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A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.6
unmadindu writes "GNOME 2.6 is just around the corner, and I figured out that many GNOME users would like to know what's in store. So I installed GNOME 2.5 (development version for 2.6) in my box, and came up with a list of the new stuff that are coming up. (and just in case, copies of the article are also available here and here)."
as the Gnome desktop itself is the fact he's using the freedesktop xserver to run it. I had no idea it was so far advanced.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I'm still trying to get a 2.4 stable version working. Toooo many new features too soon.
Is there is stripped down version gnome?
If you want to help Gnome 2.6, then you are in luck! The Beta release is here and it needs testing
More details here
Don't forget to report the bugs!
GNOME ... catches the SVG fever ... quite a few of the games have switched to SVG based graphics, which is a really nice thing, and a move towards the right direction
FYI : SVG = Scalable Vector Graphics
Looks good.
I'm so behind, I'm still using fvwm2.
But then again it's the only wm that works well on a cel500 128mg ram laptop.
I hope gnome 2.6 works as good as fvwm2 on my laptop.
A new GTK file selector. FINALLY. I can't wait to use the new one - the old one was one of the great warts of the free desktop world, IMHO.
But they have decided to remove the text entry box??? Eeep. I guess having the Ctrl-l shortcut to get one is OK (after all, it will most likely be geeks that want direct text on a file open) but thats one they need to document WELL.
On the whole though, it might be a good thing. I guess we'll have to wait and see. But text box or not, it can hardly be worse than the old one.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
When will we start to see serious performance improvements? Currently, GNOME doesn't feel much better than Windows XP, and it needs at least 128M to run acceptably with other apps.
Linux is supposed to get us off the upgrade treadmill, but as far as I can see, GNOME just keeps getting bigger, slower and more complex. I've switched to XFce; it's so much faster. KDE is a hog too, but at least they're concerned about performance and efficiency as the 3.2 release shows.
Really, this is something we should think about. When gconfd is eating up 20 megs (resident), just for a configuration back-end, it's evident that we're getting sloppy. A faster Linux could work wonders in terms of corporate and home adoption, but we just seem to be chasing Moore's Law and copying Microsoft for bloat.
I'll try GNOME 2.6 when it arrives, but to give a better impression to newcomers we need to make things noticably faster, more elegant and more efficient than Windows. Companies have to support all this code into the future, after all...
And then, Microsoft will trumpet it as innovation, when everybody has switched to SVG by 2005.
Open
Save
Save (expanded)
The links are down for me... Can anyone post the whole story here?
"and now it is much easier to manage one's wallpaper collection".
That does it. I am shifting to GNOME.
...due somewhen in 2006 will render a 2004 software obsolete. Hey Sherlock, here's a cookie for your perspicacity !
:wq
If any of that would be only slightly true it would be a really good reason to not use GNOME.
"land of the free", sorry but that was a long time ago.
Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6
.
Sayamindu Dasgupta
The boring intro...
As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD branch a spin - in order to find out what's new, as well as to get an estimate of how much we would have to translate (I hate that part of the job) to attain supported status. The last time I did this, I also wrote an article about what I saw, but unfortunately, I never learn from my mistakes - so here I go again....
However, before jumping in into this guided tour, please remember that I have been involved with the GNOME community for the past few months as a helper in the GNOME Summaries, and I may not be able totally impartial towards GNOME. Feel free to consider me biased.
The Vital Statistics
Before going into the real stuff, let me give me a brief overview of my system, so that when I mention something as fast or as slow, you would be able to guess how it would crawl in your system.
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
RAM: 512 MB of PC 2700 DDR RAM (with 875 MB swap)
Motherboard: Nforce 2 based mobo from Leadtek
Storage: A 40 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
Distro: Mandrake 9.2
Kernel: 2.6.2
The Installation
I had gone through (successfully) the GNOME dependency maze before, and to avoid losing my sanity, I decided to use jhbuild (one can also use GARNOME or cvsGNOME - maybe I'll test one of those with GNOME 2.8)
Using jhbuild is quite easy - just set some variables in ~/.jhbuildrc, and you are ready to roll. Jhbuild grabs the latest source code from CVS (taking care of the dependencies), compiles them, and installs them in whatever $prefix you want them to be in. OK - there was one major problem - but that was at a later stage, and it got fixed really quickly.
First Impressions
Fig 1. The default GNOME 2.6 desktop
Jhbuild took around 6 hours to get a bare bones GNOME system up and running, and surprisingly, there were very few errors, and I had to manually intervene only thrice.
I logged in as root the first time (yaya - I know security risk and other stuff..), to be greeted by a clean and polished looking GNOME desktop (Fig. 1) . (Note that I am running the Freedesktop.org Xserver here - so don't expect a stock GNOME 2.6 install to have panel shadows).
Seeing an icon named "Computer" right on the desktop - my first reaction was to click on it, expecting Nautilus to pop up with my "/" directory or something like that.
Nautilus goes spatial
However, as soon as I clicked on that icon - my reaction was "Yikes!! What have they done to Nautilus ??". Gone was the old and familiar explorer like interface. In it's place was a really minimalistic window, with no toolbar, just a plain menubar. I was quite confused - I even clicked on "Help" -> "About" to verify that the "thing" was indeed Nautilus. After some head scratching I remembered a post at FootNotes, in which the Nautilus developers announced something about going "Spatial". People had been pretty much excited about this - though I personally had no idea about what this stuff was all about. Now I thought I understood.
Fig 2. Spatial Nautilus - Showing "Computer"
All my disks had been correctly identified by Nautilus, and was showing up in the "Computer" window (Fig. 2). But that was not very important at that point - all my attention was riveted on the new UI. After some Googling and RTFM sessions, I figured out that Nautilus was following a "Object Oriented" metaphor, instead of the normally used "Navigational" metaphor. The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time - i.e, the next time it will pop up in the same position. This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht ml.
Fig 3. Viewing a deep folder with spatial Na
Hmm. I really hope they do have thumbnail and bookmark support, and continue to add features. Xpdf is a nice renderer, but the interface IMHO is not exactly a nice one. If gpdf can become the full equal of Acrobat Reader I'll be one very happy camper.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
They go to all the trouble of creating a decent filer, Nautilus, and then ignore it for opening and saving documents by sticking with stupid file selectors. Again. Do any GUI developers bother challenging tired, illogical concepts? (Check out ROX for true drag and drop opening and saving: here)
Time for chmod 755 images, my friend
As much as I like the idea of it being smaller and faster, it's still kind of strange.
The windows take up 1/4 of a 1024x768 screen. I don't want to have a bunch of gigantic nautilus windows filling up my small screen.
Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6
.
Sayamindu Dasgupta
The boring intro...
As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD branch a spin - in order to find out what's new, as well as to get an estimate of how much we would have to translate (I hate that part of the job) to attain supported status. The last time I did this, I also wrote an article about what I saw, but unfortunately, I never learn from my mistakes - so here I go again....
However, before jumping in into this guided tour, please remember that I have been involved with the GNOME community for the past few months as a helper in the GNOME Summaries, and I may not be able totally impartial towards GNOME. Feel free to consider me biased.
The Vital Statistics
Before going into the real stuff, let me give me a brief overview of my system, so that when I mention something as fast or as slow, you would be able to guess how it would crawl in your system.
* Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
* RAM: 512 MB of PC 2700 DDR RAM (with 875 MB swap)
* Motherboard: Nforce 2 based mobo from Leadtek
* Storage: A 40 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
* Distro: Mandrake 9.2
* Kernel: 2.6.2
The Installation
I had gone through (successfully) the GNOME dependency maze before, and to avoid losing my sanity, I decided to use jhbuild (one can also use GARNOME or cvsGNOME - maybe I'll test one of those with GNOME 2.8)
Using jhbuild is quite easy - just set some variables in ~/.jhbuildrc, and you are ready to roll. Jhbuild grabs the latest source code from CVS (taking care of the dependencies), compiles them, and installs them in whatever $prefix you want them to be in. OK - there was one major problem - but that was at a later stage, and it got fixed really quickly.
First Impressions
Fig 1. The default GNOME 2.6 desktop
Jhbuild took around 6 hours to get a bare bones GNOME system up and running, and surprisingly, there were very few errors, and I had to manually intervene only thrice.
I logged in as root the first time (yaya - I know security risk and other stuff..), to be greeted by a clean and polished looking GNOME desktop (Fig. 1) . (Note that I am running the Freedesktop.org Xserver here - so don't expect a stock GNOME 2.6 install to have panel shadows).
Seeing an icon named "Computer" right on the desktop - my first reaction was to click on it, expecting Nautilus to pop up with my "/" directory or something like that.
Nautilus goes spatial
However, as soon as I clicked on that icon - my reaction was "Yikes!! What have they done to Nautilus ??". Gone was the old and familiar explorer like interface. In it's place was a really minimalistic window, with no toolbar, just a plain menubar. I was quite confused - I even clicked on "Help" -> "About" to verify that the "thing" was indeed Nautilus. After some head scratching I remembered a post at FootNotes, in which the Nautilus developers announced something about going "Spatial". People had been pretty much excited about this - though I personally had no idea about what this stuff was all about. Now I thought I understood.
Fig 2. Spatial Nautilus - Showing "Computer"
All my disks had been correctly identified by Nautilus, and was showing up in the "Computer" window (Fig. 2). But that was not very important at that point - all my attention was riveted on the new UI. After some Googling and RTFM sessions, I figured out that Nautilus was following a "Object Oriented" metaphor, instead of the normally used "Navigational" metaphor. The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time - i.e, the next time it will pop up in the same position. This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht
Would both of you PLEASE shut the FUCK UP so we can get back to arguing about vi vs. Emacs?
TIA
I've always thought that the reason having two (main) desktops (KDE and Gnome) is good is not necessarily because of the competition, but because there is a need to interoperate between the two, so sensible 'generic' programming interfaces need to be created. This should create more modular code, and modular code makes successful open source projects.
However, to what extent is this true? Can I, for instance, use just the Gnome file manager in KDE, and vice-versa? Is it an aim of these projects to make this level of interoperability a goal?
From the decription of the 'spatial desktop', it sounds like OS/2 Warp circa 1995.
:-)
We only had to wait a decade or so for Moore's Law to make it usable...
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
The boring intro...
.
As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD branch a spin - in order to find out what's new, as well as to get an estimate of how much we would have to translate (I hate that part of the job) to attain supported status. The last time I did this, I also wrote an article about what I saw, but unfortunately, I never learn from my mistakes - so here I go again....
However, before jumping in into this guided tour, please remember that I have been involved with the GNOME community for the past few months as a helper in the GNOME Summaries, and I may not be able totally impartial towards GNOME. Feel free to consider me biased.
The Vital Statistics
Before going into the real stuff, let me give me a brief overview of my system, so that when I mention something as fast or as slow, you would be able to guess how it would crawl in your system.
* Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
* RAM: 512 MB of PC 2700 DDR RAM (with 875 MB swap)
* Motherboard: Nforce 2 based mobo from Leadtek
* Storage: A 40 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
* Distro: Mandrake 9.2
* Kernel: 2.6.2
The Installation
I had gone through (successfully) the GNOME dependency maze before, and to avoid losing my sanity, I decided to use jhbuild (one can also use GARNOME or cvsGNOME - maybe I'll test one of those with GNOME 2.8)
Using jhbuild is quite easy - just set some variables in ~/.jhbuildrc, and you are ready to roll. Jhbuild grabs the latest source code from CVS (taking care of the dependencies), compiles them, and installs them in whatever $prefix you want them to be in. OK - there was one major problem - but that was at a later stage, and it got fixed really quickly.
First Impressions
Jhbuild took around 6 hours to get a bare bones GNOME system up and running, and surprisingly, there were very few errors, and I had to manually intervene only thrice.
I logged in as root the first time (yaya - I know security risk and other stuff..), to be greeted by a clean and polished looking GNOME desktop (Fig. 1) . (Note that I am running the Freedesktop.org Xserver here - so don't expect a stock GNOME 2.6 install to have panel shadows).
Seeing an icon named "Computer" right on the desktop - my first reaction was to click on it, expecting Nautilus to pop up with my "/" directory or something like that.
Nautilus goes spatial
However, as soon as I clicked on that icon - my reaction was "Yikes!! What have they done to Nautilus ??". Gone was the old and familiar explorer like interface. In it's place was a really minimalistic window, with no toolbar, just a plain menubar. I was quite confused - I even clicked on "Help" -> "About" to verify that the "thing" was indeed Nautilus. After some head scratching I remembered a post at FootNotes, in which the Nautilus developers announced something about going "Spatial". People had been pretty much excited about this - though I personally had no idea about what this stuff was all about. Now I thought I understood.
All my disks had been correctly identified by Nautilus, and was showing up in the "Computer" window (Fig. 2). But that was not very important at that point - all my attention was riveted on the new UI. After some Googling and RTFM sessions, I figured out that Nautilus was following a "Object Oriented" metaphor, instead of the normally used "Navigational" metaphor. The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time - i.e, the next time it will pop up in the same position. This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht ml.
At first, I was not very comfortable with the new spatial mode (to be honest, I thought it sucked), but after a few days, I grew used to it, and be
I guess I'll never be a Gnome user. What is the fascination with muddy colours?
GNOME is quite themable; if you don't like the muddy colours, use another theme.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
aGet the fuck (esc)8(left)4x4(right)iing lost, loser.(esc) :wq
It'll be interesting to read a decent "neutral" KDE 3.2 vs Gnome 2.6 article though! And it also has to be said that the competition between KDE and Gnome really had driven both communities to excellence. Als competition has not deterred them from cooperating in freedesktop.org - something to be encouraged until hopefully one day somehow the libraries can be unified.........
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
So you can be 10x more efficient with your systems than you can on an individual basis. Assuming you design your system archtecture with a bit of thought. Of course, very few do.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Amen. This "spatial" feature is no different than the default Windows 3.1 navigation. What a dud.
If you don't like the standard look, you can easily apply a diferent theme. Try browsing through this and see if anything could spice the Gnome desktop up.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
Slashdot ... where having an opinion gets you moderated as a troll or as flamebait! :rolleyes:
I'd like someone to argue that the colours aren't muddy, that the new Nautilus spatial feature isn't merely a new window for a new folder, that minor application upgrades and integration is special and amazing, and that the GUI isn't brick like.
GNOME vs. KDE will perhaps be one of the holy wars of this millennium, and this is certainly another kick in the teeth for the ever-so-slightly clunky KDE (in my opinion). As said in the article, the developers have done some superb work and, well, put it this way, it is almost making me want to lose Mac OS X on one of my iBooks. Do not underestimate the pulling power of eye candy and the HIG!
:)
Liberal inspiration has, of course, been taken from the Apple way of doing things - the spatial navigation is, as noted in the Ars Technica article, based on the pre-OS X MacOS Finder. And that's no bad thing, certainly if FOSS wants to move towards real usability on the desktop.
The file dialogue boxes are also notably similar to Mac OS X's way of doing things, although the puzzling (at least to me) scrollbars that the Mac uses to browse up and down a directory tree are here replaced with arguably simpler tabs. Very nice touch.
Personally I'll keep Mac OS X on this for the moment, if only to avoid kernel recompiles and incompatibilities arising from that, but hell, if I were a Windows user, I'd be sitting here asking myself why the fuck I am waiting till 2006 for Longhorn when I can have this now...
Zealots were quick to criticise the most prominent competition - Mac OS X 10.3 - in terms of eye candy on the desktop when it came to making comparisons with their darling Longorn (which is, rather pointedly, not available for purchase yet). Now that UNIX is offering two superb alternatives, one of them properly FOSS (and, more importantly, runnable on x86), Windows' days should surely be numbered...?
iqu
You're sure about that?
Why not use a nice clean theme by default? First impressions are the most important thing. KDE comes up clean, crisp and neat. Gnome comes up looking like a field after a music festival.
These things matter!
Running it happiliy on my k6-2/400 laptop
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
None of them are in any way professional in any way.
There's a difference between "dull looking" and "clean and professional looking".
I'm of the opinion that Gnome developers are incapable of understanding the term "professional looking".
Less browns and dark greys!!! Please! For the love of God/Allah/Buddah/etc!
yep, just like win 3.1 ..except that it automatically thumbnails images and video, doesn't need to use dot extensions to parse the filetype and generally rocks.
try it!
Just like AmigaOS from 1985 with a little more processing power used to be fancy with the thumbnails. Wooo!
... but did it have to take so long and so much bloat?
I'm happy that a sane navigational mechanism now exists of course
Only thing I miss in XFce is that konsole doesn't seem to want to work well. A tabbed multi terminal app is very very usefull to me :) a cli junky who wants pretty pictures.
But I think we can't really hope for KDE and Gnome to become much faster. That is not their aim. Other windows managers do that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I used GNOME for a while on my laptop, but then a routine Fedora upgrade made it self-destruct. Suddenly no text anywhere. All the non-GNOME applications were fine. I tried the suggested fixes, but they didn't work.
So, I switched to KDE, purely so I could carry on working. And suddenly I noticed everything was a LOT faster. Even simple things like application window redraws were way faster.
So when I rebuilt the machine, I didn't even bother installing GNOME. I'll look at it again when it's about 4x as fast and much more reliable. Until then, I'm sticking with KDE 3.2, even though it's uglier.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Why not use a nice clean theme by default? First impressions are the most important thing. KDE comes up clean, crisp and neat. Gnome comes up looking like a field after a music KDE comes up looking like an ass-poor Windoze clone. Who the hell wants a GUI that looks like crayon-puke?
(and just in case, copies of the article are also available here and here).
Now i'm wondering whether or not they're handling the load of a slashdot effect...
It looks nothing like Windows, sheesh. If the use of grey and brighter colours in icons makes something Windows like ... sheesh.
Anyway, there are plenty of other themes available from the easy to use configuration application. This seems to be the argument that Gnome users use regarding their interface, so I'll just use it back.
It is certainly not just geeks who will want or need to type in file names. Skilled typists will not want to move their hands from the home row to open a file. Making them use the mouse to open a file is a bad idea.
So ... type in the name of the filename, anywhere in the window. This file selector has type-ahead support so it will search through the files looking for the next file that matches the string you have typed so far. If you've been using this feature extensively in Mozilla, it'll be second nature already.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
longhorn uses SVG as well.
Perhaps you should check out the EFL's. The edje library works very similar to Avalon/XAML. UI's are completely abstracted from the applications and stored in text/image archives, but unlike Avalon, edje files aren't pre-compiled. They also allow animations and other neat things that MS hasn't mentioned being in Avalon.
Avalon's SVG-like display tech breaks SVG standar- err- has better interoperability with WinFX (whodathunkit).
And nice troll btw. Yummy.
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
OK - Here's a mirror that should work properly - sorry for the initial goof up http://www.clai.net/sayamindu/GNOME-2.6/GNOME_2_6. html
Have to say it, this was one of the best written personal review article submitted to slashdot in recent past.
It covers the functionality well, does not break the continuity and was fun to read.
If only we had more articles like this, slashdot might gain few more subscribers.
- mritunjai
Anyway, there are plenty of other themes available from the easy to use configuration application. This seems to be the argument that Gnome users use regarding their interface, so I'll just use it back.
You just validated Gnome users' argument then, and the parents' little whine about how the default GNOME theme sucks becomes irrelevant. Bah, trolls.
Now I've got a 512mb / 900MHz system here, but I'm well aware of what a PentiumMMX or even a 386 is capible of. My first computer was less than 10MHz. I'm sure these Gnome / KDE geeks know how powerful these older computers are compared with the barheater monsters on their desks.
The problem is they just don't care. Their motivations are not alturistic any more than Bill Gates, perhaps even less so. If it runs fast enough on their computer, that satisfies them. If it doesn't run on a PMMX or P2, they wouldn't care a stuff and wouldn't understand why the owner of the said system wouldn't just bin it and buy a new AMD64. If you've got 32mb of ram & can load an OS to check ur email, they can't understand why you don't just go and buy more ram. They'll even think you're a 'looser' for being happy with an older system.
Basic socio-economic concepts like resource efficiency are irrelevant to them. You actually have to care for these things to matter to you. Sorry to really slam these guys, but I've never seen any real sign of alturism amongst most geeks. It's a pity.
Such is the story of our dystopian world.
triple slashdotting??
are you trying to break a new record or what? ^_^
"My Uncle switched Linux Desktops today." "Gnome?" "Know him? He's my uncle!"
Colors can be changed, but "open folder in new window" really annoys me. I've just recently switched to Gnome from KDE. I was using KDE because it is what I first used, but I found I was using a lot of Gnome apps, so I started using Gnome. If this behavior can't be changed, then it's back to KDE, or find another environment.
I think the post was sarcastic.
Clearly the troll was the person who dissed KDE for looking like Crayon Puke.
Any person who is half educated knows that First Impressions are Very Important, and that by configuring Gnome with a Dull and Ugly Default Interface they are only doing their own project a disservice.
Configuration later is meaningless. Most people never get to that stage.
You do some user interface work and you'll find this all out for yourself too.
Some people have the misconception that "spatial navigation" is about having one window per folder, but that's not really the point. In explorer-like navigation, every window is a partial view of the filesystem. Every window can be used to navigate the fs with browser-like controls (forward, backwards, folder up, folder down). Two windows are just two views of the fs, they can point to the same folder.
The defining characteristic of spatial navigation is that a folder window IS the folder. That's why there cannot be two windows on screen that show the same folder, and why there are no navigation controls. The fact that folders open in the same place as when you left them is just a result of the fact that the position is an attribute of the folder itself, not of a windows which is a viewport of a folder. It's a subtle difference that people who have worked with explorer-like browsers for too long may have some difficulty adapting to.
Personally, I feel more comfortable with an explorer-like fs browser, maybe just because I'm used to it. It seems easier to manage large trees this way. But I can easily see why new computer users would be less confused with the spatial model. It's hard for some people to understand (and remember!) that a dozen of shortcuts to "My Documents" in different places all point to the same folder "underneath".
I'm thinking a tabbed file browser is the solution! Oh wait, Konqueror already has that option. Konqueror just rules, basically ... apart from some HTML issues, the recent versions have been solid and functional.
... but I'm sure a lot of tabs (of acid) could have averted a few wars in the past if applied to the right people at the right time)
Yay for tabs.
(yeah, I know they aren't the solution to everything
Did they REALLY make a file requester widtout pattern matching? WHY? Even windows got that feature, and it is so usefull that there are NO reason to leave it out.
Have the good people from Debian tried to package Gnome 2.5, or will they start packaging once gnome 2.6 is out?
``Not true. GNOME (and KDE!) have only gotten faster and faster. The exceptions are KDE 2.0 (which is slower than 1.0; but 3.0 is faster than 2.0 and 3.2 is even faster than 3.0) and GTK (which has become a little slower but also smoother because of extensive double buffering).''
I can't comment on KDE, but when I upgraded from Gnome 2.2 to 2.4, I noticed significant performance hits. The desktop took longer to load, and in general, were noticably slower.
``On this system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz 390 MB RAM) I can definitely say GNOME 2.x is faster than 1.4. And GTK 2 feels smoother than GTK 1.''
Well, you have a nice system. My primary FreeBSD box has a 500 MHz CPU with 128M RAM. Yes, it sucks, but I was fairly disappointed when I upgraded to Gnome 2.4
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
One thing that always bugs me (oops, I mean... "enchants me") about these reviews is the obligatory sentence "slick and polished desktop". Look at the picture... it's an empty grayish uniform square with nothing on it... Now if the Gnome developers could only remove the remaining 1-2 icons and the menubar, add a command prompt right over it (alpha-channel of course)... would be an extra-clen super-polished desktop! Oh the joys of removing everything, and going back to the CLI!
http://www.automatiq.se
It'll be interesting to read a decent "neutral" KDE 3.2 vs Gnome 2.6 article though!
About as interesting as a "neutral" Britney Spears vs. Paris Hilton article.
something to be encouraged until hopefully one day somehow the libraries can be unified.........
They could have been unified long ago if the Qt license (GPL) didn't prevent it. You see, ultimately, the difference between KDE and Gnome doesn't come down to technology, it comes down to licenses, and the Qt license just doesn't work for many people.
Isn't this just a tad bit harsh? Imagine someone opening his TiVo box:
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Firefox was set to 800x300 , here's what I could read:
As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD
those bengali guys sure are strange...
So now I'm reading a version of the article without screenshots on here because the actual link is now 403 and the two mirrors are 404, but the text has convinced me that the gnome developers are insane. It's a beta, so there is room for things to change before it goes release, but some of them sound like major design decisions.
First, "The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time" - I am glad this behavior can be overridden though it would be nice to have a config option for it as windows does. ("you can enable the /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser GConf key"). I only want a window to pop up when I create one. This is one of the things that bothers me about one of my coworkers in fact (a simple little petty thing, which in no way stands between us) since he is always configuring windows systems to open a new window each time you open something. Hello, clutter! I use GNOME on a system with an 800x600 flat panel, I am not interested in that many windows. I'm glad they remember where you left them and what size they were: Welcome to 1984.
"However, the real major test of spatial Nautilus came when I decided to reorganise my home directory" ... "A cool thing that I noticed later was that when I dragged a file into the "CD Creator" window, instead of getting moved, the file just got copied." Now look, I don't care how many files you have in your home directory. Norton commander could do that job with thousands of files, especially if "many of the files [were] in directories which were moved as a whole". Congratulations? It would probably be faster to do this from the command line, still, if you have decent tab completion.
"You just put a file in ~/Templates directory, and Nautilus will have an entry for it in the Templates submenu" - Bill Gates called, he wants to know where you got the idea for that one. Good thing to implement, tragically easy to implement, why wasn't this done much sooner? If it's going to be done at this late date it should have something special, like having a different list of templates for different kind of directories. The kind of thing I want to know about a feature like this is, when you try to create a template in a directory to which you do not have write permissions, will it still faithfully display the list of templates, or will it just tell you that you have no write permission? Inquiring minds want to know, but not badly enough to make a gnome beta.
On the plus side, thank you GNOME team for including key mapping into the Keyboard preferences. This is an absolute requirement and an obvious addition, which for once puts something ahead of Windows. (I don't know how much of a pain it is to do on MacOS, I never tried, because I used an apple keyboard and all my keys worked right.) Windows still requires you to go make registry changes, which admittedly is still better than using xmodmap.
The "most anticipated", and apparently the most screwed-over feature, is the file requester. You have to hit Control-1 to get a text entry box? The author apparently likes to avoid his keyboard at all costs, as he only enters filenames opening hidden files. Well, at least on Windows I like to simply configure the OS to show me hidden and system files, so I can click on them, and I use the text entry box to rapidly jump to a directory. For i
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Isn't it a matter of taste then? Some people like the default Gnome interface, some like the default KDE interface. One guy thinks Gnome is ugly, another guy thinks KDE is "crayon puke". How do you please everyone then? You just can't.
I have used Gnome last three years, but two days ago I tried KDE ... and I have switched to KDE :P
:P
I like both desktops, but KDE seems to be more integrated and *all works*. Things like KIO slaves work far better than Gnome VFS.
When I use Gnome I use terminals constantly for every operation, with KDE I use more the GUI.
Of course, I will give a change to Gnome 2.6
However it take 1 sec to open the gnome menu. This time delay especially is painful, because I cannot help thinking that it would be so easy to avoid.
I hope that gnome 2.6 will have a faster gnome menu.
For a format thats so highly tied to the printed page, I'm not sure what the fuss is about online readers for PDF's.
Its nice to be able to preview before you print, but if you really want to read online you should probably use a format that looks good on screen, and can adapt to your preferences and settings.
For my purposes, HTML has always been far superior to PDF format. I hardly print anything out anymore- it gets obsoletted too quick and becomes unsearcheable.
So, for my purposes, as long as I can get a vague preview and print well, any pdf reader will do.
True ... but you can try to appeal to more users. I'm sure that the only people that like the Gnome interface are the developers themselves! At least KDE appeals to me as well as the developers... :)
A few lighter colours here and there, less mud textures, and you've got something that corporates would look at. IMO.
This new spatial apperance of the new Nautilus reminds me of old MacOS finder. I liked it back then and I will probably like it in Nautilus.
But I am a bit worried, some folder hierachies in Unix is quite deep.
Perhaps they should introduce something like the Mac spring loaded folders.I.e. if you want to move a file down in the hierachy you just drag and hold it over a folder, after a short while the window opens, and you hold the file over a folder in that window, until that opens and so on. When you finally reach the right folder you drop the file, and all windows you encountered on the way is closed automatically.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Is it just me, or is it a little ironic that agreatserver.com is /.ed... must not be so great.
I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
Not trolling or anything, but here goes...
As a developer, I have always been interested in writing software for Gnome since 1.x. The one thing that has really set me back from doing so is the fact that with each and every iteration, something in the very core of Gnome changes and more often than not, those changes mean that you would have to recode large chunks of your software to cope with the changes.
Yuh, sure all your Gnome 1.x apps will still run but it won't be able to use any of the new features in 2.x. This comes naturally, since this is after all a "major release" upgrade. They've really done it with 2.x this time, something major changes with each "minor" version is released. I know this is all about bringing Gnome closer into the "integrated desktop where you have everything you need to do everything you need" that it is trying to achieve.
Case in point, this whole new-fangled "Object-Oriented" metaphor. Now not only do I probably have to learn a whole new set of interfaces to get desktop integration going for programs that I write for Gnome, I also have to learn how to operate this contraption. I mean come on! Do we really need all this HIG crap?!? My UI was "usable", at least for me, before all of this HIG things were implemented. If the developers want to implement this HIG thing, then go ahead and do it but it would also be nice to let users with "bad habits" choose to revert to the old UI behavior when they want. And for heaven's sake, leave the API's unchanged until the next major release! Being a developer for Gnome is a lot like being Sisyphus.
Now I realise why there are more apps written for KDE than for Gnome.
</rant>
Yuh, I know this rant probably doesn't make any sense to you. But maybe that's because you haven't been around when Gnome 1.x was new and Miguel was still sane.
(puts on asbestos underwear and ducks under the sink)
After using Evolution/Gnome during a year, I have just changed to Kontact/KDE and I don't miss any feature in Kontact. I even think it's more complete. BTW, both Evo and Kontact rocks
I mean, come on. What UI are gnome devs trying to imitate, that they can't have the Esc key close dialogue boxes? Now Galeon, by popular demand, has put code in to make the find dialog box closable by the Esc key. I wish the core Gnome devs would follow their lead. I don't run Gnome, but I do run a couple Gnome apps.
For your information, both Gnome and KDE are moving away from bitmaps right now, not 2007. And if you are talking about database driven file systems even Gnome people make experiments with that.See:t ures.html
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/fea
I would be surprised if there was many new things in Longhorn when it finally gets released. Not so much because Microsoft hasn't the technical knowhow to produce something new, but if Microsoft alters their GUI too much existing windows users will not feel at home.
A too big change would be bad for marketing. If you are going to learn a new way of working you can just as well learn something that is free.
It will be minor innovations like multiple desktops (known to the rest of the world since about 1990)
In fact I'm not even sure there will be a Longhorn. It sort of looks more and more like Pink and other pre MacOS X Apple OS attempts. It gets more and more delayed and filled with features that nobody really wants.
Instead I guess Microsoft will shift their focus of development to MS-Office and try to tie it more to the server side where Microsoft is not doing so well at the moment.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
I really shouldn't get involved in this, but Gnome does and always has used a nice clean theme by default. like this. Those "muddy colors" were configured by the reviewer, including the uglyish Noia-warm icon set which is (ironically) a port of a KDE icon theme.
By comparison, KDE looks like this by default. In my opinion the Keramik theme is offensively ugly. The default 3.2 theme is quite a bit better, although the window decorations are an XP ripoff.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
About the licensing; You're absolutely right. Trolltech and KDE have worked out an agreement http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p hp that I think addresses most issues people have with the QT license. Trolltech has developed a great desktop environment and cross OS development toolkit and commercial licensing has paid for much of it (which in turn allowed Kdevelop to become such an incredible tool for linux/windows/osx GPL development). Still I fully understand that the QT license makes it legally difficult to freely commercialise the desktop.
On the other hand a lot of people believe the GPL is the way forward for QT and KDE.
Maybe these differences cannot be bridged; I do hope so but it won't be easy. And perhaps it isn't all that necessary either. Both KDE and Gnome have much better and faster function libraries; computers get faster; apt-get and yum make updating so much easier.. In a few years it won't hurt to have both installed and freedesktop.org will hopefully allow for theme unification.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
I should also point out that some people have trouble supporting the Qt licence that KDE is built on. Qt is open (sort of) and closed (sort of), and there seems to be little concensus about how open it is -- having read the license myself, I'm still not sure. Thus the reason why the Desktop Linux project isn't supporting it.
A better way to work your post is that the Gnome 2.6 beta screenshots appear to take great strides in catching up to where KDE was several months ago.
Microsoft only innovate in ways to manipulate the law.
Rox Filer does that too and I have to say it became the prefered way I copy/moving my files. Actually I've never used drag'n'drop until I've tried the Rox Filer. You grab the file and just drag it over the directory, another window with that folder opened pops up and the you can just hold the file for a sec or so above the dir and it opens. It just rocks. And I don't know how those guys managed to achieve such performance in it. They got be crazy :)
Make sure to go back and pick up gtk+-2.4.0 (as well as glib and pango updates) which may be released by the time you are done compiling. :)
...does it still work like in the old one? That's the one feature I really like about the old file selector. Sure the old one may look ugly but it serves its purpose.
About as interesting as a "neutral" Britney Spears vs. Paris Hilton article.
Pudding wrestling solves all the world's disagreements...
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
none of the graphics on the page show up, and clicking their links takes me to www.linksponsor.com - anyone else?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
it's made by europeans.
Now with redhat gone fedora, how do people pay for all this stuff?
Whenever I bought RedHat, I figured the people at RedHat were shoveling the money around in some logical manner, but now what am I supposed to do?
I love free software, in the sense that it's available to all, even if they can't (or don't want to) pay for it.
Since I can pay, my goal is to drop $50-$100 on gnome.org or something, somewhere...each time a fedora release comes out. I'd like the drop to be managed by reasonable people--that is, the people doing most of the work, or the people contributing the most to the project, get a sizable part of the money brought in.
Any better ideas?
Before posting a site containing multiple images to frikkin' slashdot, you may want to check your server's bandwidth ability.
Just wondering: how do you use tabs in a file browser? I use tabs in firefox to have several pages in the same window, but surely you're not speaking about several "opened folders" in one file browser?
you mean it uses its own idea of scalable vector graphics format ... not quite SVG. But hey, Longhorn will obsolete SVG as well! Take that, you open source freaks!
Trolltech and KDE have worked out an agreement that I think addresses most issues people have with the QT license. Trolltech has developed a great desktop environment and cross OS development toolkit and commercial licensing has paid for much of it (which in turn allowed Kdevelop to become such an incredible tool for linux/windows/osx GPL development).
Oh, please, spare us the marketing speech. I pointed out that it is incompatible with the Gnome licenses: Gnome libraries are LGPL and Qt is dual-licensed GPL/commercial. It doesn't matter what spin you try to put on that, that's just a legal fact.
If you want to talk about consequences, you can see those in the market: Gnome is a thriving project and is becoming the de-facto standard for commercial UNIX and Linux systems. If Qt had been LGPL from the start, the Gnome project would have never started.
In a few years it won't hurt to have both installed and freedesktop.org will hopefully allow for theme unification.
If we are still running something called "Gnome" and/or "KDE" in a few years, they'll hopefully not be based on bloated, obsolete C or C++ libraries.
I might not have thought this through completely!
Hmmm, maybe you could drag icons onto the tab of another folder to move the file that the icon represents there.
Dunno, I don't use file managers that much! Command line all the way, heh.
Directory Opus for the Amiga was a good file manager in my opinion. I wouldn't mind one that looked and operated like that, whilst being modern. Hmmm...
KDE is interested in adding 2,000 new sidebar buttons and Control Center options. Gnome is interested in, instead of a big giant "K," having an Applications menu and an Actions menu.
Gnome should have been the interface project, and KDE the application framework project. Instead, we have one desktop environment trying to be Windows, the other MacOS.
"Sufferin' succotash."
There are many things I like about KDE that GNOME lacks. However, appearance has never been one of them.
To me, KDE has always seemed boxy, rigid, and tacky. I've seen Motif/CDE workstations that look nicer by default than KDE.
And then someone pointed out that the review does not picture the default gnome theme. The default gnome theme looks like this.
Not too shabby if you ask me.
err, I assume you mean this
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
Its posts like this that someone can come up with that fast that are that funny that make me wish there was a special mod higher than 5 sometimes. Like maybe you have to get 4 mod points for each point after 5 or something.
Just like for more than 18 hit points.
That being said, the OP has a very good point. and he did say install a compiler, which your average joe has no need for.
I'm sorry if you find it off-putting to be given the party line. I understand, really.
./autogen.sh --enable-debug=minimum
However, while I would agree that it's unreasonable to be wasteful in your application and just brush it off as "well, hardware/memory/dist/etc is cheap", I also feel that it's only fair to make certain trade-offs that benefit the users of modern hardware when most OS distributions won't pick up a new software version for six months to two years.
An older box is essentially a different platform. That software runs on it at all is cool, but in order to support it well, you really have to do a full port, with all of the tuning that is involved in any port. That would be a great goal for a distribution vendor... to put out the "P1-P3 Optimized Desktop" would be quite and excellent contribution, but to say that making trade-offs like memory-for-speed is unreasonable in the core project seems to me to be a bit difficult to swallow.
There are, of course, many things you can do to enhance performance on low-end boxes:
1. Load a very lightweight, texture-free theme
2. Re-compile all of the core Gnome software and toolkits with env CFLAGS="-O3"
3. Use a light-weight WM like MetaCity
4. Check each core application for performance settings
Following these steps, you can tune your environment to your needs. Good luck!
Here's why. We need to get away from this obsession with 20+ year old graphics servers running 20 different inconsistent toolkits, all working extra hard to "work well with each other" when we should really be focusing our efforts on one major desktop competitor running on Linux.
"Sufferin' succotash."
A few lighter colours here and there, less mud textures, and you've got something that corporates would look at. IMO.
As some people pointed out before, that is not the default gnome theme, plus the icons were originally developed for KDE.
There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.
At time of writing two of the three links do not work and the third has broken links to all the images.
Better luck next time.
Come on, everyone knows VIM - VI(IMPROVED) is the best.
The reviewer mentions that he couldn't change the launchers. I have the same problem with 2.4. What's the solution to this?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Before the web, I believe what you describe could have been true. But today, most people are used to browse the web, which is a kind of file manager interface. Perhaps people don't think about the similarities, but I doubt anyone expects a link equalling a new window with a specific position. The browser is a window to the web, and adapting that to be a window to the underlying file system should work well for current computer users, I believe.
To give different places on the file system their own "look", perhaps each directory could have its own background color. It could be dynamically computed from the path, and give each "place" on the file system its unique identity. A unique background pattern could be added as well. Has anyone experimented with that?
2. If you are advocating a single desktop that runs on Linux, I guess you want to get rid of FreeBSD etc?
3. What happens when the desktop project starts being unreasonable? The only reason we aren't all stuck with XFree's tantrums is that competing projects like fd.o give users leverage. Do you really think that the XFree team would have backed down on the license change if they didn't think everybody would switch away?
4. There's no clear "winner". KDE and GNOME have different design goals, and lots of people agree with KDE's set of design goals, and lots of people agree with GNOME's design goals. You'll never get consensus, and you don't provide a reason for getting rid of one of them.
5. You state that X/KDE/GNOME are dead in the water, when in fact they are moving along at a rapid pace, and then point to Y, something that is barely out of the vapourware phase.
6. You state "we should be focusing all of our efforts...". Exactly what effort are you focusing? Or are you just an armchair know-it-all?
6 points, and you get called a troll. Bye now.
Besides, if I have both mplayer and xine installed, how does the One File Browser know which one to launch ? Or Emacs and Vi ? Or whatever ?
The way Windows does it is when you install a program it asks if you want it to be the default for certain file types. Most file types you will always use the same application to open that file type.
And yes, I realize you can set this in preferences; but suppose you want to use different tools for different tasks, despite the file format being the same ? Or if I just want to try out a new program ?
If you want to use another application, then open that application and drag the file onto it.
Because that would mean resizing application windows to fit them besides the directory windows, and be a lot more hassle than simply using a selector window ? [snip] No, it's a useability feature. Lacking a separate file selector would give users unneccessary grief.
I totally disagree. Having used both I find the file selector such a drag on productivity it makes the desktop unusable compared to the drag and drop. You DON'T resize applications to fit them next to directory windows, that would be a crazy thing to do. You only need part of the window to be showing, but if you have a small monitor and are in desperate need of space then you leave it in the background and alt-tab or use task bar to make it jump to front when you need to save. If you have 3-4 on the task bar then it's instant to bring up the directory you want to save to, as opposed to tediously clicking your way through the selector EVERY SINGLE TIME. In my opinion, it's the worst thing that Linux desktops share with Windows. At a pinch you can always drag onto pinboard, then drag and drop the pinboard icon into a directory later. I'm talking about general principles here, not Gnome in particular (I use xfce4 + rox atm)
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
QT is licensed under the GPL. So it not "sort of free", but totally free (speech and beer).
Hyperbole, thy name is Overly Critical Guy...
.sig or posting history is any indication).
Seriously, there are at most three major toolkits being utilized today (QT, GTK, Motif) on XFree86 and as for X being old--so what? Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason that it's been around for so long is that it works?
As for how this makes XFree86, Gnome and KDE all "dead in the water" somehow makes no sense at all. You do realize that as far as the end user is concerned, it makes no different whatsoever what toolkit an app was built with? Again, I fail to see a problem.
And what is this "we" that you speak of? Last time I checked it seemed to me that you hate everything connected with Linux and Open Source Software and that everything Microsoft does is golden. Either you've changed your tune, or you're karma whoring (the latter being the more plausible, especially if your
Seriously, whoever modded this as insightful needs to have their head examined.
At the end of the day, you just have to face the fact that foo bar baz.
I HATE this idea that "the window is the folder". The "folder" is A FREAKING DIRECTORY! To store information like the location of the window on the desktop means either a) storing the metadata as a hidden file in the directory (which won't work if you don't have write permissions to the directory) or b) storing the data about the directory in some database elsewhere, so that you have to access 2 files to show a directory (the directory itself and the database). It means that if you access a directory on a removable medium that metadata won't stay with the media, so for example every floppy disk appears in the same window location on the screen.
It means that if I drill down 5 levels into my MP3 collection, I have 4 UNNEEDED WINDOWS opened on my system.
And the idea of "close the parent" is equally stupid - now instead of 4 repaints of the window, I have 4 unneeded window destroy events and 4 unneeded window create events.
I had updated things on my Fedora machine at home, and had noticed this behavior. I chalked it up to my Nautilus install being broken. Now I know it is not my install that is broken, it is Nautilus itself. And of course, we simply CANNOT allow lowly users to have the option of restoring the old behavior - That Would Offend The Gods Of User Interface Usability.
Not that I was a big fan of Nautilus before - I felt it was bloated. However, since you pretty much cannot run Gnome without it I accepted it. But now I like it even less.
Yes, this is REALLY going to make it easier to bring a NOOB over from Windows.
Gee, thanks guys.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It can also be used under another lisence, if you are willing to pay to help QT development.
#include "sig.h"
Not changing the behavior of the file browser at all is the solution.
The whole spatial thing, that is. It looks to me (reading the article and looking at the screenshots) just like the old 'Navagational' method. He's still browsing down to his files, it's just that there's windows open for the parent folder (and I think they're attached somehow to the parent).
/home/me/mymusic the operating system (here meaning all the software that's running my computer) takes care of that for me, storing by object type and letting me look for things based on what it is (an mp3) and it's meta data (artist, song, title, etc). Is this sort of functionality meant to be in Gnome 2.6?
I thought (and admidt I may be wrong) that the point of 'spatial' was to change the way files are stored all together. So that instead of putting an mp3 in
I'd like to see something to replace the file/folder Navigational method. It breaks down once you've got over 1000+ individual files scattered on your hard disk.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
obviously they aren't doing this for you then, JACKASS. just set the freakin gconf key to get back to browser mode and SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Maybe I'm strange for wanting a desktop environment that cleanly displays the information I need.
Although I do wish the "simple" theme actually had toggle buttons where the checked state was different from the non-checked state. Oh well...
RTFA... middle-click to open in new window & close parent window.
I should note that I am not at all surprised someone smoking crack modded me down as "Troll." What makes Linux so great that it's above criticism? XFree86 for that matter? Here on Slashdot, if you dare criticize something and hold a differing opinion than the majority, you get modded down.
I'll take your post point-by-point.
1. Just because something is 20+ years old, it doesn't mean it should be thrown away.
If you had bothered to RTFP (read the fucking paper) I linked to, you'd see *exactly* why using that 20+ year old X technology is a bad idea.
Plenty of people like the idea of heirarchical filesystems. Plenty of people like mice, monitors and keyboards. Plenty of people like icons and windows.
I have no idea why you're bringing all that up. Those are abstract concepts and ideas, like the idea of books, pages, and chapters. I never mentioned anything about those.
The X protocol in current use isn't 20 years old. It's matured and gone through a number of revisions, just like any other technology.
The X protocol *is* 20 years old. It supports extensions really well. As the paper outlines, many of these extensions are breaking other extensions. A typical desktop runs about 26 extensions. Not to mention that adding certain graphical effects requires changing a lot of architecture in the source code because of the way XFree86 is set up.
2. If you are advocating a single desktop that runs on Linux, I guess you want to get rid of FreeBSD etc?
Port it to BSD if you want. That's not even a relevant issue to what I was talking about--removing this silly desktop "competition" going on between competing products, completely scaring away any serious company wanting to write an app for X. Who do you write for? GTK? QT? Motif?
3. What happens when the desktop project starts being unreasonable?
What if both GNOME and KDE become unreasonable? You can't argue with a "what if" because it could apply to absolutely anything. You haven't even defined what you mean by "unreasonable."
The only reason we aren't all stuck with XFree's tantrums is that competing projects like fd.o give users leverage.
It's a fork of XFree86. It still has its tantrums. X doesn't even have its own widget set. The issues with X are much more fundamental than you are discussing here.
Do you really think that the XFree team would have backed down on the license change if they didn't think everybody would switch away?
What does the license have to do with anything? I'm talking technologically and logically--XFree86 needs to be gone, and the two competing desktops need to get their acts together. All these incompatible toolkits have driven away serious desktop development all in the name of "choice."
4. There's no clear "winner". KDE and GNOME have different design goals, and lots of people agree with KDE's set of design goals, and lots of people agree with GNOME's design goals. You'll never get consensus, and you don't provide a reason for getting rid of one of them.
Application support. There. Which one should Adobe port Photoshop to? If we had one seamless desktop with proper binary installation/uninstallation routines and a sane programming library that retained backwards-compatibility with each major release, you don't think companies would take a look?
5. You state that X/KDE/GNOME are dead in the water, when in fact they are moving along at a rapid pace, and then point to Y, something that is barely out of the vapourware phase.
Vaporware? You can already download it and compile. Developers are writing the base widget set as I type this. I don't get this bizarre aversion to change that Linux users have.
6. You state "we should be focusing all of our efforts...". Exactly what effort are you focusing? Or are you just an armchair know-it-all?
I'm currently writing a design paper. Sto
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm looking forward to Y-Windows. It's already at 0.2, and developers are finishing the core widget set. The PDF on the website describes what's wrong with XFree86 and what Y is gonna fix.
And not only is 2.6 going to increase its usage of SVG, bug 2.4 ALREADY uses SVG a lot. Not all of the icon themes use them, but a bunch do. And they look really nice, too.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
> A better way to work your post is that the Gnome
> 2.6 beta screenshots appear to take great strides
> in catching up to where KDE was several months ago.
Since GNOME was started over *one year* after KDE was started, you're basically saying that GNOME is closing the gap quickly.
What, in 2006 Windows will get the equivalent of SVG which Gnome has now?
I think you've got the wrong group playing in the dust.
The desktop itself is a dead metaphor. Sure, in 1984 the Mac looked great, with a whole virtual desktop on a 10" screen. But 20 years later, the screen is only 20". What happened to my 3'x5' physical desktop? It's covered with other computing devices that want to talk to my virtual desktop. That's confusing.
And an obsolete metaphor. In 1984, that desktop made computers more user-friendly (coining that now-trite phrase, too) than the mainframes anyone knew, or the disembodied HAL voice everyone was "promised" (threatened). Now that the virtual desktop has gotten 80% of the way there, it's no longer necessary to oversimplify info management into the straitjacket of its 20th Century analog form factors. It's still too complicated for most humans to intuit - not to mention the billions who have never used a real desk, but could get jacked into the Internet at least intermittently, changing their lives and the world much more cheaply than chaining them to a desk out in the bush. And for the rest of us, we already get it, and the desktop metaphor just keeps us in the second grade.
Linux, with its excellent support of the OSI multitier model, and true cross-platform distributions (from modems to mainframes), is not chained to a desktop metaphor for presentation and organization. All its competitors are. As we leave our desks behind, we'll also leave behind Windows, Macintosh, and all the rest stuck behind theirs. Let's get the job done better in the 21st Century with interfaces like GNOME Dashboard. Or some other interface that supports us with transparent multimedia, like some kind of quiet voice interface through our earbuds. Webs of the World, unite, you have nothing to lose but your desks!
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make install -not war
These guys amaze me. Just when I thought they couldn't get any worse, here they go and do it. I've got to say, even winxp is easier to use than that steaming heap of pigshit looks like. Man, 2.4 was bad, this is just terrible.
Slashdot, where using BB code for "cute" GIF smileys makes you look like the retard you are.
The MSWindows "Open With" opens the file chooser expecting the user to find the program to use from the file system. Some programs use strangely named EXE files, and some require additional settings in the command to work correctly. This cannot be called "user friendly".
If MS cared, there is a much better method.
Every application installed on MSWindows must tell the registry which file extensions (since MSWindows does not check the actual file type) it can open. It then overwrites the setting for each of those extensions.
A better method is for the registry to add the program as one of the choices for that extension. When right-clicking, the menu would show all the programs that claim to open that extension. When double-clicking, it uses the last program chosen. Let the users decide during installation which extensions now default to use the new program (most programs do ask), but do not remove the previous choices. Remove the choice when the program is uninstalled. The "Open With" option should allow adding new programs, without "Always use this program" deleting the old choice.
If they want to get fancy, right-click to show the choices, then right-click on a program would prompt to remove it from the list for that extension.
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I do not expect MS to make choices easy. They want their programs to be the default, and making it difficult to choose another program means less people will even think about having choices.
I have rewritten my registry so I can choose several programs to edit HTML files while keeping Mozilla as the default. I even have a choice to open with MSIE. Installing a new browser or HTML editor can discard my settings. (I use a REG file to restore my settings, but I wonder if allowing the mission-critical registry to be written so easily is a good thing.)
- I also added choices for playing videos to the right-click menu. When one player will not work with an MPEG, I right-click and try a different player, without using the awful "Open With" dialogbox.
- It would be much nicer if the OS maintained the list of programs.
Non-MS OSes could implement something like this. How are file types associated with programs? KDE shows multiple programs for viewing/editing text files in the file browser. Is that a start towards the above suggestion?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
After all these years I still prefer Midnight Commander (two-window) style interfaces. Every useful feature in modern file managers are available --- you can change directories by typing TAB-completed "cd" commands, (most often) by Ctrl-S which resembles incremental search or type-ahead-find, or by arrowing and selecting, or by using the history (Meta-P, Meta-N). Selection is made individually with the Insert key, or they can be made with wildcards. Moving files and directories are done with one function key. It is also possible to type commands which can refer to the files selected. By the way, it takes up little memory --- you can open as many xterms containing it as you are comfortable with (I usually use about three or four; Of course sometimes I run out of workspaces, but then "screen" comes to rescue) on a 32MB machine.
MC is something loved by command-line freaks like me, but it isn't exactly hard to use. My mom (which is hardly a geek) uses Windows Commander in WinXP (which is quite similar to MC), so does most of her fellows, all without any form of advocacy or special training.
In short, if you don't like Nautilus or other Windows-Explorer-like interfaces, give MC a try. It can almost be called an innovation, except that it actually has a rather long history.
On a side note, another thing I as someone who uses linux for Real Work (TM) can't live without is Links, a text-mode browser. Great for writing java apps when there are such a lot of libraries with API documents to read, since "screen" in an xterm, when used correctly, still feels better than a tabbed galeon window, and is definitely less resource hungry.
I don't deny there are quite a few sore spots in MC and Links (e.g. sometimes MC says "you are already running a command", when I have to do C-o, C-c, C-o, M-P), but they are like crashing bugs in MS Word --- you hate the bug but you still can't live without the applciation. Anyway, the bugs are not crashing bugs that eats files, so it is quite possible to live with. Also it doesn't look as good (or run as snappily) in anything other than a vanilla Xterm with font VGA and white-text-on-black background, neither does it have good i18n support (which is related to the fonts problem), but I hope someone (or myself, if I have time) will get to fix that.
http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/
Rox rules.
go fuck yourself
Oh, thanks, as someone who has used gnome from the pre 1.0 era I know what themes are about, and see many of them. Repeat after me: so good, so dull.....
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All my submissions to Slashdot rejected... and proud of it!
"Get it? 'Why' - 'Y'! ...It's funny, dammit!"
It'll be interesting to read a decent "neutral" KDE 3.2 vs Gnome 2.6 article though!
What does "neutral" mean? If you wrote an article that didn't draw any conclusions for fear of offending one side or the other, you'd still have to pick a finite number of features to compare, and somebody would find that set biased.