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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.
But that "default desktop" screenshot is pig-ugly. Grey isn't going to pull in the XP-using Teletubby-land loving hordes. I think they should have a nice default background image, and if you want to get rid of it, you can. It can't be hard to improve on "Bliss", anyway.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
GNOME has a netstatus applet now, which lets you know about the status of your network interface. It is similar to the Windows XP network status applet (which spews forth those irritating balloon like message boxes from the taskbar every now and then).
Like when your connection goes down? Wouldn't you like to know when that happens? I rather would. And, not to troll, but Windows has had that since NT 4.
What is with some developers and their attitude towards little Windows-like widgets? Some of those things are actually useful. And if you ever want GNOME to approach the functionality of, say, Windows XP (and I do say functionality; the XP interface simply does a hell of a lot more) you need to focus on both "polish and more polish" and the inclusion of useful little applets.
Disclaimer: Have only seen the screenshots, not used.
Does that "save" dialogue make sense to anyone?
I'd have thought that saving would be the easiest thing in the workd and yet it's not obvious where the file is being saved at.
/. Where the truth
I remember on the Amiga, and Macs having spatial, and this is a very bad move from GNOME.
Its a mistake, Every one used Directory Opus to deal with files on the Amiga for a very good reason. Spatial handling is messy, and a pain in the arse.
There not just redoing things, there now repeating other peoples mistakes. ArsTechnica is quite good normally but spatial file handling was never any good.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Lose the smelly foot! I mean really... Why do they insist on using that as their logo? You could pick random objects out of a dictionary and come up with a uniquely unoffensive mascot to which people will endear themselves.
I know it sounds petty, and someone is bound to cry, "flamebait", but it's the truth! At least Red Hat (now Fedora) had the decency to put a hat on it, but most distros come with that distinctively vulger set of four little piggies.
Other than that, there's only one very minor reason I don't switch to Gnome, and I'll admit it's probably nothing, and if I bothered to look it up, I'd probably stumble over the solution... I've been using KMail since it automagically ported everything so nicely away from MS-Outlook Express (my archives go back to '95), and I just don't want to go through the hassle of porting it all again.
But seriously. I like the GTK philosophy a lot, but feet are just gross (I know I'm not the only one who thinks that either), and I'm just not getting over that logo.
I know... I know... "We gotta keep the logo to stick with our priciples... It's more like you need to change your attitude... Let's hear it for feet... I think the foot is sexy..."
Of course the most obvious is, "This is Linux. You can change to logo to whatever you want, man... It's open source! Why don't you just write your own GUI and come out with your own logo?"
The Gnome people did a very nice job, and the overall appearance looks great from what I can tell. But for now, I'm still going to keep KDE.
If it was announced by Chris Stone, and people heard him mind you, then it seems as if it will be Qt. Apparently, there will be a flamefest, I mean meeting, at Novell in May to decide. It seems as though it will be Qt though.
k top_1.html in the past.
Suse seems to have insisted on Qt, and since they are the Enterprise Linux Division of Novell, and have 50 million dollars of investment because of that from IBM, I'd be swaying in this direction.
I'd be inclined to believe the Qt arguments simply because the Ximian people have come out with stuff like this: http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/24/46NNdes
This was before the ink was even dry on the Novell/Suse deal, and Nat Friedman was talking about the future of Suse products probably without them knowing. Ximian Desktop in Suse 9, or 9.1? Nope, must have missed that one Nat. Nice way to make friends with the Suse people!
Given Novell's talk of embedded systems, it probably will be Qt, but we are speculating here. It probably won't make a blind bit of difference to anyone anyway.
I am writing this from my Fedora Gnome desktop, which I use on a regular basis. Therefore I am very knowledgable on the bugginess of Nautilus. It is slow, buggy, and lacking in features. If something big doesn't happen by the next Fedora release, I will be switching to KDE 3.2... as I recently demo'ed it on a Mandrake install. Konqueror is fast, featureful, and seemed to have far fewer bugs than Nautilus.
The only problem is that I am really used to Gnome's look-n-feel, but I guess since I am using Fedora, that won't be as much of an issue due to the whole Bluecurve thing.
So how's performance? Or does it just not matter these days?
Look. Unlike Windows, this stuff is going to be going on to multi-user systems. There will be tens, hundreds of instances of each of the applications running on a particular machine... Over the network... Performance for X based applications is *absolutely crucial* in the corporate environment. That *is* where Gnome is going, isn't it?
Gnome 2.0 (Solaris packages) performs poorly in comparison to other X based UIs like CDE and Openstep. Both in local and network performance. So, does 2.6 suck or is it acceptable, is it even better?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
As a few other posters have said. This is a bad idea. It's been tried several times, each time there has been a replacement file manager developed that used a navigational structure. I had at one point 8 windows open to edit one file with the new nautilus. I thought it was rather interesting that the desktop group that espoused a 'cleaner' interface gave me a cluttered desktop.
As my grandpappy used to say - Don't kill the cow because the milk is bad.
GNOME and KDE are not the only desktops for Linux, despite what many seem to think. WindowMaker (with cousins like fluxbox) are much older and support tiny programs called dockapps that do anything you could want them to. The variety, configurability and stability of this tiny applets beats Windows, easily.
Remember GNOME is not Linux, nor is it XF86. It is a high-level desktop environment -- which is another way of saying that it is window-dressing. Explore the other desktop options (and I do not mean KDE!) for Linux and you will be pleasantly surprised.
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I'm considering upgrading to GNOME 2.6 but really the only reason would be because I want the damn panels to stop rearranging the icons/launchers/applets.
It seems like every other time I login all my icons, launchers, and applets have been magically rearranged on the panel. Man that pisses me off to no end.
The worst problem is when your system locks up or otherwise crashes and you're using ReiserFS. Oh man, I feel so lucky when my entire desktop and all the panels don't get trashed. I can't count how many times I've lost my entire GNOME setup due to my system locking up. Something about the GNOME preferences system, it must hold lots of files open all the time or something. This is one problem I can not tolerate and for a while I switched to KDE solely because of this insanely stupid behaviour.
The ratio of people to cake is too big