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

Year of the Monkey cant be that good...

[MrRTFM]

Developers, Developers, Developers!!!!!

We all know where this is going to lead :(

Gnome the way to go?

[armando_wall]

I'm a big fan of KDE, and a few years ago I found Gnome a little bit cumbersome to use on a daily basis (this is not troll... those days I didn't find KDE too special either).

However... recently, I've tried it once or twice, and man, how it has improved!

I always liked Gnome because of its GTK+ (C coding is great!).

I'm even considering switching to it, thanks to Dropline Gnome, a version especially crafted for Slackware. I'd like some opinions from its users (Dropline Gnome).... anyone around?

year of the monkey

[Dreadlord]

GNOME Foundation's Tim Ney describes some of the project's efforts marking the Lunar New Year of the Monkey with a tip.

Huh? Year of The Monkey can only be good for Ximian Desktop.

GNOME's logo desn't look like a monkey's print anyway.

Re:year of the monkey

[kfg]

GNOME's logo desn't look like a monkey's print anyway.

It's just a pretty rare species is all. And not a monkey really, an ape. The Great Octal Ape. Found only in the deepest jungles of Cambridge, MA.

They do have a cousin though, the Lesser Bonoboctal Ape, found only in the misty, magical land known as Berserkly.

KFG

Re:Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

And vi? Who the hell uses vi these days. I installed emacs the other day and I haven't looked back - the cursor keys work, there's no stupid seperate "insert/edit/command" modes, it "just works".

I have NO idea why anyone would choose vi over EMACS. Perhaps it's time the supporters of VIM and BSD switched to supporting EMACS instead.

Also does anyone use Macs these days? I just got an Amiga and it is shhweeet. Decent pre-emptive multitasking and a real command line, not like a Mac where you have to install the Multifinder just to have more than one app running at once. Command line? Ha.

Anyway, I'm converted to Amigas and EMACS forever, I do hope the community gains control over its senses and switches to supporting just these two.

Developing countries?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is GNOME becoming popular in developing countries when it's geared towards newer machines? I mean, you need at least 128M of RAM to run GNOME smoothly, and many systems in developing countries have 16, 32 and (just possibly) 64M of RAM. I would've thought they'd use IceWM or perhaps XFce.

This is the only problem I see for GNOME and KDE. Powerful and flexible as they are, they're so bulky and huge that they don't feel much faster than Windows XP. If we want to give people an incentive to switch, we want them to FEEL that their machines are faster under Linux. Instead, you can see on message boards around the Net first-timers stating that Linux is "slow" and "bloated" because of this.

I hope at some point KDE and GNOME developers really make headway into the bloat and performance, because otherwise it's not only unusable for any machine built earlier than 2001, but also doesn't give a good impression. Linux was always known as the speedy, svelte and lighweight OS - this image is being eroded.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a KDE user for the first half of 2003 and then switched to Gnome to see what was up, and stayed with it until now. The main reason for me to switch was almost all of the apps I was using were using GTK+. Gnome 2.4 did everything KDE did, and it is faster and lighter. Nautilus was a bit weak before, but recent versions are pretty good. Gnome has a lot of nice things once you spend a little time learning it. It looks better than KDE. Try Gnome with Industrial window borders and Industrial controls (and any icon set). Its fast and nice looking. I could never get KDE to look good, and I've tried a lot of themes.

The ability to drag and drop just about anything is good. Try dragging and dropping a file from Nautilus into a Gnome file dialog. It switches to that file and its directory. That eliminates any complaints I have about the file dialog. Also, little things, like the theme configuration menu, you can drag and drop a theme onto it. You can drag and drop a file onto a program shortcut to execute the program with that file.

Gnome panels are pretty nice. All the little mini-apps you can add to them are cool (weather, mail checker, etc). The drawers are pretty nice, too.

And then there's the apps:
Gaim, Evolution, Rhythmbox, Totem, Gimp, etc.

KDE is great, but Gnome is great, too, and fits much better for me and has made my Linux experience much nicer.

BTW, I know I'm responding to a troll (the part about supporting a single GUI gave it away), but I'm sure someone is truthfully saying exactly what this guy is saying.

If you haven't, try the latest Gnome. And I'll try the next KDE release when it comes out of beta. I'm not committed to either, I'll use the one that works the best for me. Right now that one is Gnome.