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A User's First Look at GNOME 2.0

Posted by timothy on from the will-rankle-or-delight dept.

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."

2 of 461 comments (clear)

  1. Re:configurability by __past__ · · Score: 1, Troll
    Not being configurable might make software easier to use for computer-illiterate people. However, there are quite a lot of UN*X users that can cope quite fine with complexity, and aren't afraid of options.

    This whole "Linuxs on the desktop" thing is going in a very strange direction, IMHO. Why do people choose UN*X as a desktop system in the first place? I for one don't care about newbie-friendliness that much, all I want is a powerfull, efficient, open and stable system that is a pleasure to use and doesn't treat me like an idiot.

    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  2. MacOS 1984 by groomed · · Score: 0, Troll
    None of the GUI frameworks for Linux come close to matching even the MacOS circa 1984.

    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.