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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.
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!!
When I upgraded to SuSE 8.1, I decided to give KDE another whirl since it had hit version 3. Pretty good, does a lot of stuff, appears to do it well aside from a couple of basic apps which would crash every time they were closed (not KDEs fault as such).
;-)
Why did I switch back to Gnome 2?
Speed. The two systems I was using KDE on were a dual p2-400 and a celeron 800. On both, there was an enourmous speed increase switching to Gnome - especially with lots of open apps. They definitely still have work to do, I like Metacity because it's nice+light+simple, but the configuration leaves a little to be desired. GTK2 based apps appear to run a lot slower than GTK1, but even then they're still much quicker than the QT based KDE.
Fortunately, with "big players" backing KDE and Gnome seperately, I don't see either going away - a good thing, although I do wish they'd agree on how drag+drop should work
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
my GNOME has always sat silently on my front porch. And now it's singing MP3s encoded with LAME?
Who would've though that open source software would lead to a singing GNOME?
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
My understanding is that they removed Sawfish because it is difficult to maintain. The original developer of Sawfish has moved on to other things, and he isn't working on it at all. Sawfish is lacking some major features (multihead support, accessability), and large parts of Sawfish are written in LISP. I guess the GNOME developers don't like working with the code base.
Metacity is simpler than Sawfish, and the theory is that it will be simpler to keep it bug-free.
I've switched to Metacity; I'm content with it.
The guys who get paid to work on GNOME are not doing anything with Sawfish. If its fans are dedicated enough, however, they could keep it going.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I belong to the "something has gone wrong with Gnome" school of thought. I dearly want Gnome to succeed. It's got a different sort of style and sensibility than KDE and Windows, and there's a lot of great stuff there.
Love it or hate it, KDE feels like a unified desktop, while Gnome feels like a cobbled together set of unrelated tools.
The "Open File" dialog is a thing of shame, and I can't believe that it won't be until October until a replacement comes along. The fact that something so basic has been allowed to stay unchanged so long, in my mind, reflects the difference between KDE and Gnome.
I don't think that it's an organization issue, or even that one group is more clever than the other. My guess is that, at some level, Qt really is better than GTK. I don't know if it's C vs. C++, or KParts vs. Corba, Glade vs. KDevelop... Perhaps Nick's got it right, that it's the underlying objects. KDE doesn't seem to have suffered from having a C++-centric toolkit, and Gnome doesn't seem to have benefitted from having a C-centric toolkit.
The last release of KDE had some pretty cool stuff in it - I was eager to get my hands on it and play with it. In contrast, most of what I've heard about Gnome 2.2 has been about what it doesn't have in it anymore. It apparently won't even be featured in the next Knoppix release, since it's broken so badly.
But I wouldn't discount the future of Gnome. Maybe .NET/Mono will solve the problems (I wouldn't bet the farm on it). Maybe there are no problems at all - just a different desktop, with a different way of doing things.
But, gah... Please, fix that "Open File" dialog!
Bad analogy. Wheels are essential. That's like a mouse cursor or a basic window in GUI terms.
But KDE and Gnome also copy dialogs, start menus, taskbars, basic design conventions, and much more.
You can either copy forever in a futile attempt at winning the Windows crowd (yeah, let's give them half-assed clones of what they already have), or innovate and create something people will actually want to use.
You say Microsoft has good ideas that are poorly implemented. KDE and GNOME are just copying what's been done in that department, under the guise of making it more "customizable" (wow, I can move the taskbar and start menu around now).
Please, won't somebody create something new? The "killer app" I think Linux needs is a new GUI system designed from the ground up for desktop use. Don't give me "well, write it yourself," because I don't have the skill level, but more importantly, it's a ridiculous attitude to have to start with. Besides, if you want a graphic designer, I'm your man. Linux apps are always sorely lacking in the aesthetics department.
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?
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.
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?
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.
So I'm giving KDE a try. It has problems too. The most annoying one to me is the way that it switches focus when I use my scrollwheel. It has options for what to do when clicking any of the mouse button (focus, raise, etc) but not the scrollwheel. When you scroll a window that is not focused and not on top, it gives focus to that window but does not raise it. This maybe wouldn't be bad, but then clicking on the window also does not raise it. You have to focus some other window then come back.
Another thing I don't like about KDE is that it is hard to add buttons to launch X (not KDE) applications to the sidebars. In gnome I could add a launcher easily. In KDE I have to add a non KDE app, it gives me a browse dialog. I don't know where my apps are, probably usr/bin/ or usr/local/bin, I don't want to hunt around, so I try to click on my terminal button so I can do a `which app`. The dialog has the sidebar. Doh.
The choices for applets in KDE is very underwhelming. In gnome 1 I was able to put applets for gaim and xmms in my sidebar. They are unobtrusive there and available on all my desktops. It was wonderful. KDE doesn't have these.
Sure the KDE apps all look the same and act the same, but they are not powerful compared to other stuff. I always use Mozilla as my web browser, open office as my word processor, etc. The KDE stuff are nice, but not as full of features. As soon as you add in non-KDE apps, you lose much of this consistency.
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.
The article in question is obviously nothing anyone should take seriously. It does not even pretend to be an honest comparison between two windowing environments; it's basically one person's rant about why he prefers one over the other. Good for him, but mentioning only KDE's good points and only Gnome's bad points isn't a useful comparison to anyone else.
I'm surpised at how poorly informed the people who discuss Gnome vs KDE are. No one has mentioned any of the new accomplishments both environments has achieved. It's still all "file selector" this and "configuration options" that. Dudes, I stopped fretting over thing like that years ago. There's plenty of other things that need focus for a good desktop environment, and are being worked on as we speak, but no one has mentioned them in any of the comments I've read.
Anyone here even know about the massive time spent on building a rich and powerful "accessibility toolkit" ATK? Or the very well thought out multimedia framework GStreamer that's currently in development. I've only seen a few mentions of the establishment and accomplishments of freedesktop.org - whose goal is to set standards (such as the HIG) which both Gnome and KDE can follow to achieve consistency and inoperatability. How about the universal adoption of Unicode (using UTF8) throughout so that proper internationalization is finally possible?
These are important things, and much more forward looking than all the nitpicking that's so prevalent in these discussions. These articles and the bickering that ensues are no better than "celebrity tells all" and "other celebrity makes rebuttal" shows on TV. Totally pointless - fun to watch sometimes - but pointless.
One thing I need to add: Most complaints about GConf that I've read are miss-informed. Yes, the closest approximation is the Windows registry. But it was created with the strengths of that registry in mind, and steps taken to get rid of the problems that the registry had. For example, ALL keys are documented. Which is easier? Hand editing a text file, or going down a list of fully documented options in a gui editor - toggling boolean keys, editing strings, etc.
I'm obviously a Gnome user. I know KDE has it's own list of accomplishments, but I don't know them well enough to list. My point is, why the hell are you choosing a desktop environment based on which has a better file selector? There is plenty more to look at.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
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.
This was copied-and-pasted from here. It was originally a reply to an article posted on ZDNet in October of 2000.
Can you write a closed source program with GPL software? NOT LIKELY...
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
You know, it's not even all about people like your Dad -- people like me want stuff to Just Work too.
I'm a Unix sysadmin by trade. (Mostly Solaris, but now some HP-UX as well) At work, I do nothing _but_ futz with configuration files and tweak things and make it go --- not so much because things are busted, but because I'm trying to make them run _better_. Things like setting the sd_max_throttle setting in Solaris, or various ndd commands to disable source-routed frames and so on
Anyway, when I get home at the end of the day, the LAST DAMNED THING ON EARTH I want to be doing is tweaking config files, downloading Widgetx 0.234567 and finding out it's incompatible with the libc libraries in my OS, so I have to upgrade to glibc and now Widgetx still doesn't work because glibc broke my window manager.
I remember those days --- the libc-to-glibc migration
March 24, 2001 I bought my first Mac. And I haven't looked back since
Now stuff Just Works. I come home and I can read my email, play games, connect to work, and even watch DVD's and edit home movies and play with my digital camera
Some folks can't see the forest from the trees --- The end-goal here should be for the system to just GET OUT OF MY WAY and let me work