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.

Comments

Menus and DDLs are nice - a bit like OSX

[Zog The Undeniable]

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.

GNOME catching up to Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GNOME catching up to Windows...

[Mia'cova]

They can be very annoying on wireless connections under non-ideal conditions, especially when it's popping on and off when you don't even care.

These balloon tips will be removed in longhorn I believe. So we won't have to deal with them for too many more years. Registry tweaks can also disable specific balloons (eg low disk space on drive d) as well.

Overall, I like the balloon tips but I think longhorn's sidebar will really step things up another notch.

Save Dialogue

[Czernobog]

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.

Spatial Not worth it

[leonscape]

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.

Re:Spatial Not worth it

[petabyte]

I've been running Gnome 2.6 (It's almost all in Gentoo now but masked) for roughly a week and I'd have to agree with you. I'm not a big user of Nautilus anyway but why I would want a Mac OS-9esq filesystem browser is beyond me. Fortunatly, there is an option you can bring up in gconf-editior under the nautilus tab and that will convert it back to the explorer style interface. In that same folder is the option to turn of the "we didn't have enough useless icons on the desktop so lets add one more" My Computer.

That said, my experience with 2.6 hasn't been all bad. Once you turn those options off, nautilus behaves much as it does in Gnome 2.4. And Gtk2.4 makes a noticable difference with the 2.6 panel. It looks clearer than 2.4 did. As for that fileselector - I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to be able to type the full path name in so I can open the directory or file I want. That is a MAJOR obstruction.

I've been a Gnome user since before 1.4 and they've made considerable progress. This new version, however, has left me with serious doubts about their future.

Is Nautilus still a buggy bloated POS?

[Jagasian]

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.

Ugh.

[Moderation abuser]

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?

Spatial is a step backwards

[futuresheep]

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.

Look beyond the suburbs of GNOME and KDE

[lysium]

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...SNIP

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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Have they fixed the panel in 2.6?

[Cthefuture]

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.