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Has GNOME Become LAME?
auferstehung writes "Nicholas Petreley (should that be KNicholas KPetreley) of LinuxWorld and VarLinux.org has taken his gloves off in the latest article in his KDE vs Gnome series. An unabashed KDE supporter, Petreley uses some choice fighting words in re-acronymizing GNOME as the Language Agnostic Morphable Environment
(LAME) Franken-GUI. Despite the sensationalistic flamage throughout the article, several of his GNOME criticisms (Gconf, file selector, features) echo those already voiced within the GNOME community itself. A happy GNOME user myself, please someone...tell me it isn't so."
.. that complains about GConf, is the ones that do not know what it means.
It is basically a configuration database that provides notification, and can use any backend, where the default is pure XML-formatted text files.
An LDAP-backend is also being worked on, something which should be a boon for network administrators.
The file-dialog is lame, and is being replaced.
This article is basically a troll. Use whatever you like. Some people like KDE, others like GNOME.
I am very tired of reading flame wars between Gnome and KDE. OK, I am a big supporter of Gnome, but that doesn't mean KDE sucks. It plainly does not. I would be the first to agree that there have been some terrible blunders made by some of the Gnome developers along the way, but the current 2.2 is very sweet. Every so often I try out new versions of KDE as they come up, and every time I abandon it because my desktop looks cluttered and Kalling Keverything Kfoo.Kbar Ketc Kgives Kme Kthe Kshits... :-) [/rant]
So to use your analogy, if I was to design a car, I can't design one that uses wheels because someone else has done it before?
Microsoft has certain ideas that are sound in theory, but their implementation of it sucks in practice. There is nothing wrong with implementing GUI features in Gnome or KDE that have already proven to be useful in actual use.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Nicholas Petreley (should that be KNicholas KPetreley) ...&&... Despite the sensationalistic flamage throughout the article,
So can you give examples of this "sensationalistic flamage"? I sure didn't find any. Why is there an immediate knee-jerk reaction when anyone ever criticizes gnome or kde? I personally think he has some very good points. Why can't people try and learn from constructive criticism?
If I could now lapse into a personal opinion: I've tried gnome and I try it regularly. And to be simply honest, I continue to get this "Is this all?" feeling every time I use it.
He's right about the dialogs. When I tried changing my background with one of the latest gnomes, I get this measly little window with three different picture boxes that don't help at all. I remember thinking how Spartan (?) this was back then.
Gnome just seems to be going in so many directions that it's turning into a mess. And no one wants that.
One thing I completely agree with is the removal of sawfish and the inclusion of metacity. A lot of the GNOME users I know loved sawfish. Removing it was a bad decision. Perhaps the developers had their reasons but.... *shrug*.
However, some of Petrely's remarks are just silly. For example, he thinks that KDE being "more feature rich" is a good thing. Sorry, but that's not true. Having lots of features and buttons and widgets may work for some users, others may prefer something simpler, and yet others may want a different set of complex features. And while some users get all pushed out of shape about inconsistent appearances, consistency just isn't a big deal to many users either.
But what makes Gnome/Gtk+ and KDE/Qt both really lame in my book is that they don't take advantage of the really powerful and useful capabilities of X11. Motif and Xaw, for all their many and fatal faults, had better support for remote applications, customization, and inter-application communication than either Gnome or KDE. And Gtk+ and Qt both make very inefficient use of the X11 APIs, giving X11 an undeserved reputation for being slow. The Gnome and KDE developers don't even seem to understand what they are not doing, they are just complaining with some regularity that X11 is more cumbersome than Windows (which it is, if you try to program it like Windows).
As I was saying, I think both Gnome and KDE are ultimately good projects for Linux. I'm glad I have something simple and pretty to install on PCs for use by friends and family, something that, for better or for worse, works just like Windows and MacOS. But I also view them both as about equally "lame" from a technical point, and the differences between them seem minor compared to their common limitations.
The "best" feature of gnome-panel was the Swallowed App, but it seems it's not to be in Gnome2... Now That's LAME!!
Because it's backed by RedHat and Sun.
And it's no coincidence that RedHat users usually say that Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet while SuSE, Mandrake or Gentoo users say it is...
At least that's my observation, and it's also confirmed by statistics (in Germany (= SuSE territory) Linux marketshare is about 3-4 times higher than in the USA (=RedHat territory))
Something concerns me with the Qt licensing. I'm asking people who likewise share a love for the freedom that free software gives us, not to those who don't really care.
Imagine 3 years from now KDE has overtaken the Linux desktop, and GNOME/GTK+ has faded to obscurity. The Linux desktop is beginning to look bright and we start to have many commercial applications made for us (free is always better, but commercial is necessary).
With GNOME or KDE it is possible to make commercial applications. With GNOME the developer merely takes advantage of the LGPL license. In KDE however, the developer would need to purchase a license from Trolltech for Qt.
Now I have no problem with making companies pay - it's an incentive to make free software. But what I don't like, is if Qt becomes the necessary standard, that we have a commercial company that is the controller of the fate of commercial applications. I don't like the thought of commercial apps for Linux being in the hands of another company - I'd much rather if the community controlled such a mechanism.
So I want to know if others think my concerns are legitimate or misinformed?
Because you say so?
KDE is a complete mess of feature and preference overload, with little apparent thought given to design. GNOME has the design part down a lot better, and has a far more sane attitude towards preferences, but is lacking in some features, a few of them major. (No, I don't mean stupid sh*t like edge-flipping - I'm talking about stuff like a lock-down system for administrators, a must-have in office environments!)
There cannot be such a thing as "preference overload" because you only set preferences once, but use features daily. The maybe 10 seconds that it takes longer to find your preference in a preference-rich control-panel is irrelevant compared to the features you gain.
The drooling morons just use the defaults anyway and never use the control panel, so they are the least affected user group
Neither desktop is quite ready for Joe Consumer use - but I predict that one or both will get damn close this year, either by GNOME filling in a few feature gaps, or KDE getting serious about consumer-level usability.* We're not there yet, but we are damn close.
Nonsense. KDE and even GNOME (yes, I'm a KDE fan, but while GNOME isn't that great anymore for power users, it's still good enough for basic users) is technically ready for Joe Consumer.
All problems have nothing to do with KDE or GNOME itself:
* side note to Mosfet-worshippers: "organization" will not save you - kontrol center is drowning in useless preferences. Some of them simply have to go
Gooddamn, that's nonsense. You only need to set preferences *once*, so any time-gains are negletible and the so-called mysterious "average user" doesn't change the preferences at all, so using the "average user" as a reason to reduce kcontrol functionality is pretty moronic.
OK, now in all-tabs, otherwise you won't get it:
SHOW ME A SINGLE PROGRAM THAT IS SUCCESSFUL BECAUSE IT HAS REDUCED CONFIGURATION FUNCTIONALITY
Name one. Everyone *I* know, ICQ, Winamp, Photoshop, MS Office, etc. is loaded with configuration options, and every version more are added. MS Office alone probably has more configuration options than KDE in it's full glory.
Name a single program that has become successful because it has removed configuration options. Just a single one.
So according to you, MS Office can't be used by "Joe average", right?
You are dead wrong, sorry. I'm a Wordprocessing-newbie (well actually not really a newbie, I use them for several years, but only about once every 2 months, so I'm at the same skill level as a newbie, but I disgress) and I can get my work done using the defaults in OpenOffice. If I would use it more often, I would dig around and customize it to fit my needs - and I would be very happy to find the options I need.
There has been a lot said about the usability of GNOME, and a lot of work done to make the user interface more consistant. However I think that it has mostly been a waste of time. The people who are writing the GNOME Human interface guidelines are forgetting that the majority of GNOME users are going to be UNIX/Linux users, and that to these people it is not necessarily atractive to use a desktop environment which tries simply to be a better Windowss than windows. Take for example key bindings. In the Unix world there have always been two different sets of keybindings that people use, emacs keys and vi keys. I think that it is fair to say that the majority of unix users spend a lot of thier time in either emacs or vi. Gnome used to try to emulate some of the emacs default keybindings, but now they all seem to have been replaced with windows keybindings.
Another good example is the "too many clocks" problem. A Sun sponsored ethnographic study into GNOME usability said that users were confused when trying to add a clock to a panel, because there was a multiplicity of clock applets. The people who write these things make a basic mistake of thinking that a windows user should be able to walk up to a UNIX machine, grab the mouse and go, and that makes for good user interface. Well its not true. The old MacOS is often cited as a good UI. The first time I tried to use it, I didn't have a clue what was going on. The menu bar at the top confused the hell out of me. That doesn't mean that it wasn't a good UI, it just means that it wasn't TWM or windows 3.11, which is what I was used to at the time. So I was pissed off when I upgraded my version of gnome and half the applets I used had gone!
Don't even get me started on window managers with maximise buttons!
Developers should remember who they are developing for, and give more precedence to unix traditions than to windows traditions. It is nice to be able to attract new users from other platforms, but it shouldn't be at the price of losing users on the current one. Users from MacOS or windows should have to learn how to use a new user interface. If theres nothing different then theres no point in changing.
psr --History is ending.
No, the ridiculous attitude to have is to presume that you can sit, having made absolutely no contributions aside from a retarded comment about a "killer app ... new GUI system," and tell coders what they should be doing with their time.
What exactly do you expect? Some sort of magical new alternative to dialogs, start menus, and taskbars? Those have been the staple of GUI design, not only for Windows, but for MacOS, BeOS, OS/2, and basically all other GUI systems.
Have people tried to create radically new desktops before? Yes, and those have always been spectacular failures. The second someone finds something better, EVERYONE will switch. For now, this is the paradigm we have, and every group tries to creates its own vision of that paradigm. These are not "half-assed clones".
Believe it or not, but some people actually prefer using Linux desktop environments over Windows. I'm one of those people. I can't stand Windows at all, so I use Gnome. It's not perfect, but neither is Windows. I use what gets the job done quickly and get the bonus of not having to be constantly irritated by the Windows feel.
Whenever a program is cloned, it is usually for good cause -- sometimes Microsoft or some other company creates a good program or adds something interesting to the UI that others overlooked before. To not take advantage of a proven design for the sake of being different is sheer arrogance. I've noticed that Gnome and several GTK apps draw their influence from various sources to create programs that have their own personality. (I've never really used KDE, but I'm sure the same can be said about it.)
Which leads me to this: Your comment is total nonsense. Every one of your five paragraphs have at least one major flaw. Some have more. I don't think I'll be able to influence your opinion on the matter at all, so I won't even try. But since you've given your opinion, I thought I'd give mine.
... which is in turn a copy of stuff that Mac System 4 did four years before that, which in turn was a copy of Xerox's GUI work in the mid-to-late 70s, which in turn based itself around the work done at SAIL in the late 60s, which itself ripped off the Lascaux cave paintings. Yes, we know.
No, they didn't listen to bashers. They listened to the usability tests that Sun and Ximian have done, with user skills from beginners to those very experienced with UNIX.
Not true again. Galeon is written in C++. A large portion of redhat's system tools, including their installer, are written with the python bindings. Sawfish is mostly written in a weird dialect of Lisp called Rep. None of these are trivial apps.
I think your idea that Gnome is very politically oriented is a bit off. After all, they've refused to elect Richard Stallman to the Gnome Foundation Board :^)
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Drooling moron? I wish you smelly, pedantic bores would realise that most people don't want to hand-hack some poorly documented config file, they want to play games, browse the web, do their taxes and all the other things that Windows allows them to do (albeit sometimes in shades of blue).
Don't diss peope like my dad just because he's got better things to do. If you took your head out of your backside occasionally you might be able to see this for yourself.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
"or innovate and create something people will actually want to use."
But that is the problem. People don't WANT to learn something new!
"Average users" want things to just work. They want zero learning curve. They DEMAND things to work the like the way they used to.
"Innovation" will NOT make people switch.
Ignore the comparison with KDE for a moment. And the fact that he is pro-KDE. The article is written in such a way, that it provokes. This is the purpose of it. So that people discuss it.
He raises some valid "problems" of GNOME. Those problems are more metaphyiscal, so they might don't actually have to concern you.
He raises the valid question: "What does GNOME stand for?"
The whole project seem to lack consistency in its development process. The whole core parts have been totally replaced. (WM 3 times, Configuration once, FM once). The laudible idea of an "GNU Network Object Model Environment" has been dropped in favour of being a language agnostic desktop enviroment.
Those aren't real problems, but they are probably the reason for the deficiencies of the Gnome desktop in respect to UI consistency, which is the part KDE concentrated on. And meanwhile, KDE gained some language independency of its own.
Please note, that I didn't say that the GNOME Desktop is better or worse than the KDE. It primarily means, GNOME could be better than it currently is, when it had concentrated on their primary goal (Being GNOME).
In the authors admittently slightly provoking words:
"GNOME's higher purpose was forgotten somewhere along the line, after which it degenerated into a LAME Franken-GUI."
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Emacs
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Some clarifications are needed here.
;)
.gconf and .gnome* so defaults can be restored and things can run again.
It was created in a political effort (to replace (=kill) KDE.) and politics is still very involved in GNOME. I really acknowledge what GNU has done in the 80's and early 90's, but lately they have become a bunch of buerocrats and politicians. KDE vs GNOME is pretty similar to Linux vs. the Hurd. - Pragmatism versus Politics.
Once upon a time, a couple of students coding an image manipulation program (The Gimp) decided to design their own X toolkit as the existing ones didn't satisfy them. They called it gtk+, and it soon became the toolkit of choice for many coders, since QT was still affected by license sickness at the time.
Gnome came up later not as a KDE killer, but as a higher-level UI API to design applications on top of gtk+. The K desktop environment is an environment, Gnome was supposed to be a toolkit (and in many aspects still is).
It has improved lately, at least GNOME's primary goal doesn't seem to be killing off KDE anymore and they seem to even cooperate.
The KDE vs Gnome flamewar was started, battled in, and lost by the same people who bash emacs vs vi or linux vs windows : users. The Gnome developpers and project leaders never tried to "kill" KDE AFAIK, and it wasn't the other way around either.
GNOME made the big mistake in listening to bashers. The bashers (= non GNOME users) said GNOME was too complicated so the politicians (see above) decided that many configuration options must go in Gnome2. That pissed off many real users but attracted not a single new user.
What they did is try to "innovate" in a "corporate" way by producing UI guidelines and following them. This may have been a political decision indeed, but the real problem here is that the UI specs just get in the way. Gnome is trying to be an environment, but, as a toolkit, it has to coexist nicely with former versions of itself. Having gnome1 and gnome2 apps running simultaneously (often you can't avoid it, e.g. everything you run is gnome2 except evolution which is still gnome1) brings chaos to your desktop. The preferences have to be defined twice, once for gnome then gnome2, and some overlap and mess things up.
C. KDE/Qt/C++ programming is faster and more elegant. Again, this was a rather political decision. (Almost all GNU software is C-based, therefore GNOME has to be C-based, too) Yes, in theory many non-C language bindings exist, but in the real world none of them are used for any non-trivial project.
C was chosen because not everyone could afford C++ compilers when gtk+ was designed. The choice has stuck ever since. Many language bindings do exist, and since you found no non-trivial project using these, did you consider the possibility it may be so because the _original_, _raw_, _C_ toolkit is easy enough to get the job done ?
As I final word, I have to say my main concern about gnome these days really, genuinely is gconf. I know about it being not evil, not really a registry, XML based, easy to modify, and such. I don't buy it. It is a registry. It means that every emerge -u world I issue that upgrades gnome2 may result in me and my users having to lose 20 minutes reconfiguring. Because some applet in your panel changed its gconf property format. Or everything keeps crashing because a major component has. And you can't be bothered to dig the gconf repository (ha!) to find the offending key, because, well, it's time to go to work. Which means deletion of
Some registry upgrade strategy is required I believe...
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
"* side note to Mosfet-worshippers: "organization" will not save you - kontrol center is drowning in useless preferences. Some of them simply have to go"
I do so love being told what I can and can't do with my own computer.
But yes, good organisation can sort out this situation. Why is it so difficult to choose a sensible level of "standard" options, well-thought-out and well presented, and hide more advanced options behind an "advanced" button in the appropriate dialogs ? Some applications already do - Microsoft also uses this idea in places.
And if you insist that you're dealing with people that can't deal with "advanced" configuration options, I would suggest two solutions:
1) All advanced dialogs to have a "Restore to Defaults" button (some applications already do this). In fact, this would probably be a good idea on all dialogs;
2) Have some single centralised option, controllable by root or a system administrator, which simply turns off all "Advanced" dialogs (and the buttons which acccess them) if you insist that users can't be trusted to use them, and will only be confused by them (or that their use will make a system administration / support harder).
So you insist that Trolltech must offer their product to you for free so you could write closed & proprietary software with it?
Before, GPL-fanatics whined because Qt was under QPL and not GPL. Now that is't GPL'ed, those same people whine because they cant use Qt for free to write closed-source software. They want to deny Trolltech the right to profit from their software, and in the same time, they insist on using the product for free to profit themselves. Hypocrisy. Plain and simple.
"Do as I say, not as I do!". That seems to be the core of their argument.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Redhat choses to use Gnome while most of the "Pure" distros like KDE as do I
Painting a picture that it's only Red Hat who like GNOME and that everybody else uses KDE is entirely false.
According to http://counter.li.org/reports/machines.htm, which is just about the most reliable source of information on the subject (due the lack of actual retail figures it's very difficult to count accurately), the most popular core distributions are*:
- Red Hat (~ 29%)
- Debian (~ 14.5%)
- SuSE (~ 11.5%)
- Slackware (~ 11%)
It should be noted that Mandrake is the second most popular distribution of all with over 17.5% market share, though it is not a 'core' or 'pure' distribution as it is based on Red Hat.
* = These figures are taken for a random sampling of 110,000 GNU/Linux users.
Out of these distributions:
- Red Hat - primarily supports GNOME
- Debian - primarily supports GNOME
- SuSE - primarily supports KDE
- Slackware - no notable preference exhibited
Anaecdotally - even when you include Mandrake's slight predisposition towards KDE - this puts GNOME's market share at ~ 43.5% and KDE's at ~ 29%.
With all of these distributions you can obtain GNOME packages or opt to use the GNOME desktop. There is clearly no case to be made that 'core' distributions choose to use KDE to GNOME or even prefer KDE to GNOME, if anything, GNOME seems to have greater market share, not less.
In my opinion, Gnome is turning into the Frankenstein of the open sourced world.
It should be noted that GNOME and KDE are NOT trying to meet entirely the same goals!
KDE works very well 'out of the box' - all the applications are tightly integrated and it works with little fuss as most of the core components are built and written by a core set of KDE developers.
GNOME however, has become a vastly more ambitious project, it is about building a scaleable, flexible, and to some degree language agnostic graphical environment. It is perhaps not surprising that someone might think it has become a Frankensein product - but that is to misunderstand the point of GNOME.
GNOME is a platform for developing and rolling out great best-of-breed applications from disparate developers - software such a GIMP, Gnumeric, Abiword and Nautilus - having them interoperate with each other - and, most importantly - having them interoperate with the user and the desktop environment in a consistent and user focused way. The fruits of this are visible clearly in most current release of GNOME.
GNOME is being developed with long term goals of usability and expandability in mind. It's not just about creating a desktop for the here and now - to borrow a phrase being used recently by Sun - it's about building a product that can "stand the test of time", an expandable product the developers can be proud of and an environment that others will want to build their applications around.
The current incompleteness of GNOME means that many users will prefer the convenience and tight integration of KDE at present - KDE certainly better meets many of the shared GNOME/KDE goals, like the provision of a useful default set of software tools and a coherent control panel. In such an imperfect world it's certainly important for users to have choice - but with regard to the future and long term desktop dominance I belive GNOME is a much more likely canidate than KDE.
>> XML is human-readable
And so are C++, x86 assembly, and calculus. But why should someone need to learn them, or XML, to configure a desktop?
Software can be as open and free as you can make it, but it will remain closed to the real world so long as it comes with a "For Geeks Only" label.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Yes!
I've only started to really like GNOME after 2.x where they made it simple and elegant. There used to be millions of little options in the control center, WM, everything, just like there still is in KDE. The usability test have really improved GNOME a lot.
Customizability is only a good thing up to a certain point. You can't really be easy to use *and* ultra-customizable at the same time. I have a lot of respect for KDE (and the file picker dialog really is better because of offering easy shortcuts to desktop, floppy, CD etc. even if a little busy... I bet GNOME will adopt those).
So, you basically have to make some sort of a compromise between intuitive, ultra-customizable and efficient to use. GNOME has just decided to have the ease of use as the top priority and I applaud them for that. Fortunately, we can all choose between GNOME, KDE or something else (I'm currently using ion which could fall to the concentrate on efficiency above all category)
what is it about Gnome's file dialog that everybody hates so? [...] the fact that the TAB key works properly is a big point
:)
The reason everybody complains is that nobody knows that normal shell tab completion is possible in the dialog. I don't know if that works in KDE at all. People clickety-click their ways through it. Of course the gtk dialog sucks then. I once filed a bug that the selector should have a text saying "Use tab completion here" over the text enter area, but was turned down (rightly so
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Linux is taking over the world anyway, I personally wouldn't mind if we were left with at least choice, when it comes to desktops.
The world is big enough for the two to hang around.
The site where: "I'm right, as long as you ignore the things that prove me wrong", became a valid method of debate.
Can you write a closed source program with GPL software? NOT LIKELY...
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Yes, you certainly can write closed source software with GPL software. The tools you use to create your software do not necessarily impose license restrictions.
Unless I'm mistaken, I can write a GTK+ application closed source so long as I'm not using any GPL'd code in my app. All I do is tell people who buy my product that they need to get the free GTK+ libraries in order to run it.
Your argument would be the equivalent of saying you can't write closed source software to run on Linux because Linux is GPL'd. That is simply not the case.
Now [in Gnome2] even the (dismal) file requester takes about five seconds to draw up. I think Gnome is going the wrong way. It's only a good desktop for those that like to fire up a number of apps / windows, and then sit there looking at it / fire screenshots around the globe.
Apart from adding a bit of spiff, all I can find are features removed. I heard someone type 'gnome 2.2...now you can have transparency in the panel'. Well, 1.4 had that, 2.0 didn't.
I started using Gnome about three months after I started using Linux, about five years ago. I've been hoping it hasn't, but all I've seen (apart from a glimmer of hope in 1.4) is Gnome go to shit. I think I'm going to get the 1.4 source, maintain it myself and keep using that.
Not trolling, I'm genuinely disappointed that Gnome has given Linux a bad name, not because Gnome is Linux, but Joe Public who's used to a Windows system thinks that, he can't draw an abstraction between a desktop environment and an OS, and I think that's why a lot of people think Linux sucks. I also think adoption of Gnome by Sun is a bad move. Sure CDE sucks, but it runs.