GNOME in the Year of the Monkey

An anonymous reader writes "GNOME Foundation's Tim Ney describes some of the project's efforts marking the Lunar New Year of the Monkey with a tip, "Never sit with your back to a lobbyist for proprietary software." GNOME is rapidly becoming popular in developing countries and you can donate to help."

Comments

Re:This lunar year

[I confirm I'm not a]

Strictly, the Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, not a lunar calendar. I believe that lunisolar calendars have leap years whenever 12 months won't fit easily into one year. Hopefully this means Gnome will enjoy many leaps;)

Re:Gnome the way to go?

[pcbob]

Dropline is great! If you have fast connection, then installation is painless - just start the instaler, select few options, go outside (gasp!) and when you are back you new gnome is waiting for you.

I've been using it for some time now, and I haven't found anything missing (besides win32 video codec drivers :) I use Serbian Cyrillic trnaslations, and I'm glad that they included everyting, and it works out of box.

Also they update packages fairly often (stuff like mozilla); they even provide an applet for panel that checks for updates.

Overall, strongly recomended for any slacker outhere!

Re:Gnome

[deminisma]

Yeah - I use GNOME. Why you ask?

1. More consistentcy between apps due to the Human Interface Guidelines
2. Nicer interface layout. Better spacing, and I like the OS 9 style menu up the top, feels less like a windows clone, taking the best from both worlds. Also less flashly, more standard than KDE.
3. Options. Apart from Gconf, GNOME comes with far less options. KDE is nice, but trying to locate an option in the KDE Control Center is hell. GConf is a far better way to go.
4. Apps. GNOME/GTK2+ has all the apps I want. Gems like Rhythmbox and the GIMP when there is nothing that compares on KDE. Also the old standbys like Abiword, Bluefish and Gnumeric.
5. Lastly, the GNOME community! Sites like planet.gnome.org and gnomedesktop.org help GNOME rock just that much more.

Re:Gnome

[zsau]

1. More consistentcy between apps due to the Human Interface Guidelines

This used to be a point in favor of KDE didn't it? :)

2. Nicer interface layout. Better spacing, and I like the OS 9 style menu up the top, feels less like a windows clone, taking the best from both worlds. Also less flashly, more standard than KDE.

The menubar isn't OS 9 style. KDE can do an OS9 style menubar up the top, GTK can't. OS9 style menubars are per-application, not for the desktop. The two are incomparible because they create a different user intereface style, one that focusses on the application more than the file.

(Disclaimer: I prefer Gnome-apps to KDE apps, but run ROX.)

Re:Gnome

[digitect]

Note that desktop environment usability should not be judged on its similarity to another. If you've only ever used Windows, and you like the Windows interface, and you judge everything against Windows, KDE may seem more appealing. But that doesn't mean KDE (or GNOME) is better.

For many of us, the Windows interface is not ideal. I might also question the quality of the SuSE GNOME environment, too, since they have long been a KDE based desktop (confession: I've never tried it). Try a GNOME-centric distribution (like Fedora) and try GNOME, you might find it more appealing.

Finally, GNOME's widgets can all be themed, did you only use the default? art.gnome.org hosts tons of widget, window and icon themes with which I could nearly convince you your environment was any number of other OSs.