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Gnome 2.4 Release (d)
chendo writes "Gnome 2.4 will be released today. Here is the link to the article on Ars Technica. GNOME 2.4 is the result of quite a bit of work toward complying with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which mainly focus on user interface consistency and predictability. This release has also undergone some general polish, and it can finally be said that the GNOME 2 platform has achieved maturity with this release. The Epiphany web browser, a major new component of GNOME, also makes its debut with this release. (From Footnotes)"
What is the point of all these different integrated browsers now appearing in X window managers?
Sure an integrated browser is handy, but wouldnt it be worth putting the same effort into an existing browser like Mozilla Firebird instead?
Well, GNOME has already won awards for its accessibility work, and it has a mature framework for dealing with this (disclaimer: I've never tried it, just heard people praising it).
The article itself points this out in two places.
2) Taskbar doesn't reflect order that programs were started in. It inserts new buttons at random positions.
It doesn't insert them at random. It inserts them beside similar buttons. At least, Debian testing's Gnome (version 2.2) does.
If you open a Galeon window, then a terminal window, then a FreeCell window, then open a second Galeon window, the button for the second Galeon window will appear in the taskbar beside the first Galeon button. That way, you don't have to go searching through 14 buttons to find the similar ones.
Windows XP does this, too, if I remember rightly. Of course, every time I see a default Windows XP install, I want to gouge my eyes out in horror.....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
No way to edge-flip to another desktop.
Thus no d'n'd windows across desktops. Pager sucks for this at 16x12.
Gnome-panel regularly poops out at shutdown.
Metacity? Feh. Bring back sawfish (and I mean updated!). The introduction of predictability has led to a sharp decrease in customisability.
I have on average 20 terminals open. If one dies (e.g. because it's a shell window on a machine not available from my current location at start-up), down go the others. This is wholly unacceptable. Because of this, I almost switched to KDE - but it only supports 16 desktops which is Fucking Lame. Excuse me.
Other than those few issues, Gnome (2.x) is very stable, reliable, and well-featured. Keep up the good work (and please attend to that terminal problem).
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
KDE IMO is pretty stable and Gnome for that matter is also. But I use KDE becuase there appears to be more apps being developed for it.
Maybe if the WM's would design some sort of common application interface so things would look right on all the WM's that confirmed to the standard then we'd see a lot more x-compatibility in those applications.
And why does each WM have a seperate browser/file explorer? Just keep the explorer seperate from web browsing (Besides it's a MicroSoft idiocy) and we can all use Mozilla/Opera or whatever else.
The GNOME section icon is out of date: GNOME changed their logo about a year ago. I've done a new topic icon with the new logo if one of the slashdot editors is interested in putting it in.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
They dumbed down nautilus. What Nautilus needs is tabbing and splitting like konqueror has.
There still is no common compound document model between kde and gnome.
Besides that, Gnome has become excellent. Congratulations to the developers.
I normally have a great number of windows open. As most start their entry in the taskbar with the application name and then the content of the application I normally can't read which specific instance of an application that button means
/var/log/messages, things like that). This way it keeps my taskbar clutter to a minimum, but keeps everything just a click (or a CTRL+TAB) away at the same time. VERY handy!
This is the great thing about multiple desktops. It took me a little while to get used to, but I can't stand going to a Win* machine and having only one desktop now after using "Linux" for 5 or 6 years.
I usually use 4 desktops. 1 and 2 are my "working" desktops (work, web browsing, games, etc.). Desktop 3 I leave my mail app open (kmail). Desktop 4 I usually have Pan open or minimized, and also keep a few network monitoring apps open (etherape, ethereal, tailing
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
is the .hidden config file for konq views. Actually it really only applies to my desktop view as I use my home directory as my desktop.
.evolution for its datastore, I have to live with it. Being able to right click a folder on the desktop and select some like "Hide from desktop view" is enough to make me wet myself.
You'll be surprised how much cleaner your home dir stays if it's your desktop!
Right now I have three folders on my desktop that I don't want to see: evolution, mail and News. Short of recompiling evolution to use
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
That may be applicable to your example of setting the system time, but the behavior of fundamental interface elements should be consistent across installations. The problem with flexibility and customization on that level is that everybody who uses that installation for the first time has to climb a new learning curve... and everyone who gets used to that installation has to reclimb the learning curve any time they go to a different setup.
For a long time, I preferred the "X" method of window activation: move the mouse over it, it's active. But since I had to use Windows professionally, I grew more comfortable with the click-to-activate method. My instinctive predictions of the computer's behavior have only so much real estate for conflicting behavior, so the less common one (X) became less comfortable. Eventually, I changed the FVWM setting so that they were no longer in conflict.
So yes, TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it) is a good philosophy for high-level functionality, but ideally, all of the different ways to do it need to be independent of the user's settings.
A valid criticism of the Open Source Community used to be that it just copied, and never innovated. Well I think the copying stage (or as I like to think of it, the "catching up" stage) is now almost over. Now we are innovating.
I have Windows XP, and quite a few of the things in the latest Gnome are better than Windows XP. For instance, the fantastic way Pango deals with multilingual issues. And scalable desktop icons are a great addition. Some of the desktop accessability stuff is great too.
I bet that Microsoft keeps a close eye on the OSS community, and I'm sure it is starting to be the case that - internally within Microsoft - they're actually starting to have to catch up with stuff that is coming out of the OSS community. The next stage in the process - Microsoft realise that OSS solutions are actually moving faster than they can keep up with.
I used GNOME 2.2, but I cannot glean from the article whether the one quirk was fixed or not in 2.4.
The one thing keeping me from using GNOME (and for which I now use a more minimalistic window manager/desktop environment) is the fact that it is difficult to move one window into a different virtual desktop. You have to make it visible on all panels first then go to the desktop you want it to appear on and click show on just this desktop. Is there a way around this? Has GNOME 2.4 fixed this?
Besides that, it's good to see this project improve. Hope it gets faster and easier to use.
256mb of RAM should be fine. The difference in memory usage between a bare windowmaker desktop and a KDE one is about 60meg (~34meg -> ~90meg). That's worth about what, $20? Considering the vast amount of functionality that gives me, I think that's a worthwhile trade off.
Back in the day, I was a major lightweight system zealot. I used Ratpoison or Ion at work (if you though fvwm was lightweight, you ain't seen nothing yet). Then I realised that saving 0.5 seconds on launching a terminal window didn't make me any more productive, but having excellent integrated apps like kmail and konqueror did.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with the regular cursor
movement keys, only with the keypad, but I find it necessary to
remap the keypad to emulate the regular cursor keys, on the grounds
that otherwise most X apps don't support the keypad properly for
cursor movement (which is *way* more important to me than mouse
movement). (Just using the non-pad cursor keys is unacceptable
because they're arranged bady.)
I suppose I could map things so that the regular arrows emulate
the pad arrows... I never had a reason before (having no use
for the non-cursor functionality of the pad), but this might be
a good enough reason.
Do the pad home/end/pgup/pgdn keys do anything meaningful with
the shift+numlock keyboard-mouse mode turned on?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
User interface consistency between different DEs is not a huge concern of mine. Programming interface consistency is; with so many similar features, it should be far easier to make software *both* GNOME-enhanced and KDE-enhanced. Unfortunately, it's likely just as far-off a goal, due to the fact and ideological consequences of KDE being in C++ and GNOME in C.
Yeah, that's iffy, but the last time I claimed outright that GNOME was not object-oriented, I got burninated.
--
est modus in rebus
Re: metacity vs sawfish
I used to think the same way as you did, hated the lack of features, bitched on the lists, etc. But at some point I forgot to switch from Metacity to sawfish and grudgingly used it, and after a while, found I didn't miss the features I fought so hard to have. Pageflip is nice, but do I use it? Nope. Maybe it's just me as a user adapting to the lack of features, or maybe it's the fact that as a user I didn't really use that feature enough.
Try this: Make a list of all the things that MC is missing vs sawfish (or The Ultimate Window Manager) and then work as you do normally and tick the times you miss each feature. I'd be willing to bet that in an honest test you'll find that you don't use them nearly as often as you think you do.
I'm no fan of the HIG and the cutting and slashing of features in the latest GNOME, but I'm also finding that a lot of it's not all that bad, because a lot of times It Just Works.
If you repeat a lie long enough, people will believe you. Apparently even Ars believes the lie that the Windows desktop is consistant across applications.
.NET applications have a different look and feel than MFC/Win32 applications.
Take off your blinders and actually LOOK at Windows. Does Quicktime look like Media Player? Does they have even the remotely similarity in UI? Of course not! This isn't just non-MS applications.
Then take a look at the Macintosh. Funny how Apple can't make up their minds whether they want an Aquafresh toothpaste look or a scratched brassplate look. But I don't see people bailing on the platform because of it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Heres my experiance. I have two machines that I use often. A laptop with Redhat Severn, which has gnome 2.2.x, and Mandrake Cooker on my main box that now runs 2.4. I have found the Gnome 2.4 desktop to be harder to use. Before Gnome 2.2 came out I used to use KDE for workgroups edition on both my machines. Here are the problems. I *did* report bugs, I *did* complain, but nobody listened to me, and when they did I got flamed by the feature police. And I will now tell you why I will be going back to KDE 3.2 when it comes out!
.tar/zip file you get the option to "Extract here" (which is what 95% of users want) or "Extract to somewhere else" (which the power users want). How ever, the File roller development team screwed the majoirty of users by removing extract here. There were several bugs about this reported, and they were rudley marked "wontfix" because they wanted to make users do more clicks.
I won't be stating the obvious, I will be stating more deep and serious issues.
1) File-roller is harder to use.
In gnome 2.2, when you right-click a
2) Gnome Panel is now harder to use.
Although the simplified panel structure is easier to use, the configuartion dialog isn't. They have removed the Dropbox which has the sizes from X-small to XX-large (which is very intuitve, as it creates a metafor for sizes) with more confusing spinbox with the confusing "pixels" size (newbies don't know that their monitor is made of little dots, and may not get what a "pixel" is. The visual positioning box was removed by a more confusing drop box! The Foot icon (which is a violation of the HIG, Section 9.10, which says NOT to use body parts as icons (the picture is a G shaped monkey foot). They should allow easy configuation of the menu icon (as it used to in 1.4, and use a non offensive icon by default). The workspace switcher now has a limit of just 36 workspaces, compared to the 100 in gnome 2 and the infinty of gnome 2.0! You may argue people don't need that many, but when users are doing advanced work, and need to think in GRIDs and heirachies, very essential when working on large graphics and admistering multiple machines. I know some developers that use around 50-500(!) desktops when doing some SERIOUS work. I only use around 8-12, so this dosen't effect me, but others will.
3) Gnome harder to configure
More features, which EVEN NORMAL USERS USE, have misteriously dissappered. Either forcing them to use the atrious gconf-editor or flee to other CONFIGUREABLE desktops like Windows and KDE. Not to mention that "auto apply" is very dangerous, I've been burnt by it too many times already!
4) Epiphany is not ready for primetime.
The ability to add subtopics in bookmarks have been removed (not even AOL users are this dumb), its still VERY unreliable, and its not the mozilla engine's fault, its epiphanies. The documentation is only half written, and the download dialog needs a lot of usabillity work. Idealy, this should of been 0.9.4, but it seems obviously rushed.
I have other problems, but other people have already complained about that. The gnome team really need to have another usabilty test, and ask ALL types of users, from newbies, experts, designers, developers, architects, secitaries, managers and children to get the best of all worlds, not some Hypothetical "Joe Aol" (and aols got more features than epiphany anyway).
I have a lot of experiance in designing GUIS, with experiance in Visual Basic, Curses and Qt, but I'm only new to GTK, and the developers still have a lot to learn about good gui design.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!