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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.
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Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6
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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
I have done a little review of my own and wasnt impressed with GNOME 2.5-dev, not that it lacked anything, it is more that it had TOO MUCH of everything. AA fonts, sounds effects pretty menus and icons, window shading and whatnot do not make a productive work environment. I mean, this is unix we are talking about, bring on the lightweight tools that run on a P100, gnome 1.x sort of had it right, but with the switch to GTK2 everything has done down the drain, well, sort of. I guess it is nice if you have a P4 and a gig of ram, but not everyone does. OTOH, I like the new file selector. One day it will be as good as the KDE one.
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.
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface bui
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...
http://www.xml-dev.com/xml/gnome/GNOME_2_6.html with images and everything.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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.
Why must you tease me with your promise of screenshots? Gets me every time...
I'm always fooled into this false sense of security based on the fact that no one really rtfa's, and click on the link, only to find the slashdotting effect has forced me to go work instead of look at pretty pictures.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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
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 must say. i've been using gnome 2.6 since first release candidate and although there aren't an overwhelming number of new features i do find it to be a big improvement over 2.4
the new file selector for one is very nice, although it still has a few rough edges.
personally i'm not too fond of the new 'spatial' nautilus even though i've been a mac user for many years. i miss (or missed) a shortcut to close all open windows for example. nautilus *is* blazingly fast though. also, browsing samba networks works very nicely.
i'm very curious as to the final release. with it's shortcomings gnome remains my most used desktop environment.
great going guys, keep up the good work.
GStreamer is not a part of GNOME D&DP. It has been proposed for inclusion, but was never actualy added. And the GStreamer Homepage states clearly that the GStreamer API ist nowhere stable.
:)
The Gnome API on the other side has been stable since 2.0 (the change from gtk1.2 to gtk2.0).
I admint, though, tat gui programming in C is non-trivial, but there exist multiple bindings for Gtk/Gnome. Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, Java and C#. Pick your favourite language.
I don't think that the (as you called) gnome-ification of OOo is a failure. I don't see where I leads to code-duplication; indeed OOo on Linux is using gnome-vfs now. Code sharing.
The fileselector is another thing.
When the fileselector in gtk changes, it changes everywhere, just like in KDE. But the old API, still from the early days, proved to be very unflexible, thus the "new" fileselector API. The old one is deprechated - a simple API translation.
I like the new design.
The same goes for nautilus.
Your comment has some points though, especialy the gnome-vfs bits. But since gnome-vfs gets some major love right now, this will change soon.
Love.
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...
From my own experience, GNOME 2.x needs about 128MB of memory(256 if you want to run OOo too), and a 233mhz PII processor. That's hardly demanding these days, even in poorer countries. Those are the scraps we're throwing away here in the U.S. and elsewhere, afterall.
But that's not even considering that you can still use non-AA fonts with GTK2. Use the fonts that come with X, and don't set GDK_USE_XFT. Enjoy some nice jaggy fonts :)
I REALLY wish people would stop overstating the hardware requirements for GNOME 2, as they've done a hell of a lot of work to keep them sane.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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.
I get where you're coming from, but I think a dildo menu would be a lot harder to click on.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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.
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...
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.
This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop.
Absolutely, 100% wrong.
Instead of completely tearing apart your idea that spatial is a "step backwards," I'll let a better-written article say it for me.
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.
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.
===
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
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