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."

Comments

Reply from one of the Ars Technica crew

[unmadindu]

Jorge Castro, one of the Ars Technica writers has written a very nice article refutng Petreley's claims at his site.

Nothing new here

[Mars Ultor]

Not too surprising really - here's an earlier article when GNOME 2.2 was still hot. From the article:

KDE is delivering a better version of what GNOME's goal has apparently morphed into: becoming a great component framework that you can write to in multiple languages. Nicholas Petreley rebuffs the common GNOME battle slogans and explains why the window-manager's name needs reworking.

Other than boosting ad views, I'm not sure what continuing a KDE/GNOME flamewar here on /. really contributes to open discussion (pardon the pun)

Re:Don't panic... it's not that bad

[andyross]

Obviously its just my opinion, but the way Nautilus browses the file system is backwards compared to 2.4, and the removal of the tree in a left hand pane was a very bad decision.

The tree has not been removed! Right click on something and select "browse" and you have your old Nautilus back. Not enough? Make a launcher on your desktop and have it run "nautilus --browser". Still not enough? Put it in a menu (FC2 already does). Still not enough? Delete all the spatial icons from your desktop and you will never see it again.

Good grief. You would think that "expert users" who can handle the complexities of a browser-based file interface might be able to, y'know, configure their desktops before whining about it in public.

Re:Don't panic... it's not that bad

[spectre_240sx]

"Seems like people are always complaining that GNOME and KDE don't innovate, and when they do everybody gets upset."

Did you miss the part that OS/2, Win95 and early Mac OS versions worked this way too? How is it inovation if it's already been done before?

The whole idea of the spacial file management system is to bring the metaphor of files and folders closer to what it is in the real world. However, that comes at a loss in usability, and there's no reason to try to do this if people are already comfortable with the way that file managers work at the moment.

Re:Don't panic... it's not that bad

[cweditor]

Glad to see so much interest in one of our columns :-)

For the record, this column appeared on page 30 of Computerworld's print edition this week, on the last page of our Technology section. Nicholas Petreley is one of several different columnists who rotate writing for that Tech opinion page. (There is an opinion column on the last page of the print publication's Management section as well.)

Our print readers have seen quite a bit of coverage of Linux and open source in addition to this column. Two weeks ago, for example, one of our cover features was A Sunny Forecast For Open Source, about how weather.com has cut IT costs by one-third after moving away from proprietary software and hardware. It was one of the most-read stories on our site that week.

Sharon Machlis
Online Managing Editor
Computerworld