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Nicholas Petreley Slams Gnome
FreeLinux writes "Mainstream computer rag ComputerWorld, has posted a review of Gnome 2.6 by Nicholas Petreley. This opinion piece review, titled Living Down to a Low Standard, positively lambastes Gnome 2.6 over the new spatial Nautilus and Gnome's design choices. The review is quite the opposite to a previously reported review from PCWorld, last month. While this latest review is bound to be a polarizing and heavily debated issue (read flamebait), it is important in that this review will be seen by so many mainstream readers and corporate types who may have been considering Gnome."
Why doesnt he pick on someone his own size? :(
Those poor gnomes.
Sadly, the article brings up some very good points, albeit in a very inflammatory way.
The most damaging part of the "review" is that it says nothing aboout Gnome as a whole. It's just a rant about this user's opinion about how Nautilus was designed ( changed) to work in 2.6.
This sort of rant, if done constructively could certainly help the developers make better choices, but to put it directly to mass media as a review just sucks.
Well, as a Pointy Haired type myself, I can assure you, these mags hit the coffee table in the lobby - and very few people actually read the articles... However, if this review makes the front page, Gnome is toast.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
### Warning! ###
### CATCHPHRASE ALERT ###
Nicholas Petreley uses the tired term "paradigm shift" in his article!
[not that anyone will actually read the article...]
### CATCHPHRASE ALERT ###
### Warning! ###
Please debate what he said, he does make some very good points and it would be a shame for this turn into a Gnome vs. KDE flamewar.
But damn, it consumes to much ram from both the machine and graphics card.
this just sounds like a kde user rant. this is the same kind of crap that comes out everytime there is a new release of kde or gnome.
flog that goblin!
No big surprise here as Petreley has always been a KDE rulez, GNOME sux0rs guy. The piece isn't even well written or accurate. Here is a decent rebuttal. Petreley hasn't quite figured out that the GNOME v. KDE flamewars are dead yet.
That's why everyone uses that K something or other right?
(just a joke don't shoot)
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
Nicholas Poetry Slams Gnome? Seemed like an odd thing to work into a poetry competition.
I'll probably get moderated down for this, but I don't really prefer either Gnome or KDE, however the fact that both exist and compete for resources is in my mind one of the main causes behind the failure of Linux on the desktop. Hopefully this will drive a nail into one of their coffins.
His whole article centers around the difficulty in setting Nautilus to browse files / folders in a single window, which he uses as a basis to bash GNOME 2.6 as a whole.
The only way to change the default behavior of Nautilus is to set an obscure registry key via the command line or the registry editor. Not even that abomination of operating systems, Windows 95, made users retreat to the registry editor to use a single window to navigate folders. I can only assume that the GNOME developers decided to make Nautilus a worse Windows than Windows. I toast their rousing success.
Also, he says
It was deliberately designed to protect users who are invariably too incompetent to pick their own colors but are smart enough to memorize shift-clicks and keystrokes or edit the registry to get Nautilus to work the way they like.
And Lastly, he says
But it turns out there is no preference setting that tells Nautilus to use a single window to browse folders.
All this is actually kind of funny... because couldn't all of his arguments be fix by simply... adding the option to browse in a single window as a menu option???
Seems like a trivial complaint to bash GNOME as a whole... and one that can be fixed easily.
Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,
First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.
Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.
Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin
The same could be said about and interface, it's all a matter of personal and professional preference. That's why so many different brands of cars are out there. Everyone likes their own style.
Apart from flaming the spatial Nautilus, there's nothing short of a rant in generalities here. Nothing is mentioned specifically, and it's just the author whining about GNOME's design principles. Are we sure this wasn't written by Rob Enderle?
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
I hadn't even thought of touting the superior qualities of KDE before your post. Thanks...
Gnome Sucks... KDE Rulez!!!
Bwa-hahah-ha-ha
...are amazingly off base and irrelevant!
I have to ask...Did he even use gnome 2.6?
I mean really "Of all the criticisms one might lodge against GNOME, it's the hypocrisy of its design philosophy that looms largest."
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
But man that wasn't much of a review. It was little more then a rant about the way the window manager works. I agree that you should be able to change preferneces like that easily but come on give some more evidence other then that for trashing the system.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
"While this latest review is bound to be a polarizing and heavily debated issue (read flamebait)..."
And on that note...
KDE SuxXX0rz! GNOME 4Eva!!~!
--Kevin
His comments may be inflamitory, but in the long run, the comments will be good for Gnome.
Nothing like some harsh criticism about something you worked hard on to make you work even harder.
You have to have thick skin to be an open source developer. I don't know how they do it sometimes.
Opinion by Nicholas Petreley
MAY 10, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - I recently spent the better part of a week working with the latest version of the open-source GNOME graphical desktop environment on Linux. I've decided that the only way to explain the regression of GNOME over the years is that Microsoft and/or SCO moles have infiltrated the GNOME leadership in a covert effort to destroy any possibility that Linux could compete with Windows on the desktop.
To paraphrase the humorist Peter Schickele, who was describing what it was like to discover a new music manuscript by the (fictional) inept composer P.D.Q. Bach, "Each time I get a new version of GNOME, there's this feeling of anticipation and exhilaration -- a feeling that this new version of GNOME can't possibly turn out to be as bad as the last one. But so far, each new version lives down to the same low standards set by the previous one."
By the time a software project gets to Version 2.6, a user might reasonably expect that he wouldn't have to adapt to yet another paradigm shift in basic user-interface design, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as how you navigate through desktop folders. Yet this is precisely what users will have to relearn with this latest version of GNOME.
The GNOME file manager, Nautilus, no longer allows users to navigate through folders as one might use a Web browser or Windows Explorer. You no longer browse with all your options accessible in a single window or a split window with a directory tree on the left and icons on the right. Instead, each double-click on a folder icon opens a new window on the screen. If this sounds familiar, it's because this was the default behavior of Windows 95, OS/2 and early versions of Mac OS. The fact that this isn't the default behavior of any mature desktop operating system might have served as a warning sign to GNOME's developers, but never mind that.
Having used OS/2 for years, I found GNOME's retro approach to be a rather pleasantly nostalgic experience. But now that I'm used to navigating folders the way one does on virtually every other desktop, however, I decided to tell the file manager not to open a new window for every folder. But it turns out there is no preference setting that tells Nautilus to use a single window to browse folders.
The only way to change the default behavior of Nautilus is to set an obscure registry key via the command line or the registry editor. Not even that abomination of operating systems, Windows 95, made users retreat to the registry editor to use a single window to navigate folders. I can only assume that the GNOME developers decided to make Nautilus a worse Windows than Windows. I toast their rousing success.
Granted, there are myriad unintuitive keystrokes and shift-key/mouse-click operations you can use to make it easier to navigate folders, all of which will mean squat to the daft simpletons the GNOME developers say they are targeting as their users. But GNOME developers have long since abandoned logic when defending their design choices. For example, one GNOME developer says there's a good reason why users can't change individual colors in desktop themes: Someone might accidentally make both the text and background white, thus rendering the text unreadable.
Of course, this flaw has nothing to do with the inflexibility of the primitive graphical tool kit upon which GNOME was based. It was deliberately designed to protect users who are invariably too incompetent to pick their own colors but are smart enough to memorize shift-clicks and keystrokes or edit the registry to get Nautilus to work the way they like.
Of all the criticisms one might lodge against GNOME, it's the hypocrisy of its design philosophy that looms largest. GNOME grew out of the desire to free people from Microsoft's ability to dictate what users can or can't do. Yet GNOME is built on the premise that its developers are so much wiser than users when it comes to navigating folder
I'm glad the author of the slashdot story managed to keep his biases concealed until the third word of the story. If the article had praised Gnome, however, why do I suspect we'd be hearing about "Esteemed technical journal ComputerWorld..."
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I didn't know there was a registry in Linux...
This article is about as scarce on details as it can be while still managing to blast a piece of software into little pieces...the entire article is about Nautilus. One single "feature" in Nautilus. This isn't a review, it's nonesense.
Jorge Castro, one of the Ars Technica writers has written a very nice article refutng Petreley's claims at his site.
Since it's being slashdotted, I figured I'd post it here...
I recently spent the better part of a week working with the latest version of the open-source GNOME graphical desktop environment on Linux. I've decided that the only way to explain the regression of GNOME over the years is that Microsoft and/or SCO moles have infiltrated the GNOME leadership in a covert effort to destroy any possibility that Linux could compete with Windows on the desktop.
To paraphrase the humorist Peter Schickele, who was describing what it was like to discover a new music manuscript by the (fictional) inept composer P.D.Q. Bach, "Each time I get a new version of GNOME, there's this feeling of anticipation and exhilaration -- a feeling that this new version of GNOME can't possibly turn out to be as bad as the last one. But so far, each new version lives down to the same low standards set by the previous one."
By the time a software project gets to Version 2.6, a user might reasonably expect that he wouldn't have to adapt to yet another paradigm shift in basic user-interface design, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as how you navigate through desktop folders. Yet this is precisely what users will have to relearn with this latest version of GNOME.
The GNOME file manager, Nautilus, no longer allows users to navigate through folders as one might use a Web browser or Windows Explorer. You no longer browse with all your options accessible in a single window or a split window with a directory tree on the left and icons on the right. Instead, each double-click on a folder icon opens a new window on the screen. If this sounds familiar, it's because this was the default behavior of Windows 95, OS/2 and early versions of Mac OS. The fact that this isn't the default behavior of any mature desktop operating system might have served as a warning sign to GNOME's developers, but never mind that.
Having used OS/2 for years, I found GNOME's retro approach to be a rather pleasantly nostalgic experience. But now that I'm used to navigating folders the way one does on virtually every other desktop, however, I decided to tell the file manager not to open a new window for every folder. But it turns out there is no preference setting that tells Nautilus to use a single window to browse folders.
The only way to change the default behavior of Nautilus is to set an obscure registry key via the command line or the registry editor. Not even that abomination of operating systems, Windows 95, made users retreat to the registry editor to use a single window to navigate folders. I can only assume that the GNOME developers decided to make Nautilus a worse Windows than Windows. I toast their rousing success.
Granted, there are myriad unintuitive keystrokes and shift-key/mouse-click operations you can use to make it easier to navigate folders, all of which will mean squat to the daft simpletons the GNOME developers say they are targeting as their users. But GNOME developers have long since abandoned logic when defending their design choices. For example, one GNOME developer says there's a good reason why users can't change individual colors in desktop themes: Someone might accidentally make both the text and background white, thus rendering the text unreadable.
Of course, this flaw has nothing to do with the inflexibility of the primitive graphical tool kit upon which GNOME was based. It was deliberately designed to protect users who are invariably too incompetent to pick their own colors but are smart enough to memorize shift-clicks and keystrokes or edit the registry to get Nautilus to work the way they like.
Of all the criticisms one might lodge against GNOME, it's the hypocrisy of its design philosophy that looms largest. GNOME grew out of the desire to free people from Microsoft's ability to dictate what users can or can't do. Yet GNOME is built on the premise that its developers are so much wiser than users when it comes to navigating folders and setting colors
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
Because Windowmaker is all I want. But Free Software gives us a bountiful array of choices. I don't get why Nick P. needs to run down someone else's desktop.
He needs to mind his own business and write about something he DOES like rather than running down something that he doesn't like.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Gnome has been regressing for quite some time, and now this latest fiasco of multiple window browsing serves to show how its' developers are out of touch with the intended userbase.
This begs the question; Why was the default setting for this feature changed to something that would hinder the user, after Gnome has been developed for so long?
I would really like one of the Gnome developers to answer that here.
user@host$ diff
This so-called 'paradigm shift' of spatial browsing should not be enforced on users. We like Linux. We like choice. Stop being fascists and give us a 'turn off spatial browsing' button.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
Novell owns Ximian, who sponsors GNOME.
Novell owns SuSE, who is a big supporter of KDE.
GNOME has Redhat, but Redhat would benefit from a standardized Linux desktop.
I see Novell being the intermediary to get KDE and GNOME together into one package for the enterprise desktop. Ultimately, there can be only one.
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
There is one fundamental problem in the open source community (and as an occassional open source developer I know what I am talking about):
It's the old "dont you dare critisize my darling project!"-dilemma, it somehow seems that some people think that because a commercial entity is not behind a piece of software it is all of a sudden beyond any criticism.
Open source adoption and progress would be better served by taking criticism more constructively and try to actually address the problems put forward (even those that are put forward undiplomatically), instead of retorting to "no, you are stupid", "why would you want to do that?", "no you are really really stupid"-flamewars in a pathetic attempt att diverting criticism back.
Check the ego at the door and see the community prosper.
I am all for simplification, but there is no reason to go back to kinder and ABC wooden blocks.
The biggest argument against spatial navigation, as produced by gnome 2.6, is that it requires the user to learn TWO different styles of navigation: one for their browser and one for their files.
That is NOT simplification. And they didn't ask the community, and they are going against the gain of EVERY other OS.
If spatial is going to pay dividends when "database" filesystems arrive.... introduce spacial THEN. And even then, have it as an option. Besides won't a database file-system be based on searches? So won't we need "back" and "forward" buttons???????????
I am not going to swear here, but I am MAJORLY pissed at gnome. I am on 2.4 atm because of it. It is at worst elitist insanity, at best a poorly executed jump of the gun.
While I haven't tried Nautilus yet, I don't feel like gratifying this flamer with a response to his FUD, but I'll indulge him briefly: why does he want Gnome to work like Windows? Registry key? This article is of a piece with the recent campaign ads, on both sides. Unfortunately, people are getting their "facts" about the candidates from their opponents' (heavily spun) ads. I hope people in corporate America will look past Petreley's bogus line and give Gnome a try so they can judge it on its own merits.
"Den som vover mister Fodfaeste et Oieblik; den som ikke vover mister Livet." -Soren Kierkegaard
Please, let Gnome 3.0 and KDE 4.0 be the same. Utopian? No!
Wow that's a wonderfull in-depth review of gnome. He talks about nautilus behaving like "My Computer" in Windows 95 and quoted a gnome developer on the stupidity of users (They might accidentally change the background color to the text color so they'd be unreadable.) I really enjoyed the screenshots, and how he described the new layout and functionality of gnome. Wait nevermind he didn't do that, he pretty much just commented on two things that bothered him, why the hell is this "review" two pages? Yeah I guess flamebait would be a good moderation for the review.
First off, how the hell do you call this crap a review? It mentions one specific feature and is incredibly infactual in doing so. All it does is even _mention_ the feature, then bitch and bitch about all of GNOME sucks with no factual examples. The only examples given are outright lies. (For example, the reason you can't edit colors in the GUI is because nobody's bothered to write an editor for it yet. If someone submitted a patch, it would be a most welcome feature.)
This article is complete trash. The first paragraph alone makes that rather clear, and the past articles by the same author also make it clear. This guy takes every chance he gets to insult GNOME.
Here's a public response by one of the ArsTechnica folks.
This illustrates some of the fundamental problems of designing user interfaces. Namely, lots of users and developers have suggestions, but they aren't exports. They are good at telling what works and what doesn't, but their mounds of opinions are worth the same as so many mounds of shit.
Another thing GNOME has is a strong pursuit of consistency and perfection. Well, that's great, except that it doesn't always work very well. Putting "shut down" functionality in the "start" menu is an example of this: Microsoft did it because that was where people were most likely to look for it. GNOME doesn't like that because it isn't consistent, and makes things more complicated and confusing instead. (Yes, I know you CAN put it there if you want to, but most users won't change the default configuration.)
The much-trumpeted file selection dialog is another example. It does cleanly combine all the elements you'd want in there, but it isn't in the least intuitive.
To improve, GNOME *MUST* abandon the pursuit of perfection at the cost of usability and test interfaces extensively. If GNOME wants to get better than Windows or Mac OS, it must also get people doing research into interfaces, and proposing and testing new facilities. Users and developers just don't know how bad they are at it.
Little tunnels where I live.
Pointy hat. Pointy hat.
Pointy hat hides my secrets.
Damn the garden spade!
Damn the garden spade!
(Nods to the applause of a dozen hipsters snapping their fingers)
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
It reads like: "Everything that is different than how my beloved Windows works is awkward to use, ugly, hard to adapt to, and did I mention that I don't like it?"
I find Windows hard to use, awkward, ugly, hard to adapt to, and I don't really like it all that much.
It's all about the world you come from. I remember reading something about RMS using a GUI, and was cited saying something like "What are all those mysterious little pictures". Of course, he was making a joke, but never the less, he is clearly most comfortable with a CLI.
What I'm really saying is, user friendlyness is very different from person to person and from culture to culture. It's not an axiom that GUI's are easy to use. It's not even an axiom that GUI's are easier to get learn for a user that has never used a computer before (this is something surprisingly many people believe - I disagree with them).
Not all criticism is flamebait, as in offered solely to incide the reciever. Not all flamebait is bad, either. Sometimes things need to be said.
I've toyed on and off with linux' window managers for years, I remember when fvwm was brand new. But they all have, and still do, look and behave like crap.
I mean, it sucks. Gnome sucks, KDE looks a little better but still sucks. They all suck.
And an army of zealots lined up to kiss ass wont make them better.
It's not ingratitude to say that either. Thanks for the free desktop environments, folks. I appreciate the choice, really. It's just that right now they suck. They suck enough I'd rather pay 200 bananas to use Windows XP, which is far from desktop perfection.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
it is important in that this review will be seen by so many mainstream readers and corporate types who may have been considering Gnome
Oh please. Since when have ANY tech reviews had to be politically correct?
<insert witty linux comment here>
How do you know this? Are there people out there (you) who keep scorecards on the pundit's opinions of (arguably) interchangeable GUIs for a fringe OS?
I don't mean this is flamebait, I'm honestly surprised that these paper bloggers get this much 'cred'.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With an attitude like that, heaven help us if GNOME turns out to be the only defense Linux has on the desktop against a Microsoft hegemony.
Well, that's the beauty of Linux, isn't it? GNOME is not its only defense. KDE is at least equal to GNOME. Or you could try something really funky, like XPde, and really confuse people.
What's more, you can still use gnome/KDE applications, no matter what desktop environment you use.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
It's almost as bad as badmouthing Macgyver in front of Patty and Selma.
The GNOME people did make an awful choice with Nautilus, and compounded it by making it hard to switch back.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
For example, one GNOME developer says there's a good reason why users can't change individual colors in desktop themes: Someone might accidentally make both the text and background white, thus rendering the text unreadable.
A logical choice would have been to remove the first color selected from the second choice and voila.
One could argue that no one in the OSS community listens to or rather reads anything pleasant, anger is a fantastic motivator for change, Very few products and even fewer programs have ever been progressed in the area of usability without some loud anger against them
Yes, and the entire article is concentrated on his (misunderstanding) of spatial nautilis. Just pity he based his article on one aspect of a thoroughly enjoyable desktop. Rather narrow review of a desktop I would say.
Gnome looks/works ok. I have to say I prefer XFCE, but I don't expect that opinion to be universal. One thing I positively hate about Gnome is Nautilus. It is vile. Preventing it from popping up in your startup session is like snapping snot off your fingernail. It leaves .directories everywhere, like a slug trailing slime! Please will someone drive a stake through this thing's heart?
an ill wind that blows no good
I am not intending to start a KDE vs. Gnome flamewar, but seriously. I agree with the guy 100%, and his point is completely valid. The Gnome project somehow manages to become worse with every version, when it has never been that good to begin with.
Spatial nautilus is a horrible idea, period. The interface is too minimalist, and every option needs to be changed through some obscure method like Gconf because the interface is "simplified".
If you really like Gnome, that just means you have never tried to use KDE for longer than 10 minutes. Gnome can best be compared to a Yugo -- ugly and clunky.
Mustangs Rule and F-Bodys suck!
That's why they quit making Fs.
That's all it is , FUD and the people in the media are now getting the fears of the mainstrem vendors..
"what if OSS really makes it.. then we have to learn command prompts and funky icons, let's make sure that never happens.. and if we protect our stock in M$ then that's an added bonus..."
Does anyone in the OSS community really think that meanstream corporate America (or world for that matter) is going to bet against their own money and skill sets?
This struggle is gonna be long, dirty and messy.. sorta like Iraq but then not as bloody (I hope)..
It's nothing compared to the critical analysis I plan to publish in a major online journal soon, comparing Fedora Core 2 and Windows XP SP1, from the installation all the way up to the usability of the desktop. Such an article is long over due and I can tell you that, based on my early results (I started preparing the article yesterday by beginning the whole install process), 'desktop Linux' is not fairing too well.
Unlike Nicholas' commentary, my article will be a true, expository analysis, backed-up with sources, facts and actual hard data. There's nothing more dangerous than the truth (as opposed to opinion, hearsay, anecdote and hyperbole). I am getting at the truth, and will publish before Core 2 is released on the 17th. Stay tuned.
Is this the start of the closed source software companies raging war on open source? Two articles in one day I mean. We really need to watch the open source figures right now. We've all seen Microsoft play dirty before, why wouldn't other companies?
How long is it untill we start to see companies paying people to virus the open source so they can say "Well when you have the source code you can make any type of virus you wish"?
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Maybe Petreley is too used to certain ways to do things and maybe easier ways, but different, give him problems.
BTW I thought I read that the new spatial mode could be turned off, and the filemanager could return to normal operation... Ah yes, according to a post on Linux Today:
I actually have tried spatial mode in Garnome. i don't like the clutter either. But it definitely does make browsing the filesystem easier. All they need to do is add a button to 'close all windows' and I'm happy. You should really give spatial an chance before you turn it off. BTW you can turn it off with the --browser option.
I'm also going to wait for Fedora 2 to be released so I can upgrade. Gnome is really starting to rock!!!
I haven't tried gnome 2.6 yet, as it hasn't been packaged for Mandrake 10, and I don't want to mess with source, so I haven't tried this recommendation.
If you're stuck on nautilus, perhaps this will help. I've never been a big fan of nautilus (hence my ROX-Filer usage =).
"I'll probably get moderated down for this, but I don't"
Translation: Pretty please, moderate me up, will ya? please? pleeeeeease???
Konqueror rocks. Mozilla (Gecko) was neglected by Apple. ...
I didn't say a word about desktop environments
KDevelop rulez. Glade is so so
QT: state-of-art graphical toolkit. GTK+:
"Hello!? Bloom Beacon?! This is Senator Bedfellow! What's with this *@#! HEADLINE?" ... just a headline!"
"Headline?"
"Yes! There's no story
"Which headline?"
"THE *BIG* HEADLINE ON THE FRONT PAGE!"
"Read it to me, Senator."
"BEDFELLOW: THE SECRET LIFE OF A WIFE-SWAPPING ATHEIST"
"Oh, that's just a typo."
I'm glad to see that slashdot is holds itself to the same high standards of journalism.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
People who know how to communicate know that abusive reactions are the responsibility of the person reacting. Anyone can pull the trigger on flames at any message conveyed. Even controversial statements about a "polarizing and heavily debated issue" receive reasonable replies from responsible people. So what is this "flamebait" verdict that increasingly overrides interest in important matters on which many people disagree strongly? Since when has the Slashdot demographic ("nerds") preferred to go along with popular happy talk, rather than deal directly with facts and unpopular opinions? Flames are in the minds of the flamers, not in the bait of the comments.
--
make install -not war
i understand that there are many reasons why gnome devs chose the spatial nautilus. i also understand that gnome is trying to compete with windows (or macs.. who knows...) to steal its users. however, what does not make sense is that spatial nautilus is not intuitive to any the users coming from those other platforms. in fact, it is very likely to annoy them. yes, this can be disabled using gconf-editor, but we are talking about first impressions here. anoying things are very likely to send users back to windows when trying something new.
You can turn off spatial mode in nautilus in 2.6. There's a GConf setting to revert back to browser mode as default (search the net for it). Also note there is a file browser nautilus app in fedora 2 test in the menu.
Here's a direct link to the linuxquestions.org page about hacking the gconf (looks pretty simple really).
but he does have a point. Why oh why this late in the game did Gnome decide to once again change such a fundamental aspect of the operating system? Users who are used to Windows and Linux which make up 97% of the Desktop OS market have been using a filemanager a certain way for almost 10 years. Now after Gnome and more importantly my least favorite Gnome app(Nautilus) has finally stabilized and is starting to become polished they decide to do the opposite of every Gnome version before it? Even worse it wasn't optional the first time round, it was just thrust onto users with no warning. This doesn't seem very HIG-like behavior.
Another point which people rightly bring up is the whole Yes No box dialog. Why in the world did they again go against what almost every user is used to on this? What's next? Are they going to put the panel on the left part of the screen and the taskbar on the right in Gnome 2.8? Maybe they'll have you log out before you can log in? I know that sounds stupid but its not any more far fetched then what Gnome has already done.
Gnome may be my desktop of choice but it sure as hell doesn't mean I can't complain about some of the stupid interface changes they've made.
it's still not for me.
the last time i used gnome before trying the current one gnome was 1.4 still. i skipped 2.0-2.4 and i can say i don't regret. i found 2.6 as annoying as 1.4 (for different reasons).
before moding me down, let me say that i don't use KDE either, i use windowmaker (heck, i even tattooed wmaker's dock icon in my back. really) as WM and mozilla for browsing/e-mail, but when i need something wmaker can't give me, such as a file browser, i fire a KDE app (konkeror, juk, quanta, whatever). the reason is simple, KDE apps usually looks better, are more configurable, and behave the way _I_ like, and there's pretty much _nothing_ that can not be configured by a dialog box/menu.
I tried gnome. i browsed every single configuration option. i tried really hard to find a reason to keep it.
it didn't allowed me to turn off spattial browsing in an easy and convenient way, the desktop color change dialog was wierd and lacking several options, such a list of named colors, i didn't find a way to change the colors/shapes of widgets...
I know it's all eye candy, but I _like_ eye candy. my windowmaker is heavilly custmized with dock icons backgrounds, title bar shades and other stuf that i configured myself (my own theme to tell the truth). unfortunatly gnome seems to lack a complete appearance control pannel like the ones in KDE or wmaker's WPrefs, and this is reason enough for me to switch to another environment.
add _LOTS_ of eye candy configuration and a control to turn spatial browsing off in gnome 2.6.x and i may reconsider it. untill then i'll stay with wmaker and KDE apps.
What ? Me, worry ?
I liked Gnome 2.4 a lot better than 2.6. Spacial Nautilus opens up a new window for every folder that you open. This is unbelieveably annoying. At least Windows 95 had an option in the preferences menu that would let you browse in the same window. Couldn't the Nautilus developers learn anything from that?
/apps/nautilus/preferences and check off 'always_use_broswer'. Now your Nautilus will work the old way. It's stupid that they don't have this in the preferences menu though.
Luckily after some experimentation I found a way to get Nautilus to let you browse in the same window. Run gconf-editor. Go to
It also makes life confusing for developers. I ended up using java for a little app that I could have done under KDE/GNOME. I had a hard time figuring out if you write using QT would it work under gnome? Or vice versa. Even if it does work do I have to test with both???
If you were new to linux it would be very confusing. KDE/GNone Gnuatalis..
As desktop managers go they both need help.
That "review" was pathetic. His sole complaint is simply that opening folders in the file browser opens up a new window, and there was no way to disable it (apparently.) He makes some poor comparisons with windows 95, to give the impression that win95 is superior, and does not have similar problems. Right. Ever, say, try and change the icon of the recycle bin.. or, gasp, _delete it_ ? Out to the registry you must go ..
.. I have no idea.
How he managed to extrapolate that one problem into the idea that Gnome is not worth using
Here's my conclusion: Nicholas Petreley is a tool.
I don't know about you, but the only word I saw as opinion. He has every right to express his opinion about Gnome. No where (at least on the web version of the article) does it even imply that this article is a product review.
I've had a look of the latest KDE via the SUSE Linux 9.1 LiveEval CD and it's fantastic. I've never liked Gnome (never bothered with it) and looking at the screenshots and "features" it now seems further behind KDE than ever. Gnome is now completely dead to me and isn't Novell dropping it or something?, which is a shame if it means KDE guys will work less hard.
Im unable to RTFA due to the slashdotting.
...
I have to admit that I do prefer KDE, I just think that its easier to use, more flexible and more attractive to the eye. Im sure Gnome can look nice (Post your screenshots!), but Ive always found its ugly to the core. File requesters (even the latest ones are just butt ugly and inflexible). The widgets and icons look horrid and the taskbar at the bottom has never looked good.
Id like to see a gnome desktop that looks as nice as mine. Without the hideous file requesters and generally with more configurabilty.
I've tried gnome several times but I've always ended up going back to KDE because gnome has always made me feel unpleasently restricted.
Having said that, I am open minded and if the Gnome projects ever offers a better experience for me than that which I experience with KDE then id switch.
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
http://kyoto.larvalstage.net/shares/Screenshot.png
I think you suck.
As trashy as that review was, I think GNOME needs some backlash against the current trends in their UI approach.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
"It was deliberately designed to protect users who are invariably too incompetent to pick their own colors but are smart enough to memorize shift-clicks and keystrokes or edit the registry to get Nautilus to work the way they like. "
At long last, we have acheived GUI parity with the MAC!!!
Lemme get this straight...
/.!!!11!
Gnome Bad, Hybrids Bad, and SPAM good?
MOG! That can mean only one thing!!!1!1 Bizarro CmdrTaco took over
I agree with this article. (I even read it.) I want to give it mod points. Can we do that?
I used to configure the crap out of gnome, making it do all kinds of weird stuff I liked. Then, version by version, my toys were taken away. I don't get it. If the toys made it unstable, why not fix them? What ever happened to the idea of "advanced" vs. "novice" settings for a UI? Every version that comes out has LESS functionality than the one before, railroading me into a certain way of interacting with a desktop.
In Soviet Russia, the desktop clicks on YOU!
Make it easy by default, but don't take away our toys and call it progress.
-ave
...or maybe not.
"200 bananas to use Windows XP"
What's that in coconuts? I had to pay 35 for mine.
It surprises me that an ex-OS/2 user would hate the spatial file browser.
For me, that might just make me use GNOME more often.
Let me summarize - not hard to do, that review could have been written on two squares of tp (and probably should have been) - He doesn't like:
1) The file explorer
2) The mouse/key combinations
3) The color schemes
That's all. Next article please.
And what's with calling Windows 95 the "abomination of operating systems"... hasn't he ever used Windows 3.1? I practically cried I was so happy to upgrade to 95.
Well, at least you've got to give GNOME credit for coming up with a very distinct style of its own. Unlike a lot of OSS projects that just clone stuff and work on building better mousetraps, GNOME throws the whole trap and moldy cheest bit out and installs some sort of wacky trip-wire/guillotine combo system for mice. Maybe it'll work, who knows, but it's probably worth trying out.
If he thinks Gnome 2.6 is awful, he should not write that Microsoft sucks.
Just because it's Open Source doesn't mean you can't think it sucks. If the program isn't as good as all the gnome fanboys out there thinks, the "mainstream readers and corporate types" should know that. Maybe Gnome isn't what they need, maybe they need KDE or something else.
The only way to change the default behavior of Nautilus is to set an obscure registry key via the command line or the registry editor.
...
Im not keen on Gnome anyway but if the above is really true i wouldnt touch it with a fucking bargepole.
nick
Marketshare is not about the PROGRAMMERS it's about the USERS.
When I read comments like this I get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Is David the Gnome still in business? He could pose as a midget klansman out to hang open source critics.
Doesn't anyone else have something to say? This constant Timothy crap isn't really my thing. Post some stuff for the non-geek majority of the slasdot readers. That is all.
i think KDE has the much better API -- more OO, more mudularized, KParts are just cool, etc...
As far as the desktop goes, it's probably a matter of taste. What i would really like to see would be QT and GTK programmers duking it out: the maintainablility, scalability, stability and community supports rises and falls with the API.
chears.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
"I agree absolutely. I think we've gone beyond the stage of it being useful having two competing desktops."
What do you mean by that? Having two competing desktops is EXACTLY why I moved to Linux in the first place...there are a myriad of choices to choose from when it comes to just about anything. If Linux came as one, pre-packaged clump of software, like other OS's, then IMHO the user base would be much smaller than it is now. I think having choice is one of the biggest selling points of Linux on the desktop.
"In fact I seem to recall that Bill Gates himself (or Ballamer) said that he was very pleased that Linux had two competing desktops. That should be a wake-up call if nothing else."
Who cares? As much as everyone wants to topple M$ from their pedestal, ultimately it won't affect ME as a Linux user. As long as Linus is still coding with a team of kernel hackers, and people are still interested in writing OSS/Free software, who cares what they (M$) say/think/do. I don't use Windows, or any M$ products for that matter.
In addition to to opening up a new window for every folder, the folders "cascade" so if you need to get somewhere fast, your screen slowly fills up with folders you have NO USE FOR.
and the 2.6 nautilus advocate responds "use your middle mouse button"
So I have to DOUBLE, click with a scrollwheel (not a nice experience) and to top it all off.... the cascading STILL happens, so as you dig in to your navigation the window (or constantly closing and opening widows) move across the screen.
In addition, there is no location bar where you can "jump" to a place you want, nor do you get a sense of where you are in the file system. And good luck even if you do have a sense of where you are because there are no forward back or up buttons in sight to allow you to get anywhere (I know there is a hidden menu, but it's hidden, it may aswell be a keyboard shortcut for how easy it is to use from a GUI perspective).
All of this reeks of hijacking of the OS by some disgruntled designer, aka a former BeOS dude or whatever. I don't mind you making a BeOS style file browser dudes, but seriously.... make a fork of gnome.... don't just hijack gnome (at a 2.6 release, not some early design stage, a mature 2.6) to your own ends.
I have seen a few pundits say they like it, but as far as I am concerned it is change for the sake of change and it isn't backed up by any research. Apple spends more than anyone on UI research and they have abandoned spacial..... are we to believe some hacker, former BeOS lover, is somehow more skilled than Apples UI teams?????? NO.
NO NO NO. I can't take it anymore, how stupid is this design decision. At best the pundits has been able to say that "in theory" coupled with a filesystem that "doesn't exist yet" it wil l be "simpler to use" for some anonymous person who have NEVER used another UI before and gnome is their virgin cherry poping experience.
This is the same as saying we need "spacial web-browing" remove the back and forward buttons. Remove all buttons, the address bar EVERYTHING. And people can just navigate by "surfing the links" because it is more "natural".
Scratch what I said ealier, this isn't poorly implimented, it is a vicous and insane hijacking by disgruntled elitist designers who think they can make rash decisions at a 2.6 design release without backing them up with either TECHNOLOGY (the filesystem) or RESEARCH. The status quo is in my favour, they need to justify their design and they haven't. I hope they burn in the flamewars of hell.
(yeah it's a troll, but it's deliberately embellished for dramatic effect, I don't hate them... I am just having a dig at an insane, undemocratic design decision.)
Part of both the perspective and motivation from which OSS in general, and Linux in particular, were started was to offer choice. Having two desktops is part of that offering. If having to make a selection between only two choices is viewed as a failure of Linux, why even bother with it? Why not just stick with M$ with their mandated desktop that you are not burdened with having to chose as there is no choice to be made?
And isn't there really more than two choices? I thought CDE still runs in Linux as well? And someone running linux on HP may be able to tell us if HPTERM has been ported.
Not even that abomination of operating systems, Windows 95, made users retreat to the registry editor to use a single window to navigate folders.
But they do make a shite piece of software called Works that requires a registry edit to set the page size to A4 (at least it did circa 2003 just before I binned it).
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
The fact that linuxquestions.org or a web search is needed to answer such a question should be your first clue that something is seriously amiss.
It's just one of the many logical flaws I found in this rant (why even call it a 'review'? It's obviously just a rant..), but to the many KDE/Linux users it is an important one.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
I like the review. Is it flaimbait? Maybe. But is it true? I would say yes, he raises some very good issues that I know a lot of people have with Gnome. As with my day to day experince in using Gnome (I don't like KDE much, and a plain WindowMaker just isn't enough) I can fully agree with him.
Nautilus is in most part still a rather unpleasent piece of a file browser, it has been getting faster over the time, but thats it, its still missing some very basic features, smallicon-view being one, a simple button to go into the parent folder being another, but well, there are lots of more things that are just horrible broken in Nautilus (Mime-Handling and friends come to mind...). I really don't get why Gnome people got started with Nautilus in the first place, its after all just a very under-featured filemanager that was unusablily slow in its first few releases and only slowly got better. In the time they spend fixing it up, they might have at well written two other filemanager. And in its current stage I really doubt that it will reach a stage were I would consider it useable any time soon (maybe in gnome 3.0 or 4.0 or so, but it will take time...).
And well, the GConf issue, he is correct has well. Gnome Devolper have moved a lot stuff from Config Dialogs into obscure GConf settings once Gnome went from 1.4 to 2.x, what should that we good for? Basic settings that are needed to tweak Gnome into a useable stage are well hidden in some GConf settings now. I still prefer Gnome1.4 over Gnome2.x for exactly that reason. And well, this isn't only a Nautilus problem, it has tortured many Gnome apps, especially Galeon has suffered a lot, which again I consider the Gnome1.4 based builds a lot better then the Gnome2.x ones.
Anyway, as long as Gnome developers will just ignore the issues the users have I don't see much room for improvement in Gnome itself. They have multiple times in the past shown that they don't seem to care about who actually uses Gnome, but instead have optimized it for some 'hypotectical newbie user' which I have yet to meet in reality.
I'll probably get modded as flamebait for this but I'm being perfectly serious...
.NET cloning will come back and bite someday!
I despise them both.
They are both resource hogs.
K's QT isn't truely OSS since you have to pay out the ass to use it on Windows, so I avoid it on principle. But at least it looks crisp and professional.
Gnome is OSS but more confusing each release. It just plain looks 'cheezy'. There is no 'ala Windows Explorer' type app that I can ever *find* on the menu to browse the filesystem, so I have to resort to opening the Home icon then going 'up' a level, but that feels really hokey. Don't tell me it's there. If I look and look and can't find it, they have either hidden it or chosen a poor name for the icon. And I'm not poor Joe User either... Just think about him trying to find something. True or not, I'll always think of Icazza as some sort of MS schill which is another strike against it. Mark my words, the
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
If you dont like it, just email him...
:)
nicholas@petreley.com
For the rest of us:
"magazine, no better than the National Inquierer, probably paid off by Microsoft, has said BAD THINGS about our precious! Yes, bad things! Precious! Smead...ahem, I mean Slashdot will make him pay! Yes, pay! He wants our precious to change, but Smead....ahem, Slashdot won't let him! No! He baits us! He baits Smeadle with flame! but Smeadle is smart! Smeadle ignores his flame! Smeadle has his precious, that is all Smeadle needs! yes, precious!"
They must be a smaller operation than I thought.
Well, lets start with a little history lesson: Industries change, and business models change with them. When the first passenger airliner first took its maiden voyage across the Atlantic the passenger streamliner companies were saying that it would not catch on and that people would never want to fly. Well, after 8 years the streamliner companies were crying to governments worldwide to pass laws to save their industry. Didn't work, and the streamliner companies had to re-invent themselves into luxury liners (and became an even bigger industry in the cruise ship and vacation areas).
Open-Source and GPL is the beginning of a new business model that was brought on by the high prices and restrictive nature of proprietary closed-source software. Simply stated, it is the fault of the big software monopolies that forced the adoption of Open-Source on such a grand scale.
Future Open-Source software will be created and sold based on the work and labor that was put into it. Businesses and individuals will always pay for good software. The new business model will become one where the software is valued based on the quality and amount of work, not by the arbitrary inflated value placed on it by its creator.
Proprietary software companies will not go out of business, but they are going to have to re-invent themselves to survive (such as become service oriented companies).
Google is such a cool example of a service oriented company that could only have survived and become a billion dollar corporation with the use of GPL and Open-Source. The platform they are running is unimportant, but the service they provide is their business model. They have probably modified the Linux installations they use, and they do not have to let anyone see the new code unless they want to sell a distribution.
Nuff said....
However, my favorite file manager for Linux is still the command line, closely followed by Midnight Commander (yeah, command line). I've never gotten used to Konqueror (KDE), I've never gotten used to Nautilus. That's to say... I think the both suck.
However, my choice of Desktop (I run KDE at work, and Gnome at home) is pretty undecided. They both have features that I like ... at the functionaltiy level. My main problem with the article is that it didn't touch on the things that make it a desktop. Icons, Menus, Task-bars, Desktop switching, key bindings, etc.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Nobody cares what you think. Stop trying to re-ignite old flaimwars. It's totally counter productive. Haven't you heard of constructive critisism? It's all the rage these days.
Life is offtopic.
CANCEL
The reason given (other than being like Next buttons MS Wizard screens) for using Cancel-Ok instead of the Ok-Cancel was that we read from left to right in western countries.
By that logic, shouldn't the Cancel button be at the top left, since we read from top to bottom?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Our "left-to-right" reading is what makes Cancel-Ok so awkward.
Do you agree with the US being in Iraq?
NO.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.YES
Since we read the choices from left to right, wouldn't skimming through a page and accepting be more efficient if the default choice is on the left?
YES.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.NO
sorry about the x's. slashdot tells me "Please use fewer 'junk' characters when I use ' 's or '.'s "
It's an OPINION PIECE. Read the fucking articles bi-line.
The guys entitled to his opinion. You are all entitled to your own.
Get over your fucking selves.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The point of the article is to make people read it (and view whatever ads are on the web page -- I block all web ads, so I haven't seen any myself). Given the flamewars that have broken out over the article here and elsewhere (not to mention the Slashdot Effect on the article), I'd say he succeeded in getting the attention he was after.
I do wish he had aimed to generate an honest discussion of Gnome, though, instead of a flame war. Open discussion is the sort of thing that helps make F/OSS software better.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I believe what is happening is that the Nautilus team are confusing a "file manager" and a "workspace manager".
In my opinion, what needed to happen was there needed to be 3 seperate programs (sharing much common code, of course):
The first is a desktop manager. It manages the look of the desktop, and any icons on the desktop. It has absolutely no clue about file management, previews, or anything like that. All it knows is "if the user clicks on this icon, I send a Bonobo message of this type". Thus, the icon representing my home directory would be associated with a Bonobo message to the file manager, a click on the printer icon sends a message to a printer manager, and a click on "My Purdy Pitures" sends a message to the workspace manager (see next). Ideally, I can drag "things" from programs onto the desktop - cut a paragraph from a document, drag it to the desktop, cut another paragraph, drag IT to the desktop, etc. Programs can register things with the desktop - a printer queue manager could register a printer icon on the desktop, an MP3 player could create an icon for itself, a download manager could create a place to drop URLs.
The second program is a "workspace manager". It has the idea of a "grouping of things". It uses spatial navigation. Its "groupings of things" can be stored in the file system, or in a database, or whatever. A "My Purdy Pitures" folder might have a list of what pictures I have, no matter where in the file system they are. So could a "My downloads". It can record where the different icons and windows should be. I can drag pictures into it from other places. It does NOT allow me to set attributes or dates.
The last program is the file manager. It should ***MANAGE FILES DAMNIT!*** . It does NOT do spatial navigation. It allows me to have as many windows open on a given directory as I have virtual RAM to support. It lets me rename, copy, change attributes. It sorts the items it shows based upon my selections. It lets me mount or unmount file systems.
That way, the Jethros the Gnome team is trying to design for can use the Desktop manager and the Workspace manager, and have a cluttered desktop, and have everything as icons on the desktop. Those of us who have a bit more ability to sort and file can have a clean desktop, with perhaps a couple of workspace objects (my hot tunes, current projects) that are a subset of the world.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Bash is faster than Nautilus and consumes less resources. It also starts quickly and provides ultimate flexibility.
First, I'm not sure I agree with his statement that having folders open in the same window is the better way to do things. If I'm moving or copying a file from one folder to its parent, having two windows open is more efficient for me. It's easier for me to just drag the file between two open windows than to highlight the file, say Cut, then move up a level and say Paste.
g nome-2.6/gnome-2.6-2.html, which really praised Gnome, was that when you open a window for the first time, the review said that the scroll bar can be in a random place. "[I]t doesn't know where you left the window last time, so it places them in seemingly random places." Huh? That's just silly. Make the default to select the first file in the window the first time a folder is opened. So there's a lot of work to be done on usability.
The latest version Gnome does seem rather sparse to me. But that can also be a good thing for newbies.
One thing I noticed in the Ars Technica review at http://www.ars-technica.com/reviews/004/software/
If this paraphrase from Petreley is accurate, then the Gnome coders do have a lot to learn about ease of use: "For example, one GNOME developer says there's a good reason why users can't change individual colors in desktop themes: Someone might accidentally make both the text and background white, thus rendering the text unreadable."
Um, if you're concernd about people setting text and background to the same color, just do a simple check before applying the color and prompt the user if the two colors match.
Petreley may have some good points, but he's made them in an unhelpful way. The same way the article submitter showed a lack of objectivity with the comment about pc world being a mainstream rag.
Well, at least you're in good company. You pick a computer, they try to balance the budget. ("Get 'im Soybean Subsidies! Th' ayes! Th' ayes! Claw the ayes aught! Whooyah!! Lookee that! Aye tellya boys, they'rell be no raise for the Libraian of Congress this year.")
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Please mod the parent up. I'm not opposed to spatial browsing as such, or any vanguardist UI change for that matter. However, there should be choice and it should not be limited to edit out some arcane keys in a registry editor.
It's in there, there are three separate ways to browse normally
Do you actually know what those ways are? Have you used the version of Nautilus in question? Or are you just repeating what you read in that "rebuttal" argument somewhere up there?
I haven't used the thing. What I can say is that the negative review has the "ring of truth" - and if there is options to fix the interface they don't seem to be implemented in the obvious way (ie. a clear option like a "Open folders in separate windows" checkbox) - unless the reviewer is just outright lying (which I thoroughly, thoroughly doubt).
About half the posts on this story are of this same variety - everyone wants to jump on some story or that explains away the problems this guy mentions. The fact is, the guy had problems getting the interface to work in a reasonable way.
This is a minor problem in a way, but it's the kind of problem that suggests the need of a serious overhaul. Things like "how you browse files" should be tested into the ground by a diverse variety of people. Surely many would have had the same concerns as this writer and something good could have been done that would have worked around the problem better and more clearly.
My strong suspicion is that these concerns did come up in testing, and they were handwaved away precisely the way most of the posters here have done: "Oh, well you could have done this" or "Who cares about that little thing?"
It's this defensive attitude towards problems that ends up in software that's unusable, and problems that take far too long to be fixed.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
If you're involved in configuration, go take a look at Susan Kare's original Macintosh control panel. Now think really, really hard about how to get to something that intutive.
It's got more facts in it than the original article, sure; but it's still written from an emotional standpoint, not a factual one. His refutations of the "user's can't choose colors" and "Gnome developers are fighting against Microsoft" are a waste of server space. One would expect him to describe how to change colors in Gnome, what the design philosophies are, and why it's so important that Gnome isn't competing against MS, but instead we get something that would be appropriate on the Jerry Springer show.
I wouldn't call this a 'review', but a rant about Nautilus 2.6 and one I happen to agree with, at that. I mean seriously, what were they thinking? "Let's take the most ANNOYING behavior of Windows and make it the UNCHANGABLE DEFAULT!"
Fortunately you can enable the 2.4 behavior using gconf, but that's a sorry response to these accusations of lameness; how hard would it be to include a checkbox in one of the menus or preference dialogs that says "End This Madness - Switch To Browser Mode"? Not hard at all.
I have a big problem with any desktop environment that throws away what has to be described as standard desktop practices and forces their users into a single, debatably inferior and unchangable UI paradigm, whether that environment be GNOME, Windows, OS X, etc. I'm very worried that we're going to see more of the same from GNOME. Their blasted UI guidelines call for a level of simplicity that, while making Grandma's computing experience more enjoyable, leaves those who know what we're doing working in a inflexible and unfriendly environment. Is that what we want? GNOME to be engineered for ONLY one type of user: my grandmother? What about those that have been using UNIX and Linux for decades? Did ANYONE stop and think what features WE might like in our desktop?
I want to be able to configure every aspect of my desktop. I know what works best for me, not the GNOME foundation. And judging from responses like that of Nicholas Petreley (and others in #gnome on GIMPnet), I'm not the only one. I hate to even bring up KDE, but damn man, if GNOME had even a quarter of the flexibility and configurability of KDE, I think you'd see a lot more GNOME users.
I recently switched to GNOME from KDE for ideological reasons (more Free than KDE - no Qt), but who's got the last laugh here? KDE has far, far more eye candy than GNOME and the same goes for features with regards to configurability. The only things GNOME has on KDE, in my mind, are:
- GTK is Free on all platforms
- Third-party GNOME applications are generally of better quality than KDE applications.
- GNOME code that I've seen is much, much cleaner than KDE code I've seen.
I'm sorry that this is the state of things, because I want to like GNOME. I still use it as my desktop environment, but more often I find myself asking, why? Well, I guess I'm still running on principles. I'm going to see how the next major release turns out, but if we're forced into more unfriendly changes, chances are I'll be coping with the moral taint and heading back to KDE.
-Nick
for years I have been saying that gnome has been faulted from the get go...no one listen. They said that it was a windows clone They said it was an improvment. Hogwash!
Can't wait to see what we'll be complaining about in 5 more years. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"It was deliberately designed to protect users who are invariably too incompetent to pick their own colors but are smart enough to memorize shift-clicks and keystrokes or edit the registry to get Nautilus to work the way they like."
We have achieved GUI parity with the MAC!!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
[PETRELEY:] Not even that abomination of operating systems, Windows 95, made users retreat to the registry editor to use a single window to navigate folders.
GConf is nothing like the Windows Registry, except for the similar appearance of their respective editors. If Mr. Petreley cares to compare and contrast GConf and the Windows Registry he would know this. In fact Nicholas, I will paypal you $100 US if you can name three architectural similarities between GConf and the Registry.
Ho-ly crap.
Here you have the GNOME fan arguing with a straight face that the user might care about architectural similarities or lack thereof between the Windows Registry and the GNOME equivalent. Earth to Castro: nobody gives a shit. The users just want to be able to configure the OS.
Years of experience with Windows tell us that the Registry is a terrible place to put important config choices. Why not learn from that lesson instead of flaming users because they don't understand the architecture?
sulli
RTFJ.
Is that screenshot supposed to prove something, other than the article's complaints?
Why do you need to have a 'usr' and 'home' folder open on screen, when what you want is no doubt in 'wasabi'?
Why are there no easy/obvious parent or home folder icons? Sorry, that looks worse than Win3.1's Program Manager which was the most annoying gui construct I can think of. And that's my opinion, and nothing you say will change that.
To me that's as annoying as pop-under web ads. I said popup before but pop-under is probably more apt. Still annoying.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
All file managers suck, particularly on a linux system where you have (working) tab completion. For pity's sake, use the command line and an xterm.
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence, is indistinguishable from malice." Grey's Law
I am currently downgrading my Gnome 2.6 system back to Gnome 2.4.2 because of how hard it is just to use the file selector under many apps now, not to mention how difficult it is to use Nautilus. What the fuck did they have to go and do this for? The previous system was much nicer.
. . . but a good laugh nonetheless. It was an amusing rant. When a person has carved out their own niche, and gained an audience, one of the perks is that they get to "go off" on something that annoys them and watch the ripples spread. Actually, I agree with the person in some other forum (I forget which) who suggested that maybe the author is "trolling for tech support" which goes as follows:
I personally think MS could learn a lot from gnome.
The usability simply can not be beat.
Where I work less than 5% of our workforce (80,000+)spends any time with a file browser. The files are simply saved and opened with the file dialog. I think his review is like this because he likes cola and this is beer, and that does not make this bad beer.
Get a free ipod.
This article in Ars Technica is the reference for the Spatial Finder that the guys in Gnome used as inspiration for the new Nautilus.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I want my KDE
I want my KDE
Now look them at yo-yos - that's the way you do it
you write QT apps for your KDE
that ain`t working that's the way you do it
software for nothing and bits for free
Lemme tell ya them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
We gotta install kdelibs3
we gotta install that kdepim
we gotta write for kdevelop
we gotta pack that tar.gz
See that little faggot with the black t-shirt
yeah buddy he's really that fat
that little faggot got his own custom windec
that little faggot he's a programmer
We gotta install kdelibs3
we gotta install that kdepim
we gotta write for kdevelop
we gotta pack that tar.gz
I should have learned how to gzip and untar
I should have learned to write Python
Look at that mama, she's stickin the USB camera
man we could have some fun
and he's up there, what's that? segfault crashes?
melting up all core dumps like he was Dali
that ain't working, that's the day you do it
get your software for nothing and bits for free
Now that ain't working - that's the way you do it
you write QT apps for your KDE
that ain't working, that's the day you do it
software for nothing and bits for free
I want my
I want my
I want my KDE
I can understand people not liking the new Nautilus. It is a pain to use.
When it was introduced, they said "you will get used to it".
Well, I have been using it and I still do not like it.
I have a lot of data that gets moved and sorted from location to location. If you have just a few bins to sort into, it is not too bad. If you are trying to sort things into about 200+ directories using drop and drag, the spacial system becomes unweildy quite quickly.
Hopefully they will realize that this is a bad idea and fix it. (And while they are at it they need to fix gst-thumbnail from going into infinite loops and eating all the cpu every once in a while.)
There are some nice things in 2.6. Nautilus is not one of them.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Fluxbox + a nicely customized aterm + everything CLI and no dumbshit graphical file manager = BLISS ;-)
The article spends most of its time on Nautilus, and I'm not going to rehash the debates here. But he makes a valid point, one that I've wrestled with since Day One of Linux:
/.
Engineers design programs that work for them, not for end users.
I've seen this time and again during my work as a software product manager. Everything from base functionality to key UI choices are made by the development team based on what they find useful, or what they think will be useful. It is a very, very rare team that actually conducts any workflow analysis or UI usability studies during the design phase. And, once it's coded, it will cling like a limpet to a rock, difficult if not impossible to change.
I know enough about my own predispositions and biases to know that my judgment about what's best for me isn't always what's best for everyone. While both Microsoft and Apple make poor function / UI choices, with Linux the problem is magnified because each piece is built by a different design team using a different methodology.
Server-side and admin people aren't bothered by this, but your average end user is easily frustrated by applications that don't behave in an expected way, or don't have settings that can be easily changed to adapt to the user. If you give your software to a reasonably knowledgable end user, watch the interaction with your product. Don't argue, or explain why the actions aren't correct. Take notes, and figure out a way to accommodate the user. Don't use the mantra of "Read the man pages, foo!" That only leads to reviews like Petreley's, and the ensuing does not / does too debates on
"There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."
--Mike
He has been writing about Linux for years. He uses it, and most of his commentary is strongly pro-Linux and pro-Open Source. When he has something negative to say, he isn't doing it to bash Linux. He's doing it to give an honest review of what's good and what isn't.
His article says, in part: "But it turns out there is no preference setting that tells Nautilus to use a single window to browse folders." That's untrue. He's either lying or just incompetent. Probably the latter, tho with the amount of vitriol he dumps on GNOME, I'm not so sure. Anyway, Petreley, if you're reading this, or for anyone else who doesn't like the spatial Nautilus, just invoke gconf-editor, browse to apps->nautilus->preferences and set "always use browser" to true. By the way, GNOME != Nautilus. A major pet peeve of mine. If you hate Nautilus, use Konqueror or some other file manager. There are only a dozen or so good ones...
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
With 2.6, I felt, as Mr. Petreley did, that I had gone backwards in time. I am back in 2.4 now, and I'm much happier for it. My biggest fear is that I may not be able to upgrade to Slackware 10 because it will surely contain 2.6. I'd love to be able to run 2.4 on Slackware 10, but not if it means installing it without GNOME and then attempting to download and install 2.4, assuming that it would even be possible.
Basically, thanks to GNOME's design decisions, my next GNU/Linux OS desktop will be either KDE (horrors!), XFCE (not bad), or Fluxbox (fast but too minimal).
Is that anything like dwarf tossing?
(Oh, I see, the subject should read GNOME in capitals. very misleading.)
All in all, the Linux desktop need cut back on the information overload. People don't have time to keep track of all the knowledge required to use Linux as a desktop, and the horrible ways people emulate desktops on Linux actually contributes to the difficulty of Linux, not its ease-of-use. It's fine for Granny who will do nothing but use e-mail and the internet, because you can set everything up for her, but the average user who actually buys news hardware and drivers, installs new applications and removes them, does homework, and all the other things the average computer user does these days will have tough times compared to the much easier Windows XP.
People will. And eventually the only people using GNOME will be DE dilletantes and dabblers.
It's not that nautilus is a spatial file manager because that is actually a good thing. The problem is Nautilus does not integrate with the Gnome file chooser! Essentially Nautilus seems incomplete as a result.
When one edits bookmarks in Nautilus, the gnome file chooser should come up. The directories "added" using the new file chooser should be the directories that make up Nautilus's "bookmarks". This solution removes redundancy. Think about it. People "choose" files from directories their applications use, which incidently happen to be the same files that people tend to manage.
There should be an "open" option under the file menu that invokes the Gnome file chooser. People still want and need to browse the file system. This solution allows that.
In summary, the new gnome file chooser and Nautilus should be inseparable bed buddies. File choosing *is* file management in a practical sense, so why doesn't Nautilus take advantage of the new Gnome file chooser?
Years ago petrely would hang out with all the developers at a consulting shop that we all worked. Petreley was a tech writer who specialized in instruction manuals.
He quickly developed the name "Jelly Belly Petreley" and was the laughing stock of the company.
Basically a nice buy, but kind of irrelevant at this point.
"Never mind the decades of UI studies that show that configurability is a good thing as long as the defaults are carefully chosen."
Indeed. Were are these "decades" of research, and why are we just hearing about them. Seems they go into hiding when the UI meeting starts.
You mean PHBs run Linux? Come on, you must be dreaming.
I'm personally ready to use ANY modern DE if that gets PHBs to run Linux.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
What in the heck makes this insightful?
Choice is a good thing.
In fact, choice is not always a good thing. Having a choice can be confusing for users. My mother, for instance, didn't sign up for Internet service for years because she couldn't decide which one to go with. Having no choice is generally bad, but according to these guys (sorry for the Amazon link), markets generally settle into a #1 and #2 players with #2 having about half the market share of #1. For some reason, that doesn't seem to be happening here.
Since there is no "obvious" choice of desktop, users who aren't technically savvy have a hard time making the decision and may, in fact, be pushed away from Linux and back into {Apple, Microsoft} products.
So, back to the mods on crack part -- the first statement of this two-sentence post is a mindless assertion -- "Choice is [always] a good thing". How could such a flippant and shallow statement be insightful?
If you don't want a choice of desktops for your operating system I suggest installing Windows or buying a Mac.
The next sentence is essentially "Love it or leave it." Is this insightful? When an American disagrees with something the government is doing and they say so, is "Love it or leave." the best we can do? This is certainly not insightful.
If the parent post is what passes for insightful analysis, we're in real trouble.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
jackasss, you live in a hole.
While this latest review is bound to be a polarizing and heavily debated issue (read flamebait), it is important in that this review will be seen by so many mainstream readers and corporate types who may have been considering Gnome."
/. people will write them bitching and complaining about the "inaccuracy" or "bias" in their article..
Does anyone else hear MC Chris's voice when they read that last bit? For real, man. Relax already.
If you hate it so much, why did you submit it? Oh, I know. You wanted to get the link posted so a bunch of
How is that going to benefit the Linux/OSS movement? It's not. You are just going to cause an editor to get a lot of nasty mail just because he doesn't agree with your opinion. Perhaps, next time he will just find something besides Linux to write about..
It's great to support the one you love, but why strike out like that? Nobody gains anything from it. Oh, and shame on the moderators for letting this get through. You had to recognize it was soley to irritate the editor.
" In fact Nicholas, I will paypal you $100 US if you can name three architectural similarities between GConf and the Registry." I once saw Chris Lahey of Ximian speak, and he said, the best way to describe the GConf was that it was like regedit, but it really wasn't the same thing, honest. Here are four (rather than just three) archetictural similaries between GConf and the Windows Registry: 1) They both store application preferences 2) They are intended for user preferences - not for configuration of things like Apache - and not for arbitrary data 3) They are both motivated by a desire to make application preferences more manageable for system administrators 4) They provide a preference database, which is like a simple file system Cha-ching! All I did was to paraphrase the GConf home page.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
That's great! I love that she did the control panel for the original Mac OS, and for Windows 3.0. :)
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
Why is it we are still having these totally disconnected conversations?
Its like the users of most OSS projects communicate entirely with themselves while the actual project plugs along continuously without ever hearing what the users think. This if fucking weird!
So I'll point to one of my favorite websites (not perfect, but a million times better then nothing at all) and ask why haven't we found a better way to interact?
Here on Slashdot we appreciate the benefits of feedback and moderation. Of open discussion. What gives?
Quack, quack.
The article is right on the money... I've been going throught this same "anticipation that the next version will be better then the previous crap" phase and my experience has always been the same mentioned in the article. I dont care to see a multitude of Window Managers, just give me one that works well!
Ok, I flame you
Argh! OK, I posted this comment before reading the second page (their servers were Slashdotted or just being piggy). He does go on to mention the gconf-editor option.
However, he *does not* mention the fact that you can right-click on "Computer", choose "Browse Folder", and get a browser-style window. One right-click. Seems pretty easy to me!
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
Damn, and all this time I thought you just use it to open emacs and your terminal sessions.
As an aside, I wan't aware that Gnome had a 'registry' (a la Windoze?)...I always thought you could just edit flat files...another shock for my delicate constitution.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I'm sorry, but I just don't like that kind of argumentation. Mainly because it's a flawed one.
I'm not going into the debate of KDE versus Gnome, since I only tried them out sporadically, but the 'if you don't like it, bugger off' reasoning has always been a very weak one, IMHO.
It's the same sort of thing you get from, say, chauvinistic USA zealots that answer to every sort of criticism of the government or state/country of fellow americans with: "well, if you don't like it, why don't you move to another country?"
Why should criticism be unvalid because of the possibility to go away, not use it, fork, etc? If the critique is valid, it remains valid, even if there are a zillion other things one can do.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Hi --
/. It means we get to know if aunt Thelma likes Gnome.
I wonder if anyone knows if Gnome conducts usability studies on GUIs (meaning: collecting statistics on user's opinion on ease of use)? Apple and Microsoft do.
Objective usability studies are entirely different from gaining feedback from a community with a heavy bias - us here at
Because if they *don't*, then that's really stupid. Open Source has the chance to experiment, instead of just copying what Apple or Microsoft do.
For instance, Gnome is being deployed on a massive scale on Extremadura (Spain). Are they even collecting opinions on that?
They have corporate money now, they should. Shouldn't they?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Here's the truth: QT on X11 has been licensed under the GPL for almost 4 years. This means that KDE is 100% GPL and 100% Free, and has been for a very long time. No matter what Trolltech decides to do to stay in business, my KDE desktop will ALWAYS be Free.
Spread your FUD somewhere else.
I don't think that comparing Word 97 and OpenOffice is valid. Word 97 launches by itself, OpenOffice launches an integrated suite, so of course OO will take more memory. Perhaps Word 97 and AbiWord would have been a more accurate comparison.
I wish I had mod points, because you are exactly right. One of the first things the articles says is, "The GNOME file manager, Nautilus, no longer allows users to navigate through folders as one might use a Web browser or Windows Explorer." That is 100% false.
If you are going to write for a major publication, and if you are going to write a huge rant, at least have your facts right. At least make it look like you really tried out the interface. The author did not and he will no be misleading the many people who read his article.
If one holds down shift while opening a folder, its parent will be closed when it opens.
The button ordering is not because of left-to-right reading. As you tried to explain, that doesn't make much sense anyhow.
The truth is, it is just easier to *spatially* find the buttons. Yes, that spatial stuff again. As with spatial Nautilus, human minds are in fact very, very good at managing spatial locations. Ars Technica in its Spatial Finder write up noted that even an expert programmer's ability to comprehend paths and abstract concepts is entirely dwarved by even a child's spatial recognition and manipulation ability.
With the buttons on the right of the dialog (which is how every well design OS/app works, independent of how the buttons are ordered) you are always able to spatially locate the button group in relation to the dialog itself. Just look in the bottom right corner, and there you have them. (The right alignment may be due to the fact that we read left-to-right, and thus our eyes find it easier to look in the bottom right after reading the text above.)
The reasoning for using Cancel/Action (*not* OK - there is never an OK button in properly designed GNOME apps. Explained below.) is just an extension of that same design/layout that even KDE and Windows use. Finding things is easier using spatial locations. Finding the button group as a whole is easy because its in the bottom right corner. Putting the main action button in the very bottom right thus makes it even easier to find. This has been tested, extensively, by both GNOME engineers (Sun and Ximians folks; both do a lot of usability testing) and the Apple folks, who do things the same way for similar reasons.
Regarding the OK buttons, it's just a matter of usefulness and safety. "OK" is 100% meaningless. OK what, exactly? The same thing with Yes/No: yes what, no what? You can change the meaning of OK/Cancel in any dialog you see, and the only way to tell the different is to read the whole text (which is often poorly written itself). By avoiding the term OK, and using the actual action the button does (Save, Quit, etc) you remove ambiguity. It increases safety, as well; say you usually see dialog A when doing some task, in which the OK button does what you need. Then after an upgrade, or maybe after some data corruption you're unware of, dialog B pops up instead. Due to habit, you don't even read the text, you just click OK. But oops, this OK did something else, something you didn't want to happen. Or maybe you expected something to happen (like saving) that didn't, but you have no idea it didn't happen. By labelling the buttons something other than OK, it's much less likely you'll just click the button and not notice something is different. Your eyes look directly at the button to aim for clicking, unlike the dialog text which you just skip over out of habit. If the button text changes, you'll notice. Cancel is also better defined in the GNOME/Apple HIGs. Cancel only shows up in dialogs caused by user action. Cancel does nothing other than cancel that action. No other side effects.
Try opening two directory trees you are about to diff with this new interface! (then go use Meld).
My two immediate suggestions would be:
"I'm not using gnome now, but this sounds like it turns it off for the current window, but there's no easy option to turn it off completely.
:D
"
Well I am in front of Gnome right now, and I can tell you that once you do what he says. It will hold for any child windows. It doesn't hold for any parent windows you create anew, unless you go into GConf. Anyway I have a mouse with a thumb button, and "CTRL+ALT+W" is assigned to it. You'd be surprised how fast I can move around. Almost as fast as the command-line.
The only legitimate complaint (and answer) is the color issue, and that could be handled by a more intelligent color algorithm e.g. Background changes, the text changes approprietly for visability purposes.
When a bad review happens, it is an opinionated peice of flame bait. Any good review is an insightful peice of journalism.
That behavior is very similiar to an ill-tempered 4 year old. Other (more successfull organizations) look at bad reviews and say, "Hey, this is a problem, what can I do to fix this."
Praise benifits image, where as critism SHOULD benefit the product.
GNOME man!
GNO Man!
NOOOO MAN!
I looked for my file
It took a long while
Now 'find' is my only friend!
While this review seems biased and certainly doesn't go very deep (it does seem more like a review of Nautilus than of gnome) it brings to light some of the many problems developing with the gnome project. Gnome seems to be moving in contridictory directions, and dominated by developers that are continuing a crusade against C++. They site performance reasons for this, but maintain a fairly bloated window manager. Sure it's not nearly as bloated as KDE, but for a group of developers that seem bent on performance, it's fairly slow.
Then you combine the fact that gnome applications are much more difficult and time consuming to develop than KDE apps, and you get a real lose/lose for gnome. They aren't really excelling at anything. KDE may be woefully slow, but at least it's easy to develope apps for and thus has a vast number of easy to use apps. Gnome/GTK have only a few nice (some very nice) apps available in comparison. Both KDE and gnome seem to have problems with navigation. But at least KDE has several well developed and extremely effective file managers (like Krusader).
What ARE the big advantages to using gnome?? There doesn't seem to be any anymore. I like the lightweight approach, so I use XFCE. Why would I want to use gnome?? I can think of reasons why I would want to move to KDE (and some reasons not to -mostly the fact that it's so slow), but unforutately I can't really think of any reasons to use gnome. Gnome developers need to figure out what they want their WM to be GOOD at! Being OK at everything won't work in the Linux world!
"I used to configure the crap out of gnome, making it do all kinds of weird stuff I liked. Then, version by version, my toys were taken away."
And here's the most fundamental difference between a geek and everyone else. Geeks love to play with their interface. The rest of us don't give a damn. We bought the machines to get work done, not play with it's interface.
That's why there are TWO interfaces, so the "play with your interface before getting down to work" crowd will not feel disenfranchised. While the "just works" crowd can get some work done, and then if we feel like it THEN we can play with our interfaces, like the game you think they are.
"What ever happened to the idea of "advanced" vs. "novice" settings for a UI? "
Because everyone's an "Expert" when it comes to their interface. Bad idea.
"Every version that comes out has LESS functionality than the one before, railroading me into a certain way of interacting with a desktop."
All desktops, from the Acorn to the Amiga, to the Mac, and Windows "railroad" you into a particular way of doing things. You must really have difficulty dealing with a civilized society "railroading" you into a particular way of living.
"Make it easy by default, but don't take away our toys and call it progress."
Bet you hated when the Horse and Buggy went away. Darn that progress. Oh yeah. Thanks for at least proving why 20 years from now, our WIMP interface will be the same one as the one from 20 years back. Hey! Were's the reins on our new fangled cars? Bet you didn't know that some of the early cars did have reins? Something about "not taking away people's toys".
If spatial is going to pay dividends when "database" filesystems arrive....
"Database" file systems have been here for 40 years. Maybe they'll come back into fashion again, but I wouldn't expect any breakthrough changes in usability or functionality from them.
The biggest argument against spatial navigation, as produced by gnome 2.6, is that it requires the user to learn TWO different styles of navigation: one for their browser and one for their files.
I think it makes little difference, frankly. Windows, Macintosh, Gnome 2.4, Gnome 2.6, and KDE file system browsers each have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are a little more intuitive to novices, some are a little more powerful for experienced users, but the differences are minor.
Most of this desktop stuff is just fashion and different tastes. There is very little real difference between the various systems.
Thanks.
The thing with "spatial navigation" is that it is only effective with a small group of commonly used folders. Back 20 years ago when you were lucky to fit 800k on your Mac floppy, you could justify the spatial finder as making it much easier to navigate your few folders.
The problem is that this thing doesn't scale! As a pathological example, say I have a 800GB volume with 400,000 files (mostly photos I've taken as a professional photgrapher) spread out over 3,000 directories. I'm not going to memorize the screen location of each of those 1000s of photo shoots. Dragging my mouse back and forth across my 24" monitor half-a-dozen times to get to the photo shoot I'm looking for is almost the worst scheme I can imagine. The Windows Explorer 2-paned tree model (as opposed to the MacOS tree where there's only 1 pane) is about the most efficient I can imagine for this scenario.
Now that disks are 1,000,000 times bigger than they were 20 years ago, why is somebody trying to introduce the metaphor that was only appropriate for use back then? Granted, it works fine if a novice user has maybe a dozen commonly used folders, but beyond that it is unwieldy.
I think the best solution is perhaps to use the "spatial" metaphor only for folders created on the user's "desktop". That way your ad hoc folders work the way your real desktop does (spatially), while proper hierarchies are still navigable the way they were intended -- as a tree.
aQazaQa
K's QT isn't truely OSS since you have to pay out the ass to use it on Windows, so I avoid it on principle. But at least it looks crisp and professional.
...that if Qt didn't exist for Windows under any licence, you'd call it "truly OSS". So what makes it not OSS? That the same code is also in part used to make closed source and/or commercial software? Well, I guess that disqualifies BSD or LGPL code as "truly OSS" too.
Oh and don't you dare use any Linux kernel with JFS or RCU. If you'd wanted to run them on AIX, you'd need a licence from IBM, so they're not "truly OSS". Or something like that, I really don't understand your reasoning.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can give all those crap reasons why it makes sense, but I believe it should be how we speak it.
Wanna go to the movies Yes or No.
Wanna smoke some crack Cancel, No, Yes.
WTF??!!!
I can't stand it.
And not only do we speak this way in the english language, I've been conditioned by windows I admit.
But I recall KDE asks you which way you prefer when you install. Gnome should be the same, ask me how I prefer my dialogs and every app should follow.
And just to show how some developers are, I use xfce but did not like that maximized windows can be resized. I found out that this is intentional and will not be changed. sigh
So I thought I'll try nautilus within xfce all being gtk2 apps, they should intergrate nicely.
In nautilus, you can't turn off the damn option for the minimizing windows effects!
I thought there must be some gconf option or something for this. I did a little search and found a bug filed for this that spanned the last two years about why the developer would not add this option stating that this was a visual cue to the user that the app has minimized to the task bar.
Even if it gives some visual cue, give a god damn option to turn the motherfucking piece of shit animation off.
In the end he incorporated an option to turn off all effects like draw contents when moving windows, which is something I do want.
Some developers have to get their head out of their asses and listen to their users once and awhile.
By default, the window of a child folder should open in the exact same location and size as the parent folder window. This would avoid cluttering the desktop.
Then this should be combined with a configurable property to automatically close the parent window. This would further make it appear like a normal file browser.
The main difference is that it retains its spatial behavior, so the next time you double-click on the same child folder, it will open a window in the place where you had it last time if you previous moved or sized it.
The mistake is if a folder does not have an explicitly set size and location, you should always use the parent's size and location to avoid clutter and confusion.
I would love spatial mode if it worked like this, because I do have certain directories that I always want opened a particular way. As it is now, though, it is a little difficult to use.
Step 1 - right click the home icon and select properties
Step 2 - Change the command to "nautilus --browser"
Bingo... nautilus opens in browser mode as required when you click the home icon.
Spot the idiot who:
a) Can't search the web
b) can't send posts to usenet
or
c) can't send email to a relevant discussion list.
If he lacks even the most basic skills in communicating with other users in the open source community, I think we can all ignore this "educated opinion."
It took me all of 5 minutes to find the solution to his problem. Truly amazing a journalist can do SO little research on a subject before posting it to a major publication.
Idiot.
NT, no really, none.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Look dude... you are acting like it's the responsibility of the Gnome developers to produce a desktop that you like. It sounds to me that you like the design choices of KDE over the design choices of Gnome. Personally, I find the KDE applications and general desktop environment ugly and cluttered, while I enjoy the simple and sleek elegance of Gnome. So it should be apparent to you that I prefer the design choices of Gnome over the design choices of KDE.
Two desktop environments for X11, each optimized for users with different preferences for user interfaces. And the best part is that they all interoperate, so I have no problem running KWorldClock in my Gnome environment, and you can run Evolution or whatever you want in your KDE. Check out what Havoc had to say about how modern DEs can interoperate these days.
So by my definitions, Gnome is progressing rapidly. I'm enjoying version 2.6 over 2.4 after using it for only a few days. Do I consider KDE to be regressing because it is getting more cluttered and ugly by my standards? That would hardly be fair... it's progressing in it's own way, and the same is true for the Gnome project. Mr. Rodney King, we _can_ all get along, just don't let slashdot know.
501 Not Implemented
Thank you for being informative, and if you are really whom you claim to be, may I be the first to invite you to join the discussion in other ways. Heck, maybe you could coax Nick to join the discussion.
I'm quite happy to hear that this will be a mid-pages article, especially as - well you've read by now - the narrow target of the article has got some folks a bit up-in-arms.
The reason why I am so vocale, is that I know how I read the tech magazines I'm sent (over 8 per week), and I honestly don't have time to read all the articles. But if a tag strikes my interest on the front page, them I'm likely to open to that article. At that point, I've never once gone to seek additional information from other sources.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
When you let Sun's codemonkeys at GNOME. Sun does (or did) some great stuff, but the software isn't so hot.
The real motivation was freedom from Qt. The relevance of KDE is that KDE was a widely-used piece that relied on Qt, and was therefore establishing Qt as a proprietary critical component in the standard free software stack. (Yes, I know that Qt is no longer strictly proprietary. It was then.)
Nobody had a problem with KDE itself. In fact people liked KDE, which is why it was a problem.
Of course both Nick and Jorge are more than halfway right.
While Qt was the significant detail that made Gnome important, the underlying motivation was to have a completely free software stack, giving freedom from proprietary software - including Windows. Whether motivated by ideology (the FSF, Debian) or business reasons (Red Hat), that was the goal.
And, of course, fundamental goals like that only go so far. The people who got involved and stayed involved in Gnome had a goal of creating a kickass desktop. That was a means to the end for people cheering from the sidelines and making financial donations, but it was (and is) the goal for people doing the actual work.
But then again, I mostly use the command line, or if I'm feeling really GUI, I might bring up Midnight Commander.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
This guy's opinion (yes, it's an opinion piece) is worth solid gold. If you can't see it, you should probably not try to develop software for the masses and stick to making stuff for yourself.
Average user feedback is something rare for Linux, firstly because it's unappreciated and secondly because there's not many average users on Linux.
And if they balk at something, two responses out of three are "read the man pages". As if there's any reason to presume the man pages are actually any good or up to date or written with an average user in mind...
As always, I'm writing for linux people who like the idea of linux desktop.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
His whole gripe was on Spatial Nautilus and themability? What a dumbass. Try covering something like, ease of use, stability, consistancy. I know Gnome isnt perfect but it gets better and faster with each release and if all you have to bitch about is "I can't change my titlebars color." then just keep your mouth shut. No one cares. Next he will complain about how its impossible to change the gnome menu icon easily. I think businesses want their employees to worry about more important things. This guy is a troll and nothing else. I don't hear him complaining about the utter lack of themability in the default WinXP desktop. What does it have, 3 themes? The rest you have to pay for. What a boner.
Frankly thats quite horrible. It isnt obvious to me what half of the options in that dialog do. It strikes me as confusing and unclear. I think the lack of any kind of text labels makes it the worst part.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
This is how I look at it: Mac OS used this approach for years and Win95 started in a similar way (to this day I still set up my Win2K machine this way). It may be more "cluttered", but I find it convenient still and very intuitive. Look at the older Mac OS (pre X); That interface was simple enough that a person with almost no computer experience could sit down and use. The reason that all other modern operating systems can use the Explorer-like approach is because they expect that you have some kind of computer experience. If the Gnome team wants to make a desktop that _everyone_ can use, They made the right choice.
Would you like your new Linux desktop to:
1) Mimic a Mac environment
2) Mimic a Windows environment
3) Use the "classic" Gnome setup
4) Use our sweet new Spatial organizational system
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Just for your information, there's a thing called "Qt non-commercial edition for Microsoft Windows" which you don't have to pay anything to use on Windows. Yes it's dated, but it's free as in free beer if $$$ is the primary concern for you.
Rox Filer has a better "spatial" behavior than any other file managers I've seen. Also KDE is too cluttered with stuff, i like the way new Gnome looks.
Did I really read something about some "registry" and "registry editor" in that article?
Sorry, I don't know Gnome. Is it really configured through some sort of registry, like Windows?
The registry is one of the things I hate most about Windows and the alternative is among what I appreciate most in Linux: all configuration through simple text files, usually well commented, grep-able, diff-able, whatever-able.
If indeed Gnome is going the way of Windows (and Windows 95 for the folder thing!) with this registry nonsense, I'm certain to stay away from it. Someone please reassure me that I misunderstood.
I think the lack of any kind of text labels makes it the worst part.
I'm not a big fan of text in a graphical user interface. Especially when the meaning can be told in a picture, and I should know: I was using a Mac before I could read thanks to GUIs like this one.
Wherever you go, there you are!
As far as I've been able to tell, (as a KDE user), gnome has always been about limiting it's user's options, (or at least any ease to get to them). While I won't comment on whether gnome made the right choises about the defaults, it always eeemed that gnome was there for stupid people who didn't want the option of screwing things up while KDE always had the options a few clicks away should someone desire to change it.
I do security
I haven't used gnome 2.6, but I've used previous Gnomes and Nautilus. I know this makes me a Ludite, but what I realy want is TWM.
So while I know what we need to land Gnome on the usual corporate and home desktops is integrated file browsers and clickable devices and such, I'd really like to be able to very, very quickly turn all that off, but have it so my brother-in-law can log into my box and have all that stuff.
Maybe a "behavior" browser (one with plugable pages for any app, one with a hand-holding look that does NOT remind people of registry editing, one with a really obvious, friendly, lasting icon) should be a prime-focus part of the next release? Maybe a browser with templates at the front, then deeper in, individual behavior changes.
Windows (the versions I've used) doesn't make changing the way the desktop works all that easy. There are a couple of different places you have to click, you can't change a huge amount, and the places to make changes move from version to version.
What if a major design aspect of gnome was "All behavior, where there IS an alternative, must be configurable. The one thing you cannot turn off, is the _Configure_ icon."
That would make me MUCH more comfortable with whistles and bells and would encourage me to try stuff. Would it be a good aspect for conversion users from Windows, Mac or KDE?
Can the Gnome guys do a nice job on such a thing fairly easily? Could we all (even those who, like me, want a truely minimal desktop) stand one constant part of the interface, the behavior-browser, which would always be there?
Those that like Spatial desktops have few files and use the same files repeatedly. Those that like Browser desktops have many files that are always changing and have deep hierarchies. They both work great for their specific user but if you can't interchange them. People simply work better with space as an organizer when it's a limited number of things their working with. Large numbers need lists, and nested lists.
Idiot.
Lots of people want a standard desktop environment for Linux. One that is installed on (almost) every distro by default and one can be safely used as basis for projects.
Your grammar seems a bit questionable for a professional editor. Something posted as yourself on a ComputerWorld-hosted forum might be a bit better received.
i use fluxbox
it's not intuative
doesn't even have icons
and doesn't have built in file managers, flashy icons or anything
will it win a war against windows
no
does my girlfriend know how to watch movies on my computer
no
do i care
no
but i like it and i'm glad that linux affords me the choice to use a desktop that i enjoy even if a correct solution for joe user hasn't quite been found yet
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
I admit that I haven't seen much in the way of flamewars lately, but on the other hand interoperability between GNOME and KDE is circling the drain. Try to access a KDE app from outside of KDE (say, by using ssh) and you get a flood of error messages. Try to run a GNOME app from outside of GNOME (ssh, KDE, whatever) and you get a fatal "gconfd is not running" error.
For all practical purposes, the interoperability of X applications has been jettisoned.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Engineers design programs that work for them, not for end users.
I'm not so sure about that. Check out this this article by Alexander Larsson. He seems to be saying that the new GNOME UI is the engineer's perception of what new end users like. Here's a quote:
People have argued (and I'm inclined to agree) that the object oriented methaphor (hereafter called oo), is easier to understand for new users. The argument is that the direct graphical representation and manipulation makes it easier for people to understand the concept of directories.
There may be additional reasons for their choice of the spatial interface. I hope so, because in my experience, the typical end user is much happier with the traditional navigational interface. I would wager that most of us hate pop-ups of any kind.
I also agree with the above posters who said that such a dramatic change from a previous version should have been optional in the new version.
At least for those of us who dislike *both* gnome and kde. ('Cause they're klunky, slow, and annoying, each in its own individual way.)
If it weren't for the entrenched battle between gnome and kde, I suspect many developers for both would have long ago made it impossible to run their software without also running their favorite desktop. As it is, we have to put up with a bunch of directories full of nearly unused material and a constant stream of silly error messages, but at least it's *possible* to run all those cute "k-" and "g-" programs.
And 98 and a few others and the first thing everyone did on a new Windows install was go in and reconfiger Windows explorer to work like a browser. No one I ever met liked the, click a folder, get a window, behavior. No one.
What can I say, I was a KDE fanboy until GNOME 2 came out. Maybe GNOME 2.6 is the time when I go back to using KDE.
I know that sounds like I am over reacting, but the file browser is the most used application on the box. If they have messed it up as badly as it seems they have, then I will be buried in unneeded windows. The whole point of adding tabs to web browsers is to reduce the number of windows on the screen. If they want a window for every directory that has been passed through (why would you want that?) then why not just put them in tabs?
Stonewolf
www.stonewolf.net
Thanks for the eloquent Mac zealot response, fag. May i remind you that OS X didn't come out until *after* linux had been in development for years. If there's any "impostor fragrance os" it's the Mac/OS.
In any case, GNOME is way ahead of apple's prorprietary "Aqua" GUI, and the development continues. Sure it has its rough edges but not nearly what Apple's or M$'s have... and it's built on top of a rock-solid secure OS too. There's a new Apple virus out now like every week from what i've read. You can have it!
I built my PC and my OS myself... and it's better than any Mac you can buy at the apple store, and for half the price.
Yes I would like to have a autohide task bar that worked again!!! It worked great in gnome 1.4 but in 2.0 2.2 an 2.4 it forgets to hide about as often as it remembers to. Task list grouping that worked as well as it it did in 1.4 would also be nice. If I have 30 aterms open I get 30 buttons on my task bar it compleatly ignores the "Alway group windows" setting.r /usr/bin/metacity ln -s /usr/bin/enlightenment .usr.bin/metacity
Now the real fun one is trying to change the window manager to run that has some actual functionalaty. I have used both virtual windows AND virtual desktops since well before the gnome project started and will be using the long after it is dead. Gnome used to be a desktop envirement that could be set up to work the way YOU wanted it now you have to work the way it wants. Try to use the gconf edit to change the window manager.
step1 find setting in gconf
step2 change "metacity" to "enlightenment" exit gconf then exit X
3)restart x and say "WTF?" metacity started again
4)look at gconf see it says metacity again
5)find the file in the ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manage
edit it by hand then restart X metacity starts
6)kill X edit file change oner ship to root then chmod 644 start X again metacity is running again.
7) kill X edit file chmod 444 the file and start X again. still metacity starts (thias time the gconf shows that it is suposed to run enlightenment.
8) rm
I have seen the same thing on 2 different distros(mandrake and slack) o it si not disto changes it is the normal activity of the "New Improved (we know better then you) gnome"
I would love to see a updated gnome 1.4 (it actually worked and allowed you to have your desktop instead of one that they want you to use
In looking at the article, it occurred to me that I haven't read anything by Petreley recently.
Then I realized - the reason I haven't seen anything by him was that he hasn't been showing up lately on LinuxToday. Then I noticed that I haven't seen anything from ComputerWorld recently on LinuxToday.
I must say, after reading this dribble that he passes off as an article, that I really haven't missed much.
I'm also surprised this got /.ed - it's an opinion piece to be sure, but amounts in content to no more than some silly usenet rant -- and, frankly, I've seen plenty of those full of vitriol that still maanged to say more than this (ahem) "article."
Perhaps Word 97 and AbiWord would have been a more accurate comparison.
Ick. I haven't actually tried the Linux version of AbiWord, but I have tried the Win32 version. My experience ran like this: I loaded a 650 page MS Word document in AbiWord. Some of the formatting was mangled, but not irreparably. The trouble started when I changed from 100% zoom to 75% zoom. Fifteen minutes later, when it was finished resizing, I had pretty much decided AbiWord was not going to cut it for me.
Word 97 launches by itself, OpenOffice launches an integrated suite, so of course OO will take more memory.
This, IMHO, is a bizarre design choice for a free software package. The only real reason for integrated office suites was to lock out competition. Why can't I launch the word processor and the spreadsheet -- the only components I use -- as separate applications? Don't get me wrong, I think OpenOffice is a great product -- I am, after all, about to spend two grand to buy a laptop capable of running it -- but that does make it more expensive for me than continuing to run Word 97.
The reason I am comparing Word 97 and OpenOffice, incidentally, is because there have been no significant added features in subsequent releases of Word for individual users. Almost all of the new development in MS Word since Word 97 has been aimed at corporate groupware applications. Moreover, the OpenOffice word processor really doesn't offer anything Word 97 doesn't have, except for being free and based on open standards. Now, that matters a lot to me, and probably you as well, but odds are that we are a tiny, tiny minority.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Face it, since 1.4 Gnome's been going down hill with all the functionality being nutered. You either do it the one way or not at all. Even Windows is more configurable than Gnome now. I keep hoping that they will come to their senses, but each time I try a new release, I can't belive how little control I have over my environment. I dispised KDE until I saw 2.0 and 2.2 and finally switched to get back some of what was lost. Gnome seems to be aiming as low as they can. I don't think they can even be compared against Windows or KDE any more -- they lack too much.
The window manager sucks. Not only do I have to use that one little corner no matter how I want to resize the window, but putting the Close button right next to the other window controls was a huge leap backward in GUI usability. Don't even get me started on the color coding.
I can't save my session when I log out.
Right-click support is abysmally sparse.
I have to reboot it every few days, otherwise it will start complaining that it can't talk to my USB printer or it will lose the ability to authenticate a PPP connection with my ISP. I haven't had that sort of problem since Windows-fuckin'-95.
Speaking of rebooting, I have to manually turn Internet Connection Sharing back on every time I do it.
I bought a wireless mouse & keyboard after the cheapie Apple keyboard died. The Apple Installer handily put a configuration icon for them in the Control Panel. Too bad I still can't configure them because the driver can't find some kernel module it needs. So much for "It Just Works".
I suppose I shouldn't complain. After all, history shows us that it takes at least six or seven iterations before Apple manages to make an OS that works well. In the meantime, I suppose I could drool over the "lickable" UI.
We all think you're a fag.
The level above me, they are still PHBs to me. I may not consider myself a PHB, and my staff tells me that I'm not - I still recognize myself as having the potential to be there.
When I loose that recognition of the possibility... then I truly will be one. And my desktop is wood grain Mica.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine why, in the year since its announcement, no one has made any significant progress on Y.
No one has made any significant progress? Have you visited the IRC channel? Did you know they release patches constantly, and that they plan a 1.0 release within a year? The developers are concentrating on widgets right now.
Or not. Maybe developing a new window system from scratch is both hard and pointless at this point in history?
You're right, let's stick to copying and sticking with the same 20+ year old technology, while Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else starts anew with modern tech.
You mean like the fact that for nearly 10 years, apple resisted proportional sized sliders (so you dont have any idea how large the window view you have is in relation to the rest of the document)?
:-P
Yeah, some wisdom.
(Generally I consider apple's design guides from the 80's-90's very good and applicable to any UI design, but the non proportional sliders thing was simply retarded.)
really. They need to sit down computer noobs in front of their GUI and analyze what users find intuitive and what nonintuitive.
What a programmer assumes is intuitive will often not be the case for non-programmers. And not because non-programmers are stupid! Because they aren't.
It appears Gnome developers are making UI design decisions without consulting the non-developer end users first. Big mistake.
Well the article was written to be controversial and it's clearly succeeded judging by the number and tenor of replies. The underlying point is a pretty good one. Linux is still developer driven and this is a classic example of what happens when developers get into the driver's seat and eject all others from the vehicle. It doesn't matter whether there are alternative ways of turning a feature off or on (in this case, turning on a tree menu and turning off multiple windows). The crucial question is whether the untutored user will realize that there are workarounds, and be able to use those alternatives because they are very clear and simple to operate. In this case, the answer appears to be a clear "no" on both counts. So long as developers come first and the poor user comes a long way last Linux will continue to have a problem. And a very small share of the desktop PC market.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I've use Gnome, then became comfortable with KDE, and now use xfce4. No matter which, I've always used ROX for my Filer. It's the best out there and works perfectly under all the window managers. I agree with some other posters, he should have reviewed Gnome and then said he was disatisfied with Nautilus and recommended another Filer (one of his preference).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The OP refuted your points and this is the best you can do? Rather than rehash what he said (which you completely ignored), I'll sit here and goggle at your stupidity. O_o
/me feigns surprise at yet another transparent attempt to discredit the poster who discredits you.
Just an anecdote, but all people I know who switched from OS9 to OSX have lots of trouble locating files on their systems.
This is partly due to the UNIX like layout of the file system and partly due to the new finder. These same people never had trouble with the old, spatial finder.
I for one quite like spatial Nautilus in Fedora Code 2 (test3).
I think its got a long way to go til it becomes usable. Too much effort is spent on making Gnome a next generation desktop when its not yet up to the standard of a current generation desktop.
/dev/console themselves all the time, you know, just in case...)
Emblems, spatial Nautilus, contextual sidebars etc are great. So are Evo, Gimp 2, XChat Gnome, etc.
But the current Gnome desktop:
* No menu editor
* No way to modify what a launcher points to
* A file manager that acts like it can display web pages, then can't
* A bloody complex file associations menu that doesn't know about either the programs in my Gnome menu, or $PATH.
* No display of emergency messages when your hard disks decide to melt (apparently users have to be proactive and read
* No decent looking, comprehensive theme. Minor in comparision to the rest, but still...
Thanks for fixing the File Open dialog though.
Er, wasn't he the first editor of LinuxWorld? Nicholas Petreley has long been a supporter of free software, and one of the few mainstream journalists to 'get it'. He probably knows more about Linux and free software than you.
So please, don't be condescending and put inverted commas around the word 'reporter'.
I'm not defending this piece, but to criticise Petreley like you've done either shows a very poor memory on your part, or that you're fairly new to the free software world.
"...This means that KDE is 100% GPL..."
Close. The KDE libraries are 100% LGPL, while Qt/X11 is 100% GPL. A GPL port of Qt to Windows is well underway.
You have to know in advance that the GNOME developers differentiate between the file managing and "browsing" ones files. That distinction is non-obvious for the general public - only someone who is up to speed on this particular GUI development decision is going to be familiar with that meaning for the verb "browse".
I recently used GNOME 2.6 for a week to try out the Spatial Nautilus I had heard so much about (and oh were promises of milk and honey made!). It wasn't until the last two days of that trial before I found a post that clarified the GNOME-centric connotation of the word "browse".
Most of the world uses the terms file manager and file browser interchangably. The browse as a codeword for classic/Windows/OS X style file managing information is a bit non-obvious lingo.
In July O7, I got a mac pro. There's no punchline. Just endless joy and wonder.
Y'know, I didn't lay down US$1800 (+$90 for the Jaguar upgrade two months later) for a Mac because I was expecting to dislike MacOSX. My disillusionment formed over half a year of regular use as I found myself getting more and more irritated by the problems I listed. Now I'm happily back on KDE and only use the Mac to watch the occasional Flash file.
Just go into the registry... (hehe... I know.. he was bitching about the registry)... But, seriously, if you want Tab completion to work in your regular Windows command prompts, change the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\CommandProcessor\Completio nChar to 9 (TAB in ASCII).
:)
Then, you can tab complete (it will actually TAB complete the whole word, and you can cycle through words beginning with the characters typed by continuously hitting TAB.).
Ahhhh... much better
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
three seperate methods to access the old view, one of which is even on the panel by default
Yes, but no way to change this behavior permanently without hacking Gconf settings - which is precisely what Nick was talking about
This is the same Petreley who predicted that both Caldera & VA Software would be HUGE.
Perhaps he doesn't quite know as much as he thinks he does.
Cheers Koz
No, Ximian is duplicating Microsoft's work (reimplementing it from scratch), not porting Microsoft's GPL'd code. See my other reply to your post.
I dont think its unreasonable to assume that most people using a computer can read. I'd expect anyone who can read English can understand "Double click speed" a lot quicker than some ambiguous looking drawings of a mouse button being pressed. Fact is, if you have pictures like in the mac example, you have to figure out what they mean; if you use text you can just say. IMO icons should be used as hints to the user to help them navigate, not as the actual labels themselves.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
:-( :-(
ROFL LOL
Are you seriously trying to tell me that it isn't the resposibility of the Gnome developers produce what the Gnome users want?
Was I saying that, or was I saying that he sounds like someone that would appreciate the design decisions of KDE? You have a choice, you know... you can even mix and match if you don't want to fully choose between them. It's not hard to use substitute konqueror for nautilus if you like it. I just don't get what all the complaining is about -- Gnome isn't broken, it's just different from what they seem want. All I was doing is pointing out that he seemed to be wanting what KDE is providing.
501 Not Implemented
Properly, configuration should work like a database that enforces invariants. You can try changes, but you can't commit them unless they're consistent. Some of that consistency involves checking with other parts of the system. Only once you have a sanity-checking engine underneath is it appropriate to put a GUI on top. Otherwise, it will inevitably get out of sync.
With a reasonable database, you don't have the same information in more than one place. If you need another view of it, that's obtained by query. For example, if installed programs export to the database the file suffixes they understand, finding which programs can read a given file is a lookup operation. You don't want to have a separate list of "who understands what".
The Windows registry is not a database. It's a tree of tuples, with no mechanism to insure consistency or security. That's not a good example to look at.
Look at how major databases (not,sadly, MySQL) manage consistency. You don't need a full scale database engine, though, because writes are infrequent and the database is small.
Too true. I consider fluxbox to be the best wm I've ever used(especially 0.9.9). The only thing wrong with it is the toolcar doesn't go on the left anymore. Other than that, I consider fluxbox to be my desktop. Gnome happens to be running on it, but really, it's just a fancy panel.
Nautilus has a few of the Apple developers on board. They seem to be living in the past.
What the article doesn't say is that there is always the possibility to go back to WindowMaker. Or even to (yuck) KDE.
realkiwi
K's QT isn't truely OSS since you have to pay out the ass to use it on Windows, so I avoid it on principle.
Comments like this really bother me.
Don't worry about it dude. The kinds of people who make those comments and pick toolkits on principle, most likely have never and will never implement anything substantial in said toolkits that they or others would use. Completely stupid.
Sorry, I'm in the wrong area. I thought this article was about Travelocity commercials!
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
This is a PR disaster the m$ marketing droids must be salivating over. What lovely copy for them: bad UI design, knee-jerk flaming, PHB reluctance.
It's not an obstacle, it's an opportunity. Don't write off Petreley and esr, they are trying to help you by putting the message of the users into a form you might find easier to understand. Users are not necessarily stupid, just conservative. And they will avoid you if you confuse them.
Please learn this lesson; if I have to read this sort of thing again in another two years time, I'll know it's too late for FOSS. That's seriously all the time you're going to get.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Someone should let this guy know that you can in fact prevent Nautilus from opening everything in new windows, just because KDE holds your hand through every little thing doesn't mean that all desktop environments work that way. Isn't part of using Linux being able to tweak things to your liking? If he put time into checking out things like gconf-editor, he wouldn't have made himself look like such a biased KDE fanboy.
If you need names in order to refute arguments, then your position was never strong to begin with.
Comments like this really bother me. What, were you planning on running KDE on Windows?
Perhaps he was planning on building a cross-platform application. Then, it definitely sucks that there is no OSS version of QT for Windows. That might be a reason to build GTK apps (or build for another GUI toolkit) and steer away from KDE/QT.
Here's the truth: QT on X11 has been licensed under the GPL for almost 4 years.
How true and how not relevant at all to his complaint. Read my lips: QT/X11 is not QT/Win!
And I think that's a good thing. Any publicity is good publicity, after all. At least linux will be on their "radar screen". Maybe they'll mention the article to one of their technical underlings, who will bring up alternatives to Gnome, or point out some of its strong points.
Or, far more likely, said pointy-haired individual will freak out whenever he hears the word 'gnome' (heaven help the underling talking about his RPG) and won't consider Gnome as a viable option until Computer World prints a new review saying that Gnome is good again.
And there wasn't much mention of Linux. About the only way you'll get bosses vaguely interested in checking out the options is if they really badly want to escape Microsoft - even if they're just vaguely unhappy with them, they'll probably stick around. Certainly, bosses aren't going to make the connection that 'Gnome' is related to 'Linux' from that article unless they're already knee-deep in alternatives, in which case it's not exactly earth-shattering.
Although, if we're talking boss of the pointy-haired variety instead of boss of the vaguely-clued variety, they'll stick with Windows for their own PC anyway because they're already familiar with it.
I get that the author never uses Gnome, that much is obvious, if he did he'd know about Gconfd, which will allow him to change this horrible behaviour, and thus take away the only point in his two page diatribe.
The dumbest compliant is implied. He acts as if though desktop Linux will be harmed by his inability to understand Gnome. Sure, his article is harmful for not mentioning the many fine alternatives to Gnome that you can have on your computer without interfeering with Gnome. Nicholas, if you want a file browser that works the way you like it and you can't figure out the keystrokes within Gnome, just call up Konqueror. It and Gnome's file manager run just fine in Window Maker, OLVDM, Enlightenment, Fluxbox or even KDE or Gnome. You always have other options with free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"There is no law that says that you cannot create a niche product which suits only a particular group of people. Or do you think that they shouldn't be allowed to create a GUI that appeals to less than 50% of the users?"
:-) The fact they haven't got an obligation to change anything does not make the criticism unvalid, however. You are confounding the two things, it seems. 'Bugger off' can be a statement indicating they are not willing to change, but it is a very weak response to criticism.
There is no law that says you can't move to another country as well (at least, in the USA). I think they are allowed to do whatever they want, but that wasn't the point. My argument was about the fact that criticism is not made unvalid by the fact that one can go away, use something else or fork, etc. It was not about the validity of the critique in this particular instance, because, as I have said, I'm not really familiar enough with both GUI to make a sensible judgement on it.
"Not at all. In that case, there are many reasons which make it hard or even impossible to move:
- No country may exist which suits you (and unlike software, you cannot simply program your own country).
- The countries you like may not accept you.
- You may not want to leave your family & friends.
- You may have trouble finding a good job abroad.
- etc, etc."
I'm afraid you cloud the argument with restrictions you imagine, while they do not touch the real issue. I could as well make up restrictions to the 'then create your own fork', for instance:
- he could not be a coder
- he could not have the ability or means to do it
- he may not want to leave his group of peers that work on the application
- etc, etc.
I imagine the same people would simply say 'tough luck'. One could do the same in on the USA matter. So, you see, it's not all that different then you portrayed.
The question boils down to: Is this a strong argument? Does it invalidate the critique?
Take, for instance, that non of your objections are met, and a person could go to another country without any problems...would it then be justified to say to him: 'If you don't like it, go to another country' when that person gives criticism? Me thinks not. So it's not a question of restrictions or not that go to the core of such an argument.
"Furthermore, the idea is that in a democracy, you can try to chance the government through legal means. When using someone elses product, you can't vote or otherwise (legally) force them to do what you want."
Once again, this does not matter in regard to the argument. Would it make any difference if you hadn't the legal means? Take, he lives in a non-democratic country, and has criticism... would one be justified in saying: you have no right to critise, you can't legally vote or otherwise legally force us to do what you want, so if you don't like it, bugger off!" Would you think this reaction would be justified, then?
"The capitalist dogma say that if you really know better, you will drive the other guys out of the market. So if you think that the 'bugger off' reasoning is weak, then you should also have a problem with capitalism."
LOL! Seems a tad demagogic if you ask me. I'm not in favor of unbridled capitalism, but I think it's the best of all the (bad) economies we have, currently. I think the 'bugger off' reasoning is weak as a way to handle criticism. I do not think it's weak to conquer the market per sé. So, it comes down to what your purpose is, but in my post I talked about the response to criticism, not gaining marketshare.
The difference may seem subtle to some, but in fact it's not all that difficult to grasp. Take MS for example: it has a huge marketshare, but it still doesn't mean criticism that points out the weak security of windows is unvalid because people can buy another OS.
"But the guys who spend their time and money to build something have got a right to disagree with you and tell you to build your own (or get someone else to build what you want). They don't have any obligation to change what they like into something you like."
I'm a free-speech addict: anyone can disagree with anyone for my part.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I'm afraid we seem to have a different premise. you seem to equal 'not being obliged to change' with 'a valid response to criticism', while I don't.
You make artificial distinctions between my comparison of choosing countries and that of chosing other GUI. For instance, I have demonstrated that you can find similar restrictions for GUI or OS'es too, to which you respond by claiming it's incomparable because you can 'create' the one and not the other.
First of all, the original post said: "If you don't like it, that's okay with them -- use a different WM/desktop." *USE*, not *create*. Thus, the analogy with use (go to) another country is the most correct one, and not create.
Apart from that, you're counteragruments are: well, if you can't create it your own, you could pay someone (etc). Well, if you can't create your own, pay some mercenaries to overthrow some little Island-state. You see? Throwing imaginary restrictions and solutions can be done both ways, always. It's not even correct to state it's impossible to create one; the folks of Sealand have done it. It just takes a lot of money, which, granted, few of us have, but then we come to the same argument you gave by saying it doesn't matter if someone has the means (to pay someone) to create a GUI or OS.
"Actually, MS is a monopoly which means that you don't have a good enough choice to buy another OS. That is also why there are laws that (can) change the game when a monopoly is involved. At that point, we feel that the capitalism game is no longer functioning."
Once again you seem to miss the point and confuse things. The whole market-analysis-thing doesn't enter the picture. It *doesn't matter* if MS has a monopoly or not. Even if it had only 75% of the market and thus was not a monopoly, would that change anything? Of course not. It would *still* not mean criticism that points out the weak security of windows is unvalid because people can buy another OS. And if they would say 'bugger off' to that criticism, it would still be a very weak response to it.
"It depends. Some criticism is simply a matter of taste."
As we all know, there is no discussion possible about taste, on itself. Therefor, if someone only vents a personal opinion or taste, there is no way of going into the question in any meaningfull way. On this we can agree. But even then one could explain that choices/tastes differ, and why you prefer the one and not the other, instead of saying 'bugger off', which has the least amount of rationale to offer. And the moment he tries to justify or give reasons and arguments for it, however, the ballgame changes even more, because then you can (should) respond on those arguments, and not make a weak 'bugger off' statement.
Now, in this particular instance, the guy gave a lot of opinionated criticism without much substance, but that doesn't mean 'bugger off' isn't a weak response anymore. And in some cases, like with the nautilusthingy, he did try to argument it, which is even less served with making such a statement.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
"If you are completely free to choose (where all possible options are available), then it is completely fair to say that you shouldn't complain about certain options"
vs.
"That is true and in real life, the question of choice is never absolute. You never have infinite choice and rarely no choice."
That says it all, really.
Since absolute free choice does not exist (dixit yourself), it is not 'completely fair' to say that you shouldn't complain about certain options.
If it's not completely fair, it's partially unfair, which makes it a weak response (because of the unfairness of the response) to criticism, which was what I argumented in my first post.
No one will argue it's unfair when people actually give counter-arguments to the criticism instead of just saying 'bugger off', however.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Welcome to being persecuted for _what_ you believe rather than the relative merit thereof. The irony would be delicious if it weren't so sad.
You actually had a point but it doesn't matter with this crowd. Groupthink.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I think we already went over this with the discussion between me and Sinterklaas. ;-)
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
It (StarOffice) wasn't a free software package when it was designed. Now that it is free, developers are trying to break it up into modules.
I just metamod'd the troll Unfair.