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.
The best function in Gnome 2.4...
by
heironymouscoward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Is the "typing break". I can sit back in my chair, hands on my head, and when the PHB asks why I'm not working, I just say "Gnome Typing Break" and he says "Uh-hu" and goes away. Totally excellent.
--
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Re:The best function in Gnome 2.4...
by
hey
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I don't think its trying to prevent RMI (Remote Method Invocation)... Maybe RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) ???
not flamebait
Does it fix any of those annoying problems in the current versions like:
Nautilus takes an ungodly amount of memory to run
It can't seem to associate file type with applications consistently
It has that annoying "feature" where any time I insert removable media, it opens a window of the media automatically. (I was going to bitch about it mounting automatically, as well, but I suspect that's RH's doing, there: god, sometimes I want to dd, you know)
You close it and it still takes up the same ungodly amount of memory. If I want that kind of behavior, I'll look for it in Windows, thank you.
* It does take up less, I believe (not having done any formal comparison).
* I have never seen that problem; maybe time for a bug report?
* That is Redhat, and can be turned off. Go to "Preferences" -> "CD properties".
* It won't really release all memory until you _really_ close it - as long as you want it to handle your desktop it is still running. Oh, and just like all other Linux apps, releasing memory doesn't actually release the memory as such; the pages are kept around as long as nothing else needs it, and they are still mapped to the app as long as the app is running. Looking at RSS gives you a sort-of reasonable estimate on the memory use, but it too (if I am correct) will overestimate memory use.
-- Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Re:Nautilus?
by
BladeMelbourne
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I use RedHat 9 and GNOME - and I find that the used RAM slowly creeps up whilst using Nautilus. Now that I have 576 MB it takes a while, but it is still annoying. It would be great if this was resolved in GNOME 2.4.
Used RAM also increases (at a reduced rate) when I use a lighter file manager. The only way to reclaim that memory is to restart X. Maybe XFree86 4.3.0 has a memory leek in RedHat 9 too?
FYI the amount of RAM doesn't increase like that in my Windows 98, which is also immune to the Blaster Worm.
Well, it does a lot of stuff... you might not use it all, but it's there.
It can't seem to associate file type with applications consistently
This is somewhat confusing, but I found in RH9 and Ximian's XD2, a lot of things are associated correctly from the get-go.
It has that annoying "feature" where any time I insert removable media, it opens a window of the media automatically. (I was going to bitch about it mounting automatically, as well, but I suspect that's RH's doing, there: god, sometimes I want to dd, you know)
RTFM? Try "gnome-cd-properties". This isn't nautilus' fault in the first place.
You close it and it still takes up the same ungodly amount of memory. If I want that kind of behavior, I'll look for it in Windows, thank you.
Then you haven't really closed it now, have you? What do you think is managing your desktop? If you don't like it, there's always KDE, or TWM if you'd prefer...
If I had to posit a reason for Nautilus using so much RAM, folder caching would probably be the reason. Nautilus devs can correct me on that one, but it seems like folders I've opened before open much more quickly than new ones. Fixing your memory "problem" would probably knock down the speed of Nautilus tremendously. Buy some more RAM and get on with life.
No idea what the problem with file association is. I've just never had an issue with it (and rather like the way Nautilus gives you a menu of programs to try with a right-click). If you're setting new associations, read the choices carefully, as some similar sounding ones do different things.
You do realize that the _desktop_ is controlled by Nautilus, and thus you really can't close it without killing it, right?
-Erwos
-- Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
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:Nautilus?
by
FrostedWheat
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Another thing I find annoying about Nautilus is its lack of feedback when double-clicking on icons.
Sometimes windows can take upto 10 seconds to open on my machine (2Ghz Athlon, go figure), and I find myself clicking on it a few times to make sure I got it, or right clicking and selecting 'Open' - then have three windows appear at once. Very annoying.
Agree completely (although you can run Nautilus without the desktop with "nautilus --no-desktop"). My preferred bloat-free file manager would be XFTree.
The Gnome system monitor does not give an accurate indication of how much RAM is truly in use. Gnome shares memory between apps. If an application requires the memory, later, it will be released. You're most likely just looking at cached memory that hasn't been released.
It's not a problem, technically. People are just paranoid about their memory usage and don't understand how Gnome really makes use of it.
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.
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.
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".
Windows has had the concept of "mount" and "umount" since the first day it support CDROMs. But no one ever knew it because the hid the automounting from you. But it was there.
Then came along USB storage devices. Suddenly Microsoft had to bite the bullet and introduce the concept to the user. Plug in a USB disk and it automounts, no problem. Pull it out and you've got problems. Twenty minutes and ten miles later, you realize that your memory stick doesn't have all of the data on it that you copied over. You forgot to umount the device! Which is why Microsoft puts a little icon on the tray and tells you that you have to explicitly unmount it.
And don't even get me started on automatically executing applications on the CDROM! Automatically playing audio CD's is annoying enough, but automatically running software off of foreign media is a security nightmare.
-- A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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
Well, in the real world, where nerds are not the prodominant species, people don't care about phylosophical architectural styles. They care about getting work done, and fast.
Interestingly, in the recent KDE usability study the overintegration of Windows Explorer, especially integrating CD burning in it instead of having a separate UI for it in Windows XP, proved to be quite a problem. The "philosophical architectural style" of one tool for one job seems to match user expectations quite well usually.
slashdotted
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3:: What's Changed
Having nothing better to do (and wanting to do a bit of testing on the
localization stuff we are working on), I decided to download the latest beta of GNOME - GNOME 2.3.5 (Jebe) . Since the RC
release freeze is imminent, and the feature freeze is already in place, the
system that I am running currently will not be significantly different from GNOME 2.4, when it is released on September.
In this article, I would be briefly describing the new features and applications of GNOME 2.4. However, I would
concentrate mainly on the packages in the core GNOME system, and will not be going beyond those.
Installing the packages (WARNING: slightly hairy)
To GARNOME or not...
I had heard that installing the GNOME packages in the right order could be a tricky process, and I was looking at
GARNOME and other tools for an easy way out. However, after some poking
around, I decided to do the install by hand. This decision was largely prompted by
this document, and I am really grateful to its author.
The system
The usual convention before doing a description of any large scale installation process is to give a short summary of
the specs of the machine in question, and so, without much ado, here it is:
Processor: 700 Mhz Pentium III RAM: 192 MB Swap: 250 MB OS: Redhat Linux 9.0 (Shrike) Kernel: 2.6.0-test2
It is obvious that this is not a very modern machine, but such boxes are quite common in where I live (India).
The installation
Most of the files needed for compile and install are downloadable from the directory
ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.3/2.3.5/sources/.
There are also a few "extras" which are usually included in stock "development machine" installations, like the Docbook
4.1.2 DTDs, etc. If you don't have them, the./configure script will complain, and you will find them in your
distro CDs.
I did not download the gtk2, the glib2 and the pango packages. More or less up to date GTK2 and glib2 are already included in
RH 9.0 and I usually keep in sync with the Pango development process through CVS (I have to keep track of certain outstanding
bugs in Pango w.r.t bengali rendering). If you follow these steps, please ensure that you have the devel packages installed
as well.
To avoid a mess, I had decided to install the new GNOME packages under/opt. That meant that the new
libraries and the header files would be installed in/opt/lib and/opt/include. So, I had to
set the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH to/opt/lib/pkg-config (by issuing
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/lib/pkg-config) so the pkg-config utility searched/opt/lib/pkg-config before the usual/usr/lib/pkg-config. I had also added the line/opt/lib
to the file/etc/ld.so.conf. Moreover, the usual./configure was replaced by./configure --prefix=/opt so the installation folder was/opt.
I followed the following sequence while installing packages. It works for me, and it may or may not work for you.
if you keep/home on a separate partition, you redo the OS (/,/var) and apps (/usr or/usr/local/ and/opt) without having to backup/restore/home afterwards. Also, it's nice to be able to dedicate a certain fraction of the drive to a specific function . If you have it all on one partition, you may not have enought space for/var or/tmp because you installed too many applications. For a personal system, or a single user desktop, there's really not much point. But on a multi-user server, it can be extremely handy to dedicate portions of the disk to certain logical functions.
What's with the gum-drops on the right hand side of the title bar? Is this like OS X for left-handed people?
The typing break
by
OfficerNoGun
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...sounds like an amazing idea, not just for my hands but for my sanity. If I didn't spend 10 minutes an hour meandering arround the office I would probably go insane.
Re:The typing break
by
Anders
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If I didn't spend 10 minutes an hour meandering arround the office I would probably go insane.
I am not sure why this is funny. It really is a good idea with typing breaks, and of course you can do other work while not typing.
The tool Xwrits may be of use for people interested in this item but not prepared for the entire GNOME upgrade shebang. It must be cool, JWZ uses it (and so do I).
I know what you mean! I'd be even more insance if I didn't spend the other 50 minutes reading Slashdot.:)
On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
CowsAnonymous
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· Score: 5, Informative
From the article:
> The most significant addition to the Control Center > is a utility for changing the screen resolution and > refresh rate on the fly.
This will probably be my fav. It's tough to look "kewl" with Linux when I need to exit the GUI just to change the resolution. Then again, going into that console screen does impress chicks...:0)
You must not know many real chicks, if console impresses them.
You fool!
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
FooBarWidget
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· 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
myspys
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· Score: 2, Insightful
i'm guessing quite a few webdevelopers change from their normal resolution to 800x600 once in a while to make sure that their newly created webpage/site works in 800x600
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
bmj
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· 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
mrd_yaddayadda
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· Score: 2
If you are ever developing for the web you should really be testing your site in multiple browsers/OSes and multiple screen resolutions. That is one off the top of the head actual 'techie' reason for it.
The other more important one for me is because it's convenient! It's been one of the most glaringly horrible things about Linux GUIs for me. I'm glad someone is finally addressing it.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
LordDartan
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· 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:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
3h
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· Score: 2, Informative
ctrl+alt+grey + ctrl+alt+grey - anyone? Faster, easier and X has it for looong time.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
Erik+Hensema
·
· Score: 2
You probably never have your parents over for a visit. Well, I do. And my parents can't read fonts at 1600x1200, so I switch back to 1280x1024.
On a very simple, very basic, single user setup you never have to change the resolution. But Linux is multiuser. And multiple users have multiple preferences.
--
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
sholden
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· Score: 3, Funny
Have you thought of using bigger fonts?
You know, like everyone else does who uses high resolutions.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
larien
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· 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
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· 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.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
thimo
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· Score: 2, Informative
Just type "javascript:resizeTo(800,600)" in the URL bar.
Thimo
-- Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
GNOME armageddon
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Troll
this is the sixth text revision done on 04-11-2002.
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source
of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into
writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in
a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may
find some interesting information within this text that you like to
read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes,
otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a
different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are
going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and
thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it
since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly
written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly
into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released
version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of
targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so
called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people
that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually
business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting
gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under
contract by companies like redhat,
ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much
as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy
clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so
far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows
registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal
of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and
applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the
core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only
a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now
this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated
because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't
want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people
increased. more,
more
and more
emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain
their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what
their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up
with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users
should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are
being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the
user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't
really satisfying for the user. even constructive
feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden
that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development
team actually don't care fo
What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3:: What's New
GNOME 2.4 is going to have a number of cool, new applications. In this section, I am going to describe them. The Browser: Epiphany
One of the most controversial changes in GNOME 2.4 is the dumping of Galeon in favour of Epiphany as the default browser. Epiphany is based on Mozilla, but is much more light and bloat free and features a much, much, much cleaner interface. I have not used Galeon very extensively, but Epiphany has already become my default browser. Startup is much faster than Mozilla, the interface is much more intuitive and clutter free and it merges nicely with the look and feel of the rest of the GNOME environment. The latest versions (0.8.2 and above) also have a extra experimental plugin which allows mouse gestures.
Fig 12. Epiphany - The Brand New GNOME Browser. (Click for a larger view)
It supports popup blocking, tabbed browsing, customizable toolbars, automatic image resizing and all of these, with an extremely simple and clean UI. However, I would like to see the download manager to be a little more advanced (resume support maybe??). The PDF Viewer: GPDF
GPDF has a UI which is similar to GGV (The GNOME Postscript Viewer), and handled PDF files quite well in my system. It is based on xpdf (actually, the "NEWS" file says that it is a port of xpdf to GNOME 2).
Fig 13. GPDF - The GNOME PDF Viewer. (Click for a larger view)
As with most other GNOME applications, I found the interface to be nice an clean, but it seemed to have some issues with regard to embedded fonts. The Character Picker: GUCharmap
This new GNOME Character map is quite a fancy tool - a bit too fancy, IMHO. It has support for all the Unicode Characters, and it seems to have detailed information on each and every character.
Fig 14. GUCharMap Showing Some of the Characters. (Click for a larger view) Fig 15. GUCharMap Showing Details. (Click for a larger view)
The Calculator
The new calculator of GNOME is also quite improved. There is a handy list of commonly used mathematical constants (pi, e, various conversion factors, etc). It has three modes - basic, financial and scientific.
Fig 16. GCalcTool - The GNOME Calculator. (Click for a larger view) GNOME System Tools
In my opinion this is one of the best additions to the GNOME software map in a long time. As the README file says, these tools are designed to make (Unix) system configuration easy for desktop users. They aim for what the README calls "unified system configuration", meaning that the same toolset can be used in different flavours of Unix. This is achieved by splitting each tool into two distinct parts - a frontend written in C/Python and a backend written in Perl. Currently available tools include a Runlevel Admin, a Network Admin (which lets you specify your hostname, samba hostname and workgroup, DNS servers, search domains, hosts, network interfaces, ppp, ethernet, slip and in a limited way, wavelan). Also included are a Time Admin, a User Admin and a Boot Admin. I really liked the interface of each tool, especially the artwork. I think it is a great approach towards making a user friendly set of system configuration tools for the desktop user. Tools provided by the various distros are also great, but since each one has a different interface of its own (and a different set of problems), it becomes difficult for both users and tech support people to handle them.
Fig 17. GNOME System Tools - Boot Admin (Click for a larger view) Fig 18. GNOME System Tools - Network Admin (Click for a larger view)
More information on GNOME System Tools is available at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/. The Media Player: Totem
Yes - GNOME now has a media player of its own (though of recent, it has suddenly disappeared from the module listing withou any warning). It is called Totem, and currently it is based on a Xine backend. However, from the README, I gathered
I don't care about any new visuals that they've added or performace enhancements. I just want it to be as easy in Gnome to make shortcuts and use the quick launch bar (Gnomes version of it) and manage display settings as it is in KDE 3 and Windows insert any version greater then Windows NT 4 here.
I am not a Gnome basher, frankly I find it humurous that people would bicker over desktops. But, I am forced to use it from time to time, so I would it to be at least as good as KDE.
I completely agree. I prefer KDE for the eye candy and the better usability, but Gnome for the performance. But it would be a huge improvement for Gnome to just improve usability. I think that should be first priority. After all, that's what desktops are all about.
Is that a joke? Disappointing because it lags in eye candy even though it is much more consistent and easier to use?
Re:Linux Ready For The Desktop ?
by
colinleroy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What you describe is needed for an upgrade, not an install. Installing gnome 2 with RH9, for example, is quite as simple as you describe:
Insert Redhat CD, boot, let installation and plug & play take over. It is this easy.
-- blah
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.
However, I do have a couple of questions which is kinda off-topic-ish:
1) Is there a "roadmap" setout in regards to GTK 2.4/2.6 etc terms of functionality one should expect in up coming releases.
2) I've heard rumbles that gtk2 is still being ported to Quartz, could someone confirm it. I know there is an X11 version, however, it would be nice to have one that does require it, not because of anything political, I just don't want to download that massive 40+ MB XFree86 package from Apple;-)
3) Is there going to be a move by GNOME to support MAS as a replacement for esound? having used MAS and seen it action, it would be a really great addition if it was made available.
4) When running GNOME on FreeBSD I notice that when I select text in a terminal window there is a stall and the whole computer freezes then suddenly comes alright. I haven't experience that with KDE.
Having run GNOME 2.2 on Linux quite nicely it clearly isn't an issue with GNOME but with the FreeBSD port. Could someone confirm that this is being addressed?
--
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta)
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 4, Informative
1) File dialog.
The current GTK+ file dialog *cannot* be changed without breaking compatibility. A new file dialog is under development for GTK+ 2.4, for quite a while now. But GTK+ 2.4 will not make it before the GNOME 2.4 release. If you want a slightly better file dialog (with Back button, Home button, Bookmarks, etc.) but is still compatible with all the current apps, take a look at this patch: http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=363 5
2) Galeon. Galeon never was a part of GNOME 2. At one point they had to choose a browser so they chose Epiphany because it's goals are like GNOME's. There's nothing stopping you from installing Galeon yourself. I'm typing this in Galeon right now.
3) Extract Here I agree with you on this. Email the File Roller author, not Slashdot.
4) Panel size Why click 20 times? Just focus the spinbox and type in whatever number you want using your keyboard. As for the goat logo, how's that a usability issue? Users don't care what logo they see in the about box (if they look at all).
5) Media player GStreamer doesn't "suck", it's just not finished yet. Xine is not "superior", it's different. GStreamer is a very ambitious project, and is like Windows's DirectShow. It's not just for playing files, it's an entire multimedia framework, which includes things like recording and encoding. I don't see Xine doing something like that. What's stopping you from installing MPlayer (not Windows Media Player!) or Xine or whatever? I installed MPlayer, setup some associations and everything works perfectly.
Anyway, I don't know why you say 2.4 isn't as good as 2.2. Except for Extract Here, none of the features in 2.2 are removed, some features just didn't make it to 2.4.
I am only asking for a RPN calculator! Is this too much to ask????
Re:Improved calculator?
by
BrokenHalo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Try visiting hpcalc.org. There's a sweet GTK-based HP48 emulator there - or there was last time I looked. Since I got rid of my HP48G+, I haven't really kept in touch with developments there.
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta)
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Urgh, forgot to reply to some things.
1) CMYK support Do you have any idea how hard it is to implement properly CMYK support in the current Gimp codebase? It's *not* trivial! Remember that most Gimp developers are just volunteers, not commercial developers working full-time!
2) Weather applet The old one was removed due to legal reasons. Or do you want the GNOME project to be sued by weather.com?
3) Wanda And how's this even relevant?
4) Menu editor You never had to restart the panel. Well, not on my box anyway.
5) Hidden preferences Which preferences? Hhow many of those preferences do you change daily? How many of those preferences do normal users care about? Think about that first.
Maybe it isn't a memory leak
by
r6144
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As for "used memory" keeping increasing... You just have way too much memory. On most machines "used memory" is almost equal to "total memory" while the system runs fine, because the memory not used by processes can be used for caching (and not just the "Cached" shown by top/free, either). In short, it is hard to know whether or not the kernel or a user process leaks or not just by looking at the memory statistics, even if there actually IS one.
If you suspect a leak in some process, look at its VM size. If there is a leak, the process will end up much larger after repeating some operation, such as opening a new window, N times (clean up after each time) than doing that once.
Another way is to look at the swap usage. It usually keeps increasing, but should mostly be stable after e.g. 2 hours of usage, unless you start some other very large applications.
Enlightenment save us!
by
ItWasThem
·
· Score: 2, Funny
While I struggle to cope with my KDE and my Gnome day in and day out I hold out hope that maybe today will be the day that I see E17 released un to the world...
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.
Any Metacity Fixes/Updates?
by
mauriatm
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the most troubling things to me is still Metacity WM. Maybe this has changed but last I recall you could not change the animation settings (that annoying minimize/maximize ani) and the redraw settings (dragging/resizing would show contents). To make it worse, Gnome in general made it difficult to change your WM. And what bothers me more still is that Sawmill(fish whatever) reduced its settings/options to be minimal like Metacity, although deep config settings could restore most settings back to the 1.4 days. I remember hearing some explanation that Metacity was the only Gnome2 compliant WM, so others were looked down upon.... Am I misinformed or has this changed?
Re:Any Metacity Fixes/Updates?
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're mostly correct. They've added some new features to Metacity though. Like a Stay On Top menu item.
Re:CTRL ALT +/- anyone ?
by
Sunda666
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· Score: 2, Insightful
you know, this is a bit misleading.
Unless I'm missing something, this shortcuts just change the resolution of the viewport, not the size of the desktop (eg, I have this configured at home to switch between 1280x1024,1024x768,800x600). It works fine, but the desktop is always 1280x1024, and scrolls around when I use other resolutions). Still pretty neat, since I use this to use movies/activate the tv-out in the geforce4.
But changing the desktop size on-the-fly would be cool, at least for windoz users, which are used to it.
Dunno if it changed in XFree 4.3, since I have it installed only in the laptop, and this fscking TFT does not allow me to change the resolution (vsync goes haywire).
cheers.
--
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
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.
Re: why are they bothering
by
Black+Parrot
·
· Score: 2, 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.
My feelings exactly. After a lot of work I finally got a GARNOME-based GNOME 2.something working mostly to my liking, but I had to use not-latest-releases for some components because they're still taking features out.
I've been a GNOMER since 0.4, but I expect to have to drop them if they don't start putting some features back in. Sure wish I had the time to fork off a power-users' desktop. (Hmmm, "PUD". I guess priority #1 would be to find a better acronym.)
Another option might be to start a movement to vote certain doctrinaire individuals off the board next time they have elections.
-- Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Re:Nautilus literally has no clue?
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Startup notification is implemented in the new Nautilus. There's no configuration option, it's always on.
You *can* configure for single click. In Nautilus: Edit->Preferences->Behavior->Single click to activate items.
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.
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta)
by
mhesseltine
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Warning: small rant follows
The current GTK+ file dialog *cannot* be changed without breaking compatibility.
This double standard about compatibility really gets to me. On one hand, you have projects like Gnome which use the same convention as a previous version to insure backward compatability. Then, when a company like Microsoft keeps DOS in its Win95,98,ME line, everyone bitches about the relic, and how they should remove it. Either we want projects to maintain backward compatability, or we don't. Which is it?
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta)
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ah, but you're talking about Slashdotters bitching. Those people are just that: Slashdot flamers. They're not the developers behind GNOME and GTK+. The GNOME and GTK+ projects follow a very strict set of rules in not breaking compatibility.
browser issue, RedHat vs Gnome
by
Roadkills-R-Us
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't see why they are wasting time on a browser. Why not just use firebird? Is there a compelling reason for *another* browser? Sems that time could be better spent elsewhere.
And I was underwhelmed with some of the tools. The best example I've seen so far (/.ing has delivery of all pages with all pics) is the screen resolution selector. I think RedHat's version is much nicer. Again - why reinvent the wheel? If they can't use RH's (did they ask?), do something similar. Or better. But IMO the Gnome version is a step down from RH's.
Nautilus Useable?
by
xjerky
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Sorry, but even the latest Nautilus is noticably slower then Konqueror. I have a directory with a few thousand files and Nautilus popped up a message saying something like "There are too many files for Nautilus to display. Exiting" WTF?????? Its the primary job of the friggin app and it won't do it??? Very unprofessional.
-- A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board:
"You know what? You're right."
Re:Nautilus Useable?
by
JabXVI
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· Score: 2, Informative
Maybe/apps/nautilus/preferences/directory_limit is it. Looks like the default is 4000 and setting it to -1 would make it unlimited. I just found this by looking at the nautilus-2.3.7 source for a minute, though, so I don't really know if this works.
Re:Nautilus literally has no clue?
by
Issue9mm
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· Score: 2, Informative
Check the Nautilus preferences. Single-clicking to launch files is a rather easy thing to set up.
-9mm-
Re:Nautilus literally has no clue?
by
mrroach
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· Score: 3, Informative
GLOBAL Always On Top functionality?
by
NoahsMyBro
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I haven't seen this in any version of Windows, nor on KDE 3.1.2 or Gnome 2.2.
It seems to me a sensible feature of a desktop would be to have a standard feature on every single visible window that would allow the user to set that window as 'always on top'. Remove the responsibility for the functionality from the app developer, and let it be part of the desktop's job. This would allow the user to set 'Always On Top' for any window he/she wants.
As a user, not a developer, I have been unable to figure out why this could be problematic. I only assume it may pose some sort of difficulty because I haven't yet seen this implemented, and it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Re:Make those damn buttons SMALLER!
by
FooBarWidget
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Because big buttons are easier to click on. Fitt's Law remember? And those big buttons are only used in dialogs, that don't contain much data anyway. In main windows, the only large buttons are toolbar buttons with labels. But that makes sense since it will be immediately obvious what those buttons are for; you don't have to mouseover them and look at the tooltips. And this can be changed: Applications->Desktop Preferences->Menus and Toolbars->Text Besides Icons
It makes a lot of sense to make normal buttons bigger.
So typing zenity --question --text "Delete Windows?" gives you a dialog that asks "Delete Windows?" and presents two buttons, one that says "Cancel" and the other that says "Yes".
<rant>
What the hell kind of user interface is that? It should either say "No" and "Yes", or it should say "Cancel" and "Ok". Mixing the two paradigms just looks confusing.
It's consistency problems like this that start giving Linux and other open source projects a bad name.
</rant>
(Not to say that commercial apps are immune - they certainly have their own fair share of usability issues.)
This and more fixed in current.
by
Inoshiro
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I installed Gnome 2.2 recently and have been tracking various bugs via thock.com. I haven't gotten around to filing bugs for absolutely everything, but most of the big stuff is explained there.
-- -- Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Re:Q. garnome or "partial local portage"?
by
__past__
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· Score: 2, Informative
Is it possible to set up a local portage and ebuild system, on non-Gentoo systems, for packages like Gnome-2.4 without having to build an entire Linux system from scratch?
Dunno about ebuild, but if it's the mechanism and not so much the actually available packages, NetBSDs pkgsrc collection (called "ports" on other BSDs) is actually cross-platform.
I can install Windows. Even Windows 2000. And I can have a GUI file-manager that does damn near everything.
And get this. I can do it all on less that 100MB of RAM. Unlike nautilus, which, according to my system, requires 180 - 220 MB RAM at all times. This sucks, because I'm on an old box with 256 Physical. That means that I am constantly swapping. a lot.
and yes, the idea is to remove bloat in the name of userfriendliness. Not eliminate userfriendlyness. There is a way to have friendly apps that dont take a gig of RAM to run.
-- Stop sending me HTML mail. telnet is my POP client and I am not an HTML/4.0-compatible rendering engine
Slashdot Mirror
Is the "typing break". I can sit back in my chair, hands on my head, and when the PHB asks why I'm not working, I just say "Gnome Typing Break" and he says "Uh-hu" and goes away. Totally excellent.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Does it fix any of those annoying problems in the current versions like:
Put identity in the browser.
Having nothing better to do (and wanting to do a bit of testing on the localization stuff we are working on), I decided to download the latest beta of GNOME - GNOME 2.3.5 (Jebe) . Since the RC release freeze is imminent, and the feature freeze is already in place, the system that I am running currently will not be significantly different from GNOME 2.4, when it is released on September. In this article, I would be briefly describing the new features and applications of GNOME 2.4. However, I would concentrate mainly on the packages in the core GNOME system, and will not be going beyond those.
Installing the packages (WARNING: slightly hairy) To GARNOME or not...
I had heard that installing the GNOME packages in the right order could be a tricky process, and I was looking at GARNOME and other tools for an easy way out. However, after some poking around, I decided to do the install by hand. This decision was largely prompted by this document, and I am really grateful to its author.
The system
The usual convention before doing a description of any large scale installation process is to give a short summary of the specs of the machine in question, and so, without much ado, here it is:
Processor: 700 Mhz Pentium III
RAM: 192 MB
Swap: 250 MB
OS: Redhat Linux 9.0 (Shrike)
Kernel: 2.6.0-test2
It is obvious that this is not a very modern machine, but such boxes are quite common in where I live (India).
The installation
Most of the files needed for compile and install are downloadable from the directory ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.3/2.3.5/sources/. There are also a few "extras" which are usually included in stock "development machine" installations, like the Docbook 4.1.2 DTDs, etc. If you don't have them, the ./configure script will complain, and you will find them in your
distro CDs.
/opt. That meant that the new
libraries and the header files would be installed in /opt/lib and /opt/include. So, I had to
set the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH to /opt/lib/pkg-config (by issuing
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/lib/pkg-config) so the pkg-config utility searched /opt/lib/pkg-config before the usual /usr/lib/pkg-config. I had also added the line /opt/lib
to the file /etc/ld.so.conf. Moreover, the usual ./configure was replaced by ./configure --prefix=/opt so the installation folder was /opt.
I did not download the gtk2, the glib2 and the pango packages. More or less up to date GTK2 and glib2 are already included in RH 9.0 and I usually keep in sync with the Pango development process through CVS (I have to keep track of certain outstanding bugs in Pango w.r.t bengali rendering). If you follow these steps, please ensure that you have the devel packages installed as well.
To avoid a mess, I had decided to install the new GNOME packages under
I followed the following sequence while installing packages. It works for me, and it may or may not work for you.
What's with the gum-drops on the right hand side of the title bar? Is this like OS X for left-handed people?
...sounds like an amazing idea, not just for my hands but for my sanity. If I didn't spend 10 minutes an hour meandering arround the office I would probably go insane.
From the article: > The most significant addition to the Control Center > is a utility for changing the screen resolution and > refresh rate on the fly. This will probably be my fav. It's tough to look "kewl" with Linux when I need to exit the GUI just to change the resolution. Then again, going into that console screen does impress chicks... :0)
CowsAnonymous: We're here to help moo.
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care fo
What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3 :: What's New
GNOME 2.4 is going to have a number of cool, new applications. In this section, I am going to describe them.
The Browser: Epiphany
One of the most controversial changes in GNOME 2.4 is the dumping of Galeon in favour of Epiphany as the default browser. Epiphany is based on Mozilla, but is much more light and bloat free and features a much, much, much cleaner interface. I have not used Galeon very extensively, but Epiphany has already become my default browser. Startup is much faster than Mozilla, the interface is much more intuitive and clutter free and it merges nicely with the look and feel of the rest of the GNOME environment. The latest versions (0.8.2 and above) also have a extra experimental plugin which allows mouse gestures.
Fig 12. Epiphany - The Brand New GNOME Browser. (Click for a larger view)
It supports popup blocking, tabbed browsing, customizable toolbars, automatic image resizing and all of these, with an extremely simple and clean UI. However, I would like to see the download manager to be a little more advanced (resume support maybe??).
The PDF Viewer: GPDF
GPDF has a UI which is similar to GGV (The GNOME Postscript Viewer), and handled PDF files quite well in my system. It is based on xpdf (actually, the "NEWS" file says that it is a port of xpdf to GNOME 2).
Fig 13. GPDF - The GNOME PDF Viewer. (Click for a larger view)
As with most other GNOME applications, I found the interface to be nice an clean, but it seemed to have some issues with regard to embedded fonts.
The Character Picker: GUCharmap
This new GNOME Character map is quite a fancy tool - a bit too fancy, IMHO. It has support for all the Unicode Characters, and it seems to have detailed information on each and every character.
Fig 14. GUCharMap Showing Some of the Characters. (Click for a larger view)
Fig 15. GUCharMap Showing Details. (Click for a larger view)
The Calculator
The new calculator of GNOME is also quite improved. There is a handy list of commonly used mathematical constants (pi, e, various conversion factors, etc). It has three modes - basic, financial and scientific.
Fig 16. GCalcTool - The GNOME Calculator. (Click for a larger view)
GNOME System Tools
In my opinion this is one of the best additions to the GNOME software map in a long time. As the README file says, these tools are designed to make (Unix) system configuration easy for desktop users. They aim for what the README calls "unified system configuration", meaning that the same toolset can be used in different flavours of Unix. This is achieved by splitting each tool into two distinct parts - a frontend written in C/Python and a backend written in Perl.
Currently available tools include a Runlevel Admin, a Network Admin (which lets you specify your hostname, samba hostname and workgroup, DNS servers, search domains, hosts, network interfaces, ppp, ethernet, slip and in a limited way, wavelan). Also included are a Time Admin, a User Admin and a Boot Admin.
I really liked the interface of each tool, especially the artwork. I think it is a great approach towards making a user friendly set of system configuration tools for the desktop user. Tools provided by the various distros are also great, but since each one has a different interface of its own (and a different set of problems), it becomes difficult for both users and tech support people to handle them.
Fig 17. GNOME System Tools - Boot Admin (Click for a larger view)
Fig 18. GNOME System Tools - Network Admin (Click for a larger view)
More information on GNOME System Tools is available at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/.
The Media Player: Totem
Yes - GNOME now has a media player of its own (though of recent, it has suddenly disappeared from the module listing withou any warning). It is called Totem, and currently it is based on a Xine backend. However, from the README, I gathered
People implementing LTSP are having serious problems with GDM. Most of them just change to another one.
Let's hope that they'll fix it.
Oh yeah, the website is being slashdotted to death right now. Can't check it right now.
I am not a Gnome basher, frankly I find it humurous that people would bicker over desktops. But, I am forced to use it from time to time, so I would it to be at least as good as KDE.
Is that a joke? Disappointing because it lags in eye candy even though it is much more consistent and easier to use?
What you describe is needed for an upgrade, not an install. Installing gnome 2 with RH9, for example, is quite as simple as you describe:
Insert Redhat CD, boot, let installation and plug & play take over. It is this easy.
blah
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
However, I do have a couple of questions which is kinda off-topic-ish:
;-)
1) Is there a "roadmap" setout in regards to GTK 2.4/2.6 etc terms of functionality one should expect in up coming releases.
2) I've heard rumbles that gtk2 is still being ported to Quartz, could someone confirm it. I know there is an X11 version, however, it would be nice to have one that does require it, not because of anything political, I just don't want to download that massive 40+ MB XFree86 package from Apple
3) Is there going to be a move by GNOME to support MAS as a replacement for esound? having used MAS and seen it action, it would be a really great addition if it was made available.
4) When running GNOME on FreeBSD I notice that when I select text in a terminal window there is a stall and the whole computer freezes then suddenly comes alright. I haven't experience that with KDE.
Having run GNOME 2.2 on Linux quite nicely it clearly isn't an issue with GNOME but with the FreeBSD port. Could someone confirm that this is being addressed?
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
1) File dialog.
3 5
The current GTK+ file dialog *cannot* be changed without breaking compatibility. A new file dialog is under development for GTK+ 2.4, for quite a while now. But GTK+ 2.4 will not make it before the GNOME 2.4 release.
If you want a slightly better file dialog (with Back button, Home button, Bookmarks, etc.) but is still compatible with all the current apps, take a look at this patch:
http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36
2) Galeon.
Galeon never was a part of GNOME 2. At one point they had to choose a browser so they chose Epiphany because it's goals are like GNOME's. There's nothing stopping you from installing Galeon yourself. I'm typing this in Galeon right now.
3) Extract Here
I agree with you on this. Email the File Roller author, not Slashdot.
4) Panel size
Why click 20 times? Just focus the spinbox and type in whatever number you want using your keyboard. As for the goat logo, how's that a usability issue? Users don't care what logo they see in the about box (if they look at all).
5) Media player
GStreamer doesn't "suck", it's just not finished yet. Xine is not "superior", it's different. GStreamer is a very ambitious project, and is like Windows's DirectShow. It's not just for playing files, it's an entire multimedia framework, which includes things like recording and encoding. I don't see Xine doing something like that.
What's stopping you from installing MPlayer (not Windows Media Player!) or Xine or whatever? I installed MPlayer, setup some associations and everything works perfectly.
Anyway, I don't know why you say 2.4 isn't as good as 2.2. Except for Extract Here, none of the features in 2.2 are removed, some features just didn't make it to 2.4.
I am only asking for a RPN calculator! Is this too much to ask????
Urgh, forgot to reply to some things.
1) CMYK support
Do you have any idea how hard it is to implement properly CMYK support in the current Gimp codebase? It's *not* trivial! Remember that most Gimp developers are just volunteers, not commercial developers working full-time!
2) Weather applet
The old one was removed due to legal reasons. Or do you want the GNOME project to be sued by weather.com?
3) Wanda
And how's this even relevant?
4) Menu editor
You never had to restart the panel. Well, not on my box anyway.
5) Hidden preferences
Which preferences? Hhow many of those preferences do you change daily? How many of those preferences do normal users care about?
Think about that first.
If you suspect a leak in some process, look at its VM size. If there is a leak, the process will end up much larger after repeating some operation, such as opening a new window, N times (clean up after each time) than doing that once.
Another way is to look at the swap usage. It usually keeps increasing, but should mostly be stable after e.g. 2 hours of usage, unless you start some other very large applications.
GTK+ 2.4 Plan
While I struggle to cope with my KDE and my Gnome day in and day out I hold out hope that maybe today will be the day that I see E17 released un to the world...
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.
One of the most troubling things to me is still Metacity WM. Maybe this has changed but last I recall you could not change the animation settings (that annoying minimize/maximize ani) and the redraw settings (dragging/resizing would show contents). To make it worse, Gnome in general made it difficult to change your WM. And what bothers me more still is that Sawmill(fish whatever) reduced its settings/options to be minimal like Metacity, although deep config settings could restore most settings back to the 1.4 days. I remember hearing some explanation that Metacity was the only Gnome2 compliant WM, so others were looked down upon. ... Am I misinformed or has this changed?
Linux Resources
you know, this is a bit misleading.
Unless I'm missing something, this shortcuts just change the resolution of the viewport, not the size of the desktop (eg, I have this configured at home to switch between 1280x1024,1024x768,800x600). It works fine, but the desktop is always 1280x1024, and scrolls around when I use other resolutions). Still pretty neat, since I use this to use movies/activate the tv-out in the geforce4.
But changing the desktop size on-the-fly would be cool, at least for windoz users, which are used to it.
Dunno if it changed in XFree 4.3, since I have it installed only in the laptop, and this fscking TFT does not allow me to change the resolution (vsync goes haywire).
cheers.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
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.
Startup notification is implemented in the new Nautilus. There's no configuration option, it's always on.
You *can* configure for single click. In Nautilus:
Edit->Preferences->Behavior->Single click to activate items.
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.
Warning: small rant follows
This double standard about compatibility really gets to me. On one hand, you have projects like Gnome which use the same convention as a previous version to insure backward compatability. Then, when a company like Microsoft keeps DOS in its Win95,98,ME line, everyone bitches about the relic, and how they should remove it. Either we want projects to maintain backward compatability, or we don't. Which is it?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Ah, but you're talking about Slashdotters bitching. Those people are just that: Slashdot flamers. They're not the developers behind GNOME and GTK+.
The GNOME and GTK+ projects follow a very strict set of rules in not breaking compatibility.
I don't see why they are wasting time on a browser. Why not just use firebird? Is there a compelling reason for *another* browser? Sems that time could be better spent elsewhere.
And I was underwhelmed with some of the tools. The best example I've seen so far (/.ing has delivery of all pages with all pics) is the screen resolution selector. I think RedHat's version is much nicer. Again - why reinvent the wheel? If they can't use RH's (did they ask?), do something similar. Or better. But IMO the Gnome version is a step down from RH's.
Sorry, but even the latest Nautilus is noticably slower then Konqueror.
I have a directory with a few thousand files and Nautilus popped up a message saying something like "There are too many files for Nautilus to display. Exiting" WTF?????? Its the primary job of the friggin app and it won't do it??? Very unprofessional.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Check the Nautilus preferences. Single-clicking to launch files is a rather easy thing to set up.
-9mm-
Single-click:
.hidden files:
Applications->Desktop Preferences->File Management
Click "Behaviour"
Choose "Single click to activate items"
As for the launch notification within nautilus, that feature will be in 2.4
Here's a list of the new features in nautilus. There's lots of good stuff including the multi-rooted tree view, and
-Mark
I haven't seen this in any version of Windows, nor on KDE 3.1.2 or Gnome 2.2.
It seems to me a sensible feature of a desktop would be to have a standard feature on every single visible window that would allow the user to set that window as 'always on top'. Remove the responsibility for the functionality from the app developer, and let it be part of the desktop's job. This would allow the user to set 'Always On Top' for any window he/she wants.
As a user, not a developer, I have been unable to figure out why this could be problematic. I only assume it may pose some sort of difficulty because I haven't yet seen this implemented, and it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Because big buttons are easier to click on. Fitt's Law remember? And those big buttons are only used in dialogs, that don't contain much data anyway.
In main windows, the only large buttons are toolbar buttons with labels. But that makes sense since it will be immediately obvious what those buttons are for; you don't have to mouseover them and look at the tooltips. And this can be changed: Applications->Desktop Preferences->Menus and Toolbars->Text Besides Icons
It makes a lot of sense to make normal buttons bigger.
So typing zenity --question --text "Delete Windows?" gives you a dialog that asks "Delete Windows?" and presents two buttons, one that says "Cancel" and the other that says "Yes".
<rant>
What the hell kind of user interface is that? It should either say "No" and "Yes", or it should say "Cancel" and "Ok". Mixing the two paradigms just looks confusing.
It's consistency problems like this that start giving Linux and other open source projects a bad name.
</rant>
(Not to say that commercial apps are immune - they certainly have their own fair share of usability issues.)
I installed Gnome 2.2 recently and have been tracking various bugs via thock.com. I haven't gotten around to filing bugs for absolutely everything, but most of the big stuff is explained there.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I can install Windows. Even Windows 2000. And I can have a GUI file-manager that does damn near everything.
And get this. I can do it all on less that 100MB of RAM. Unlike nautilus, which, according to my system, requires 180 - 220 MB RAM at all times. This sucks, because I'm on an old box with 256 Physical. That means that I am constantly swapping. a lot.
and yes, the idea is to remove bloat in the name of userfriendliness. Not eliminate userfriendlyness. There is a way to have friendly apps that dont take a gig of RAM to run.
-- Stop sending me HTML mail. telnet is my POP client and I am not an HTML/4.0-compatible rendering engine