Slashdot Mirror
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
Kethinov writes "I just read this article reviewing GNOME 2.6 via the 2.5 development version. Many screenshots, plus extensive discussion on the new direction Nautilus is taking among other things. Worth a read. (A mirror would be nice ;)" Sorry - I duped this. Mea culpa.
This is a repost of an article submitted by the author and posted by Taco.... I wonder if any newer articles about this topic have been posted since? Personally, I doubt we will see too much more from article-writers until GNOME is packaged up by the major distros...
Hello, oGALAXYo.
Nice to see you using the "worked on GNOME for 5 years and got ticked off" line, it makes it much easier to put together posts you've made on "osnews.com". Haven't seen you posting much there lately, but I assume that's only because you've been banned there.
How long did you have this rant stored on your copy of notepad... er, I mean, whatever text editor comes with MorphOS? Why did you post as an AC? I've got nothing personal against you, but man.... I've got to call a cheese a cheese.
Nobody is forcing you to use Gnome or KDE desktop.
If you want a ligh one use fluxbox or if you uber-cool-unix-hacker ratpoison
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
People love that clean feeling. It makes them more comfortable. The first thing I think of when I see IceWM screenshots is how old school they look and how I assume, "I could never get anything done on that." Let's not start a gui war, but the gui is what people see, not the kernel source code. I think that it is very important for developers to focus on this. Linus has the kernel, but the gnome and kde people have more of the end user to worry about. Making the gui look more stable is important not just for "pulling people away from winblowz" but to keep people on gnome. Also, the switch to gkt2 allows things to look more seamless which is what windows users are more or less comming to expect. Ironically though, office doesn't look like anything. I'll never understand that!
I agree that AA fonts, sounds, and general eye/ear candy does not improve productivity very much, but you're forgetting two things:
A) Productivity can be improved a little by making the workplace more comfortable/pleasant.
B) Many people in the workplace (i.e. if you want to capture the desktop market) don't want to put up with an ugly desktop. MacOS is pretty, even Windows is getting prettier (I can't exactly call that Luna theme 'pretty', but, well, they're working on it). To take Windows from a user and put them on a DE without the "pretty" stuff, and they'll be unimpressed.
So these things are not without value. But I'll grant you that it would be nice to turn these things off, at least to a certain degree. Also, if you're a techie that really wants just a plain, no frills, fast interface on a bottom-of-the-barrel system, maybe Gnome isn't the best choice right now.
Yeah... it's great that a balloon comes up on my system every time my girlfriend has to reboot her computer since it's connected via crossover. I just don't care. If there's a problem, I'll go look.
I understand that for the average schmoe these sorts of pop-up notices may be useful, but LET ME TURN THEM OFF... that's all I ask.
Mod this however you want, but the only thing I though of when using Gnome's new 'Spatial' file browser last week was navigating around Windows 3.1. Not only is this a bad idea, but the implementation was inconsistent on the desktop. The taskbar icon started the familiar navigational version of Nautilus, the Desktop icon launched the spatial version. What should have been done was improving Nautilus itself, not making a drastic change to the way it works.
This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop.
It's a GNOME panel applet ... right-click, tell it to "remove" and it's gone. It isn't rocket science and no one said you HAVE to use it.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
"This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop."
And people wonder why the GUI hasn't changed appreciatly in the years since Xerox Parc. How can it, if every idea is greeted like the above? Jump over to OSNews and see the complaints about "Looking Glass". Any time success is defined by how much you emulate the old, then we will never progress.
Just for
"XP-using Teletubby-land loving hordes"
You must get modded a +5 Interesting...
I haven't laughed that hard in a while.
Now as another poster said. Very few are going to download this on the web and compile it. Most will wait for SuSe/RedHat/Mandrake et all to put it in their distibution. Notice that this guy said it took almost 6 hours to set up! Heck he even considered it good that it only had 3 errors he had to manually fix. No "teletubby" is going to be able to do that.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
This paradigm has already been tried, and it failed. Mac(Old Finder), Amiga, Atari, Windows (Before 95), all used spatial, Two don't exist, Mac and Windows dropped it.
Its was crap then, its crap now. Redoing other peoples mistakes, is just bad way of doing things.
Usability studies only take you so far, Real world testing proved it wrong.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Sadly, your points will probably be ignored by the average Slashdot user who doesn't see a problem on his 3 GHz 1 GB RAM box. With many open source projects, efficiency and elegance seems to be going down the tubes. That doesn't bother me, as I use IceWM, but developers should consider the LONG RUN.
Being just as bloated and slow as Windows XP helps nobody. It's hard to get people to convert, it's a problem for third world countries, and it just gets people on the upgrade treadmill we used to mock Wintel about.
As I've said before, Linux's adoption rate would improve immensely if it offered a great upgrade path. If RH, IBM, Sun and co. could go into a company and say: "Don't spend money on hardware upgrades for XP/2k, just install our Linux and save!" then we'd be sorted. But the average box running NT4 or Win98 is nowhere near capable enough to run a modern desktop Linux, so companies have to buy new hardware anyway. And if they're splashing out on new boxes, they may as well stick with
Windows for the time being...
Also, people have to SUPPORT this code. The GNOME crew are rolling in constant features and new code, looking ahead to the next major release, and the problems this will cause are immense.
For instance, Red Hat will support RHEL up until 2008. It is supplied with GNOME 2.2. In 2008, what desktop will people be using? GNOME 4 or 5, or maybe something different. But still, Red Hat will have to support GNOME 2.2 right into the future -- this could pose problems. Open source doesn't fix this magically -- how many people are looking at KDE 1.1 source today?
The more cruft, bloat and quickly-hacked features rolled into GNOME, the more it's going to come back and give corporate users nightmares later on. We'll all be busy looking at GNOME 4 and KDE 5, but the security holes and bugs in all this rushed code, which is no longer being worked on, will make us look just as sloppy as Microsoft.
So please, let's focus on efficiency, elegance and stability now. Otherwise, we'll severely damage Linux's future on the desktop. GNOMErs, sort it out.
It's been like 6 years since i started using linux and applications are evolving pretty nicely, I can't remember them beeing faster (since I keep upgrading my computer) but the looks and usesfulness are definitevely worth the time... it has already caught up with windows and can even do a lot more things. When I install linux on a friend's PC... they can't avoid to be amazed and enjoy the nice tricks gnome has to offer.
People complaining about applications/desktop environments beeing bloated should get a new computer instead of trying to force everybody to work around their old one.
You think Konqueror sucks horribly?!?! I'm aghast!
As far as I'm concerned, Konqueror is KDE's killer app. It's the one thing I can't give up, the thing I miss most when I have to use a Windows or Mac OS machine.
I can't imagine anyone disliking it!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I have no interest in spatial browsing. I'll be turning it off immediately.
However, I'm not annoyed it went in. The GNOME desktop is kind of like a Mac desktop, only with you in complete control, and running on whatever hardware you choose. If Steve Jobs and the Apple desktop guys decide they don't like spatial, bam, it's gone, and tough luck to you if you liked it. With GNOME, you have more freedom than that.
Maybe some Mac folks who used and liked spatial from pre-OS X days will adopt GNOME now.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely