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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."
- 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.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.
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!'