie, can leave all the icons in.
It's exactly these kinds of details that take real usability testing, good design, and *time* to do well. When you come right down to it, the biggest advantage that Windows and the MacOS have over open source desktop environments is years of little tweaks and polishing.
Personally, I think that the KDE crew is on the right path: start with a simple desktop environment similar to what people already expect, and just pound away on the little stuff until the whole interface looks good, works consistently, and offers users in widely different experience levels a worthwhile experience.
Most of his UI complaints seem to center around metatheme, the "Desktop theme editor" etc. Guess what? Metatheme was dropped from the GNOME 2.0 release about 4 months ago because it was deemed sufficiently unusable. While we plan to eventually have a single "themes" desktop preference page (that will, of course, replace the widget theme, etc, we're not going to be duplicating menu entries), we decided to for GNOME 2.0 because Metatheme's interface sucked so badly. It needs to be totally redone. I agree 100%.
It seems like 3/4 of his rant against GNOME usability is based on things installed by Metatheme. It is absurd to complain about GNOME's interface based on something that was dropped from GNOME 2.0 because we knew it sucked.
-Seth (GNOME Usability Project Lead)I tried GNOME 2.0 today and i did an apt-get install of old gnome in 10 minutes.
WHERE TO HELL WENT THE STATUS DOCK? Maybe I'm too blind to see it, but I found no way to add it to the panel. I use Gabber and Gnomemeeting so status dock is absolutely required. I'm waiting for GNOME 2.2.
--Coder
Thanks for the excellent post. I agree, the reviewer's most serious error was in ciriticizing this release in terms of end users. The fact that he had to compile it himself in order to run it should have tipped him off. AFAIK the only RPMs of it are 'Rawhide'. This release is intended for developers. Power users are welcome to install it, but they should be aware that there is such a thing as a development process. It is feature complete from a developer's point of view. A novice would find it inadequate, but this is not
meant for novices to install, and they have no way to install it either. When Gnome appears in Red Hat 7.x or 8.y, then the help files, applications, usability tweaks, etc. will be there for the end user.
The other thing that really annoyed me about this reviewer is his inconsistent sense of usability. He wants to move the top menu bar... to where? Does he want the text rotated 90 degrees, reading down the side of the screen? Does he want the menu on bottom, with the menus reading upwards? He complains about this supposed lack of configurability, then he crams several of his panels (taskbar, desktop guide, etc.) into the menubar. I had no idea you could do that, and I have no idea why anyone would want to. But then, I don't understand why his screenshots are crammed with a dozen different windows. I find it much more efficient to have one or two applications per virtual desktop.
First, I've been using Gnome2 for about a month now (garnome rocks), and it is quite good. I've also been following the irc/mailing list/web/newsgroup banter for ages - the discussions there are gold. Sure, there have been simplifications, and not everything is ported or finished yet - but it is still *new*. The cardinal rule of the Bazaar is to release /early/, and release /often/ ... this provides visability and feedback. Consider gnome2 released early and often - and this is a good thing.
Now I'd like to see the /. children stop whining. You don't like gnome2? Fix it. Report bugs. Get involved with it earlier in the development cycle ... building it isn't exactly rocket science. Read the design docs, join the irc discussions, browse the mailing lists. The whining, though, is just stupid. You are liberated. Free software provides you with many freedoms; if gnome isn't exactly what you want, then MAKE IT SO (or shut up).
I use both Liberated software (like Gnome), and constrained software (like Windows) on a daily basis - a dichotomy that messes with my brain. But, at the end of the day when I go home I consider myself fucking lucky to be Free. I am able to choose the software I use, and I am free to contribute to it daily. Can I do this with propietary software? Could I afford the incredible software I use on a daily basis?
Don't complain if you are not interested in making it better: you are wasting your freedom. Your complaints only add to the FUD. Embrace your freedom!
mx
Given the FUD and hostility that Eugenia has posted in previous articles towards GNOME I never expected a fair review. As the first screenshot she posts in her review is of a crashing app, then that shows her agenda pretty clearly.
F1 is a sport. Rally car racing is a sport. NASCAR is an exercise in turning left. I concede a small amount for NASCAR races held on non-oval tracks.
I'm a cyclist, myself. I watched Lance Armstrong climb through the alps last year. That's a sport.
ok i was following some discussions here and now its time for me writing some shit.
i heard things like. if you dont like this and that then go to bugzilla and report them. unfortunately no one really gives a fucking shit if you report things or not.
i have seen a lot of people comming into the gnome irc channel every day that want this and that changed. most of the time no one gives a fuck about that user and it takes less than 2 seconds to put him/her on full ignore. thats daily business there.
if you come along to seth nickel or havoc peningtion and ask questiosn why's this and why's that. then at the end they argue you to death and turn words to move another way than how you have asked them. at the end they make you look like a moron.
this happens over and over again..
now realize it all gnome is a gnomedevloper only desktop. they are doing it for their own. not for you, not for me. only for their own. they totally ignore and dont care what you fucking want.
realize it.
by the way there are a zillions of bugs posted on bugzilla that no one really cares. there are some thousand of bugs open. even showstopper.
gnome is seriously nothing for the enduser or a consumer.
and here my final decission. i was gnome user for some years and TODAY I GONNA SWITCH TO KDE 3!!!!
end of story....
I just have to correct this dreadful spelling mistake:
In "It appears obvious to me that people claiming the MacOS X GUI is intuitive have either not really tried it themselves" it should say "inventive" not "intuitive" (see the message being replied to). Aqua is intuitive.
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
I need Emacs-style keybindings. I don't expect everybody else's hands to work just like mine. Other people may legitimately be more comfortable with another arrangement. That's fine. Nobody suffers if we get a choice. Somebody operates in suboptimal conditions if we don't.
;-), but controlling things like appearance let me feel better about it (which does help me work better).
There are other issues like colors and fonts. There is no One True Aesthetic. People like different looks and that's OK. It's like decorating your cubicle walls. It might not make my interface technically better (as some of the content at themes.freshmeat.net proves, it might even make it worse
I don't believe that one interface fits all. People are not all the same. Why force them to work the same way? I'm not saying that I have needs "over an[d] above" the average user. I'm saying that the best interface for me is different than what most people seem comfortable with.
Whether the differences are physical, cultural, or just plain individual, people have different needs and expectations. It is good to work toward finding a single interface (to be the default) that meets the most needs of most of the people. But it can't be be the best for everyone, so options and the ability to customize are important.
It is. But the uniformity that matters is on the individual's desktop, not between systems as many seem to think.
In other words, what matters is internal consistency. Once someone starts using a machine, they should be able to customize it to their own tastes. The machine needs to be consistent in how it interacts with the user, even after the user customizes it.
Now, that said, it's certainly desirable for the default interface to be something that people can get used to easily, but this does not argue against user customization. Remember that computers are there to make our lives easier, so it is the computer that should be made to adapt to us, not vice versa. That, more than any other reason, is why a user interface should be customizable.
There are valid reasons (other than aesthetics) for people to be able to customize their desktops. Different people see differently, and some color schemes are much easier on some people's eyes than others. But even if there is significant agreement within a population on the benefits of one particular color scheme, there isn't universal agreement. That's why it's important for people to be able to customize their environment.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Right off, the reviewer complains:
He laments this for some time, never mind the fact that I've seen all sorts of GNOME2 screenshots where that panel is quite happily at the bottom of the screen. Then, I look at his second screenshot, and there it is! This guy is either incompetent or lying or both.Crap, crap, crap, when the argument is given in so broad a scope. I concede that it may be so when doing, e.g., pix editing, where the mouse is essential and one hand is on the mouse anyways. But when editing text, with fingers on keys at all times, moving to the mouse is slower, 50 m spent or not. One of many examples: writing text with bullet lists in powerpoint. Alt+Shift+Arrow to demote and promote is way faster than fiddling with the mouse. I know that cause I see that all day long.
Also, though this is a little bit offtopic here, reaching for the mouse all the time is hard on my shoulder, keyboarding is not.
I work in a presentation graphics center, our 150 powerpoint operators all start to use keyboard shortcuts after they've mastered the basics. And practically all of them are your normal run-of-the-mill windows users. Nobody forces them to do that
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Multiple desktops are such an obvious advantage that I can't believe they aren't as prevalent as overlapping windows.
To my mind you might as well have your windows maximised all the time and click on the panel/taskbar. Its basically the same as having workspaces. What is the point in having multiple workspaces unless you use windows at less than full screen? I've got the powertoys for XP mod (4 workspaces) and I found I stopped using it - extra workspaces just waste my time switching. Any opera/Netscape 7 fan would understand - You just need a panel to click with one button per window.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I'm guessing this is because of build time optimizations?
Most likely. I use FreeBSD, and build everything from scratch optimized for my machine. At work, I am dual booting Win2K and FreeBSD/KDE, and there's no comparison. Win2K feels like someone dumped molasses in it. KDE doesn't feel slow at all.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Lots has been said about Eugenia's errors. I've found other ones, plus some omissions I don't want to go completely unnoticed. Some may repeat what others have said here but make me so angry I have to dissect them.
Eugenia says: The big question on any new release is 'Whats New?' or 'What does it do more?'. In the case of Gnome 2, it does less, not more
Well, if you omit the new stuff from the review, it's easy to present that conclusion. Here are the omissions, so numerous and noteworthy in what is supposed to be a review that I find it hard to not see intention. All of those and more stuff can be easily found in the press release and in the release notes. I'd expect that a reviewer reads those docs.
No mentioning of atk, the accessibility toolkit. atk makes gtk+ accessable to , e.g., screen readers and gives it full keyboard navigability. This is a major improvement, since it makes Gnome usable by users with certain disabilities, and it makes it possible to be used in certain organizations like governmental agencies that are required by law to only use software that has this feature. And keyboard nav is good for everybody
Only a brief mentioning of pango, the internalization library, in context of not finding a config option. This is unfortunate, but isn't doing justice to the importance of pango. It furthers internationalization, e.g., by giving gtk the ability to use right-to-left languages, languages with ligatures and those with reordering. You can now mix different languages and scripts in documents. This opens up Gnome to hosts of new users, e.g., in arabic speaking countries. I'm rather surprised that Eugenia, being Greek, presents herself ignorant to pango's importance like one has come to expect from lots of americans.
Then there's the factual errors and stuff I just found stupid. I'm too lazy to separate those here, I'll just list them as I go through the article:
The Gnome menu panel now resembles a bit of MacOS. It sits on the top of the desktop, and no matter what I tried, I can't change its position.
IIRC one can't change it's position in MacOs either (and neither could one in Gnome 1.4), so I fail to see how's that surprising. Moreover, on rightclick (known from Win) it's easy to see how to remove it, given that there is a very clean context menu. She can't figure it out even so, but still manages to complain earlier that the memu panel, merely includes 3 options.
Then she finds a reason to bash the default panels because they are rather empty and in the next paragraph says People will always argue that we are lucky that there is an option to do so [change the defaults] but the main point is, that the default configuration is what most people use. It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of users actually change (or have the right to change, in a business environment) their desktop. So, why then complain earlier that she can't change the menu panel's position? I thought nobody tries or wants to do that anyway?
I also wonder how long she played with Gnome 2 at all, for if she had actually opened some apps, she would have noticed that the bottom panel populates
quickly with buttons controlling the open windows, like in those other OSes people will supposedly return to because the G2 panel setup is so terrible: If the default configuration is not intuitive, most people will still live with it. Or they will switch to KDE. Or go back to Windows or MacOS. Hm, what exactly can be found on the Win task bar after a fresh install?
Overall, Gnome 2 feels slower
A clear indication that something is seriously wrong with her installation. Nautilus is so much faster that it's not even funny anymore, and the rest is certainly not slower, except maybe for the slow initial loading of the main menu icons.
On Gnome 1.x if you needed some speed, you were just telling Nautilus to not draw the desktop and everything was fine. But if I turn off this option on the new Gnome, there are no icons drawing on the desktop anymore and I have no desktop context menu.
Please, did she even use Gnome 1.4 as she claims? This has been so forever. Or maybe she f****d up her gnome 1.4 install as much as she did this one and had both nautilus and gmc running, so that after killing nautilus she got the see the gmc icons on the desktop.
My only problem with Nautilus was the inclusion of GTKhtml 2 as the main HTML renderer. GTKHtml is still extremely buggy.
True in a way, but what were the options? Writing a non-sucking html widget for sure, but failing that, what? Another indication that she had no experience with Gnome 1.4, because the fully featured mozilla renderer used in the old nautilus was awfully slow. The compromise is ok as I see it: a quick loading basic html widget for the occasional *.html file on the HD with the option to launch the fully-featured one via context click or by the (painfully big and ugly) sidebar buttons that appear when a html file is viewed in nautilus.
And where are the system tools for networking
Applications->Preferences->Network contains some simple ones. Ximian Setup Tools, which were present in earlier Garnome releases seem to have been removed from the release. I think Ximians plans are rather unclear on what they plan with them. They realized that most distros have their own config apps (drake tools of mandrake, e.g.) and have some time ago announced that Debian is their new reference platform, since it is most in need of such tools. Maybe, when and if (they've been aleady a looong time in the making) they are ready, they will be added by the distros that need them by the time the distros ship with G2. Most probably won't because they will place their own tools in the Preferences menu. So again something of no concern to the users she supposedly writes for.
or maybe a universal media player
This seems to me to be an app and responsibility of the distro. BTW, Garnome includes the Gstreamer Media Player that's meant to be exactly this
Both her probs with the text editor, gedit, When I just place my cursor on the text, and then move my mouse away in order to type there, the program seems to think that I still have my button pressed and it keeps selecting my text. and scrolling this very document with Gedit is shamelessly slow I can't reproduce and IMO point again to a borked compile (remember, she used gcc 3.1.1-CVS) or install
All in all, she does have lots of valid points I won't repeat here, but intermingled with so much either ignorantly or maliciously false information and based on a seriously incompetent review procedure that the piece is IMO completely worthless as a basis for discussion or further work. If one wanted to be unfriendly one could maybe even call it a rather well constructed troll, and a rather successful one given the 503 responses on slashdot in this topic at the time of writing.
I just hope that it goes away soon and we can concentrate on the work and discussion needed to move G2 further and fulfill its, as I see it, big potential
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Secondly. GNOME has taken a very far step towards KISS (Keep it simple stupid) unlike some comments on here seem to suggest.
Yes, so simple they took out most of the features that made GNOME my favourite desktop!
The reviewer tries to make himself out as a GUI-expert, something he doesn't seem to be at all.
When I read the review, I had the immediate impressed that she was just a regular user. IIRC, she claimed right up front to not be too impressed with *NIX desktops in general. Much as I like Linux and Unix, I'd say I side with her.
There are ACTUAL GUI-experts and usability exports working on GNOME.
Where are they, then? Last I heard, Sun did some usability studies on GNOME and that was about it. Whether the results actually did anything for the resulting interface of GNOME 2 is debatable.
Turning off Nautilus for speed should be rather unnecessary except for people really short on memory.
...or have a sub-gigahertz processor.
People desperate to get rid of Nautilus, could do it via gnome-session-properties, and actually, as of GNOME 2.0 I don't see the point apart from feeling 31337.
Wanting to get rid of software I consider unnecessary is considered "31337"? (By which I take to mean "lame".) Please explain that logic to me. In that case, I'd have to call you "31337" as well if you've ever removed panels that display by default or disabled that damned annoying fish applet.
Let's not forget that one of the things that GNOME claims to be is modular which means you can remove, swap out, or write any component you wish and the rest of the components will not bitch. THAT INCLUDES NAUTILUS.
It's really fucking sad what's happened to GNOME. It really truly is. The GNOME developers and even the Slashdot audience, which up until now I've considered halfway clueful about this sort of thing, have completely forgot what made GNOME good in the first place: the fact that you could tell it how you wanted it to behave and it wouldn't argue. Now, with GNOME 2.0, we have a desktop with a couple of "sensible defaults" and a shitload of users who believe customizing your own environment is a fucking crime.
Glad to here it is out with a new relece. i will have to check it out.
"Your min is only an image to me."
Your opinion of a user interface is based on how many non-technical people were employed in its creation? I'm all for supporting the economy, but that's just silly.
what do you find different about Windows XP? A few menus were moved, and the widgets were made diferent colors and shapes. That's not really a UI change. It would take about a day to make a theme to do that in most windowmanagers. A week to make sure you got everything.
The jury already came back with its decision on the mouse. We're in the sentencing phase. Doctors and insurance companies are protesting the "settlement" and users are, like in other things, putting up with whatever miscarriage of justice is dealt them.
A man who wants nothing is invincible
I find it funny that your average cartoon character has a thumb and three fingers and could probably operate a two-button mouse while apparently your average Mac user can't!
So much for "ergonomics" and "human design"...
A man who wants nothing is invincible
A man who wants nothing is invincible
[quote]
:-]
Plus it is all scriptable with applescript. Applescipt is like having shellscript for GUI... very slick.
[/quote]
oh like enlightenments' eesh?
Look at that second shot again...do you see a "menu panel" in there? Because I sure don't. And I see a main menu at the bottom left...
Oh, and all those development screenshots, and all the screenshots on gnome.org right now? They don't have it either. So what is this person's problem?
...a good idea for most people that are thinking of taking a look at GNOME to wait for 2.2. Don't get me wrong, 2.0 is great (it's more consistent than 1.4, faster, nicer looking, more usable, blah blah) and even only slightly curious 1.4 users should seriously consider upgrading (the more bug reports the merrier, I'm sure :), but if you're looking for something that'll make your bed, shine your shoes and impress your Mum you're going to be disappointed. 2.0 fixed the engine; the body and interior work is being done for 2.2. Also, by the time 2.2 is out more super-keen GNOME apps (Galeon! Evolution! Galeon! Gnumeric! Galeon! Galeon! Galeon!) will have been ported, so the environment will be a little less schizophrenic.
Well staroffice does word processing better than MS Office. Also it has revision control compatible to MS Office in the doc format. You have not really used staroffice obviously or you would not talk about it like you do.
Finally I would propose crossover office, if you really must use MS Office.
Moritz
Yeah, I probably should have left that out. Personally, I prefer the Mac interface over KDE, which I prefer over Gnome. Both of the latter look and feel enough like Windows that it bugs me.
I just wish someone could come up with something really different to kind of kickstart ideas.
Enforced consistency would also be nice.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
What about Apple's insistence on a one-button mouse?
I have two points.
First, a significant fraction of the population at large has problems with multiple-button mice. Young children, older people, and handicapped people all have trouble with manual dexterity. Even otherwise average people of middle age can have problems with multiple-button mice if they suffer from arthritis or other degenerative joint or muscle maladies.
So first, we have about 50% of the total population that would object to the required use of a multiple-button mouse.
Second, Apple's user interface supports but does not require a second (or third, or whatever) mouse button. While you can use multiple-button mice on a Mac-- and I do, on one of mine, with no special drivers or software-- it's not necessary in the slightest. The second (or third, or whatever) button is a user-configurable shortcut. For users that prefer them, multiple-button mice are available from third party vendors at very low prices.
The conclusion: Apple is right to design their computers around a one-button mouse, while building support for multiple-button mice into their software.
This is a basic principle that the designers of software like Gnome have thus far failed to implement in any comprehensive way: design first for everyone, and only then provide unobtrusive features for those who want or need them.
CD burning built in (though not the best) to name one big change, better integration with media files. You know, the fluff stuff that makes newbie users lives easier.
tinfoilmedia