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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)"
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.