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GNOME 2.6 Reviewed

Posted by Hemos on from the review-it dept.

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.

8 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. A repost... any new articles? by Rahga · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  2. Re:GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer. by Rahga · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:not that excellent. by arcanumas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

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  4. But that's what people want by Stevyn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  5. Spatial is a step backwards by futuresheep · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht ml.

    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.

    1. Re:Spatial is a step backwards by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Spatial is a step backwards

      Your experience with Gnome isn't enough evidence to to judge against "spatial" interfaces as a whole. As you noticed, the implementation is inconsistent- suggesting that the problem is not with "Spatial" itself, but that particular program.

      However, pro-"Spatial" posters who jumped at you with "100% wrong" are also incorrect. In a deeper way, "Spatial" is truely a step backwards: because spatial filebrowsing is non-scalable.

      It only works for small problems, where the total complexity is bounded. Back when the Mac was young and "Spatial" was in it's prime, users operated on single floppies or 100 megabyte HDs. The solutions that worked then become unbearably messy when a 100 gigabyte HD may have a quarter-million files.

      And then there's networking. Considering that it may be useful to treat the drives of other computers or the whole internet with the same file-browser that handles your local data, and the quantity is just overwhelming.

      Non-spatial file-views are the only way we can expect to view local and remote files through the same lense.

      To make an analogy of a library: If you only have 20 books, then a card-catalog system is a waste of time. Just leave them out visible on a table, and let vistors find them "spatially". But with 20k books, the catalog is an important improvement, even though users can no longer retrieve volumes from "where I left it last time".

  6. Re:Menus and DDLs are nice - a bit like OSX by FatherOfONe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  7. Re:GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer. by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

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