Posted by
michael
on from the world-outside-KDE dept.
JanneM writes "Gnome 2.4 is arriving early september. Sayamindu Dasgupta has installed the 2.3.5 development release to see what's in store, and has written a very nice overview of the upcoming release."Update: 08/14 16:06 GMT by M: The author has provided a mirror.
Re:Nautilus?
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
1) Not sure about memory usage, but it has never bothered me. I never look at the memory usage. If it feels fast enough, then that's good enough for me. Besides, no tool reports the right memory usage.
2) The current MIME system is severely broken in many ways. This is more of a gnome-vfs problem. They are currently still working with KDE on a new shared MIME system that's better than the current GNOME and KDE ones.
3) That's a RedHat thing. It doesn't happen on my GNOME desktop. But anyway... but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".
4) Don't look at the output of top, it's not reliable. And this is a kernel issue, not a Nautilus issue.
Re:KDE is WAY ahead!
by
BladeMelbourne
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Version numbers rarely have anything to do with software development progress with respect to competitors software.
If that was the case, is Windows 3.1 more advanced software that a Linux box with kernel 2.6.0-test3?
It is a well known trend that competing software vendors may increase their version increments to appear current with their competitors.
For example, Netscape 6 (as opposed to Netscape 5) was released because MSIE was already at version 6. RedHat 9 came out after RedHat 8 (there was no 8.1) presumably to keep abreast with Mandrake 9.
GNOME is a mature desktop environment. Their software is good enough - their is no need to resort to such version jumping. It suits some people, but not others. My (Red) Hat goes off to them for not needing to keep their versions in sync with KDE.
Mike
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
bmj
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Often, if I have to switch hats from programmer to designer (part of the job description when you work at a small shop) that I'll crank up the resolution to fit more stuff on the screen. Once I'm finished and get back to coding, I'll reduce the resolution again so I don't go blind. So, it'd be nice if I didn't have to restart X to do that.
-- Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
LordDartan
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It also comes in handy when you and your significant other use the same computer but like different resolutions. My wife likes 800x600 and I like 1280x1024. This is one of the main reasons my wife hates using linux.
Re:GNOME vs KDE
by
ElGuapoGolf
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I personally don't care about eye candy, but I do think the development is lagging behind.
Example: File Dialog. The Gnome file dialog is the most hideous and counter-intuitive piece of software I've ever seen. With the KDE file dialog, not only can I navigate easier, it's tied to their IO slaves, so I can save to FTP sites, SMB shares, etc. Pretty much anything.
With the GTK/Gnome dialog, I'm usually cursing and grumbling as I clumsily navigate around. And the programs that constantly reset the dialog to your home directory, even after you've called the dialog and navigated a few levels in, are way annoying.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
larien
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In my case, I sometimes change resolution for streaming videos. The image is usually small (especially for some movie trailers) and even at double size, it's quite small in terms of screen real-estate under 1280x1024. Decreasing resolution to 800x600 usually lets it fill the screen much better.
No, "full screen" mode is not an option in most cases as the scaling usually makes the image look, well, wrong. Also, not all players provide such an option, especially embedded players in browsers (some don't even allow double size).
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
Mr_Icon
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
If you have over a 100 gnome desktops in your department, you don't want to field "can you please change my resolution" requests from your users, trust me.
-- If you open yourself to the foo,
You and foo become one.
why are they bothering
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Gnome's gone downhill since 1.4 in the area of user customizations. The ability to customize behavior is almost non existant compared to what we had in 1.4. I could tweak and adjust 1.4 to create a very cool environment for myself. With the 2.x series, almost all of the capability is gone. It's now just a mindless environment for dummies. Gnome's stated that they're aiming low and catering for the dumber computer users. There was soo much potential for it to develop into a really powerful environment and then those silly studies were conducted and the rest is history..... Oh well.
I've got a really good filemanager. It does everything I want it to and more, and it only takes up a few KB of memory. It's not entirely intuitive, but once you understand it its a dream to use. It's called ls, along with its friends cp, rm, mv, chmod, chown and a few others.
Honestly, folks, isn't this why we moved to Linux in the first place? To get away from bloat in the name of userfriendliness? What happened to K.I.S.S.? What happened to having one program do one thing? What happened to the Unix Philosophy? Nowadays we have all these Explorer wannabe programs that purport to do everything you want and more all in one program -- and I've tried them all -- and I've never found them to be anything but clumsy, compared to the elegant tools of the old school.
A GUI browser, I can understand completely. Ditto word processor, spreadsheets, etc. But for a filemanager? If you're going to insist on a GUI for that, please don't complain about bloat.
-- Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta)
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Instead of asking "how many preferences can I still change now?", ask yourself this first: How many of all those preferences actually make sense?
For example, the preferences in the Pager applet that lets you tweak for a certain window manager make no sense. They're the "unbreak me" type of preferences. Things like that should be handled automatically. Another one is startup notification. Why would anyone not want it? Why should it be disable-able? And there's the Nautilus desktop preferences. A lot of users got confused by the sudden disappearence of their desktop and don't know how to get them back. Besides, this is a preference that only power users with old hardward would want to use, and is only set once.
And most people who complain about the lack of preferences are geeks and power users who are used to lots of preferences. Well sorry to say this to you, but you are not GNOME's target group anymore. GNOME is now targeting normal users that want simplicity and don't want to be flooded with config options.
A GUI browser, I can understand completely. Ditto word processor, spreadsheets, etc. But for a filemanager? If you're going to insist on a GUI for that, please don't complain about bloat.
There's nothing inherently wrong with managing files graphically. The ROX-Filer does an excellent job of combining shell-like globbing with click-and-drag ease and is particularly handy for managing images. ROX-Filer is small, doesn't eat up gobs of memory, runs fast and does one job (file managing) well. Nautilus might be prettier, but it needs a lot of improvement in both bloat and actual file managing before I'd use it full-time.
Of course, for any serious heavy-duty data management (e.g. take all the PNGs in directory A, shrink them by 50%, despeckle, convert to JPEGs and move to directory B) a shell will always beat a graphical pointy clicky tool. But I see no reason not to use both and do so on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Not sure about memory usage, but it has never bothered me. I never look at the memory usage. If it feels fast enough, then that's good enough for me. Besides, no tool reports the right memory usage.
2) The current MIME system is severely broken in many ways. This is more of a gnome-vfs problem. They are currently still working with KDE on a new shared MIME system that's better than the current GNOME and KDE ones.
3) That's a RedHat thing. It doesn't happen on my GNOME desktop. But anyway... but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".
4) Don't look at the output of top, it's not reliable. And this is a kernel issue, not a Nautilus issue.
Version numbers rarely have anything to do with software development progress with respect to competitors software.
If that was the case, is Windows 3.1 more advanced software that a Linux box with kernel 2.6.0-test3?
It is a well known trend that competing software vendors may increase their version increments to appear current with their competitors.
For example, Netscape 6 (as opposed to Netscape 5) was released because MSIE was already at version 6. RedHat 9 came out after RedHat 8 (there was no 8.1) presumably to keep abreast with Mandrake 9.
GNOME is a mature desktop environment. Their software is good enough - their is no need to resort to such version jumping. It suits some people, but not others. My (Red) Hat goes off to them for not needing to keep their versions in sync with KDE.
Mike
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
Often, if I have to switch hats from programmer to designer (part of the job description when you work at a small shop) that I'll crank up the resolution to fit more stuff on the screen. Once I'm finished and get back to coding, I'll reduce the resolution again so I don't go blind. So, it'd be nice if I didn't have to restart X to do that.
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
It also comes in handy when you and your significant other use the same computer but like different resolutions. My wife likes 800x600 and I like 1280x1024. This is one of the main reasons my wife hates using linux.
I personally don't care about eye candy, but I do think the development is lagging behind.
Example: File Dialog. The Gnome file dialog is the most hideous and counter-intuitive piece of software I've ever seen. With the KDE file dialog, not only can I navigate easier, it's tied to their IO slaves, so I can save to FTP sites, SMB shares, etc. Pretty much anything.
With the GTK/Gnome dialog, I'm usually cursing and grumbling as I clumsily navigate around. And the programs that constantly reset the dialog to your home directory, even after you've called the dialog and navigated a few levels in, are way annoying.
No, "full screen" mode is not an option in most cases as the scaling usually makes the image look, well, wrong. Also, not all players provide such an option, especially embedded players in browsers (some don't even allow double size).
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
If you have over a 100 gnome desktops in your department, you don't want to field "can you please change my resolution" requests from your users, trust me.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Gnome's gone downhill since 1.4 in the area of user customizations. The ability to customize behavior is almost non existant compared to what we had in 1.4. I could tweak and adjust 1.4 to create a very cool environment for myself. With the 2.x series, almost all of the capability is gone. It's now just a mindless environment for dummies. Gnome's stated that they're aiming low and catering for the dumber computer users. There was soo much potential for it to develop into a really powerful environment and then those silly studies were conducted and the rest is history..... Oh well.
Honestly, folks, isn't this why we moved to Linux in the first place? To get away from bloat in the name of userfriendliness? What happened to K.I.S.S.? What happened to having one program do one thing? What happened to the Unix Philosophy? Nowadays we have all these Explorer wannabe programs that purport to do everything you want and more all in one program -- and I've tried them all -- and I've never found them to be anything but clumsy, compared to the elegant tools of the old school.
A GUI browser, I can understand completely. Ditto word processor, spreadsheets, etc. But for a filemanager? If you're going to insist on a GUI for that, please don't complain about bloat.
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
Instead of asking "how many preferences can I still change now?", ask yourself this first:
How many of all those preferences actually make sense?
For example, the preferences in the Pager applet that lets you tweak for a certain window manager make no sense. They're the "unbreak me" type of preferences. Things like that should be handled automatically.
Another one is startup notification. Why would anyone not want it? Why should it be disable-able?
And there's the Nautilus desktop preferences. A lot of users got confused by the sudden disappearence of their desktop and don't know how to get them back. Besides, this is a preference that only power users with old hardward would want to use, and is only set once.
And most people who complain about the lack of preferences are geeks and power users who are used to lots of preferences. Well sorry to say this to you, but you are not GNOME's target group anymore. GNOME is now targeting normal users that want simplicity and don't want to be flooded with config options.
There's nothing inherently wrong with managing files graphically. The ROX-Filer does an excellent job of combining shell-like globbing with click-and-drag ease and is particularly handy for managing images. ROX-Filer is small, doesn't eat up gobs of memory, runs fast and does one job (file managing) well. Nautilus might be prettier, but it needs a lot of improvement in both bloat and actual file managing before I'd use it full-time.
Of course, for any serious heavy-duty data management (e.g. take all the PNGs in directory A, shrink them by 50%, despeckle, convert to JPEGs and move to directory B) a shell will always beat a graphical pointy clicky tool. But I see no reason not to use both and do so on a regular basis.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.