The GNOME Roadmap

glockenspieler writes "Recently on the the Gnome Foundation mailing list, Dave Camp posted a draft Gnome Roadmap for versions 2.8 and Beyond. Issues up for discussion are Mozilla/Epiphany, incorportation of peer to peer filesharing, blogging, addition of more media widgets, and many others. Time for Gnome users to weigh in on what improvements that you would like to see. If that's not enough, then there's always the the C# versus Java versus ? discussion."

Comments

They should stick with C

[JoeShmoe950]

Personally I use KDE, but I used to use gnome. Not as pretty, but its faster and lighter than KDE. Take out C/C++ (forget which they right it in), and use Java or C#, they just made it bulkier and much slower. That would be their main opinion IMO. Gnome doesn't look bad, but most people I've talked to think KDE looks better. Take away Gnome's advantage in this situation, and they don't have much going for them.

Re:They should stick with C

[Daimaou]

I feel just the opposite. I think Gnome's interface is elegant and KDE's inteface, while very colorful, it cluttered and knobby.

I can't put my finger on what it is, but there is something about KDE's interface that makes me angry. That may sound dumb, but I can only use KDE for a short while because it is emotionally exhausting to me and always leaves me feeling irritated.

KDE does many things right it my opinion (for example, their support for multiple keyboard layouts is excellent), but something about KDE is emotionally draining to me so I don't use it.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel the same way.

KDE is disco.

Re:They should stick with C

[Nasarius]

They use C, according to the article. I don't see why they're not considering C++. Unlike Java and C#, it's meant to be natively compiled, and it's a lot easier to write "clean" code with C++ rather than C, IMO. If nothing else, the STL is a beautiful thing when implemented properly.

Re:They should stick with C

[Jameth]

"KDE isn't standardized/cross platform enough"

Uh, what? GNOME is no more cross-platform. They run on the various *nixes.

"GTK is easily the most painful widget set, both graphically and programmatically, that I have ever used."

Oh, you were talking about the Widget set? Guess what: Qt is the most cross-platform one of those. (In case you didn't know, Qt is what KDE uses.)

Re:They should stick with C

[arkanes]

Because it's very easy to expose a C api to practically any language in existence but very difficult to expose a C++ one to anything except C++, and in fact it's generally done by flattening the API to a C one. I prefer C++ myself but for a library that is meant to be widely used and called having the base layer be in C makes oodles of sense.

Re:They should stick with C

[caseih]

I think both java and C# have a huge place in Gnome app development. As an example of an impressive app (that's pretty speedy) written for gtk in java, see Azureus. Eclipse is another app written in java that really rocks. Both are speedy, probably as fast as they would be if written in C or C++.

The few C# gtk/gnome apps I've seen look great too. Just like the transition to enterprise frameworks like j2ee is the only sustainable way to do large-scale web development, using C# or java or some other tool is the only way to sustain large-scale client application development in the long run. Sure you can do it in C or C++, but sooner or layer the maintenance issues will get really expensive.

Re:They should stick with C

[Nasarius]

No argument here. Write the libraries that are meant to be reused in C, write the core system in C++. Actually, the libraries can probably be written in C++ internally, as long as their parameters and return types are C-compatible. I'm not 100% certain on that though :)

Re:They should stick with C

[rmull]

extern "C" {
.
.
.
}

Re:They should stick with C

[Eslyjah]

I'd like to see them use Objective-C. I think it would be a relatively painless switch.

Re:They should stick with C

[mmusson]

Actually I think Gnome looks better. It's somehow more clean and streamlined. But no question, KDE is more integrated and powerful. I cannot decide between them myself so I run KDE on FreeBSD and Gnome on Gentoo...

Re:They should stick with C

[minkwe]

I feel exactly the same. Are you a mind reader or some'n

Re:They should stick with C

[SphericalCrusher]

Yeah, you have a really good point. Depending on the operating system that I use really changes my mood for the desktop environment. I'm a really old school RedHat user, so I'm used to GNOME... and even today, I prefer it over KDE. I don't really hate KDE anymore though... SuSE 9.1 (which I'm also a big fan of) really changed the way I think about it. Maybe it was just the cute little Tux My Computer icon, but I really love the way KDE looks now. I just wish that MoZilla wasn't so etchy on it... Konquerer, although the great browser that it is, gets really tiresome... especially when the windows in your OS look jaggy.

But personally, I'll use whichever DE the distro. I'm using is running -- rather that be KDE or GNOME.

Re:They should stick with C

[roror]

I don't know how you find eclipse gtk build "speedy". It just sucks in my machine. page redraw takes so long when scrolling..

Re:They should stick with C

[Colin Smith]

I have to disagree. In fact I take the opposite view entirely. I find the Gnome user interface to be clean fairly consistent and elegant. But it is slow. KDE is busy, inconsistent and distracting but is significantly faster than Gnome.

Re:They should stick with C

[farzadb82]

I think it has more to do with the fact that it looks more like Windows than other WMs.

I feel the same way, unfortunately, I found earlier versions of Gnome (= 2.2) to be worst than KDE and therefore didn't make the switch until 2.4, and I have loved it since. Although, I wouldn't mind them putting in an option to turn off the spatial crap without having to go into gconf.

Re:They should stick with C

[RichiP]

I have to agree that the language for development should change. In the same way that OSes aren't written in assembly language anymore, desktop applications should be written in languages that make sense for them.

I'm used to coding in C, Java, PHP, Perl, etc. I have to admit it would be much easier to write apps in higher level languages than C. Not to mention getting rid of nasty bugs which one could accidentally stumble on while programming in C (like memory management) that's inconvenient to work around with with macros and functions.

Instead, consider the high level language for ease-of-development, maintainability, flexibility and performance in implementation. As much as I love Java and abhor C#, it's beginning to look a lot like Mono might be the better route. Java VM is just too slow (I've used it from developing Hello World programs to embedded apps, commandline apps and full-blown desktops apps). Even the HelloWorld app is slow in all the JVMs I've tried (IBM, Sun, Blackdown) on the various platforms (Windows, linux).

Re:They should stick with C

[spectre_240sx]

I'll put in another vote for Objective-C here. I'd really like to see this language take hold. However, I'm not a hardcore developer, so there may be reasons not to use Objective-C that I don't know about.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Are eclipse speedy??? It's annoyingly slow here. That's why I've given up on using eclipse. Tried it for 15 seconds, and that was enough.

Re:They should stick with C

[gid]

I think gnome looks better as well, which is one reason I run it, that and half the apps I use are gtk apps anyway. Gnome 2.6 is really pretty nice, nautilus is finally useable.

Re:They should stick with C

[Euphonious Coward]

They don't need to "consider" C++. It's already fully supported, via Murray Cummings's gtkmm and gnomemm wrappers. He also has an application framework called "Bakery" to make it easier to churn out apps. All we need is to transcribe programs written in the proprietary languages into Free, standard C++, and make them faster, more robust, and easier to install at the same time.

Miguel and his cronies are oddly superstitious toward C++. They have probably never actually seen it in its modern (standard) form, probably having been exposed only to early MSVC++. You generally don't even know if you're running a C++ program; they are easy to install (no buggy JVM) and they don't tend to crash or leak, so they don't call attention to themselves. Apt-get is a C++ program; were you ever obliged to notice?

It's a shame that Ximian are planning to make Evolution 2 depend on Mono. Looks like it's time to fork. I'd be happy to stick with Evo 1.4.x, myself. Nothing they talk about adding for 2 is anything I want.

Re:They should stick with C

[FooBarWidget]

Azureus is not written in GTK, but in SWT. SWT has a GTK binding.

Re:They should stick with C

[udippel]

It's getting boring, but yes, maybe someone with a bit of brain in HCI or psychology can help out here. I wouldn't mind at all to like KDE (which I do technically), but I cannot help to find its icons ugly. So I thought and said (in here, to lower my karma, it seemed).

But actually, no, it has something in it; something highly unsympathetic. The panel could help: It already starts with the panel. I tried all my best to configure it so I wouldn't hate it, but I couldn't. And I'm no GNOME zealot, either. Especially since IMHO it is getting worse per stable version. KDE would be my desktop of dreams for a corporate deployment. Only, I would not want to force my users to this emotionally sucking UI; this UI with a high hate potential.

An amazing outcome: Let someone find out why it comes across with this load of aversion induction; finally correct this and we'd have a unified desktop.

No kidding.

Re:They should stick with C

[murrayc]

Evolution 2 will not depend on Mono, and Ximian have assured the GNOME community that they have no plans to make future versions of Evolution depend on Mono until Mono is part of the GNOME Platform - something that is also very unlikely to happen.

Re:They should stick with C

[ichimunki]

Either way, I wish someone would do for Evolution what Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox have done for Mozilla. I don't need all that non-email stuff and I find Evolution's composer interface really annoying. Probably I need to RTFM some more and learn how to tweak it, but it's really as bad as Outlook when it comes to replying, colored formatting, etc.

KMail would be my client of choice except that I'm a hardcore GNOME fan in every other possible respect (especially the part of me that likes the cross-platform GPL-itude of gtk+ and the excellent Ruby-GNOME2 bindings). I'm not loading Qt and KDE just to read email.

Re:They should stick with C

[Brandybuck]

You could write a library with both C and C++ interfaces. They're not unusual, except in the GNU community which is historically hostile to C++.

Re:They should stick with C

[Mr.Sharpy]

Works great on Windows!!!

Re:They should stick with C

[It'sYerMam]

And here's your advantage: you had the choice!

I actually committed a crime here; I couldn't be bothered switching to KDE, after I'd got gnome sorted out + beautiful.
On the upgrade, I decided not to install KDE, and then before I'd got GNOME set up, I discovered XFCE4 - and loved it. It's slick and fast which, although I have more than adequate hardware, is refreshing. It also looks rather juicy, with all the GTK 2 themes available for it, some of its own, and also XFWM themes. Unfortunately, the ones for XFWM are not nearly as good as metacity ones, but there are some nice options there.

Getting back to the point, I found GNOME to be very beautiful, as already stated - with skins, I don't see an excuse for an ugly desktop, however.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I agree 100%.

Buttons, buttons, buttons, preferences, preferences, preferences, buttons,....

Do KDE people spend day configuring or what? You can never get bored of preferences, you can spend days on them.

Hell, even open dialog has more buttons than average software. And every app has what, 3-4 preference dialog boxes and each has 5-6 tabs??? Start menu never fits on usual 1024x768 (at least unless you use preferences).

Re:They should stick with C

[codemachine]

Or you could use Mozilla Thunderbird, which did the same to Mozilla Messenger as FireFox did to Navigator.

I'm a KMail user myself though, so I can't vouch for Thunderbird.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

For god's sake, the GNOME and KDE interfaces are bloody identical except for "Cancel"/"OK" button placement.

I lived in Gnome 2.4 for a while and loved it. Out of curiosity I gave KDE 3.2 a try. Initially I didn't like the setup but with a couple very small changes I made it look IDENTICAL to my Gnome setup. It looks, works, and feels exactly the same, with pretty much the exact same applets (except the KDE ones actually work better, like the weather applet and the ticker applet). Hell, KDE even makes GNOME/GTK apps use the same colour scheme. Konqueror doesn't work as well as Nautilus, and actually feels a lot less stable. But everything is functionally identical.

Re:They should stick with C

[abischof]

I can't put my finger on what it is, but there is something about KDE's interface that makes me angry. That may sound dumb, but I can only use KDE for a short while because it is emotionally exhausting to me and always leaves me feeling irritated.

It may be KDE's tight letter spacing in menus that's getting to you (screenshot). As the article puts it, menus "read like a sentence instead of being wisely spaced out". I couldn't put my finger on my KDE-anger either, but I'm now thinking that the menu spacing may have something to do with it ;).

Re:They should stick with C

[Feztaa]

I agree, I find that KDE's Plastik theme is very appealing to my eyes, but the fact that most KDE apps have way too many buttons and menus and crap strewn all over the UI is extremely annoying. Konqueror, Kmail, and Kopete in particular are completely unusable. In fact, the only KDE apps that I actually prefer to their GNOME counterparts are k3b and digikam, but even then, the latest gtkam has risen to the "good enough" level where preserving widget toolkit purity becomes more important than the small relative advantages of using digikam.

Sometimes I feel that GNOME takes the simplicity to a painful extreme, though (epiphany -- the bookmarks aren't even heirarchical! Just a flat list of "categories" -- think heirarchical, but with a maximum 1 level of depth).

Besides that, I like the GTK2 appearance, especially with the bluecurve theme.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't put my finger on my KDE-anger either,

So, have any of you guys like hulked out, turned huge and green, and then smashed your systems yet? ;)

I like Gnome quite a bit, but the speed of fluxbox is where it's at for me.

Re:They should stick with C

[Feztaa]

I don't know about the original poster, but I don't think the menus are a problem for me. It's the button toolbars that really bother me.

In your linked screenshot, look at the "Configure Desktop" window... that's a perfect example what I do like about KDE.. Plastik is very appealing, it's simple and not cluttered... but then look at all those Konq windows... what the hell are all those buttons? My current Galeon window has 8 buttons on the toolbar, and 3 of them I rarely ever use anyway... Konq's menus are just as bad, and other KDE apps are similarly terrible in that regard.

Re:They should stick with C

[timotten]

Tim: Hi, my name is Tim.

Slashdot: Hello, Tim

Tim: I used to use KDE. I've been sober for 6 months now.

Slashdot Leader: When did you realize that KDE wasn't healthy for you?

Tim: I just always... I got angry and irritable. My wife started getting concerned. I tried doing less KDE, but... then, some lonely night when my wife was at a meeting, I'd see that KAtomic icon staring back at me. It made feel less lonely. Then one day I was trying to edit a menu -- I wanted KAtomic to be in the K menu -- and I just couldn't figure it out. There must have been 30,000 icons on the screen, but none of them made it work. And then my little girl tries to show me how, and I slapped her hand off my mouse. She started crying and said, "Daddy I wish KDE was never invented!"

Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: A lot of people cope with loneliness by getting angry or acting out.

Tim: No, it's more like I'd turn to KDE to take away my inner loneliness, but then it would just make me angry with the people who really should make me happy.

Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: I think you're really angry with yourself.

Slashdot Leader: Mr. Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person has a lot of experience with anger. Maybe you two can help each other.

Tim: Well, I mean, I don't want to share everything with the group. Some things are just private.

Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: You should really be more honest and open. When more people are looking at your personal life, it's easier to find the flaws. Many eyeballs, you know.

Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: You should really GPL your life.

Teenage-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Yeah, I'd like to see how your wife works on the inside.

Tim: No, really, some things are personal.

Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Don't you like open source?

Tim: I guess not.

Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Kill him!

Teenage-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Kill him! His widow will date geeks!

Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Mod him down! Troll! Troll!

[*Tim's karma becomes negative*]

Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Now I need something else to do.

Re:They should stick with C

[GedConk]

You know, it is really wierd. I have the same problem (and judging by the replies, many others do).

KDE is arguably easier, more polished, prettier, etc than Gnome, but for some reason I keep getting back to Gnome.

To be honest, I have not installed KDE in quite a while, as I'm quite pleased with Gnome 2.6 (I have used Gnome since RedHat9 and now i'm using it on Gentoo).

Still something always bothered me about KDE.

I wonder if the KDE team is aware of that ? And if so, do they know what cause this ? If yes, are they willing to modify KDE to address the issue or simply ignore it and let us wierdos and hippies :P:P:P continue to use other desktops ?

Re:They should stick with C

[TrekCycling]

Hate to say "me too", but me too. I dislike KDE not for speed or what it does, but because the way it looks just *bothers* me. Gnome is easy on the eyes, even if it isn't as customizable.

Re:They should stick with C

[Markus Registrada]

"Evolution 2 will not depend on Mono"

Hm, that's not what Nat said in the interview I read last month, or what I have been getting from the Advogato diary entries of the developers. Here's hoping you're right.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

They practically implement their own Objective-C runtime in Gtk with GObject.

But there's plenty of reasons not to use Objective-C:

1. No parametric polymorphism.
2. Multiple orthogonal type systems in the same language without (1) to unify them in generic ways.
3. Stupid restrictions regarding selector names and static typing.
4. Inefficient monomorphic dispatch.
5. Not type-safe.
6. Anything you hate about C applies to Objective-C.

There's no reason to use Objective-C. If you like Objective-C, then you will like Smalltalk better. Anything that needs to be more efficient than can be made in Smalltalk can be written as a portable extension in C. The object system in Objective-C is inefficient, so there's no real argument there. As an object-oriented language Smalltalk is better. As a portable assembly language C is better.

There's no major framework for Objective-C besides the one created by NeXT. Reimplementing one from scratch would be pointless. Using NeXT's would mean you might as well install GNUStep.

Re:They should stick with C

[vandan]

Don't like GTK?

I've been porting our Access databases to Perl / Gtk2 and I've been having a great time doing it. It's a little more complicated that Access, but much faster and much more versatile. I'm just sorry I didn't stick at it the first time I tried. I would have saved myself a lot of duplicated development now...

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono is slower than any major JVM. I don't say that because I like Java (I actually rather dislike Java as a language, and find its performance (especially memory consumption) to be unacceptable for most non-trivial applications involving one machine.

I don't really like C# either, but it's a better language than Java. The CLR is a better JVM than the JVM; Microsoft was simply more pragmatic in designing .NET.

However, Mono is slow. It's incomplete as well. IBM or Sun's JVM are both faster and more complete than Mono, and actually have real garbage collectors to boot. You can write software in Java today, and it will work better than software composed in the same manner with Mono.

Which isn't saying much, really.

However I should point out that "Hello World" apps are stupid benchmarks for both the CLR and the JVM. They will both lose (the JVM more so) compared to any language without a full runtime environment, because they're not optimized for small programs. Ruby, Python, Perl will beat them for "Hello World." The startup cost for the JVM and CLR is high. This is why Microsoft's new "shell" uses "commandlets." Because if it had to startup a new VM to enumerate the files in a directory you would shoot your computer.

But back to my point. If you want to write programs then Java is better than Mono today. It will probably be better than Mono three years from now as well. If you think GNOME should be rewritten today, and be portable, than it makes way more sense to target the JVM than Mono. However if you think that GNOME has restarted all of its development way more than enough for the lifetime of one project, you should have them focus on making it into a collection of components that can be easily used in language-agnostic ways without forcing that language agnosticism to come at being half-assed implementations on the CLR or JVM. But if you really want that, then the JVM works more or less as well as the CLR for providing it.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing, since Perl is a programming language, Gtk is a graphical toolkit, and Access is a RAD database /Office component environment.

It's truly impressive that Perl is a faster database than Access. You know, it being a programming language and all.

Re:They should stick with C

[vandan]

OOOOooooooo sarcasm.
Out of grass, are we?
You need to plan ahead more.

Re:They should stick with C

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's because almost all gtk2 themes(all of gtk?) have more of a flat look while the qt themes look more bulbous in general.

And the kicked just has too many arrows... (Why not just use right click?)

I think it has more to do with the themes used than anything.

And then there's the general clutter.

Re:They should stick with C

[Ender Ryan]

So, have any of you guys like hulked out, turned huge and green, and then smashed your systems yet? ;) Oh yeah, all the time! If not for that, I'd be able to pay off my car and credit cards. Replacing my desktop machine all the time really puts a dent in my finances!

Re:They should stick with C

[ookaze]

I think both java and C# have a huge place in Gnome app development. As an example of an impressive app (that's pretty speedy) written for gtk in java, see Azureus. Eclipse is another app written in java that really rocks. Both are speedy, probably as fast as they would be if written in C or C++

Well, Azureus explains well why I am afraid of these Java and Mono desktop apps.
When I tried Azureus (a bittorrent client), I left it running for 3 days. It ate more and more memory by the hour, eating an enormous amount of memeory in the end. What's worse, none of my bittorrent downloads would advance, or were very very slow (like 1 KB/s). It was suspicious, so I tried the ncurses bittorrent client after 3 days : within 5 minutes, I was at full speed on most of the torrents !!!

I then erased Azureus without any more thought, and thought that it was no wonder some people said Bittorrent was slow, if they use such pitiful tools that eat all their memory. Because, a lot of people told me Azureus was a wonderful tool :(

Some people rported enormous memory footprints for mono apps too. And to talk about all these high level language apps I've tried, that have GTK API hooks, most of my Python GTK app still leak memory like no other. I use liferea, for example, and I still have to stop it from time to time because it leaks memory.

Re:They should stick with C

[Quattro Vezina]

I feel just the opposite. I think Gnome's interface is elegant and KDE's inteface, while very colorful, it cluttered and knobby. I can't put my finger on what it is, but there is something about KDE's interface that makes me angry. That may sound dumb, but I can only use KDE for a short while because it is emotionally exhausting to me and always leaves me feeling irritated.

Hmm...my thoughts are exactly the opposite of yours. To me, GTK/GNOME apps just look clunky and childish...like someone just slapped some widgets together on a screen. Like it's not a real program. Even the widgets by themselves don't even look real--they look like something someone scribbled.

Qt/KDE apps, on the other hand, look sleek. It looks like it's a real program, and not something that was slapped together. The widgets have real definition to them.

It's not something theme-dependent either. I've seen some decent GTK themes (ThinIce comes to mind)--hell, I even use the GTK-Qt-Engine, which uses the current Qt theme as a drawing backend, and the apps all have the same ``fake, slapped-together'' feel to them. Conversely, I've seen some pretty ugly Qt themes (Keramik, IMO, is the quintessential ``ugly Qt theme''), and the apps all feel ``real'' and well-crafted.

And I've not even gotten started on the desktops--GNOME, to me, is feature-bare and using it makes me feel like I'm crippled. KDE, on the other hand, is perfect for me.

Re:They should stick with C

[Sunnan]

While there still are plenty of bad GTK-apps out there, I'm talking about the "good" ones like Totem, the new Nautilus, or Sound-Juicer.

A good program can look minimalistic, simplistic - like something an artist would sculpt out of clay. (Is this what you mean by childlike?) The widgets that are needed, and no more.

On the other hand - Konqueror. Oh, please, no! I've tried to use it (as a web browser) but it's just so hurting. One thousand icons, menus, and frames. I don't want to bother.

Re:They should stick with C

[djhankb]

I agree. KDE has been bothering me ever since it went to 2.0.
Back in the day the KDE 1.x stuff won me over compared to Gnome. But at 2.0, I switched. I just couldn't deal.

The reason i think that it bothers me so much currently is, Konqueror. Konqueror as a web browser is ok, and it made nice in the Sarari OSX browser. But...
as a File manager.. it is unbearable. Nautilus is very nice, well, was very nice until Gnome 2.6 had to go ruin it, but that's another story.

KDE is a nice desktop, but it is just unusable to me.. that interface.. **CRINGE**

-Henry

Re:They should stick with C

[Quattro Vezina]

Actually, I was referring to GTK's godawful, toylike rendering engine more than I was referring to app design. It really makes me ill to look at.

I'll give you that Konqueror is a tad excessive, but I don't mind it. And I love KDE's abundance of options--after reading some of my last posts siblings, I prolly spent a bit too much time talking about how much I dislike GTK's rendering, and not enough on how much I dislike the GNOME desktop.

I like clutter. Wait--scratch that--I like useful clutter (with a dash of fun clutter as well). I like features. I like options. I like control. I feel crippled in any environment that doesn't give me that, and I hate feeling crippled. I also don't like it when things appear empty--it makes me feel like something's supposed to go there, but it's not there, and it drives me nuts.

If you don't like clutter on your desktop, you'd probably faint if you were to look at mine. Since I'll not Slashdot my server, I'll just describe it in the next paragraph.

First off, I have three Kicker panels--one on the left, at ``Normal'' size, and two on the bottom: one at ``Normal'' size, the other at ``Small'' size. All three are full of buttons, options, and applets. I count 32 clickable icons in my left panel alone. If you were to minimise all open windows, you'd see that I have GKrellM and two SuperKaramba applets running (no desktop icons, however--they're useless, IMO). One SuperKaramba applet shows the weather, the other displays a Fortune message that updates every 60 seconds. GKrellM has most options enabled, plus a plugin or two.

Back to the point--some people here said they don't like KDE because it feels too crowded. I don't like GNOME because it feels too empty. That, and the rendering engine sucks hard.

Re:They should stick with C

[Quattro Vezina]

Only, I would not want to force my users to this emotionally sucking UI; this UI with a high hate potential.

An amazing outcome: Let someone find out why it comes across with this load of aversion induction; finally correct this and we'd have a unified desktop.

No kidding.

Funny how this thread here is the only place where I've heard about anything like this. Most places people are talking about KDE, they're either praising the UI or are talking about other aspects of KDE (and usually in the positive).

Re:They should stick with C

[udippel]

I think I did mention that technically, KDE is better IMHO.

It is the first time OP made me aware, that, yes, there is something repellent about it. Surely not for everyone, but for quite a few; to my big surprise.
And it made me think, could I lay a finger on it; why? No, just the panel is enough; though I have no explanation, I wouldn't want to work with it. Ever.

Re:They should stick with C

[Sunnan]

I've seen awful themes with both engines, and I kind of dislike both.

I was only discussing the "clutter vs emptiness" situation.

I do like it calm, clean and simple, and yes, I've been known to faint at cluttered desktops/panel configurations. I have so many open applications anyway, so I'd like them to be as polite as possible.

I occasionally have lavaps running since that's one of the easiest, calmest way to both see if there's something wrong going on and to do something about it (e.g. send signals to processes). I don't like gkrellm.

Installing a DE and finding it empty vs cluttered is somewhat like moving into a new room or apartment. If it's empty, I'll gladly mess it up myself, adding what I want - or (not bloody likely, but one can dream..) keep it clean.

Finding it already cluttered is a fun place to visit but I don't want to move in there.

Wow. Out of touch..

[stratjakt]

Can't people just install their own peer-to-peer and blogging apps?

Why not make an installation system that works as simply as clicking setuppackage.msi is in Windows and let the other problems solve themselves?

Why not just make a working desktop first?

Sheesh. Yeah, this year will be the year of linux-on-the-desktop now that we have integrated blogging. That was sure the barrier for entry to me.

When is too much

[vxvxvxvx]

Do we really want blogging software, p2p software, etc included with gnome? Is gnome so perfect in other respects to justify adding features that 0.01% of people are going to use? I think a better use of resources would be improving and debugging the current Gnome programs before adding this -- someone else can always program p2p apps and blogging software.

Re:When is too much

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad when a valid criticism -- namely that Gnome should focus on providing an excellent desktop -- gets modded as "troll" because some moderator thinks built-in P2P and blogging apps are Gee-Whiz Nifty(tm).

Seriously, folks. It's the Gnome Desktop Environment, not the Gnome Application Library.

Re:When is too much

[Bert690]

I agree including blogging is just stupid.... however an integrated p2p file sharing tool or user-friendly personal webserver would rock. Everyone has to share/move around files at some point, whereas very few have anything interesting enough to say to justify a blog. Yeah I realize we have scp but that's not real friendly when you need to move something to a non-linux box, or want to push something out to multiple parties.

Re:When is too much

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. They should stick to those parts that are absolutely necessary to run a basic desktop and develop the other stuff seperately. I don't see why blogging, p2p etc. should be default features.

Re:When is too much

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez. So, you want concentrate on some other things? Why not - everyone is allowed to contribute. Just do it [tm]

Re:When is too much

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly do you think a desktop environment is? If it's not a blogging tool then it's not a word processor, nor a clock applet.

The future is BRIGHT

[Gilesx]

After reading this roadmap, I'm left with nothing but warm feelings of loveliness.

First off, working with Mozilla Firebird is a stroke of genius. There are a heck of a lot of man hours being put in on that project, we should utilise them rather than recovering ground already trod upon by the lizard.

Secondly, integrating both Ximian, Gnome-DB, calendering and address book tightly into Gnome could be a great leap towards a working Dashboard project. This alone looks like propelling Gnome into pole position - it's a genuinely innovative feature, not yet seen on any other desktop, and only hinted at by Microsoft so far. Beating Microsoft to the punch would certainly be a coup.

The other really encouraging thing is the following paragraph:

--
One area in which GNOME has lagged behind other desktop operating
systems like Windows and Mac OS X is tight integration with hardware.
GNOME is working with the freedesktop.org community to make
plug-and-play hardware management just work.
--

For me this highlights that Gnome has moved well into position as the premier Linux desktop, and rather than concentrating on what KDE are doing, they are focusing on bigger fish :) Looks like all those Sun corporate installations helped a little bit! Also, the close work the Gnome community is putting in alongside freedesktop.org is a *very* good thing. Integrating the desktop with the hardware is something Windows has been able to (alledgedly) do since '95, and it's about time we had that too! New users certainly need to be able to plug their digicam in and have it "just work", and if this can all be incorporated with Nautilus and the CD burner module, transferring pictures could be as easy as insert camera, insert blank CD and click Go. Gnome could fast be approaching Apple levels of usability!

I want my 2.8!

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[Telex4]

One area in which GNOME has lagged behind other desktop operating
systems like Windows and Mac OS X is tight integration with hardware.
GNOME is working with the freedesktop.org community to make
plug-and-play hardware management just work.

For me this highlights that Gnome has moved well into position as the premier Linux desktop, and rather than concentrating on what KDE are doing, they are focusing on bigger fish :)

Personally, as KDE user I hope GNOME does this too, because where GNOME makes big improvements in areas like that, KDE generally follows, and vice versa, especially when freedesktop.org is involved :-) I also hope that GNOME doesn't approach it as a "let's get one up on the other desktop environments" exercise, as some users seem to advocate (and yes, the same can be said for some users of all desktop environments).

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[VisorGuy]

I believe this is where D-BUS comes in... And that is already or will soon be supported in KDE.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[Jameth]

------
--
One area in which GNOME has lagged behind other desktop operating
systems like Windows and Mac OS X is tight integration with hardware.
GNOME is working with the freedesktop.org community to make
plug-and-play hardware management just work.
--

For me this highlights that Gnome has moved well into position as the premier Linux desktop, and rather than concentrating on what KDE are doing, they are focusing on bigger fish :) Looks like all those Sun corporate installations helped a little bit! Also, the close work the Gnome community is putting in alongside freedesktop.org is a *very* good thing. Integrating the desktop with the hardware is something Windows has been able to (alledgedly) do since '95, and it's about time we had that too! New users certainly need to be able to plug their digicam in and have it "just work", and if this can all be incorporated with Nautilus and the CD burner module, transferring pictures could be as easy as insert camera, insert blank CD and click Go. Gnome could fast be approaching Apple levels of usability!

------

Guess what? When working with freedesktop.org, they're also working with KDE. Just shut up.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[theantix]

First off, working with Mozilla Firebird is a stroke of genius. There are a heck of a lot of man hours being put in on that project, we should utilise them rather than recovering ground already trod upon by the lizard.

I'm not so sure -- Epiphany and Firefox are very different projects. Certainly they have similar stated goals, but the execution shows that Epiphany is *serious* about them. When you see Epiphany you first notice all of the features that are missing. If you're like me, you'll quickly notice that you don't really miss any of those featues, which underscores their dedication to the goal of creating "the simplest interface possible for a browser." (more)

I use Firefox under windows at work and Epiphany at home, and so I have a lot of experience with both browsers. And they are both very good products, don't get me wrong. But Firefox is much more of a traditional browser, with the drop-down URL bar, the nested bookmarks, and the XUL theming. I can't really see them dropping those features as a Mozilla project so I'm not sure what they have in common with the Gnome desktop.

A solution that would be beneficial to everyone is to have a shared gecko engine betwen the Moz Suite, Firefox, and Epiphany, and a shared system for implementing plugins. Obviously only certain kinds of plugins would work on a non-XUL implementation like Epiphany or Camino, but other plugins like the flashblock or useragent-switcher should be possible to port.

With a common engine between the three you give users the option to choose how they would like to browse. Depending on their preferences some like the Moz suite, some like Firefox, and other like me prefer Epiphany. There is a lot of room for valid differences in preferences and I think all three browsers have a legitimate place.

Because of this I don't see how Firefox could become the default Gnome browser. They could HIG-ify the dialogs and create a Gnome theme, but like OSX the pinstripe theme is no replacement for actual integration. Collaboration is best left on the back-end of the project, let there be multiple different front-ends for different purposes.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[arvindn]

One area in which GNOME has lagged behind other desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X is tight integration with hardware. GNOME is working with the freedesktop.org community to make plug-and-play hardware management just work.

Here's a great paper (written just a couple of days back) that describes the current state and future plans of this effort. Highly recommended reading. If you read it your "warm feelings of loveliness" will be doubled :)

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[GeekDork]

Secondly, integrating both Ximian, Gnome-DB, calendering and address book tightly into Gnome could be a great leap towards a working Dashboard project.

Great, this means we get another fucking "tightly integrated" addressbook, calendar, ... database that no other mail client, organizer or whatever will ever deem possible or necessary to read. I blame this on the freedekstop people, who some time ago managed to have a perfectly good "we need a standardized addressbook" thread die in a furor of "ICAL is good" vs. "ICAL is bad". This is exactly the kind of idiocy that will one day be overcome or kill free software.

Folks, do it right and think before writing new stuff! There is a good concept, it's called ACAP.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[minus_273]

are you trying to say that OSX does not have tight integration with hardware? have you used OSX? have you treid plugging in a digicam on OSX? a flash drive? a camcorder? CDR? any supported device?
I like how it says that OSX has not done it yet,but you conclude whit Gnome approaching Apple levels of usability

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[Brandybuck]

And that is already or will soon be supported in KDE.

I don't believe that this has been decided yet. KDE development is not dictated by what proposals GNOME posts at fd.org. If D-BUS is better than dcop, and doesn't require a dependency upon gdk, then it will probably be adopted. Otherwise it won't.

The best standards are those where both sides work together to create, and NOT those where one side dictates to the other.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[Anonymous Coward]

Secondly, integrating both Ximian, Gnome-DB, calendering and address book tightly into Gnome could be a great leap towards a working Dashboard project...it's a genuinely innovative feature, not yet seen on any other desktop...

Doesn't kde already do this with a unified address book and kontact?

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the integration is through evolution-data-server which is very easy for other applications to access. For instance, Gaim is already integrated with it and GNOMEMeeting is integrated with its addressbook. It's a very flexible API.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[Excelsior]

Just because Epiphany has qualities that you like, thus making giving it a "legitamite place", isn't sufficient reason it needs to be the default Gnome browser. Many would say Galeon should be the default, while others could say Mozilla itself. No one says the Epiphany browser won't continue to be available, it's just not going to be Gnome's default.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[macshit]

When you see Epiphany you first notice all of the features that are missing. If you're like me, you'll quickly notice that you don't really miss any of those features

What I quickly noticed was that Epiphany is a damn clunky browser, nigh-well unusably so. The same is unfortunately true of almost all `alternative' web-browsers these days; firefox has its problems, but it has the advantage of actually being a nice browser. Epiphany looks more like a quick hack so that the Gnome team can check the `Got a browser' checkbox on some feature list.

Maybe the Epiphany will figure it out someday, who knows, but I'm not waiting around, and it's not clear why anyone else should either.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[theantix]

I would say that it should be apparent to even a casual observer that Epiphany fits the Gnome Desktop far better than a HIG-ified Firefox could be. The Gnome team has taken some tough stands when it comes to simplifying the desktop and bundled applications, notable examples in recent times include the spatial Nautilus and the limited file chooser. Epiphany fits that mode of thinking far better than Galeon or Firefox does, and I have a hard time seeing them switch over -- if they do they betray the reasoning behind other hard decisions they have made in the past.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[theantix]

If there is anything Epiphany is *not*, it is not clunky. It is downright unclunky, to coin a new term. It's the unclunkiest browser I've ever seen. Perhaps you are confused... you sure you don't mean Konqueror? If so, I understand what you mean.

Epiphany is certainly not as full-featured as other web browsers, but it's damn good at *browsing*. That is the point, read the manifesto. The lack of features is not a mistake, nor is it a result of laziness -- it's due to a different set of design preferences than you are used to. That doesn't mean you should use it... what the fuck do I care what you use? I do think that your particular criticism of it is unwarranted though.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[glitch23]

Integrating the desktop with the hardware is something Windows has been able to (alledgedly) do since '95, and it's about time we had that too! New users certainly need to be able to plug their digicam in and have it "just work",

That can only happen because drivers are provided by manufacturers for new products and included in Windows. For "old" products the drivers are in the OS bundle and you are fine that way. For new products the drivers come on a CD and you use that. The first problem is solved partially by people making OSS drivers and having distributions include them. The latter issue is harder to fix since we have to rely on manufacturers to make drivers for new products.

There are items now that can be just plugged in and they work but for new products we have to rely on manufacturers.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[noda132]

Obviously only certain kinds of plugins would work on a non-XUL implementation like Epiphany or Camino, but other plugins like the flashblock or useragent-switcher should be possible to port.

Flashblock, for one, works out-of-the-box. Go to about:config and set xpinstall.enabled to true, then install the flashblock extension just as you would for Firefox.

For that matter, many XUL-based extensions work, at least partially. The DOM inspector *almost* works, and other stuff (for example, the certificates manager) works perfectly.

Not to mention, there's epiphany-extensions. Not many people have coded extensions, but those who have try very hard to keep the "feel" of Epiphany the same -- it's certainly the best browser around in terms of user interface, and we don't want to give that up for our favourite features! My Popup Blocker and Error Viewer extensions fit in very well (I find the HTML validator particularly useful). Also of note are the Certificates Manager (loads the XUL dialog), tabs-menu extensions, and mouse gestures extensions.

And the future is indeed bright. The possibilities of a Storage-based history system make my mind boggle.

Re:The future is BRIGHT

[theantix]

Wow, you rock! I hadn't seen any mention of extensions in the past and I am delighted to see that I can get everything that I would actually use. Flashblock was the only thing missing from my Epiphany experience and now it's working too. Thanks for your hard work, I quite appreciate it.

Re:fp!

[eblum]

But it doesn't count if you do it anonymously. =)

Blogging

[lancomandr]

I think blogging integration would be nice to have. Some sort of dockable panel that you could type up your blog in, put in a picture for upload, etc.

Re:Blogging

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, could that be the next killer ap?

Re:Blogging

[Anonymous Coward]

A similar tool already exists - check out GNOME Blog.

Re:Blogging

[MikeBabcock]

Nautilus already has WebDAV and FTP support. You should be able to upload files and describe to, for example, a Zope server with ease today.

That said, a few extra features would be welcome.

Re:Blogging

[aztracker1]

umn, kinda like that menu thing (not quick launch) that came with ie4? that everyone thought was so cool for like 5 minutes, then everyone dissabled it, and forgot about it?

Mozie

[cshark]

Mozilla integration would be great. Maybe this could mean they're thinking of getting rid of Nautilus. I won't hold my breath, but it would be nice.

Re:Mozie

[DrXym]

Nautlius works just fine in 2.6. The spatial functionality combined with fast file typing (by using a file extension) means that Linux works and feels like a proper desktop operating system for once. Previous versions were okay, but much too slow.

Fortunately it is still possible to run an explorer style window too, but overall GNOME 2.6 gets a big thumbs up from me - spatial, minimalist, uncluttered.

While it would be nice to see tools such as blogging etc. but I'd rather see services to support such tools. For example, Evolution has a nice day view that gives weather, rss news and other stuff. Something like that would be very useful for the desktop, where the content is supplied through an API that any app can plug into.

Re:Mozie

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this could mean they're thinking of getting rid of Nautilus.

Mozilla is a web browser. Nautilus is a file manager. Replacing Nautilus with Mozilla would be like replacing Open Office with GCC. They're serve completely different funnctions.

Re:Mozie

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is a web browser. Nautilus is a file manager.

Exactly. Integrating Mozilla into Gnome would be like Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer into Windows. Could you imagine what would happen if they ever did that?

Oh, wait.

Re:Mozie

[Zirtix]

Get rid of Nautilus, of course! Because then Gnome won't have a FILE MANAGER!

IHBT?

Re:Mozie

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! If I only had mod points...

how about

[Triumph The Insult C]

not implementing any of those? actually, how about taking it a step further and getting rid of a lot of stuff in there already?

i don't understand why windowmanagers need to do everything under the sun. the footprint of freebsd's gnome port is damn near 1GB. perhaps if the gnome and kde camps could focus on simplicity instead of features, things would be farther ahead than they are now. maybe we could all agree on a unified copy/paste for once for pete's sake.

Unix is very simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity. Dennis Ritchie said that ... if anyone knows why Unix should be simple, it's him

Re:how about

[Harbinjer]

Gnome is NOT a windowmanager. Its a desktop environment. If all you want is a window manager, use IceWM, Blackbox, ION, or(heck, why not) rat poison. I would've suggested Enlightenment, but that is growing beyond a windowmanager if I understand thngs correctly.

Re:how about

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't understand why windowmanagers need to do everything under the sun.

How did that get modded up? Gnome is not a window manager. Gnome does include a window manager but not one that "does everything under the sun".

If anything, the main criticism of Gnome is that it goes too far in keeping individual components, such as the window manager, simple without a plethora of options.

Re:how about

[Jameth]

GNOME and KDE are not window managers.

Metacity and KWin are window managers.

You aren't even talking about what you're talking about.

Re:how about

[Triumph The Insult C]

only on /. do you get your ass handed to you for minor technicalities

i say bullshit. "desktop environment" is a crock of shit that someone with too much time on their hands wanted a new term than "window manager". gnome and kde are very much window managers and they do way more than they need to

Re:how about

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I hate to give your ass back to you just after you've finished talking out of it; unfortunately, whether or not you believe it's a "crock of shit" doesn't mean you're right. In fact, most people with any sense do see the distinction.

Re:how about

[Triumph The Insult C]

yes, and most people like to make things more complicated than they need to be. it doesn't mean they are right, nor does "most" mean it's right either.

Re:how about

[damiam]

It's not a minor technicality. If you want a window manager, there are plenty out there, most coming in at less than a meg. Feel free to

If you want a full working environment, including a window manager, panel, filemanager, menu system, office suite, web browser, hardware and system configuration, media players, and a full suite of APIs with devtools, it's gonna cost you some disk space (although not 1GB - I could installing a whole system with KDE and GNOME with footprint <1GB). If you don't want all of that, then don't install it.

Re:how about

[Brandybuck]

gnome and kde are very much window managers

No they are not. They are environments. If you want to quibble about the term "desktop", be my guest, but a window manager is a much different thing than an environment.

KDE and GNOME come with file managers. They come with browsers. They come with email clients. They come with a lot of stuff that's unnecessary for window managers, but useful in working graphical environments.

They both also come with standard libraries and APIs. So they're also development environments. Write a KDE program and it integrates into the environment in a way a pure Qt program never could. Write a GNOME program and it integrates into the environment in a way no GTK+ program every could.

language

[millahtime]

C# versus Java versus ?

Real men use Assembly. They should code it in assembly.

Re:language

[McAddress]

Real men use Assembly

real men write directly in machine code. assemblers are for wusses.

Re:language

[wafflemonger]

Back in my day they had a bank of switches. You entered everything by flipping those switches. And we were greatful to have them.

Re:language

[Anonymous Coward]

Pansy, I remember when a computer was a person with a pencil and a peice of paper. Now THAT is a real man.

Re:language

[AKAImBatman]

Back in my day they had a bank of switches. You entered everything by flipping those switches. And we were greatful to have them.

Back in MY day we had to rewire the ENIAC and replace blown out vacuum tubes just to calculate 2+2!

(To which someone responds:)

Well, back in MY day, we had to rotate the proper component on our differential engine to calculate 2+2! And we LIKED IT that way!

(Which begets the response:)

OH YEAH?! Back in MY day, we had to slide beads on an Abacus to calculate 2+2! We liked it so much that we STILL do it! And WE could even calculate while walking uphill through the snow! Both ways!

(ad infinitum)

Re:language

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see the replies now:

(comment on coding using hex editor)
(retort with coding by writing in binary)
(counter-retort about manually opening the hard drive, using magnetic pins to change data)
(complaints about previous poster's mother's performance in bed)

The last comment might only occur on bash.org, heh.

Re:language

[millahtime]

assembly is machine language. it is not compiled. it's different for pretty much every chip.

Re:language

[rgmoore]

Back in my day, we had to calculate 2+2 IN OUR HEADS! And we LIKED IT that way!

Re:language

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you had a HEAD to calculate with?

Back in my day, all we had were about fifty neurons in a ganglion, and let me tell you, 2+2 was a time consuming exercise, to say the least!

Re:language

[Anonymous Coward]

assembly is machine language

Assembly is not machine language. The two typically correspond 1:1, but you'll need an assembler/disassembler to go back and forth. Coding machine language directly (with a hex editor, presumably) is a lost art these days - for good reason.

Re:language

[FattMattP]

Real men use Assembly.

Real mean use cat and od.

Re:language

[bflong]

And it ends with...
Back in *MY* day, we didn't have no fancy Abacus. We did it in our *Head*! And we likes it that way!

Java vs C# vs ?

[JohnGrahamCumming]

I think they should really move on to use ?. It's the most superior language of the three, after all it's based on the earlier Jeopardy language where all statements are expressed as questions.

For example the familiar Hello, World! application is written in ? as follows:

what is the procedure the OS calls first?
{
what is the output of the most common small example program?
}

John.

Re:Java vs C# vs ?

[Waffle Iron]

Your program won't compile unless you include the standard header files:

#include <what is your name?>
#include <what is your favorite color?>

Re:Java vs C# vs ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer whitespace.

http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/

Re:Java vs C# vs ?

[Anonymous Coward]

funniest comment on slashdot for months :)

Please don't...

[mratitude]

Anything but Java, please, I can't afford the hardware it'll require to run it!

Re:Please don't...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I don't have $150 for a new PC, either.

GNOME + Ruby == good

[tcopeland]

Check out some nice screenshots of this book collection manager written using the Ruby/GTK bindings.

Re:GNOME + Ruby == good

[Harbinjer]

Some of my friends that raved about Python, now really like Ruby; do you have an opinion about this?

Also how did you get started with Ruby? Its something that I think I really like to learn

Re:GNOME + Ruby == good

[tcopeland]

> do you have an opinion about this?

Yup, some folks seem to prefer one or the other; I like Ruby but that may be just because I haven't needed to learn Python.

> how did you get started with Ruby?

My boss likes it, so he got me to write an hourly build thingy in it. It's been good times from then on...

Painful Widget Sets

[Anonymous Coward]

GTK is easily the most painful widget set, both graphically and programmatically, that I have ever used.

Never used MFC then, have you?

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Anonymous Coward]

They pretty much all suck. The closest thing to a good widget framework I've run into is the VB model ... that's pretty fscking sad state of affairs since I detest VB with a passion.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Anonymous Coward]

...clicking on the menu bar and holding the mouse down until the option you want is selected? GTK+ will think, in the middle of it, that you are trying to drag a menu item.

And how is that a "stupid" glitch? After all, you're holding down the menu, then dragging the mouse. Seems pretty intuitive to me.

Obviously, this is a mentality problem and not a GTK issue. PEBKAC.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Pxtl]

Blame the user. Smooth. Windows and KDE both let the user work in the old Mac approach of "click to open menu, release to select the item". GTK doesn't. So, Mac users are wrong then? And if they don't like it?

Oh, right, this is GNOME, where customization is either picking your desktop wallpaper or recompiling from source.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[sab39]

I just tested a gnome-terminal that I happened to have open, and click-drag-to-select-menu-item worked fine. I don't have the latest GNOME, but that makes your statement suspect to me. Which version of GNOME were you using when you saw this behavior?

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Pxtl]

Dunno - on a win box right now. Am not original poster who works Mac style, I just have a kneejerk annoyance for "blame the user" types.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever tried using the menus the way they are in old macs, by clicking on the menu bar and holding the mouse down until the option you want is selected?

Yes, just did that.

GTK+ will think, in the middle of it, that you are trying to drag a menu item.

No, it won't.

Perhaps that was just a bad dream.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Anonymous Coward]

You're off your rocker. MouseDown-Move-Move-Move-MouseUp to select works just fine in the current version of GNOME, and others say it worked earlier, too.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Anonymous Coward]

a kneejerk annoyance for "blame the user" types

But it *is* a user issue.

Software can't possibly accomodate every user whim, short of insane amounts of bloat and/or complexity. Even Gnome/KDE/etc. don't offer 100% customization. What if I wanted the computer to interpret my click-and-hold-mouse-button-while-moving actions as "queue each print/save/etc. dialog box and display them in sequence"? You can't. As a user, I must understand how the software responds to my actions, and what actions are permissible.

As I stated before, it's a user issue because there has to be some underlying set of rules implicit in the software. In this case, the underlying rule is that click-and-drag does, indeed, drag.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[diamondc]

There is some truth to this problem. Sometimes I let the mouse button go for not even a quarter of a second and then I drag the mouse, it *does* drag a menu item. Then I usually have to press the Escape key and restart over again.

Re:Painful Widget Sets

[Rick and Roll]

Yes. Exactly. Thank You. What a stupid glitch.

I guess I am just really bitter about GTK+ because I use Eclipse, for various other reasons. Why does SWT have to use GTK+? In fact, why does SWT exist in the first place?

Maybe I should just switch to NetBeans.

My Gnome Wish List

[Nuclear Elephant]

Basically gnome is great, but it lacks attention to detail IMO. I think future versions should focus more on detailed quality and not on expanding featureset.

1. The Menus should be much more customizable; treated like folders that you can click and drag into (I hate to say this, but "Like Windows").

2. Better Video control properties; take advantage of XFree's extended features and have options like TV switching and such.

3. Better preferences; the control panels are quite lacking.

4. Other aesthetic enhancements that will make gnome pretty enough to compete with other window environments (like win XP's or OSX's). Smooth scrolling, the zoom-on-hover icons in OSX are sweet, and _drop shadows on windows_ would be real nice.

5. Some kind of Linux-version-of-Active-Desktop would be real nice, so I could have an IRC session running as part of my wallpaper,anchor the weather channel radar map to the background, etcetera.

Re:My Gnome Wish List

[mcconk]

1. Easy-edit menus. This is a must for consumers and even us old timers. I'd like to see an "expert" version of gnome that brought back all the panel and window manager tweaks that you could do back in the day. 4. Yeah, eye candy ok now with fast CPU's and lots of RAM.

Re:My Gnome Wish List

[Jameth]

1. The Menus should be much more customizable; treated like folders that you can click and drag into (I hate to say this, but "Like Windows").

Quite right.

2. Better Video control properties; take advantage of XFree's extended features and have options like TV switching and such.

Again, correct.

3. Better preferences; the control panels are quite lacking.

GNOME is a horrible offender on the front that it wants to give the user just a few options, but no real power.

4. Other aesthetic enhancements that will make gnome pretty enough to compete with other window environments (like win XP's or OSX's). Smooth scrolling, the zoom-on-hover icons in OSX are sweet, and _drop shadows on windows_ would be real nice.

Those are being done on the X level in the new x.org server. Not GNOME's problem.

5. Some kind of Linux-version-of-Active-Desktop would be real nice, so I could have an IRC session running as part of my wallpaper,anchor the weather channel radar map to the background, etcetera.

It exists, and has for a very long time. On KDE, you can use SuperKaramba and stick all sorts of things on your desktop. I thought GNOME had something, but I don't know.

Re:My Gnome Wish List

[Anonymous Coward]

It exists, and has for a very long time. On KDE, you can use SuperKaramba and stick all sorts of things on your desktop. I thought GNOME had something, but I don't know.

GDesklets

Re:My Gnome Wish List

[Anonymous Coward]

...why don't you just run Windows??

Re:My Gnome Wish List

[Anonymous Coward]

#5 is easily possible with GDesklets

Re:My Gnome Wish List

[Bert690]

My wish would mostly be to improve responsiveness.

I'm no fan of MS by any stretch of the imagination, but Gnome menus on my 2-way 2.4GHZ Xeon server feel like a crappy Java Swing app on my much older Windows desktop machine.

I heard that 2.6 kernel should help things a bunch but I'm still not seeing it.

Re:My Gnome Wish List

[tempest303]

A few replies:

1. The Menus should be much more customizable; treated like folders that you can click and drag into (I hate to say this, but "Like Windows").

This is finally getting some serious attention. (thank god!) Check out the whole thread if you're interested. Looks like there's a decent chance we'll see this by 2.8.

2. Better Video control properties; take advantage of XFree's extended features and have options like TV switching and such.

This would be cool, though certainly less of a priority. I'd bet we'll see some custom ATI and nVidia proprietary solutions to this for a while to fill the gap, which is what Windows has now, and then somewhere down the road we'll get proper "generic" controls that work with more than one driver.

3. Better preferences; the control panels are quite lacking.

This is poorly defined - what do you mean by "better"? For some people (I'll pick on the KDE crowd here), more prefs is generally though of as "better". For others (such as GNOME's case), "less is more", where preferences like "Use XVideo or XShm for video output"* are eliminated, since it's thought that the code ought to be smart enough to know which should be used, and that burdening the user with such things is a great disservice to them. See Havoc's essay on this. Naturally, there's no One True Way, and that's why there are (and should be!) more than one desktop for Free platforms like Linux, FreeBSD, etc. However, GNOME's approach is almost certainly best for typical non-geeky end users, and is also very popular with anyone else who expects software to Just Work, and that having to figure out what XVideo and Xshm are just to get good performance from a movie player should be considered a bug. It's obvious where my opinion lies on this, but again, I'm very glad KDE and all the rest are out there too, since GNOME's One Size Fits Nearly Everyone is not truly One Size Fits All, and doesn't aim to be.

4. Other aesthetic enhancements that will make gnome pretty enough to compete with other window environments (like win XP's or OSX's). Smooth scrolling, the zoom-on-hover icons in OSX are sweet, and _drop shadows on windows_ would be real nice.

Drop shadows are coming. Smooth scrolling is coming. (scroll down on the link) Zoom-on-hover is kind of crack, and probably won't happen. There's a gDesklet for this, though, if you really want this. :-)

5. Some kind of Linux-version-of-Active-Desktop would be real nice, so I could have an IRC session running as part of my wallpaper,anchor the weather channel radar map to the background, etcetera.

Done and done. Hope that's been informative...

blogging?

[halfelven]

Cool, that could mean:
1. RSS feed client integrated into Gnome (maybe even displaying RSS feeds on the background?)
2. Blog API client integrated in Gnome. BloGTK seems to be a good candidate.

Re:blogging?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even - better - Blog right from a panel applet. http://www.gnome.org/~seth/gnome-blog/

Re:blogging?

[Anonymous Coward]

For gods sake. NO BloGTK!!!! Anything wlse but that.

DBUS/HAL

[ImpTech]

Good to see D-BUS and HAL integration on the roadmap for 2.8. Just set them up on 2.6 last night, and they're quite fancy.

ATM, all they do (in conjunction with gnome-volume-manager) is automount/unmount/run removable media. Pretty much what you got with autorun for years on Windows, but more extensible in that you can tell the daemon what program to run, etc. Its also setup to detect/play dvds, and import photos from a digital camera automagically. Long overdue perhaps, but still very nice to have.

I suspect the best improvements are coming in the future once this is all integrated. Basically it gives the system a queryable, extensible device manager. In the future, I would expect all software that does hardware interaction will interface with this layer, for detection, hotplug, identification, and so forth. Long story short, its an absolutely critical piece of Linux on the desktop.

Re:DBUS/HAL

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that is a simplistic view of the whole stack. The stack is ment to make hardware just work. Automounting is just the first much needed step.

More responsiveness?

[Jayanef]

I think GNOME 1.4 is faster than the newer version. Right now I still use 2.4 and shut nautilus desktop off because hog the memory.

So I want new version as fast as GNOME 1.4

bluetooth, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see Ed Dumbill's Gnome Bluetooth subsystem get picked up by Gnome. I'd also like some UI to turn on and off spatial browsing. It's got real potential, but I'd like to be able to switch it off without gconf-editor.

Also, now that x.org's CVS has Damage and Composite on the way to working, someone should sit down and cook up some new eye candy using this stuff.

Re:bluetooth, etc.

[Zirtix]

I'd also like some UI to turn on and off spatial browsing. It's got real potential, but I'd like to be able to switch it off without gconf-editor.

This is in the works.

Re:bluetooth, etc.

[daemonc]

"I'd also like some UI to turn on and off spatial browsing."

Right click, Browse Folder

Or, if you have a one-button mouse, Applications->Browse Filesystem

Done.

Re:bluetooth, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that would make me need to click "Browse Folder" every time I want to use browse, and your second option means I can't use my desktop to open folders.

It's great that those options are there, but really.. How hard is it to add a checkbox somewhere in control center to toggle the gconf option that I know is in there?

Anyway, looks like we're going to get it.

Um...Python?

[Jameth]

Java and C# have been proposed as alternatives. The community is currently discussing the technical, political, and legal ramifications of adopting these languages into the desktop.s

I would like to point out that Python has been proposed ABOUT A HUNDRED TIMES. Guess what: It's easy to use, it's high level, it has no legal ramifications, it's open source. Python solves every problem they have with its alternatives.

Also, using Python paves the way for universally integrated scripting, somewhat like the VB script possibilities in MS-Windows (and, despite waht MicroSoft did, that is a good thing).

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's also slower than the above two choices

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also solves the problem of performance by guaranteeing you'll never see any.

Desktop Managers are not a good place to have an interpretted language running about.

Re:Um...Python?

[Jameth]

Python can be compiled, it just doesn't need to be. So compile it. Problem solved.

Re:Um...Python?

[Jameth]

According to a lot of theory, yes. In practice, no. Both C# and Java need their virtual machine to run. Python can be interpreted or compiled. When compiled, it's plenty fast.

Of course, when GCJ is done, this won't be true, and Java will be able to be compiled.

Re:Um...Python?

[tempest303]

I think you stumbled onto something very important here, though you're missing the big picture.

Python should not be used for core libraries or core apps like Nautilus. As completely excellent as Python is, it's just a fact that it just doesn't run as fast as C (or even Java or Mono) for nearly any operation. Also, using Nautilus as an example again, while Nautilus is finally fast enough as of 2.6, it still needs work in terms of memory footprint. Going to Java or Mono wouldn't help this, but going with Python for something like Nautilus would probably make it Much Much Worse(TM). Finally, while PyChecker is a beautiful complement to Python, it's simply not a complete replacement for static type checking.

What you did hit on, though, was that Python (IMHO) ought to be pushed as the Linux equivlant role as VB does for MS - with hooks for it into everything, wherever possible. I don't see any reason why Python shouldn't be A) used like VB is for making quick custom desktop apps, but B) (and I know I'll get flamed for this), like VB, Python makes for a great system *and* web scripting language (ie: why push PHP when Python could do a much better job and offer familiarity between web scripting and system scripting)

If Python could get the approximately the same speed, memory footprint, and built-in sanity checking as Java or Mono, then it could be a contender for core app/library programming. Sadly, this isn't likely, and even if a concerted effort were launched to this effect immediately, it still wouldn't materialize for a couple years. Java and Mono, however, are here now.

Re:Um...Python?

[squiggleslash]

Python can be compiled? Show me. I'm aware you can distribute "executables" but IIRC these are simply the Python run-time interpreter and internal byte-code representation of the program bundled together. I'm not aware of anything out there at the moment that can convert programs written in Python to ix86.

BTW, I agree Python's probably faster for the most part than Java for small apps, because of Java's somewhat heavy load, link, and set up times. But what I've heard of .NET and Mono suggests to me neither have the same issue.

Re:Um...Python?

[Jameth]

Python should not be used for core libraries or core apps like Nautilus. As completely excellent as Python is, it's just a fact that it just doesn't run as fast as C (or even Java or Mono) for nearly any operation. Also, using Nautilus as an example again, while Nautilus is finally fast enough as of 2.6, it still needs work in terms of memory footprint. Going to Java or Mono wouldn't help this, but going with Python for something like Nautilus would probably make it Much Much Worse(TM). Finally, while PyChecker is a beautiful complement to Python, it's simply not a complete replacement for static type checking.

Quite right. The core system should still be completely native. The purpose of the change over, as they originally stated it, was to allow programmers to develop apps faster, and to allow new people to start development sooner. It wasn't for the core apps, so that's not so important.

What you did hit on, though, was that Python (IMHO) ought to be pushed as the Linux equivlant role as VB does for MS - with hooks for it into everything, wherever possible. I don't see any reason why Python shouldn't be A) used like VB is for making quick custom desktop apps, but B) (and I know I'll get flamed for this), like VB, Python makes for a great system *and* web scripting language (ie: why push PHP when Python could do a much better job and offer familiarity between web scripting and system scripting)

Well, PHP is used instead of Python because it truly is almost a thousand times easier to use. It really is, especially for bad programmers like myself. I find Python not-very-hard, but I find PHP trivial.

If Python could get the approximately the same speed, memory footprint, and built-in sanity checking as Java or Mono, then it could be a contender for core app/library programming. Sadly, this isn't likely, and even if a concerted effort were launched to this effect immediately, it still wouldn't materialize for a couple years. Java and Mono, however, are here now.

Python isn't as much slower as people imply, and it's not too important either. Java and C# are that same amount slower than C and C++. What I see happening is Java/C#/Python being used for light development in the coming years, and D replacing C/C++ in about three years. D really does look good (my roommate is working on its STL, so I see a lot of it).

Re:Um...Python?

[Jameth]

It is compiled to byte-code, the same as Java and .Net, but the Python byte-code interpreter is not a heavy VM like the JavaVM.

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Python's a great scripting language, but it's performance does not compare very well to more static languages such as Java and C#. Yes, Python can be compiled into bytecode, but it does not help that much performance-wise (except at the beginning of the program). They are some projects to try to improve the speed of Python, but they are still nowhere near the advances that, say, Java has made. Python also has a really weird syntax for object-oriented programming.

Re:Um...Python?

[Azghoul]

Did you mean to suggest that PHP can't do system scripting? Just curious why you believe Python can do a "much better job".

PHP CLI-mode is way too much fun.

Re:Um...Python?

[MassacrE]

Could you clarify - what legal ramifications would something like Java and C# have (aside from trying to distribute a proprietary, copyrighted version without permission) that Python does not?

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, this so called "compilation" is more like pre-parsing sources, as NO bytecode optimizations are performed.. Zend Encoder does the same thing in PHP, that's hardly "compilation". And, as python is very dynamic, its bytecode is pretty inefficient.. Static typing languages (Java,C#) allow for greater bytecode performance.

Re:Um...Python?

[chris_mahan]

That's great, and CPython (the C implementation of Python -- as opposed to Jython) can directly call C modules like Python modules. Optimize your modules in C that need the speed, write everythong else in Python.

see: http://docs.python.org/ext/intro.html for more on that.

On windows you can access COM components from Python.

By the way, did you know that Python is really OO with multiple inheritance (diamond-style class traversing added recently) and has hundreds of built-in libraries?

ultimately, stay with the UNIX philosophy. more here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s 06.html

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Though Java and Mono are both free as in beer, they are not free in the way Gnome would need them to be. Check out this for a detailed explanation.

Re:Um...Python?

[random_static]

Python is slower than compiled languages, because it is interpreted (from bytecode, at best; that's still a far cry from real compilation). static versus dynamic typing has nothing to do with it.

Lisp is dynamic and fast, because lisp is natively compiled. C# is compiled (maybe JIT-compiled, but that counts) to something reasonably fast, even though it's static. Java's just a fucking mess, and what Python needs is a good native compiler - a JIT-compiler would do.

i'm not sure what crack you're smoking that makes you not like Python's OO syntax. it makes a helluva lot more sense to me than, say, Java's.

Re:Um...Python?

[random_static]

Static typing languages (Java,C#) allow for greater bytecode performance.

i've heard loads of people saying this, but i've never seen anybody explain why this is necessarily so. what, precisely, about statically typed languages makes it easier to optimize them when compiling them to bytecode, in particular?

and what's so different about bytecode (as opposed to native code) that we can't optimize dynamic languages when compiling them to bytecode, even though we have been able to optimize dynamic languages when compiling them to native code for decades already? i don't get it.

Re:Um...Python?

[tempest303]

I know all that, and they're many of the reasons I love Python.

Still, Python + C modules doesn't completely fix the problems - it alleviates much of the speed pain, but you still have memory footprint problems, and the lack of static type checking.

Python totally, completely rocks, but I think it's foolish to try to write an entire desktop with it at this stage... (I'd love to be proven wrong, mind you. :-)

Re:Um...Python?

[tempest303]

Well, for basic scripting, PHP might be fine - that's probably personal preference.

For the kinds of GUI tasks that VB gets used for though, OO is really nice, and why wait for PHP to catch up when Python has great OO right now?

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, static typing allows to fix(ascertain) more things at compile time, making it possible to use more effective bytecode commands, and enabling more optimization opportunities. With dynamic typing you're doomed to make type checks at runtime. Lisp is fast, when you add type annotations (optional) to variables and then compile, without it it is not that fast. Python JIT-compiler exists, it is called Psyco (not part of official distribution), but it makes no miracles - static languages like java/c# are still way faster. Attempt to create a native python compiler failed (it is written in python faqs somewhere) - binaries it was able to produce were still required to do a lot of what /bin/python code normally does, so performance improvements were too minor. Python is just too dynamic to compile, in other words, too little is known at bytecode generation time.

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just replied about that in other place: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109 994&cid=9338487

Re:Um...Python?

[Deusy]

As completely excellent as Python is, it's just a fact that it just doesn't run as fast as C (or even Java or Mono) for nearly any operation.

Have you tried Psyco?

From the website: "Psyco is a Python extension module which can massively speed up the execution of any Python code."

Re:Um...Python?

[random_static]

Lisp is fast, when you add type annotations (optional) to variables and then compile, without it it is not that fast.

take a look at this language comparison, and of course the (flawed, but still not worthless) great shootout. or just google for "optimization" on comp.lang.lisp.

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what's your point? Yes, lisp is pretty fast, and as it seems like its optimization mechanisms are rather advanced, it is exactly lisp's dynamic nature that makes it not as fast as static compiled languages. But why lisp, python and lisp are too different beasts to even compare them, and I'm not a lisp guru to do this either.. If we talk about static/dymanic, this is not a boolean attribute of a language, it is an attribute of different things within execution enviroment. In this sense, python is more dynamic that lisp.. Plus, python doesn't seem to be designed with performance in mind.

Re:Um...Python?

[random_static]

python and lisp are too different beasts to even compare them,

the original claim was that dynamic typing made programs slow. lisp is dynamic yet not particularly slow. i wasn't arguing for python as such; it's a nice language, but it is slow - i just don't believe that it's necessarily its dynamic typing that makes it so.

Re:Um...Python?

[smallpaul]

Pyrex is a Python compiler and yet it is (by default) much slower than Java, which is bytecode interpreted (but static). But then if you add type declarations, voila, it runs pretty damn fast: rivalling C sometimes. This is very well studied. The performance bottleneck is not the Python interpreter. It is the dynamic semantics of the Python language. a+b in Python involves a bunch of type checks and method calls. You can speed up dynamic languages (with or without a compiler) but it takes some seriously complicated code and Python's implementors have always tried to keep the implementation clean and simple.

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Python has better memory characteristics than Java.

Re:Um...Python?

[random_static]

Pyrex is a Python compiler

not according to the language overview i found on its website it isn't. it's a compiler for something quite a bit like Python, but - again, according to the website - it's meant for doing something different from what Python is meant to do.

don't get me wrong; Pyrex looks like a very interesting project, and i'm glad you pointed me to it (i really hadn't known it existed), but a Python compiler it ain't. Psyco comes much closer to being a Python compiler, but still falls short.

if this is really "very well studied", as you claim, how about just dropping me a few references to the studies? that'd be more convincing, and might actually teach me something.

Re:Um...Python?

[smallpaul]

We're talking about performance. Pyrex implements a subset of Python that maintains all of Python's dynamicity. It runs at almost exactly the same performance as Python. You've never heard of it before today so don't bother arguing that it is "like" Python unless you are ready to argue that the differences are performance relevant.

The one difference that I have found is relevant is that if you add static type annotations to Pyrex you get Python-level speeds.

References:

1: http://www.prescod.net/python/pyrexopt/optimizatio n.html

2: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/1999- April/001319.html (look for the words "interpreter" and "overhead")

3: http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/1/paper. pdf

Re:Um...Python?

[Azghoul]

Ohhhhh you're talking GUI stuff. :) Okay, I gotcha. When you said "system scripting" I was thinking all the fun stuff that many people use shell scripting to accomplish. I find being expert in PHP on the web helps me to do tons of system-level stuff that I'd take weeks to do if I had to figure out how using bash...

Re:Um...Python?

[random_static]

we're talking about performance, yes, and you bring up one particular language implementation in support of your point. it's true i'm not familiar with it, and so can't say that its particulars are performance relevant; but by the same token, i have no reason to believe that the conclusions you're drawing from the performance of this one implementation are a good example of some general rule about all dynamic languages.

your reference (1) doesn't resolve. reference (2) doesn't seem to discuss dynamic languages specifically; it either talks about the overhead of Python's OO system, or about some implementation overhead incurred by Python's regexp module in storing some intermediate results, as far as i can tell. i'm not sure how relevant that is to language dynamism, but it does imply that interpreter overhead can go as high as 30-40 percent; if this is true, it would mesh nicely with my contention that compiling a language makes more of an immediate difference than static typing. reference (3) goes to an admittedly very interesting paper that flat-out states Python is slow because of its dynamism, but then goes on to describing the author's own hobby project. the paper doesn't really support this blatant assertion much; it makes it a bit more detailed, the author lays out a few of the reasons he believes the assertion to be true, but he only lists these, with no supporting evidence. that's okay, the paper isn't about supporting this claim, but by that measure, you can't very well use it to support that claim then.

i'll check back on the first reference in a day or two in the hopes the server comes back online. thanks for the two i could get at; particularly the Salib paper is fascinating, this is teaching me quite a lot.

Re:Um...Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...maybe it is just me, but if GNOME switches to python, I'll switch to something else.

Python programs have consistantly NOT worked on my computer. I'm including ones I have downloaded on my own, and ones I have apt-gotten via Debian (including automagically downloading all dependencies). They simply don't work with me. C, fine, C++, no real problem, JAVA, works like a charm after I've installed the JRE.
I've given up on this language.

Is it just me, or is Python simply lacking in decent equivalents of the autotools? And if so, when is this language going to get them?

Re:Um...Python?

[juhaz]

As if Python hasn't got useful and fun CLI mode.

Both are quite useful and easy languages for all kinds of tasks, having used both for a while, I now prefer Python to be quite a lot better since it has, including but not limited to:

a) Vastly better library support for most things (can be quite important even for non-GUI tasks, even more so for them) both out-of-the box and available as 3rd party software.
b) I'm having severe case of '$' allergy (no, not money!). If they had to cross C with something, why, oh why it had to be Perl or SH?
c) Syntax. I know some people (well, at least those who haven't tried ) hate the whitespace sensitivity, but it grows to you...
d) Much better interactive interpreter for testing simple things and changing them on the fly out before you write them to stone.

Integration is "good" now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Secondly, integrating both Ximian, Gnome-DB, calendering and address book tightly into Gnome could be a great leap towards a working Dashboard project.

Didn't Microsoft get flamed pretty badly for integrating a browser into their Desktop/OS? Just amusing to see how easily this is overlooked with the list of new Gnome "features".

Hint to Gnome developers: KISS. Manage my desktop, don't manage my applications.

Re:Integration is "good" now?

[Gilesx]

Integration is good when there is a reason to do it, and that reason is not to achieve a monopoly illegaly.

Re:Integration is "good" now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Integration is good when there is a reason to do it

But there is no practical reason to do it. What purpose would this serve that an independent blog application can't achieve?

The only thing that this will do is introduce bloat and instability.

Re:Integration is "good" now?

[Gilesx]

Here's my reason

Re:Integration is "good" now?

[Anonymous Coward]

From your handy link:

For example, if a friend IMs you and says "I can't wait for our camping trip this weekend!" the dashboard will show things like your recent emails about the camping trip, your camping bookmarks, and any files or notes you've got on your hard drive about camping.

So this is like an OS-wide Clippy or Bonzai Buddy then?

"Hi! It looks like you're IM'ing about camping! Would you like me to show you websites where you can book a campground?"

Because we all know how much people love Clippy.

Re:Integration is "good" now?

[Gilesx]

Not really - the key here is that it searches *your* hard drive - ie.. rather than randomly pulling up camping websites, it would show you a list of your bookmarked camping websites. It only shows relevent information that has been created by the user, not generalised information, so I'd say it's a world apart from bonsai buddy.

Re:Integration is "good" now?

[Anonymous Coward]

So now it is ok to do it becuase Gnome isn't a monopoly? Talk about a double standard

Re:Integration is "good" now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, corporate monopolies are held to a different standard than other businesses, much less small, non-profit projects. That's why we have anti-trust laws.

Go OS X route a finally ditch X11

[charnov]

For the love of all the is good and right let X die! You want a road map for devlopment, copy each and everything the is in OS X and then go from there. Of course, I am one the weird ones running XFCE with Rox filer.

Re:Go OS X route a finally ditch X11

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what would you have them replace X with, exactly?

P.S. Your answer must include 3-d accel support from at least two vendors.

Re:Go OS X route a finally ditch X11

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X ships with an X11 server now, right?

Re:Go OS X route a finally ditch X11

[Brandybuck]

You do know that XFCE with Rox filer uses X11, don't you?

X11 is not going to die, because X11 is too damned useful. It may evolve, but it will never go away. Despite uninformed trolls to the contrary, X11 is fast and efficient. Some toolkits on top of it might not be, but X11 itself is lean and mean.

Re:Go OS X route a finally ditch X11

[charnov]

Then why didn't Apple use it if it is so darn nice?

Re:Go OS X route a finally ditch X11

[chez69]

perhaps because the OS they bought that became OSX used display postscript instead of X?

Are we forgetting somebody?

[Avatar889]

Why look for such a big jump? C++ has a proven track record and none of the legal ramifications that Java or C# might. Plus it would interface so easily with C files.

Re:Are we forgetting somebody?

[chez69]

C++ still suffers from some of C's problems, such as no garbage collection without special libraries.

Re:Are we forgetting somebody?

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern C++ does not need garbage collection, well written code does no memory management by hand.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

To install package 'foo' in windows:

1. Search Google for "foo."
2. Find a working download site.
3. Download the package.
4. Double-click the installer.
5. Welcome to "foo" installer. *Next*
6. Would you like a standard install? *Next*
7. What components would you like to install? *Next*
8. Would you like to make "foo" the default application for "bar"? *No* *Next*
9. Please wait. Installation complete. Reboot? *Yes*

Compared with

1. apt-get install foo

Which one is simpler?

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
UI Guru

Other Tools Needed

[syntap]

Maybe if Gnome came with a defragger, a backup utility, a DRM media player, and a Windows Update tool it would be improved.

C'mon... none of these address simple usability issues like those noted by Nick Petrely. I don't agree with him on many things, but let's get usability going before we start throwing applets in.

Try fixing the sound recorder

[johnjaydk]

Try fixing the sound recorder app. in core 2. Segfault is sloppy coding.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Cereal Box]

Why not make an installation system that works as simply as clicking setuppackage.msi is in Windows and let the other problems solve themselves?

Oh man, you just opened the floodgates with this one. Prepare to be lectured on why the 37 different packaging standards make software installations easier than with Windows. Of course, the reality of the situation is that it's a crapshoot as to whether or not a package will work with whichever one of the 10,000 Linux distributions you happen to be running (chances are it won't), but hey.

Why not just make a working desktop first?

That would require setting aside this childish "Linux has to do every single thing that every single person on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues the community. No one wants to sit down and say "OK, let's mandate that all distributions have, at minimum, THESE particular packages that operate in THESE particular ways." No, no. That stifles choice somehow. Of course, everyone conveniently ignores the fact that some amount of standardization has to occur before Linux can be accepted on the desktop.

Yeah, this year will be the year of linux-on-the-desktop

You must have missed how the zealots are spinning this one now. See, there's no particular "year of Linux on the desktop" anymore, now it's "EVERY year that Linux gains popularity it's getting closer to the desktop!" Some clever guy came up with that one after everyone pointed out that Slashdot has been proclaiming every year since 1998 as the "year of Linux on the desktop."

Serious SDL Buffer Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see anything on the roadmap to suggest that the Gnome team is planning to address the serious problems with multithreaded accesses to the windowing system's Z-buffer, problems that render many SDL based game ports nearly unplayable on anything but the latest video hardware.

The fact is, Linux needs games to be a success in the home. Windows 95 didn't really take off until DirectX - and MS's attendant publicity efforts - boosted it along. I feel that the Gnome people should be taking more care not to break SDL for the greater good of the Linux community.

Very odd.

[Henrik S. Hansen]

I find it very odd indeed that the official Gnome2 developer's guide is not Free Documentation.

It's especially amazing, considering that Gnome is an important part of GNU. What's up, Gnome foundation? Don't you care about documentation freedom?

Re:Very odd.

[minkwe]

The OpenGL Bible is not Free Documentation either. I thought the Bible was supposed to be free.

"the official Gnome2 developer's guide" is just a book named that way.

Re:Very odd.

[Henrik S. Hansen]

"the official Gnome2 developer's guide" is just a book named that way.

No, it is not.

It's a book so named that Gnome advertises on their front page. That makes it official to me.

Re:Very odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that book, or at least big parts of it, are under a somewhat free license.

In any event, the GNOME project has a whole ton of documentation and sample code available freely. This is just one book. It may have "official" in the title but it's just one book.

As for GNU, they have odd ideas about free documentation; their latest free documentation license is not free according to the Debian guidelines. And I'm siding with the Debian guys on this one, not with the GNU guys. What's up with the "invariant" sections in "free documentation"?

Re:Very odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bible itself is copyrighted unless you use the King James Version. Hello Zondervan :)

Re:Very odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Miguel is a fucking sellout. Notice him helping MS reinvent the wheel.

x.org integration

[FLoWCTRL]

With regard to the plans for new media and networking features in GNOME, I hope that the GNOME team leverages efforts from the x.org project to work towards a common implementation of those features. In particular, I think that the Media Application Server looks very promising. Since future versions of GNOME will likely be running on x.org anyways, the wheel should not be re-invented with respect to advanced media features.

Re:x.org integration

[Anonymous Coward]

The GNOME project is looking to replace the sound server (currently EDS) in the future. MAS is primary candidate for that switch. However, MAS is just that - a sound server; it doesn't replace or conflict with GStreamer.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[linzeal]

Because most people do not install much software and when they realize they do they make terrible mistakes in choosing the biggest most colorful box or the first website that hits on google. IF you include more software that would likely satisfy upcoming trends and needs of your users you reduce the chance that they will go get ripped off or buy something incompatible.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[McDutchie]

It seems like the ROX and Zero Install folks had the same idea...

Stability vs. Features

[AnomalyConcept]

As far as my Gnome experiences have taken me, I find that there are a lot of features that are incomplete and/or not fully stable. I think the developers should focus on getting everything that they have working first, and then start fleshing it out with more applications.

As for the 'long term' projects, I don't really have a necessity for a blogging application. Which services will it integrate with? Or will it use one of the common APIs? I ask this because a friend and I are working on a content management system.

Since when has Linux desktop environments started to integrate exclusive programs into the respective environments? Will this eventually end up like the integration of Internet Explorer with Windows? I thought one of the aspects of Open Source was about choice, and so, will this integration limit choice? What if the DE was designed to be modular, where you can install/uninstall components at will? I agree with a previous poster, that software should be easy to install.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to the new release.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Pxtl]

Amen. Features come second when your core framework is fucked.

IMHO, MS is finally getting something right - the framework they're designing for Longhorn is goregeous. XML GUI and class definition and all the crummy header and import crap, and C# for the procedural code. Basically, C# as a scripting engine, one almost as fast as straight C. Compare that with the sluggish Python scripts other systems use.

OS coders could do this. Just because moronic Java developers converted platform agnositicism from a nice idea into ideological zealotry doesn't mean OS coders have to. GNOME has a wonderful idea with using Java.

Think of it this way: you code all your heavy lifting code in painful C and C++. Your 3d model renderrers, your window placement, etc. Then you code all the mostly event-driven procedural crap in Java. Tons of apps do this already, but with sluggish VB or Python or Perl. Instead we do it with Java, which, compared to real compiled languages is slow, but compared to a scripting language it rocks ass.

This is what Microsoft is doing with Longhorn, and its a wonderful system. Try modding Unreal Tournament to experience a game engine built along the same paradigm (albeit without the wonderful XAML concept of Longhorn) and you'll see how much of a joy this is to code with.

Regardless of all the monstrous feature creep (like giving IE a complete copy of the Firebird feature set) of Windows, the new coding framework of Longhorn has got me twitching with anticipation. Unfortunately, it looks like its up to the OS team with the shittiest track record (GNOME) to try and make a counterpoint for this.

Linux On The Desktop will be ready just in time for Windows On The Desktop With Super Fast R.A.D. Trustable Networked Operating System.

The tools are available, Longhorn is behind schedule, its not like an OS counterpart framework with an intelligent window manager couldn't be ready long before Longhorn. But I doubt it will happen.

GNOME is becoming more like KDE every day...

[Rupan]

It seems to me that with this roadmap, Gnome is planning on becoming the swiss army knife that KDE is. That is the exact reason why I do *not* use KDE. Gnome in its current incarnation (2.6) as well as the last several versions have appealed to me because they provide just the right amount of eye candy.

I am not particularly an X fan. I don't go for the shiny point and click thing because its just another layer separating the user from the system. Hence, I often have maybe a dozen terminal windows upen spanned across my 4 desktops.

That's not to say that X doesn't have its virtues. I wouldn't want to use Lynx as my sole browser, for the Web really does have some neat interactive and graphical content. However, things like IRC, News, and even P2P filesharing really don't need a GUI. Oh sure, I use X-Chat, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate Epic. And I actually really like Pine.

How would you like it if you could do realtime management of email on your computer from anywhere? And I mean anywhere. Run the email client you use at home from school, work, your mobile phone, etc? To do that, you need a client that can run in a terminal. This includes Mutt and Pine (amongst others). Hell, I even use (http://www.idokorro.com) idokorro mobile ssh to access my box from my car!

That said, everything has its place. But making Gnome into KDE is not the right way to go. If this happens, I will probably keep a backup of version 2.6 on CD somewhere and downgrade any new version from that my distro ships.

Re:GNOME is becoming more like KDE every day...

[Anonymous Coward]

But making Gnome into KDE is not the right way to go.

But I really hope that they do - if only to work around the retarded licencing model that KDE's QT widget set has (commercial licence on Windows, GPL on Linux) - this makes it impossible to do quick ports to KDE.

We want to support Linux for some of our products - but at the moment this would only be for an extreme minority of our users. KDE / QT is one of the more refined GUI solutions, but we can't go with it because development costs are prohibitive (several thousand dollars per seat for QT). As a result, we're probably going to develop new revisions of products with wxWidgets instead (which runs on top of Gnome's GTK and is native on Windows and the Mac) - and try to nurture a Linux customer base that way instead.

Re:GNOME is becoming more like KDE every day...

[Anonymous Coward]

"And I actually really like Pine."

You've obviously never heard of mutt.

Re:GNOME is becoming more like KDE every day...

[theantix]

Have you tried XFCE4? It sounds like your personal preferences are matched pretty closely with that project. I like Gnome personally, but for a lot of people XFCE4 is a really good alternative and not enough know that there is a "third way" outside of KDE/Gnome.

Re:GNOME is becoming more like KDE every day...

[Brandybuck]

You don't have to install everything GNOME offers. I know several KDE users who only install kdebase, and never bother with the "swiss army knife" of kdeadmin, kdeartwork, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepim, kdeutils and kdeaddons. All of those are *optional* packages.

You have heard of gdesklets, right?

[djeca]

oh, and 4 should be possible with Cairo and the new X servers. 2 sounds interesting, but I don't agree with 1 and 3.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Cereal Box]

You conveniently forgot to take into account...

• Distributions that don't have apt-get. Or yum. Or emerge. Or the other 23 different, incompatible package managers.
• The possibility that what you're looking for isn't packaged.
• That you know offhand what the package name is.
• The need to point your installer at different repositories if what you're looking for isn't at the default one.

If you don't get all the criteria right, well, it's back to compiling the software, or searching for the package you want (just like with Windows), huh? Personally, I prefer the Windows route.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[powerlord]

Yeah.
<sarcasm>
Having a set of standards for an installation to adhear to would just be wrong, after all, name one thing in computers that ever became predominant because of a standard
</sarcasm>

If I had mod points, I would mod you up :)

Most important technology not on the roadmap?

[uss_valiant]

What about the vector graphics plans?
Is a SVG based window manager so far away?

Re:Most important technology not on the roadmap?

[ianezz]

What about the vector graphics plans? Is a SVG based window manager so far away?

Well, you asked for it.

Re:Most important technology not on the roadmap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kamuela!

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Nasarius]

Of course, the reality of the situation is that it's a crapshoot as to whether or not a package will work with whichever one of the 10,000 Linux distributions you happen to be running (chances are it won't), but hey.

Exactly. Package management is a distro issue, *not* a desktop problem. Of course, it's nice if you can just click an ebuild/RPM/DEB/whatever and it's installed automatically.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Lumpy]

Why not just make a working desktop first?


because for some reason today programmers can not understand the ideas of.....

Smaller.
Faster.
Better.

I really hope that someone will come in from the sidelines with a nice fast and easy to use desktop manager that has NONE of the added crud that is going into KDE and Gnome. I want all the added "features" to be add-on programs. if I want a battery meter, I'll download and install it.

If I want a blogger I'll download and install one.

I just wish that someone would either rip out the Gnome desktop functions, and Both KDE and Gnome copy paste and drag functions and strap them onto xfce after removing the bloat. (Oh and add a decent menuing system so programs can self-install launch icons easily by dropping a symlink in a directory location!)

I want the speed and TINY footprint of XFCE with the decent desktop managebility of Gnome and cross app cut paste.

that is it. no video editor built in, no mp3 ripper built in, no web browser integration, no launch feedback, no nothing but the job it is designed for.

coule we PLEASE get some genius programmers working on a fork of Gnome and remove 70% of the cruft? or they can do KDE... I dont care...

the rest of us simply want small fast and capable.

please?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared with
1. apt-get install foo
Which one is simpler?

Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
The following packages have been kept back:
[long list of packages]

112 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 125 not upgraded.
Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
[long list of dependencies]

Don't SCREW the EXPERT

[Speare]

Disorganized series of thoughts follow.

Make everything as simple as possible, and no simpler.

It seems the Gnome architects often forget the important second part of that goal. Or they are, frankly, deluded into thinking that there is no limit to how simple and appliance-like they can make the computer. There is a limit, and that's when I can no longer adjust it to fit me.

In contrast, this is Microsoft's lofty goal, which is good enough as it stands, but they too still forget the nuances in that goal.

Make the easy things effortless, and the hard things possible.

Desktop designers can't just cherry-pick a few simple problems and write a few lines to make it easy. While it's noble to strip out the rarely used options, or the options that "confuse" the newcomer, it is NOT ACCEPTABLE to bury the familiar power interface behind a gconf/registry setting, or to make the familiar power interface unreachable. (You hear me, Nautilus?)

Allow configurability. Allow personalization beyond just the stupid passive things like wallpaper and skins. Let a user choose their favorite way of presenting information, and be smart about it.

Commit to finishing the features you start. How long has a Gnome-Menu editor been promised, but neglected? Ever since Gnome 2.0, they've said, "well, real soon now." We thought it just barely missed the deadlines for the first distros with Gnome 2.0, but I still can't edit my launcher menu. If obvious features aren't usable, then don't go announcing major X.0 version releases.

Re:Don't SCREW the EXPERT

[starnix]

Um... Rightclick the menu and all your menu editing functions are right there. Not a folder view like Windows but quite easy. Also if you want a folder view enter "Applications:" into a nautilus window and bam, you have a folder view to use to edit menus. Just because you haven't figured it out doesn't mean its not there. Read the user manual.

Re:Don't SCREW the EXPERT

[jensend]

A very large number of Gnome 2.x users are on RH/Fedora based setups, where the menu editor still doesn't work (rh 81215 and a dozen other bugs on the same subject).

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[gr8_phk]

I'm always impressed when I run across something that says to "apt-get big-fscking-name" to install - or yum or whatever app your distro uses. Sure how am I supposed to know that? Where's the list of applications - indexed by function?

I'm with you, they need a good installer.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

# Distributions that don't have apt-get. Or yum. Or emerge. Or the other 23 different, incompatible package managers.

I use Debian. All my boxen and all my lusers use Debian. What isn't available for Debian?

# The possibility that what you're looking for isn't packaged.

Improbable. When you want to make software available for windoblows, you make an EXE and an MSI and a DLL. When you want to make it available for Linux, you make a DEB and maybe an RPB. And you release the source as a TARball.

# That you know offhand what the package name is. ...or you use aptitude, which lets you find appropriate packages.

# The need to point your installer at different repositories if what you're looking for isn't at the default one.

Debian's repositories have over 89,000 packages available, including the one you want.

Please God..

[Visceral Monkey]

Ditch metacity as the windows manager. Please. Also, after installing both the latest Gnome and KDE I can say without any doubt (at least on my machine and configuration, etc) that KDE is *much* faster than GNOME as almost everything now. It's now GNOME that feels bloated and out of touch.

Re:Please God..

[Colin Smith]

I agree about the speed. KDE is noticably faster, running it over the network emphasises the difference and if you try a lower bandiwdth link like wireless for instance KDE is perfectly usable, just like running stuff locally, Gnome is almost unusable.

I don't think it's the window manager, it seems to be all of the apps so I guess it's something in the base libraries.

Re:Please God..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll chime in on that. I use "free" instead of top to look at memory usage.
My old gnome 1.0 setup while running lots of tabbed firefox windows and xterms, currently eats 82 MB RAM.

My gnome 2.4 gentoo box takes 27 MB RAM before calling startx and about 118 MB RAM afterward.

That means gnome/X/and associated libraries are now eating over 90 MB RAM! Just for a basic desktop and one xterm! Consequently my desktop never feels faster. It has to go through that much more cruft to do the same thing.

Re:Please God..

[Anonymous Coward]

"That means gnome/X/and associated libraries are now eating over 90 MB RAM!"

Please stop trolling. You know perfectly well that that figure includes memory on the graphics card. For any clueless mods: the more memory you have on your card the more memory X will apparently use.

Re:Please God..

[MikeBabcock]

They should have kept the working relationship with Rasterman for Enlightenment.

The new E desktop project is looking good and moving along -- it would have been nice to have been more integrated with an existing desktop system instead.

Re:Please God..

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't necessarily say he's trolling. On Fedora Core 1, gconfd takes up 60 megs of memory. And that has nothing to do with X. It's just a daemon that runs in the background. That's *HUGE* and one of my major annoyances with Gnome. Everything else in Gnome is small...

Re:Please God..

[BenjyD]

Probably something to do with the large amount of detailed profiling and optimisation that the KDE guys did for the 3.2 release.

My two cents...

[Howard Beale]

I'd like to be able to print directly from the Snapshot app. I'd also like to be able to select a single window instead of just the entire desktop.

How about being able to have a different wallpaper on each workspace?

Re:My two cents...

[Skeezix]

Alt+Print Screen takes a screenshot of one window. Print Screen takes a screenshot of the whole Desktop.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get dist-upgrade, then.

Debian is the gold standard by which Linux shall be judged. And it shall be judged worthy.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

Use aptitude. It installs all the packages you want, as many times as you want, and is free.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Fritz Benwalla]

Don't have mod points, so I'll just weigh in with an "I agree."

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Cereal Box]

I use Debian. All my boxen and all my lusers use Debian. What isn't available for Debian?

Typical childish behavior. "I use Debian, therefore the whole world uses Debian!"

Improbable. When you want to make software available for windoblows, you make an EXE and an MSI and a DLL.

Well no, not really. You can release the software as is (ZIP of the contents), use InstallShield, MSI, etc. Any route you take, when you download the installer, it works.

When you want to make it available for Linux, you make a DEB and maybe an RPB.

Ah, but you're forgetting that there are RPMs for Redhat, SuSE, and Mandrake (and possibly others, I'm not sure), each of which may have issues that prevent the RPM from working across those three distros. Then there's Slackware TGZs, and other obscure package formats I'm sure I haven't even heard of yet. And you still haven't guaranteed that what you've packaged will work on any given Linux system.

Debian's repositories have over 89,000 packages available, including the one you want.

And yet, people make their own repositories, why?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[jb.hl.com]

So that'd be WindowMaker then.

Let's face it...

[carrett]

It has not yet been the year of the GNU/Linux desktop, and it probably won't be for a while. Here's why:

1. If something works for Joe Desktopuser, he doesn't want to change it (and, though crappilly, Windows works for him).
   
2. Joe Desktopuser doesn't want to bother becoming familiar with a whole new set of programs (and really, asking him to switch OSs is asking him to do exactly that...unless we make all GNU/Linux software clones of Win software...but that's no fun).
   
3. Sure GNU/Linux can provide a substitute for the programs Joe Desktopuser needs, but, right now, it's too much trouble for him.
   

I hate to say it, but I really think that right now M$ is unbeatable on the desktop market (at least for i386...lotsa people are switching to OSX). If we can beat M$ at running M$ apps. and providing an even simpler interface, then I'm sure the market will swing. I think that GNU/Linux developers don't want to do that though, since the goal was to write GOOD software, and just because we win over windows users doesn't mean we're writing good software.

Finally (I guess I'm blabbering): Why Do We Care So Much!? If people want to use windows, what's it to us? That's one less person in #debian complaining about X telling them there's no screens found.

I use linux because I like having control over my system. I like that I get to control everything. But if you're using windows, you want dumbed-down software (in most cases).

-Garrett (the carrett)

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[stratjakt]

It's not even a gnome thing. I'd like to see a package format defined that everyone can use.

I used to use slackware (still do on most boxes) and I'd find some app I wanted to install, alas no slackware .tgz package. Maybe an rpm or something (but rpm2tgz never worked for me), so I'd end up installing from source.

So now I'm trying out gentoo. Oops, no ebuild for what I want. Or maybe I don't know the name of it. After browsing around the portage trees for an hour or so, I'm back to installing from source tarballs again.

Distros, well even projects, all have different ideas of where stuff should go, too. /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin... /opt/bin (what does opt mean?) hell OpenLDAP seems to like to put it's daemons in /usr/libexec.

I frankly don't see the point in the unix style "binaries in this folder, config files in this one, data in this one" thing. I like the c:\program files\nameofprogram and "My Documents" way of handling things. That'll never change in unix land, but it sure is nice.

I understand the logic.. You can have all the /*/bin folders on seperate read-only partitions or network shares, /tmp on a ramdisk, /home on an nfs share, etc.. But who does that on a desktop system? Most have one big partition for all of it.

Re:language - -

[Anonymous Coward]

You had pencils?!? Lucky bastard. Why in my da...OOF!
SFX: ashen club striking sack of meat...
SFX: thud

Better Menu Management

[artios]

One of the highlights of KDE as far as making it usable for grandma is being able to search through the installation and find applications that aren't in the menu that could be incorporated into the menu.

If gnome is truly about usability, putting programs into the menu should be a piece of cake. I'm not sure if KDE has the end-all solution on menu management, but it could be improved in gnome.

On the other hand, gnome has done a nice job at being able to modify the menu directly from the menu (where it makes sense).

Some drag and drop capabilities in the menu would also be nice.

Make it a better development platform

[jared_hanson]

Here is my take. Linux will succeed on the desktop when more developers and ISVs jump on board. This won't happen until GNOME is a better development platform. How can you make it better? Well, I'll share my opinion (even if you didn't ask.)

Developers want to quickly build applications. Right now, a lot of the development focus for GNOME apps is using C. That's a generalization, but a fairly accurate one. They have bindings for many other languages, but they usually don't get the spotlight. Fold the bindings projects into the main project. For example, fold Gtkmm (C++ bindings) into the bigger GTK effort. Likewise for other language bindings and other libraries. Make sure these bindings are as identical as possible accross target languages, so the learning curve from one language to the next isn't so great. Right now its easy for a newcoming developer to find the main project (ie Gtk), but no so easy to find information on how to use it with his/her preferred language.

Once that has happened, stress the fact that using GNOME you can develop apps in a wide variety of languages. Lay the whole Java/C# thing to rest and support both. Linux has an opportunity to become the premier development platform (which should rest nicely with geek and open source ideals). Everyone says choice is key, but then they try to rope you into a development methodology. This isn't necessary. Build incredible libraries (likely in C) and then bind them to as many higher languages as possible, and always keep these bindings current with the mainline. Developmers will come in droves, and make great applications, if they can pick and choose the most appropriate technology rather than having it dictated to them.

Re:Make it a better development platform

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but why should *anything* be developed to run for a specific desktop? That kind of attitude only fragments the Linux development world more. To run "gnome apps" I have to have monstrous gnome libraries. Ditto for KDE.

That kind of nonsense is driving development away. Certainly game development. The main problem is there is too much constant change in every foundation of Linux (*cough* except X.... no one ever realizes basic things like *vsync* are important in the Linux world *cough*). Making gnome into a development platform only makes this problem worse. As a game developer I could not count on any Linux system to follow the same standards. Not only do many Linux users customize their environments to death (no SDL, no ALSA, KDE, etc.) but the underlying widgets and OS functionality are constantly in flux (e.g. gtk2, devfs/sysfs).

The only way to turn Linux into a stable development platform is to freeze everything. Freeze the device hierarchy. Freeze the APIs. Stop all development work on underlying functionality. I know that's anathema to the Linux spirit, but the reality is it's hard to build anything better than an outhouse when you're constantly busy ripping up the foundation (or, in X11's case, shoring up a crumbling old foundation).

The reason there's so many houses-built-on-windows is because they have a relatively standard foundation that only changes with each major release. It may not be the most solid foundation, but it's both good enough and--effectively--frozen.

So don't add gnome into this nightmarish cocktail of development systems.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

i wish.. windowmaker has horrid desktop control, horrid cut and paste and horrid integration... I cant add anything to the program menu without a fight.

those are all VERY simple things compared to a built in blogger tool.

Real virtual desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what I'd like to see? Real virtual desktops. The current "virtual desktops" are really just virtual screens, not desktops. Full virtual desktops should act as completely separate desktops, with their own set of icons, etc. Obviously this would not be for everyone, but I would love to see it as a user-selectable option.

This is related to a problem I have with Gnome 2.4 (I don't know if it's been fixed in 2.6): when I double-click a desktop icon, I expect that program to launch on the desktop where I clicked the icon. But if I switch desktops before the program window shows up, it opens in that desktop instead. Maddening, especially on a slow computer such as mine! Also, dragging items between virtual desktops needs to be made easier (again, apologies if this has improved in 2.6).

I also have to second the idea of a sound server replacement, though I'm not thrilled that it's in the "Long Term" section of the roadmap. The current situation is frankly an embarrassment for a desktop environment of Gnome's stature.

In the pie-in-the-sky department, I would love to see options for a Mac-style menu bar, and Acorn-style file choosing via drag-and-drop rather than with a file selector dialog.

Mike

Re:Real virtual desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

Most GNOME apps (and assumably KDE apps as well) will accept a drag-drop from the file manager to load. They don't, however, support this for saving, though with the pluggable FileChooser dialog in GTK2.4, it's supposedly possible to implement an XDnD saving dialog.

KDE just a bit off

[Psymunn]

I know exactly what you mean. KDE, as it's default, just makes me angry and i can't tell why. It's as if they try to be just a bit more flashy or bubbely then windows and everything seems just, slightly not how you expect. It's like walking from a yellow room to another yellow room that is 3 shades off, just frustrating. Now if the room was blue, you wouldn't notice or care. Frankly, I just use fluxbox. Now that's a clean desktop.
Granted, if I help someone switch over to Linux, i set them up with KDE, but donig so just makes me angry inside...

I searched for the word "performance"

[Colin Smith]

It wasn't mentioned in the article at all. Neither was the word "speed" or the word "faster".

I guess Gnome is destined to remain the slowpoke of the GUI world. Who would have thought KDE would be the quick one.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

"the rest of us simply want small fast and capable."

And everyone else can stick to Windows or the Mac.

I wouldn't mind so much but this Gnome/KDE cruft is permeating into otherwise useful programs. GTK used to be excellent; it's still good but why does the file requester insist on forcing Gnomisms on me?

I could go on but I won't. Suffice to say, the moronification of UNIX is continuing apace.

Update?

[Anonymous Coward]

a Windows Update tool

Now why would I need Windows Update on my Linux machine?

Oh, wait. You must be talking about something like apt or yum that's included in pretty much every damn modern distro.

Re:Update?

[syntap]

Right, obviously the joke flew over your head. Sorry to confuse you.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[happyfrogcow]

Sheesh. Yeah, this year will be the year of linux-on-the-desktop now that we have integrated blogging. That was sure the barrier for entry to me.

the day that "find / -name blog" gives me some found files ... oh brother, i might do a "rm -rf /" and go cry myself to sleep.

Weighing in could make a difference? (yeah, right)

[jensend]

1. Scratch the plans to add everything under the sun to the desktop, and focus on reducing the footprint (heh) instead.

2. Stop the user-hostility effort (disguised as a usability effort). Gnome 1.2 was way more usable than 2.x is. Spatial nautilus is a typical Gnome 2.x disaster (see also several "features" of the new filechooser and just about everything about Metacity): "abstract principles we dreamed up (and artificial usability tests, on occasion) tell us that, contrary to what the vast majority of real users may say, this is the way to go; since we're so much smarter than our users that we always know what's right for them and they don't, the ability to change this behavior should be well-hidden or nonexistent."

Gnome Wishlist

[Sweetshark]

What Gnome needs most IMHO is:

• more stability.
• Good, complete and easy to navigate configuration tools.
• less integration, more modularisation (it should be easier to use another wm for example)

Gnome aims to be a complete DE and thus to also be an option for beginners - it has to takes care that is is not squeezed between a clean small DE like xfce on one side and an fully bloated KDE in all its might on the other. Advanced users also tend sometimes to go for the leaner wm-only solutions like *box, fvwm and the like.
I think this comptition explains the above list. The first point is essential for beginners and advanced users alike. The second a result of gnomes obscure usage of gconf and essential for beginners, while the third was always the unique selling point of gnome over KDE.

Re:GNOME wishlist

[BigSven]

More types of data being supported in cut-and-paste in GNOME apps. This means being able to cut-and-paste from the GIMP or Inkscape to Open Office and back again.

You'd have to put that on the GIMP / Inkscape / Oo roadmaps. But fortunately it's already on the GIMP roadmap at least. Might even make it into GIMP 2.2.

The GNOME NO Roadmap

[Anonymous Coward]

That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.

Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.

If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.

I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).

Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.

Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.

Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.

Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.

Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.

We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.

- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,

Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil

Re:The GNOME NO Roadmap

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, i'm finally moved to post something to /. :-)

i read this post in another recent thread, and it actually did resonate with me somewhat.

i started using GNOME around 1.0; partly because KDE was (iirc) based on the then-non-free-as-in-speech Qt toolkit, and partly because i just didn't like the "look and feel" of it.

i tried developing a GNOME app using one of the language bindings that was available. This was rather difficult, as there was no documentation for how this language implemented the API. i sent a few emails to the developer of the bindings offering to do the documentation work, or assist such work if it was already under way, but got no response.

Over time, i've felt GNOME has become more and more unusable (this from someone who is comfortable in both a Linux CLI and GUI environment). It's becoming slower, and more likely to crash (that is, gnome-session is more likely to crash), and then freeze upon attempting a restart.

My work - which has nothing to do with IT - involves me spending a lot of time on the Web, and i enjoy using Galeon and GAIM (though Galeon seems to leak memory like a sieve). However, although i used to use Evolution, i've sinced moved to KMail, and am very glad i did so. Evolution seemed to get buggier and buggier with each release. It seemed to have stuff /hard-coded/ which i feel should have been in a config file (such as the list of RSS feeds - not that the RSS feed mechanism worked that well anyway). It felt like the developers were seeking to clone Outlook right down to the bloated 'feel' of Outlook. (i know, KMail is just a mail client, whereas Evolution is a 'PIM'. But just using the mail section of Evolution felt bloated. i did make use of Evolution's calendar functionality, but in my desire to get away from Evolution, i'm now using MimerDesk instead. Which doesn't require me to run an Exchange server in order to provide groupware functionality, like Evolution apparently does. Please correct me if i'm wrong.)

So now i'm using Xfce4 as my desktop. It's light, it's fast, it's stable, it gets the job done. The more i read about the latest GNOME developments, the more i'm glad i've moved on.

Re:The GNOME NO Roadmap

[Repugnant_Shit]

This is simply a troll posted everytime a story about GNOME comes up.

why do you troll every Linux story?

[Ender Ryan]

Why do you troll every Linux story, when you obviously know very little about Linux in the first place, and are obviously not very interested in Linux developments.

Can't people just install their own peer-to-peer and blogging apps?

Sure, but they can install web-browsers, mail clients, et cetera too.

Why not make an installation system that works as simply as clicking setuppackage.msi is in Windows and let the other problems solve themselves?

Often it is that easy, with a number of caveats, however. If you use a distro and stick with packages for that distro, you won't have a problem. If not, well, you made that decision. People who aren't Unix saavy should stick to packages designed for their distro, meaning they should be using a mainstream distro like Fedora, Mandrake, SuSe, et al.

Why not just make a working desktop first?

News to me that it doesn't work, considering I'm using it now, and been using it for years. I'm a bad example of course, being Unix saavy and all, but I have several friends who switched to Linux on their own, over a year ago.

Sheesh. Yeah, this year will be the year of linux-on-the-desktop now that we have integrated blogging. That was sure the barrier for entry to me.

Well I'm always glad to hear of another Linux convert...

Re:why do you troll every Linux story?

[IamTheRealMike]

Why do you think he's trolling? Yes, such a post would inspire lots of aggravted replies which is the hallmark of a good troll but that's not his fault. The guy makes a good point. An OS where you can see some software written for it, that you want to run, but that you can't easily install is a broken OS.

And no the answer is not "Just use Debian".

Re:why do you troll every Linux story?

[Ender Ryan]

Why do you think he's trolling?

Because stratjakt is often trolling. Every single story related to Linux, he has to put in his two ill-informed cents. Just see the recent X copy/paste "Ask Slashdot." He rambled about how X is so broken, without even a modicum of understanding of how the X clipboard/selection buffers work. Not that X doesn't have problems of course, but posting inaccurate drivel all the time leads me to believe he's either a complete moron, a troll, or some kind of shill(doubtful, he seems to be a student).

Several months ago, stratjakt posted a string of comments in SCO discussions, claiming he knew first-hand (or something) that Linux had stolen SCO code and that SCO would win, and other such fairly obvious lies. A number of moderators fell for it. (Un)fortuneately, after other posters pointed out that he was lying(easy, since his posts all contradicted each other - he was claiming to be an employee at a bunch of different places and such - I don't remember the particulars), his posts were modded to -1, making them difficult if not impossible to find now. I don't know what his motivation was/is, but he is most certainly not a trustworty person.

The guy makes a good point.

No, he didn't. "Software installation on Linux is far from ideal," would be a good point. Inaccurate exaggerations coupled with outright falsehoods is a troll.

Complete bullshit

[Overly Critical Guy]

Exactly. Package management is a distro issue, *not* a desktop problem.

Absolutely, 100% wrong. Your abitrary mindset is the primary problem. "I've randomly decided that application installation should be handled by the distro!" No reason or proof or logic is given.

How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API? The very idea is so backwards and laughable, I fully expect Linux to take another 10 years to reach the level XP and OS X are at now.

Since Linux crunchies are absolutely dead-set on never replacing the interface failures that are taskbars and start menus, I want to at least be able to have applications install their links on the menu and give me shortcuts to their uninstallers automatically.

I want to be able to just download an installer for an app onto my desktop and double-click it. A desktop environment should keep track of the desktop applications it has installed. Forgive me, but I want my desktop to be self-aware of what the hell it has installed and how to uninstall them. We're trying to compete with OS X and Windows here!

You have two options:

Do it in "bundles" like OS X, where applications install to folders in an Applications directory, and you can remove the program just by dragging the folder to the trash.

Do it like Windows does, where applications register their locations, tell Windows how to uninstall itself, and adds appropriate shortcuts and entries in the start menu and "Add/Remove Programs" dialog.

High school Linux zealot: "B-but we have a hundred possible external package managers to run all that!" Yeah, good luck remaining 15 years behind everyone in the GUI department just because nobody can be arsed to stop working on new sidebar buttons and integrated blogging functions in order to create a sane API in the vein of Cocoa and .NET for people to develop for. Until then, GNOME and KDE are exactly what they were when they first came out--hacky desktop emulators stuck on top of X to make it look like Linux is in the same league as Apple and Microsoft in the desktop market. "Look, we have an integrated browser too! Look, a taskbar! 7 second app startup time? Ignore that, here are more screenshots!"

You want a litmus test? The day someone can buy a printer that comes with a CD, stick the CD into the drive, a menu comes up to install the binary driver, and afterward the printer works. All done in a Linux desktop. Then it would truly be the "year of the Linux desktop (tm)". At the current pace, that is definitely not going to ever happen with either KDE or GNOME. They both are horrible desktops, and people overlook it because they don't want to admit that Microsoft still gets this part right. To Linux guys, it's a penis length test of shoving in as much pointless crap as possible to compensate for the lack of very basic functionality.

Re:Complete bullshit

[hemanman]

I wish I had any mod points, because what you say are the truth, but it hurts most of the zealots to hear it.

Also, GNOME was supposed to be a small memory footprint system, but with XFree86 using 40MB, Gnome core 20MB, Nautilus 100MB and Mozilla another 100MB, you end up using 260MB for a GUI and a webbrowser! Windows XP only uses 120MB, and Windows 2000 60MB. On Windows NT 4 you could do it in 20MB, and on Windows NT 3.51 only 12MB.

But I guess thats evolution or what. I just think it is sad that Linux has taken the lead from microsoft as the resource hog.

-H

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Familiar with the concept of shared memory? I mean, if you run only about four largescale GNOME apps and add up all the RSS values, you'll probably be up to three times the amount of memory you have in your system, yet for some bizarre reason, swap is entirely unused. (YMMV, but this is typical)

Re:Complete bullshit

[irix]

GNOME was supposed to be a small memory footprint system

WTF? According to whom?

but with XFree86 using 40MB, Gnome core 20MB, Nautilus 100MB and Mozilla another 100MB, you end up using 260MB for a GUI and a webbrowser

BS. Try checking the number of shared libraries you just double, triple or quadruple counted.

Re:Complete bullshit

[FooBarWidget]

"Since Linux crunchies are absolutely dead-set on never replacing the interface failures that are taskbars and start menus,"

*cough* Window Maker? XFCE? ROX? Enlightenment? There are tons of window managers and desktops that don't use a taskbar+start menu interface.

"You want a litmus test? The day someone can buy a printer that comes with a CD, stick the CD into the drive, a menu comes up to install the binary driver, and afterward the printer works."

I bought an Epson printer. I stick in the driver CD, and the install program pops up. I click Next, Next, Next, and after a while I get an error. The printer didn't work.

No dude, Windows is highly overrated. Things don't always work smoothly. Things go wrong more often than you zealots want to admit.

On Fedora Core 1: Applications->System->Printers. Click Add Printer, Next, Next, Next, done.

"At the current pace, that is definitely not going to ever happen with either KDE or GNOME. They both are horrible desktops"

Yeah let's make grand statements without any evidence to back up. What makes GNOME and KDE so horrible? Do you have any usability tests that say GNOME and KDE are totally unusable?

Re:Complete bullshit

[Overly Critical Guy]

*cough* Window Maker? XFCE? ROX? Enlightenment? There are tons of window managers and desktops that don't use a taskbar+start menu interface.

The discussion is about the two major, most popular choices--KDE and GNOME. The rest lack even more functionality than those two do, so I didn't realize they had relevance to this discussion.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to be able to just download an installer for an app onto my desktop and double-click it.

You mean like RPM?

Re:Complete bullshit

[irix]

Somehow I can't resist feeding known trolls today...

How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API?

Let me get this straight... you want GNOME to invent their own packaging format. So then your distro will use .rpm or .deb for every package, expect for the GNOME ones, which will use this new packaging format.

And despite the fact that on modern Linux distros installing a new package or uninstalling an old one is just one command or a few clicks away, this new GNOME-specific package format will solve all of the ills of Linux.

Right.

The day someone can buy a printer that comes with a CD, stick the CD into the drive, a menu comes up to install the binary driver, and afterward the printer works.

Of course, because 3rd party printer drivers are something that GNOME developers can really do something about.

Did anything in your rant have something to do with GNOME?

Re:Complete bullshit

[swv3752]

As has been pointed out, you just double counted libs. On my home system which besides being a desktop is also a dev mysql server and apache server is using about 240mb of RAM on a regular basis. Yet at work on a win2k system with a terminal emu, outlook, mozilla, and a mustomer management system open, 315MB. hrmm...

Re:Complete bullshit

[FooBarWidget]

And why is the taskbar+start menu interface broken? Almost everybody uses it, and I've yet to hear any average user complain about it.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

insightful??

You are just s fag...

first of all.. we aren't shooting to have binary drivers install with a printer..

second of all.. if you want that.. just put in the CD that comes with a lot of lexmark printers.. guess year of linux on the desktop was a few years ago.

There is a package management gui that works across distros... red carpet.. next?

Re:Complete bullshit

[Nasarius]

Let me get this straight... you want GNOME to invent their own packaging format.

Yeah...calling for a standardized package format is one thing. Calling for the Desktop Environments to create something new is...bizarre. Once again, it is the responsibility of the distro to modify their DE to make it compatible with their packaging system. Until their is one Grand Unified Package Format (mandatory Gentoo zealotism: ebuilds!!), it's simply unreasonable to expect GNOME or KDE to work perfectly with your distro of choice by default.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Brandybuck]

How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API? The very idea is so backwards and laughable, I fully expect Linux to take another 10 years to reach the level XP and OS X are at now.

XP and OSX get around the problem but mandating the operating system. Only an idiot developer would think that a binary OSX package should be able to install on XP, or vice versa. Yet people expect this of Unix!

KDE and Gnome support more than one Linux distro. And to clue you in, they support more than just Linux. Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, Cygwin, OSX+X, OpenBSD, IRIX, NetBSD, etc, etc, etc. Expecting the desktop to provide a common binary package format is beyond ludicrous.

That's why it's up to the OS. Just like it is with XP and OSX.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Brandybuck]

Beyond that, he also needs to take into account that GNOME+Mozilla has ten times the functionality of Windows. It might not necessarily be as intuitive for Windows users as Windows is, but it certainly has more features and functionality.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Nasarius]

I've randomly decided that application installation should be handled by the distro!

Me? No, the distros decided that themselves. Y'know, each of them has their own different package manager. It's one of those things that makes a distro unique.

Re:Complete bullshit

[ilctoh]

OK, lets get one thing straight - I want to use whatever program I want. I don't give a rat's ass about how you want your "super easy Windows-work-alike" distro/desktop/OS thing to function. I want to get to choose what I want on my system, and if that means I'll have to make a *gasp* choice so be it. I hate to break it to you, but software is not "one-size-fits-all", I'll use whatever I like, and whatever works best for the specific job I'm doing. One other question - why are we trying to "complete with windows and os x?" Does it really matter if we have a "year of linux on the desktop"? I think that Linux is too focused on being a Microsoft Windows work-a-like, and why do we want to work like a product which we all claim to HATE?

Re:Complete bullshit

[Patoski]

How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API? The very idea is so backwards and laughable, I fully expect Linux to take another 10 years to reach the level XP and OS X are at now.

Speaking from an enterprise perspective Windows package management royally sucks! Having a modern Linux distribution for desktops would make my patch management responsibilities SO much easier. Let me give just one example that I run into almost every single day at my job.

With windows if you want to roll out a patch or a program of some sort I need to make an install package that will auto install silently (time), QA test my installer (more time), QA test the patch (even more time), write an SMS job to deploy it or put it on a RIS server somewhere (I don't have time for all this!!!). THIS SUCKS!

With a Linux desktop I can setup an RPM repository(s) on our LAN (we'd use Novell or Red Hat]),create a workstation build that would point to our pricate RPM repository, fill the repository with patches QA tested by the vendor (we'd QA test in our own environment too of course) and let the client pull the patches each time they log on to our network. Each time the computer is turned on the distro pulls down the latest updates. Simple! FAR easier than rolling my own packages / installer / SMS job and doing all the testing myself. How MS has gotten away with putting all this work on their customers given their penchant for patching is beyond me.

Don't be so proud of Windows package management. In many ways it is light years behind what can be done in a modern Linux distribution. There may not be one standard for package installs in Linux but you can't say that for windows either (EXEs, MSI installers, etc.).

You want a litmus test? The day someone can buy a printer that comes with a CD, stick the CD into the drive, a menu comes up to install the binary driver, and afterward the printer works. All done in a Linux desktop.

In a modern Linux distribution I can double click on an RPM file, be prompted for a password and happily install the package in question. One may say that entering a password is too large a burden to place on users but quite frankly I don't want my users installing hardware / software willy nilly. Users installing freeware / spyware / non-standard hardware generates a ton of support incidents that we don't need or want.

The home market is all well and good and is generally what most people think when they ask "Is Linux useable?" but practically speaking MS doesn't make NEAR the cash from the home market that they do from their business accounts. This is where most commercial Linux companies are rightly focusing their efforts and it is really starting to pay off.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Love,
Overly Critical Guy (aka bonch)

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Love,
Overly Critical Guy (aka bonch)

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop saying this---it's wrong. See above.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Rahga]

"people overlook it because they don't want to admit that Microsoft still gets this part right"

And I assume the right way means, 9 times out of 10, that you should reboot the system after you install the drivers?

Re:Complete bullshit

[Zirtix]

If I could have a free (as in speech) implementation of Windows, I would jump at it (cf. codeweavers). I'm sure a lot of people here would agree. When you look at the apps and the kernel, GNU/Linux is the best free desktop solution there is right now.

Re:Complete bullshit

[ak3ldama]

wow, absolutely 100% wrong ... or something

i think that it is stupid to just download an app to the desktop and install some rpm (or similar), that is not the linux 'way' at all. has all the fs/oss ranting tought you all nothing? you should be wanting to do this:
$ tar -xzf appname.tar.gz
$ cd appname
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
(zipping format issues aside for moment)

if you trully care about the app in question that is what you will want to do. all of the other various apps will likely be installed as part of the base system, but to go out and download an app that should be the recommended procedure.

having the source is what drove me to linux in the first place, and this was redhat 5.2 days. my video card didn't work with X11, but that didn't matter, i had access to source which was way better than with Windows.

Re:Complete bullshit

[jazman_777]

One other question - why are we trying to "complete with windows and os x?" Does it really matter if we have a "year of linux on the desktop"? I think that Linux is too focused on being a Microsoft Windows work-a-like, and why do we want to work like a product which we all claim to HATE?

Some folks don't want to dual-boot Windows just for certain apps (Quicken, games). They'd like Linux-native versions of those apps. Linux popularity supposedly makes that more likely.

Re:Complete bullshit

[bit01]

doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API

I think you mean standard, not API. Always re-inventing yet another API is one of the reasons why programming in M$/Windows is such a pain. And one of the reasons why the applications are often so buggy. No attempt at abstraction and consistency, just a mess of inconsistent function calls.

tell Windows how to uninstall itself

That's another problem in M$/Windows. Every one installs/uninstalls differently, for no good reason. And usually stuff up working files and shared resources like DLL's and the registry while they are at it.

7 second app startup time

Nonsense. All versions of M$/Windows are as slow or slower to start applications as GNU/Linux etc. on the same hardware. On both platforms some applications move the startup time to boot/login time and claim they've made it faster; they haven't (pre-loading).

sane API in the vein of Cocoa and .NET

.NET is hardly a sane API. Yet another new API that simply duplicates existing libraries and functionality for marketing reasons. It may be clean on it's own but it's not clean embedded in the real world. Don't know about Cocoa.

install the binary driver

No thank you, that's the whole point of open source. There is no reason why an installation couldn't do a quick compile if the environment was sufficiently standard.

Having said the above I agree with alot of what you say; the big failing of Linux at the moment is basic standards, not GUI functionality. Despite what some poor programmers like to claim standards, if written properly, are not inconsistent with innovation and choice.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

You're going to have to clarify what you mean by "GNOME." The development framework? Some set of programs that are bundled as part of gnome-*? GNOME + OpenOffice + GAIM + ...? Wtf are you talking about?

And then when you say 'Windows,' what are you talking about? The default install? The default install + the 600,000,000 programs available for it?

Because really, anyone that suggests that GNOME + all of the programs that use Gtk does more than Windows + all of the programs written for Windows is smoking a lot of crack, or is so ignorant of what computers are used for that all they do is sit around on IRC and talk about whether KDE or GNOME is better.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Lucky for us people like you don't write software. On Linux packages are a distro thing by definition. debs are far superior to executable installation programs -- in fact we need to move even farther in that direction. Installation should be performed via a sandbox (much like emerge does) so it will be completely impossible to write evil debs.

Re: Complete bullshit

[gidds]

The day someone can buy a printer that comes with a CD, stick the CD into the drive, a menu comes up to install the binary driver, and afterward the printer works.

No. The day Linux is good enough to win over users from other OSs is the day when you plug in your printer and it just works. You shouldn't need to faff around with drivers or CDs at all, let alone config files or whatever.

Seriously, I think this illustrates a major failing. With the amount of technology and cleverness that's gone into the various bits of Unix, you'd think that getting stuff like printers working would be easy. And yet folk don't even seem to aim as high as MS on that score, let alone what's possible.

Re:Complete bullshit

[DarkVein]

How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API?

You contradict yourself later. MacOS X does not have an application installation/uninstallation API. The closest thing they have is their extremely horrible setup script thingy which is for installing programs that have to put things places like /Library/ and /System/. Even that is completely divorced from MacOS X itself, which they just encourage you to use for messy bundles.

Personally, I like the idea of application bundles. However, do not confuse them with anything resembling an API. I think they are also somewhat incompatible with GNOME, although they could be used for a layer on top of GNOME.

Re:Complete bullshit

[Bohemoth2]

Amen! Brother! Let's get this fucking show on the road and start coding for users and get the system files gui and all in under 100Meg

Re:Complete bullshit

[Brandybuck]

You're going to have to clarify what you mean by "GNOME." ... And then when you say 'Windows,' what are you talking about?

I'm talking about the default installs for both. For GNOME, this is everything under "GNOME 2.6 Installation Order" on the GNOME installation page. For Windows, it's also the default install, choosing "full" instead of "minimal" of "custom" when given a choice.

Re:Complete bullshit

[aztracker1]

I think this is where mono and java come into play.. ;)

Re:Complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're trying to compete with Windows and OS X here"

Since when the fuck have you been a 'we', OCG? Or do you mean you're now part of the Linux community, even though you spend all your time trolling on Slashdot?

Start coding a solution, or leave your fucking house. Either way, it'll help.

There are other Desktops

[Psymunn]

While less intuative, there are several other desktop or windows managers that are light weight, easy to use if you have an intermediate level of knowledge (not for joe user, that's who Gnome and KDE are trying to cater too), and about as stripped down as it gets. Best part, they don't try to be windows at all.
Personally, I use fluxbox and it's a dream. It comes with a couple of x applications (i'm sorry if x-calc is too much bloat for you) but otherwise it's the least imposing interface i have ever had teh good pleasure of useing. Window tabbing, and no damn start bar or menu icons (unless you want to add them) adds to a much cleaner interface.
If you're comfortable using terminal a lot and fiddeling with system files, then why bother with KDE or GNOME. Let those be what they are trying to be, an interface and solution for the average person.
A KDE Lite would be nice though.
(note: This does not mean i support allowing joe user the ability to write blogs. Infact a blog crippeling patch for everything wouldn't upset me inanyway)

Firefox is OK, but...

[bcs_metacon.ca]

I like Firefox just fine but it has one gigantic mis-feature that keeps me using Epiphany: profiles. I hate 'em. They really don't make much sense on a mutli-user OS anyway (individual user preferences are handled at that level, where they belong). Most of the time when you open up another instance of Mozilla/Firefox, all you *really* want is another window. It's high time they killed profiles!

I really hope GNOME sticks with Epiphany, or fixes Firefox's wart(s).

Re:Firefox is OK, but...

[GeekDork]

I hate [profiles]. They really don't make much sense on a mutli-user OS anyway [...]. Most of the time when you open up another instance of Mozilla/Firefox, all you *really* want is another window.

I'm using the debian/unstable package and have never seen a profile manager in Firefox, and calling the binary with an instance open just creates a new window. So if this is not the default behaviour, it's reasonably easy to implement.

Re:Firefox is OK, but...

[colinramsay]

Ben just ripped the profile UI out of Firefox, it's a lot more hidden now I believe. I suspect more stuff along these lines will occur - the profile stuff in Firefox is useful only for testing and network deployment.

Re:Firefox is OK, but...

[bcs_metacon.ca]

I've only recently used Firefox in OpenBSD and Solaris, and the profile manager was there, and annoying. It's good that it's being downplayed in recent builds 'tho.

Re:Firefox is OK, but...

[Feztaa]

You have been tricked ;)

Firefox (and thunderbird) still have the profile manager, but the default launching script has been rewritten with some trickery to hide it. That's right, when you "call the binary" and it opens a new window, that's actually an ugly shell script that detects whether or not firefox is currently running and then decides whether to actually launch firefox or just tell the existing firefox to open a new window based on that. It's a really ugly hack workaround for brokenness within firefox itself.

I know this because I wrote a similar shell script for this back in the day before firefox was bundled with distros and came with such a script by default.

Rest assured, if you were to download the official firefox tarball from mozilla.org, and tried to launch it twice, you'd get the profile manager.

It's not that firefox's profile manager has been removed, it's that lots of people have gone to great lengths to hide it at all costs... it's still there.

I personally use Galeon now, and I'm very happy with it. It's smaller and faster than firefox, has all the features I need, and doesn't have any of the big ugly warts :)

Re:Firefox is OK, but...

[fred3666]

Mozilla's Firefox is still at 0.8 (well, let me check my watch, it's about to go to 0.9) and thus it is still a work in progress that has yet to reach its 1.0 milestone. IMO, it already blows all the other open-source browsers out of the water. Even at this point, I'm prepared to declare it the open-source winner. Let's not bother developing open-source alternatives like Epiphany (or Galleon or Konqeror or whatever else).

Gnome's programmers that have been working on Epiphany should be redirected to some other function and let FireFox 1.x get bundled with Gnome 2.8. Gnome doesn't need to compete with Firefox because they will concentrate on besting MSIE and Opera (and I don't think they're particularly concerned with besting Epiphany at the moment anyway).

Linux has enough duplication as it is. Let's try and pick some winners from the crowd and go with it to some logical conclusion. I'd love to keep Gnome as the full desktop-environment UI and merge XFce and Fluxbox together for the alternate, low-resource UI.

Okay, perhaps I have a bit of an autocratic streak in me. Deal with it!

Re:Firefox is OK, but...

[LoveTheIRS]

amen, firefox shouldn't have to have separate profiles because that should be taken care of by me logging in. Only one profile per unix user plz. In otherwords I don't care or want to have to deal with Linux Firefox profiles crap where I can't open up a new Firefox window by clicking the icon on my panel.

Re:Firefox is OK, but...

[MaoTse]

Not true.

Having more then a single profile is really handy when doing web programming stuff. You can test multiple cookies sets and test your web app with diffrent security levels, etc.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[minkwe]

Why not make an installation system that works as simply as clicking setuppackage.msi is in Windows and let the other problems solve themselves?

It works on my Fedora system.

Download an RPM, double-click on it, voila, it is installing!

Get out of the dark ages.

Every time I upgrade Gnome...

[26199]

It seems like features disappear and nothing is added. I just finished compiling KDE, it's time I gave it another try...

This saddens me, I've been a Gnome fan for a long time... but the whole .Xmodmap fiasco has me fairly annoyed right now.

Amusingly enough...

[Overly Critical Guy]

One of the MSDN tech videos demonstrated a guy writing a 10-50 line XAML app that updated his website blog for him via .NET.

We're basically chasing someone's tail again--as we have done for the past 10 years. I agree with another poster here, I want a working desktop first. Where's the sane development API? Oh, I forgot, everything is about "choice" and we need 23 different libraries, APIs, and window managers that all conflict with each other (I have to install two entire fucking desktop environments to be able to run each other's apps! Amateurish and unprofessional). For crying out loud, my GNOME memory footprint is sucking up more RAM than XP does on my laptop. I don't even want to think about that krudgy slow thing we call KDE...

How is it geeks can get so many things right--Linux kernel, Apache, PHP--and so many things wrong--KDE, GNOME, XFree86, and basically anything attempting GUI usage? It's like when it comes to moving away from the technical stuff and actually getting creative and interacting with people, geeks fall short not only in social life but in their application projects. Not a troll but a real observation here--the problem is who is developing these projects and how they approach them, which is illustrative of the community as a whole (including Slashdot)...

Re:Amusingly enough...

[stokkie]

I think I know why. Techies can do the most wonderful things. But a desktop is nog only technical (under the hood), but also involves human psychology. What feels good to a typical person, looks good, sounds good, is intuïtive etc.

And that psychology insight is not one techies have.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[gr8_phk]

Case in point. How do I install it? This the typical thing you see in Linux land.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[dpw2atox]

Well it appears that you haven't ever heard of the Linux Standard Base project which can be found at http://www.linuxbase.org/ The goal of this project is to set a standard base for linux distros. Several of the major linux distros are members of this and try to adhear to its standards. There is also http://www.freedesktop.org which is working on standards for the desktop to make it easier to write programs for linux. Before you go on a rant and rave you should definantly do your research.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Laxitive]

No, he didn't open the floodgates. You just did.

Oh man, you just opened the floodgates with this one. Prepare to be lectured on why the 37 different packaging standards make software installations easier than with Windows. Of course, the reality of the situation is that it's a crapshoot as to whether or not a package will work with whichever one of the 10,000 Linux distributions you happen to be running (chances are it won't), but hey.

Dude, fragmentation is what happens in healthy, competitive markets. And the fact that several packaging formats exist is a side effect of a healthy, competitive market of ideas. We don't WANT a monoculture in Linux, and for GOOD reasons. It might be a little inefficient to have competing standards.. but it leads to furthering the pace of development. It provides more ground for ideas to be tested on.

That would require setting aside this childish "Linux has to do every single thing that every single person on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues the community. No one wants to sit down and say "OK, let's mandate that all distributions have, at minimum, THESE particular packages that operate in THESE particular ways." No, no. That stifles choice somehow. Of course, everyone conveniently ignores the fact that some amount of standardization has to occur before Linux can be accepted on the desktop.

It's that childish attitude that's gotten us this far. I've been with this OS for a long time. And from what I've seen, the REASON that it's where it is today is BECAUSE, not DESPITE, of the fragmentation, and breadth and width of scope that Linux provides. That is the operating system's MAIN advantage.

That's why I can sit here, typing up a post in KDE on my Linux workstation desktop, while indexing gene sequence databases on a Linux server, and also run a massively parallel BLAST across the entire NCBI sequence database using on the 32-machine Linux cluster with no hard drives. I can do it because people who wanted these tools to do something different, to accomplish THEIR goals, were able to do so, and took the time to do so. This is true across the spectrum of Free/OSS software. Who are you to lambast their efforts?

This shit might not matter to you.. but it does to others.

You must have missed how the zealots are spinning this one now. See, there's no particular "year of Linux on the desktop" anymore, now it's "EVERY year that Linux gains popularity it's getting closer to the desktop!" Some clever guy came up with that one after everyone pointed out that Slashdot has been proclaiming every year since 1998 as the "year of Linux on the desktop."

The "year of the desktop" guffaw you chide us over is a sign of this community's general unbridled optimism. We know what we have is better, and every year we say to ourselves.. "they'll understand this year.. they'll finally come around". Every year is the year of Linux on the desktop. It's also the year of Linux on the server, and the year of Linux on the cluster. Because Linux's desktop feature set, and server featureset, and every other featureset evolves and improves every year. I've gone from twiddling config options in .twmrc files, to .fvwmrc files, to WindowMaker dialog boxes, to Gnome and KDE dialog boxes. I've gone from spending two days configuring dialup over ppp on my 486DX2, to clicking a button and watching it all set up.

Nobody is above elitism. There are the elites who whine about how the unwashed masses are flowing into what used to be an almost private club. And then there are the other elites.. the reverse-snobs.. the ones who, ironically, whine about Linux "elitism" because it doesn't serve THEIR needs RIGHT NOW, JUST THE WAY THEY WANT IT. Populism has the ability to be just as incestuously corrupt as elitism.

-Laxitive

The blame game

[Overly Critical Guy]

Those are being done on the X level in the new x.org server. Not GNOME's problem.

Anything is better than KDE's completely hilarious, amateurish icon label dropshadows. They don't even fade out gracefully. How did anyone think that should be something to include in an official release?

Someday, just someday, I'd like to see hardware acceleration. The Y-Windows boys are already planning it.

Re:The blame game

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE's completely hilarious, amateurish icon label dropshadows

At least you can turn them off, something that Gnome would probably not allow without hacking the Registry.

The Y-Windows boys are already planning it.

That's great. Let me know when they're done porting KDE to Y.

Consider Ada

[zmower]

It's staticly type checked wherever possible. It's compiled using free tools (GNAT Ada compiler). It's trivially easy to import/export to C. C++ is harder but possible. There are bindings to Gtk+ and Gnome libs. Garbage collection is optional so you can be fast and dirty when needed. Oh, and it's had proper typesafe generics and emumerations (cor!) since 1983.

There are no polictical or patent timebombs unless you hold being invented by the military but then so is this internet thing you're using. In fact the only real disadvantages are a lack of Free Ada software and the fact we haven't standardised on a collections framework yet (Ada 200x where x>=5).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_programming_lan gu age has a pretty good overview.

and for bioinformatic systems

[Psymunn]

#include

Want X dead? Y-Windows is the answer

[Overly Critical Guy]

Y-Windows

Their IRC channel is active, and they're already working on the widgets. They plan a 1.0 release within a year. Full hardware-acceleration, network transparency, and a complete replacement of X with a user-level X-compatibility layer. The PDF describes all the reasons why they're replacing X. Stuff even I didn't know.

Multiple logins to same account

[Qick]

How about making it possible to login onto two different machines with the same account and home directory? I'm not sure with newer versions of Gnome then 2.2, but it really dosen't work well at all.

Re:Multiple logins to same account

[statusbar]

Yes, or related: I run vncserver as well as X11 locally. Log into both running gnome on the same home directory and failures happen all over the place! kde has this problem too. Some types of program defaults should be XDISPLAY specific.

--jeff++

File Manager

[DreadSpoon]

Why in all the nine hells would including Mozilla, a Web Browser, allow them to get rid of Nautilus, a File Manager?

BTW, GNOME already depends on Mozilla. It's one of the requirements for Epiphany, which is included in the Desktop package set. Mozilla is _not_ defined as part of the Platform (developer packages) because Mozilla constantly breaks API/ABI, making it impossible to develop an application on top of it and expect it to actually Just Work(tm). Mozilla may move into the Platform once the GRE is out and stable.

The Roadmap, if you actually read it, states that the Mozilla work is in regards to cooperation with the Firefox developers, as the development goals of Firefox and Epiphany are pretty close, except Epiphany is all GTK/GNOME while Firefox uses that unfortunate cross platform hack.

And yes, cross paltform UIs are hacks. You either end up with Mozilla/Firefox, where the app looks like an alien everywhere, or OOo, where the app looks native on Windows and like an alient everywhere else. A far better strategy is something like Abiword where there is a single core and multiple frontends targetted at specific platforms, or something like the Mozilla GRE where the Mozilla core is provided for easy deployment of multiple platform specific front ends (like Epiphany or Camino).

Re:File Manager

[aztracker1]

If they used the mozilla XUL as a base for applications in gnome, that might work.. it's already themable, and simply works... beyond this, there are tools like wxWidgets that do cross platform UI, but are a heavy investment...

I think using XUL, with Java/mono development would be a good step for development in gnome... keep the core libraries in C, and do the front-end apps in C# or Java.. to be honest, I prefer C#, but that is a different argument.

"Wherever possible, GNOME strives to eliminate...

[Anonymous Coward]

obstacles that unnecessarily hamper the user experience."

Are gnome developers aware that speed, or lack off, is an obstacle that hampers gnome users' experience? I might be in minority, but speed was the only obstacle that made me look (and still looking) for a gnomeish alternative.

(Redundant, I know.)

Lingo of tha Guh-nuuum

[pmfp]

Personally, I'd love to see D being used instead of .NET or Java. For one, I don't trust Microsoft to let Mono live when an important part of the Linux desktop is dependant on it. Second, as for Java, it leaves too big of a memory footprint, and it is still not available on all distros.
Besides that, I don't like VMs, but that's a personal thing. :)

So, why not D? Most people knows the advantages, or can otherwise check the website [http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html]. It's very clean, familiar, fast and gives most or more advantages than C#/Java. It has gotten far in development. The frontend is being integrated to GCC. So why not?

Re:Lingo of tha Guh-nuuum

[GeekDork]

Because the world doesn't need yet another C dialect?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

So you go to freshmeat.org or just type what you're looking for in google with +linux and +software. Wham, you get a list of all the different things that may be applicable. Then you open up your graphical package manager and type the name of the programs that you found that are interesting. Hit install, try them out, uninstall the ones that you didn't care for.

It's all very slick, and the only way I can see this getting better is to add better search to freshmeat and automatically turn it into a debian/fedora/gentoo repository so that you simply click on the program in your browser to install rather than switching to a different package management tool.

Michael

Firefox would be a good choice

[brandonp]

I personally prefer to use Firefox in my Fedora Core 2 box. I believe it would be wise to standardize around Firefox and have Gnome's brower be tied more closely with Mozilla's community.

No matter what happens with the default browser situation, I'll end up using Firefox no matter.

Brandon Petersen

setuppackage.msi is smooth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, how many PCs do you work with? I have endless hassles with windows installer crapping out for no reason all the time. And this is on software that was paid for at exorbitant rates. It can't even make it past the installer. Absolutely pathetic. Of all the lousy products in the world that's got to be one of the worst. That's not a model I'd emmulate.

Aw shucks

[turgid]

Anything but Java, please, I can't afford the hardware it'll require to run it!

I know how you feel, but gcc has been able to compile Java source straight to native code for quite some time now :-)

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Laxitive]

One additional point.

Linux _has_ standardization. Choose a distribution, and stick with it.

For example, Mandrake Linux + kde:

One method of installing software - CHECK
One interface and widget set - CHECK
One set of 'canonical' programs - CHECK

Well, looks like it has everything you want right there. Perhaps you'd like to use the Mandrake Linux standard?

Or maybe not.. maybe you'd prefer the RedHat Fedora Core standard:

One method of installing software - CHECK
One interface and widget set - CHECK
One set of 'canonical' programs - CHECK

Or maybe you would like to choose the Debian standard? Or perhaps the S.u.S.E standard?

"But wait!", you say, "There are too many standards! There should be only one!".

Perhaps.. maybe there should be a Linux standard. But then, how are you going to choose between the Linux standard and the Windows standard and the Apple standard? How are you going to handle that choice?

We should roll that in to one standard too. The OS standard. But shit.. we're not home free yet. How are you going to choose between all the different competing hardware on which the OS standard runs? Honestly, why should you be expected to invest time and effort finding the one that's right for you when you could make one that FITS ALL SIZES?

But hey, no chance of that ever happening. So I guess for now, the world remains complicated.. and we remain forced to make choices.

What a travesty!

-Laxitive

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[IamTheRealMike]

Most people do not install software?

Outside of locked down corp desktops, I have never seen a machine where the user did not install something, even if it's only WinAmp.

I'll probably get flamed to hell

[Anonymous Coward]

for proposing this usability nightmare, but how about a filemanager that can handle hidden files easily?

I still can't get over the fact that people writing a linux desktop think it is a gain in usability if you have to press Ctrl+L and then Tab to select a hidden file in the filemanager.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[mattyrobinson69]

try using the tool that comes with your distro (or one written for your distro)

i use slapt-get in slackware
ther people use:
apt-get - deb
urpmi - mdk
red carpet - ximian
various others for other distros

plus, there's kpackage, which supports many formats

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, apt-get install aptitude of course.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[abigor]

1. KDE has been defining its UI with XML for years.

2. Mozilla did XAML first. They called it XUL, though.

3. KDE has Java bindings to do all sorts of stuff, like write applications or whatever.

4. Through KDE's DCOP, you can script applications to respond to whatever events you want, with whatever language you want.

5. Python isn't as slow as you think it is.

Before bashing things, you should probably learn about what the hell it is you're talking about.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Cereal Box]

Dude, fragmentation is what happens in healthy, competitive markets.

No, in competitive markets there's different, competing products. The kind of fragmentation Linux has only works against it. How does anyone expect to focus their efforts when everyone's attention is split 1,000 different ways? Why should Linux compete with itself? Duh?

It might be a little inefficient to have competing standards.. but it leads to furthering the pace of development.

A little inefficient? May I nominate you for understatement of the year?

And riddle me this: how can the pace of development be furthered more with hundreds of similar, but different projects instead of one focused project?

And from what I've seen, the REASON that it's where it is today is BECAUSE, not DESPITE, of the fragmentation, and breadth and width of scope that Linux provides.

And just imagine where it would be today if everyone focused on creating one standard piece of software for everything they needed instead of creating 20 or 30 of everything, when 9 times out of 10 it's clear that there is only really one superior piece of software in the whole bunch.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[b-baggins]

Yet another thing Linux zealots need to shed: Their snotty, elitist attitudes.

I remember the first months after OS X came out and the *NIX geeks were starting to come over to the platform. New OS X users would post technical questions, and these snotty *NIX types would come back with their arrogant RTFM type comments. It was very satisfying to see the Apple community dress them down properly for being the arrogant snots they were and told them if they weren't willing to be helpful and supportive to get the hell off the platform. The real jerks among them went back to Linux.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Cereal Box]

No, I have heard of LSB. However, adoption of the standards is what matters, not sitting around talking about it. As it is, Linux is horribly, horribly fragmented due to the hundreds of available distros, only a few of which are compatible with the LSB. I find it very funny that you mention that the major distros are "trying" to adhere to the standards -- should they be able to definitively state that they DO adhere to the standards?

Don't list crap as improvements, dammit!

[Quietti]

Sheesh! The following items are NOT improvements and should therefore not be listed as one:

• New file selector - Either click your way thru the whole folder hierarchy or call up a path dialog and be expected to remember the exact full path. The lovely tab completion from GNOME 2.4 is gone. Idiots!
• Yet another browser change - First Galeon, then Epiphany, now Firefox? Can you make your fucking mind up and stick to it for good?
• Rhythmbox is more mature - Hard to tell, given that the 0.6 series could play streams and files that the new 0.8 series fail to playback. Try telling that to the Gstreamer guys who are so ego-inflated that they insist on calling their new back-ends "better" even though they broke Rhythmbox.

Re:Don't list crap as improvements, dammit!

[ReinoutS]

Tab completion is nice in bash; but GNOME strives for accessibility, and in accessible applications Tab means 'focus next widget', not 'complete'. With the autocompleting textfield, the need for (tab) completion has almost disappeared anyway.

Epiphany is here to stay, nowhere in the article does it say anything about a switch to Firefox.

GStreamer isn't 1.0 yet; your expectations should be set accordingly. File bugs as you find them.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Nugget]

Debian is the gold standard by which Linux shall be judged. And it shall be judged worthy.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears that this is true.

-1 Troll

[irix]

Insightful? Come on moderators...

Why not make an installation system that works as simply as clicking setuppackage.msi is in Windows and let the other problems solve themselves?

Of course, the core goals of any desktop environment like GNOME: invent your own packaging format. Hello?

Why not just make a working desktop first?

Not even a well-disguised troll. Try some subtlety next time.

In the end...

[GeekDork]

... some divine entity will chime up in the alt.creation newsgroup and end that "back in the day" joke with some incredibly easy answer. I doubt 42 will cut it, but who knows...

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[joeljkp]

That's what projects like LSB and FHS are for. Theoretically, if your distribution complies with these standards, a standards-compliant package will integrate beautifully into your system.

But that day is still a long way off, it seems. Right now, at least, I think our collective job is to be vocal to our various distributions that LSB/FHS compliance is important to us, and that if it doesn't agree, some other distro does.

Real men use punch cards....

[lenulus]

Real men use punch cards....

RE: The GNOME Roadmap

[Anonymous Coward]

They should rewrite it in LISP and integrate within emacs, that's The One Right Way.

KDE really has improved...

[otis wildflower]

... It's faster, has better integration (kwallet, addressbook, etc), DCOP, and Konqueror URIs are wicked cool (man:/find)... That plus the latest Baghira theme/window behavior makes it OSXy enough for me.. I _love_ kicker popups (integrating with kopete, apollon, juk, etc) and all the other candy that I expect in my GUI.

I'd like to see konqi cleaned up a bit (every app's first menu should be 'file', I'm sorry) and a few of the 'political' decisions in apps are impediments (kmail IMAP filters via headers vs sieve, kopete tray popups should display connected buddies, etc), but I'd rather run it than GNOME any day.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Pxtl]

1, 3, 4. I did not know that. Only developed on Gnome. I think I may be giving KDE a second look - I had discarded it as "Windows, except that it's _almost_ free software".

2. Yes. Unfortunately:
a) nobody uses it and
b) I am not personally impressed with its performance.
Maybe XAML will be the same, maybe not.

5. Python is slow. I've used it extensively, and know how the interpreter works inside and out. Maybe native-compiled python or Jython is fast, but Python is slow, compared to JIT languages like Java and C#.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Laxitive]

And riddle me this: how can the pace of development be furthered more with hundreds of similar, but different projects instead of one focused project?

Because hundreds of developers will never agree on the focus of one, focused project. And you shouldn't be expecting them to. A developer doesn't start a new project because he wants to improve an old one. He starts a new project because he thinks he can do better. Maybe most of them don't do better. But some do, and when they are better, they generally end up replacing the old ones. And we have an easier time replacing them since it's an unrestricted market.

And just imagine where it would be today if everyone focused on creating one standard piece of software for everything they needed instead of creating 20 or 30 of everything, when 9 times out of 10 it's clear that there is only really one superior piece of software in the whole bunch.

That'd be pretty awesome. About as awesome as it would be if the entire wold all held hands, hugged, and promised to be nice to each to each other from now on.

-Laxitive

Java, C# ARu you kidding me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, if the were to move to either of those two enviroments I'd switch to something else, KDE perhaps. Heck I'd go back to CDE/Motif if I had too.

I've never seen a Java app that worked well consistantly. I think the whole model has problems.

How about a fast gnome-terminal?

[djohnsto]

I love Gnome. I think it looks great, I think it works great. I don't mind the lack of options too much. But, I still use KDE for the simple reason that konsole is actually usable and gnome-terminal isn't. It takes more processing power for gnome-terminal to *scroll the text* from a compile than it actually does to compile. As a software developer that has 5-8 tabs open on a couple terimals and is compiling a lot, that just doesn't cut it.

I've read past mailing list logs trying to figure out why gnome-terminal got slower over time and the culprit seems to be the "functionally elegant", emulate anything, terminal emulation library. While I'm sure the code is easy to work with, the actual product isn't. One of the posts mentioned that Miguel doesn't even use the modern gnome-terminal any more.

I guess since the average user isn't a developer this hasn't been an issue. I guess I'll continue working with KDE (which is also a great system, but not perfect).

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not make an installation system that works as simply as clicking setuppackage.msi is in Windows and let the other problems solve themselves?

Oh man, you just opened the floodgates with this one. Prepare to be lectured on why the 37 different packaging standards make software installations easier than with Windows.

Yes, but I can't get RPMs to install on Windows, now can I? (which is about as stupid a statement as calling it a "crapshoot" when RedHat RPMs don't install on Debian.)

Why not just make a working desktop first?

That would require setting aside this childish "Linux has to do every single thing that every single person on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues the community.

Or we could just point out that GNOME is a working desktop. Oh, that's right, Linux has to be just exactly like Windows in every way before it replaces Windows. Just being a good desktop isn't enough. Got it.

Yeah, this year will be the year of linux-on-the-desktop

You must have missed how the zealots are spinning this one now.

Is that what is says in the article? Oh, wait, the article doesn't say anything about "year of the desktop".

Oh, I get it, this is how the Windows zealots are spinning it now...

The GNOME NO Roadmap-oGalaxyo JIHAD.

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear people around here have the shortest memory author is of course oGalaxyo trolling as usual. And this is just the one's google caught. He posts the "EXACT SAME THING" in every story that mentions GNOME.

Re:The GNOME NO Roadmap-oGalaxyo JIHAD.

[Anonymous Coward]

your poing being ?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Cereal Box]

Because hundreds of developers will never agree on the focus of one, focused project.

And yet, somehow it happens in the commercial software world: Windows and OS X, Microsoft Office, etc. Any way you slice it, in the free software world there's thousands of man hours spent doing the same things, over and over again, when that time would be better spent concentrating on making the "superior" piece of software even better.

That'd be pretty awesome. About as awesome as it would be if the entire wold all held hands, hugged, and promised to be nice to each to each other from now on.

Your sarcastic hand waving does nothing to back up your point. It is entirely possible to focus software development efforts into making "the best solution" instead of aimlessly pouring effort into "100 different, equally crappy solutions". You just want to shake your head and pretend like it can't happen, simply because it doesn't happen in the world of Linux and OSS.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[ViolentGreen]

No, in competitive markets there's different, competing products. The kind of fragmentation Linux has only works against it. How does anyone expect to focus their efforts when everyone's attention is split 1,000 different ways? Why should Linux compete with itself? Duh?

Exactly. Everyone keeps falling back to that point. It's like a country that has been involved in a civil war for the majority of its existance trying to get immigration.

Joe Desktopuser will use what he's given!

[djeca]

Joe Desktopuser wouldn't know what a desktop environment is if it bit him in the ass.

Joe Desktopuser doesn't know what an operating system is, for chrissakes.

All Gnome needs to do is persuade Joe Desktopuser's CIO that they can switch the company's desktops to Gnome-on-Linux and by doing so save money and increase productivity year-on-year, with minimal retraining needed.

And after that, persuade Dell, Gateway, whoever, that Gnome-on-their-branded-distro is a better solution to bundle on their crappy PCs.

Joe Desktopuser won't be installing Debian; he doesn't need to know what Debian is.

What Gnome needs is security and ease-of-use to impress the CIO, a short transition period to impress the CFO, and pretty buttons to impress the CEO. Joe Desktopuser doesn't enter the picture.

You did put your finger on it!

[theantix]

I think Gnome's interface is elegant and KDE's inteface, while very colorful, it cluttered and knobby.

That is probably reason enough to make you irritated by KDE. It's a great project for the needs of many people but for others like you and me who get irritated by needless clutter KDE can be very annoying to use. And being irritated and annoyed is a pretty good reason for emotional exhaustion -- I think you already answered your question without knowing it.

Epiphany vs. Firefox

[steveha]

I mostly like Epiphany. It's well integrated with GNOME, and mostly it Just Works. After a crash or sudden shutdown, when you run it again it brings back all the pages you had open, which is great.

It's biggest problem for me is sucky performance. If I hit Ctrl+N to open a new window, my CPU usage goes to 100% and stays there for 3 seconds or so. And I dread saving a bookmark; CPU goes 100% for 4 seconds or so. I suspect there is some sort of N-squared behavior in the bookmark management or something like that, and if I get time I might build a debug version of Epiphany and run a profiler against it.

If they could somehow merge the Epiphany and Firefox projects, that might be interesting. If Epiphany could run some of the plugins from Firefox, I'd be very happy. But I wonder if the two projects are too diverse, and it might be more work than it's worth at this point.

steveha

Re:Epiphany vs. Firefox

[fred3666]

I certainly wouldn't list Eliphany's ability to bounce back from a crash as it's number one feature. That seems rather pessimistic.

You're also complaining about the speed of Firefox 0.8? Remember that optimizing for speed is the last thing that the coders concentrate on. I'd expect that the imminent 0.9 release will pretty much lock down the feature set and then they'll optimize the code before they release 1.0

Re:Epiphany vs. Firefox

[steveha]

I certainly wouldn't list Eliphany's ability to bounce back from a crash as it's number one feature. That seems rather pessimistic.

Not just a crash, any interruption. For example, I can boot my PC into Windows to play Unreal Tournament 2004, and when I boot back into Linux, Epiphany puts back all my open web sites. I like it.

And that's Epiphany's number one feature that Firefox doesn't currently have. There are many features of Epiphany I like, but most of them Firefox matches.

You're also complaining about the speed of Firefox 0.8?

Um, no. I said I mostly like Epiphany, but its biggest problem is sucky performance. I also use Firefox and I don't see the same problems. Ideally I want everything to happen instantly, and Firefox isn't instant-fast, but it doesn't make me wait for over three seconds with the CPU at 100%. That's Epiphany. And I hope someone fixes that.

steveha

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[ViolentGreen]

Download an RPM, double-click on it, voila, it is installing!

That is assuming that you have all the dependencies satisfied. It's not the double clicking that's the problem, it's the tree of dependancies and sub-dependancies that is the problem.

Mozilla Firefox

[abertoll]

I know everyone seems to like Firefox, but I still like the old Mozilla project. While I like the fact that Firefox is standalone, with the old Mozilla, I can middle-click a link in my mail client and have it open up a new tab in my browser. Whereas if I prefer, I can regular click the link, and have it open in a new window or the old window.

I posted these observations to a mozilla help group, and the best they could come up with is something that forces the browser to automatically load new links into a new tab (which was a pain to set up on linux anyway).

Oh, and one other thing for both old Mozilla and Firefox (that someone mentioned before): please get rid of the profiles. It's insanely redundant to have each user with multiple profiles. This is a hold over from the Windows 95/98 days, and certainly isn't necessary anymore.

Re:Mozilla Firefox

[codemachine]

I agree 100% with the profiles. It seems Mozilla is packaged slightly different on different distros. On some, they force you to use profile dialogs on startup even if you only have 1 profile; on others, they never bother you about a profile unless you create a second one. Of course, I much prefer the second method.

As to the Mozilla SeaMonkey (Navigator/Messenger/Composer/IRC) suite, I do agree it is still a useful piece of software. I personally use Konqueror or FireFox as a browser on most of my machines, but when doing support for Windows users, I often install the Mozilla Suite instead of FireFox. That way you can kill the security nightmares of IE and Outlook with one stone, and have some integration between the two. Also the migration tools in Messenger and Navigator to move mailboxes and bookmarks are nicely done. The preloading is also nice - on newer 3GHz type desktops, a new Mozilla window "loads" faster than a FireFox window due to the preloading.

It does seems that the FireFox/ThunderBird developers would like to get the same integration and features found in the suite through extensions, which I think is a great approach. They can then ship their lightweight apps seperately for those who prefer them that way (many on /. fall in this category), but they can also still ship a full suite by having selected extensions installed by default. A FireFox browser with a ThunderBird and NVu integration extension and a preloading extension would come very close to the Mozilla Suite in functionality.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Rombuu]

You are right. I think we should take this to the logical extreme and each distribution should include their own incompatable version of C, so that we get the luxury of having even more choices! After all, this would give us even more diversity, right?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[irix]

Distributions that don't have apt-get. Or yum. Or emerge.

Go ahead and name a distro in common use that doesn't have a package manager.

The possibility that what you're looking for isn't packaged.

I can release a source tarball for a Win32 app too. Whose fault would this be exactly?

That you know offhand what the package name is.

As opposed to Windows, where clairivoyance is built into the operating system...

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[pebs]

Oh man, you just opened the floodgates with this one. Prepare to be lectured on why the 37 different packaging standards make software installations easier than with Windows. Of course, the reality of the situation is that it's a crapshoot as to whether or not a package will work with whichever one of the 10,000 Linux distributions you happen to be running (chances are it won't), but hey.

Wrong lecture. The lecture should be from Debian or Gentoo users who say how easy it is to apt-get or emerge packages.

Being a Debian user, I have to say apt is really nice most of the time. But its only as nice as the package repository. There will be issues that the average Joe simply won't be able to deal with, at least with testing/unstable. I have no experience with stable, but I would imagine a pure stable (no backports) should work with no hickups. Too bad its so out of date.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[linzeal]

They would not install winamp if something similiar was already installed like xmms. The point is including those "killer apps" and lessening the need for more lib checking and incompatibilities. Not to mention the GUI for some Linux applications is wholly different than their windows counterparts.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Laxitive]

And yet, somehow it happens in the commercial software world: Windows and OS X, Microsoft Office, etc. Any way you slice it, in the free software world there's thousands of man hours spent doing the same things, over and over again, when that time would be better spent concentrating on making the "superior" piece of software even better.

Yes, because in the commercial world, the guy in the big office gives you a wad of cash, and in return, you agree to spend 8 hours a day caring about what he wants you to care about.

Now, if you are interested in the products and results of that kind of model, then you are very free to choose to use Windows or OSX or whatever fits your brain, and pay the good man what he wants for the privilege of doing so. You are also free to choose the results of the free software model of development, and pay the price of having to choose the kind of system you think fits you best.

Directed development has its benefits. And it _can_ be applied to good uses in a small scale. On a large scale however, centralized management becomes intractable. And the set of all Free software is NOT a small scale system. It's HUGE, and attempting to manage it centrally, or even considering that it _can_ be managed centrally, is a waste of time.

That's not to say that cooperation should not be encouraged. However, cooperation cannot be enforced. And to have free software follow the rules that you would have it follow, would require enforced cooperation. That just doesn't work.

Your sarcastic hand waving does nothing to back up your point. It is entirely possible to focus software development efforts into making "the best solution" instead of aimlessly pouring effort into "100 different, equally crappy solutions". You just want to shake your head and pretend like it can't happen, simply because it doesn't happen in the world of Linux and OSS.

Yes, it's "possible", for the most expansive definition of possible. And if all the developers saw the light and decided to follow your suggestion, then it would be great. But to sit and wring our hands over "possibilities" missed because of simple facts of human nature accomplishes nothing.

-Laxitive

Oh FFS

[Second_Derivative]

As opposed to a gigantically bloated "Platform" that's about as speedy as a quadrapalegic on ketamine? And where one business has a very strong interest in the platform, interests which can quickly lead to conflicts of interest which will make the whole thing drown in politics?

D looks like a good idea. I'd actually support that, the language is clean and straightforward. Although I don't know how open it is, but it was consciously designed, and doesn't have a VM or a religious mania about it so I think I like it already.

I just want better taskbar support

[Kickstart70]

I want to be able to sort it manually or by group instead of by process ID. I want to be able to drag a taskbar item/window to my desktop switcher and have it show up there (instead of putting it on all windows, switching desktops, then putting it only on the second desktop). Kickstart

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Cereal Box]

The possibility that what you're looking for isn't packaged.

I can release a source tarball for a Win32 app too. Whose fault would this be exactly?

What? I was simply saying that it's stupid to assume that any piece of software you're looking for is packaged using the particular package format your distro uses.

And unless I'm mistaken, in most cases it's the responsibility of someone involved with the distro that does the packaging and includes it with the OS, not the person who originally wrote the software. That software isn't going to get on the APT repository by itself, you know. Someone involved with Debian has to put it there before your magical apt-get will install it.

That you know offhand what the package name is.

As opposed to Windows, where clairivoyance is built into the operating system...

I was saying that if you don't know the package name offhand, you're going to have to go searching for it, much like you would with Windows. This is the counter to fools who respond to everything with "apt-get <obscure package name>! It's so easy!" ... you have to know the name of the software first.

MacOS X's packages leave much to be desired.

[jbn-o]

Do it in "bundles" like OS X, where applications install to folders in an Applications directory, and you can remove the program just by dragging the folder to the trash.

Even on MacOS X that's not true. NeXTSTEP had a far more functional Installer.app which would install, uninstall, and archive packages based on the bill of materials (essentially a list of files that belonged to the package) and this was more useful than the current MacOS X strategy (except that the NS Installer didn't handle conflicts at all).

On MacOS X you can't be sure that a package's content are only in the .app directory because some apps are installed with an installer program that does who-knows-what to your system. Programs that come with the OS are not always desired and don't come with uninstallers (how does one properly uninstall Microsoft Internet Explorer and be sure that all of its parts are gone; how can we know all the parts are in the .app folder? Why can't the installer let you tell it what not to install if you are reinstalling the OS and you know you don't want some program?). Many MacOS X users commonly run their machines as administrative users where they have the ability to write to system directories. Therefore it's possible for a program to see that some file isn't installed somewhere else (like a system dir) and then place a file there. Also the .app directory grants virtually no dependency tracking (modulo that which is built into an application). If program A depends on program B and B is removed, there ought to be a complaint and some kind of extra effort required to break program A but none will occur. As a result, programmers are implicitly urged to not reuse code in this way.

Then there's the inconsistent uninstall procedure -- uninstalling the developer packages appears to have somehow messed up a friend's ability to use Software Update on his iBook running MacOS X. He was lucky there happened to be a Perl script to do this job in the first place -- the developer packages install a lot of stuff in a lot of different places. Software Update complained of a permissions error on a /tmp subdir it was trying to write to. A reinstall of the OS fixed this (and also forced making a backup of personal data which was needed anyhow, so this wasn't a complete waste of time) but it sure seemed like overkill. Depending on each program to supply its own uninstall seems problematic and unnecessary particularly when you have the installer "receipt" which lists what files belong to which package and you could let packagers run a pre- and post-uninstall script to do things that aren't strictly file-based.

Making all of this worse is that so many programs on MacOS X are non-free software; inspecting the program's source code to see what the program really does is not possible. In the end, I think Apple sacrificed a lot for perceived simplicity that ended up not being so simple after all. I think MacOS X has some important user interface improvements other systems would be wise to build upon, but this way of doing package management is not one of them.

As for making a printer (and, for that matter, a scanner) work, I prefer the approach I've used in Fedora Core GNU/Linux: plug in the USB printer and run the printer manager program wizard. The wizard could be improved to automatically sense the new printer and configure itself (or the desktop could do this), but no additional software was needed. Scanning was even easier for me with my Epson scanner -- plug in the USB scanner, start the scanner program, scan. OS X required additional non-free software to do both of these tasks and that means another dependency I have no ability to share, modify, or inspect. I'm not willing to give up my software freedom for user interface enhancements and I don't think I should have to. Looking at how things used to be, history suggests I don't have to either.

Try running the thing once in a while

[alexborges]

You bunch of jerks!

If i download an rpm and click on it with konqueror or nautilus, BOTH WILL run the appropriate visual installer application (kpackage or synapys or whatever) in ALL of the most popular distros.

What the FUCK are you guys talking about not having an installation standard. Redhat CAN and DOES install deb packages in a single click, debian CAN and DOES install rpm with a couple of clicks.

Geeze

Its been this way for four years !

Re:Try running the thing once in a while

[aldoman]

One word: Dependencies.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[swv3752]

URPMI, Apt-RPM, Apt-get, Portage, whatever that thing that slackware has now...

Anyways my point is that dependancy checking is handled automatically now.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Laxitive]

The point is, I'm not the one asking for forced, artificial standardization. Where it occurs, and if it occurs for the right reasons, it is good.

But who decides which standardization is good? What are the right reasons? You, and I, and everybody else has their opinions on that.

This is the reason we delegate responsibility to self-organizing systems. And it seems to me that the Free Software system is reasonably well organized. It's well organized because most decisions happen through concensus. If there is a lack of concensus, then forks occur, or new projects are started. That's how the system works.

Forcing either artificial standardization, or artificial diversity, is a useless venture - especially in a system as loosely held together as the body of free software developers. For any given case, you might feel that two projects would serve a better purpose by coming together as one. But for other cases, you might feel that a project should be split into two to function effectively.

Arguing blindly for an overarching uniformity, however, is NOT the correct way of approaching things.

-Laxitive

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[damiam]

Your distro's package manager should provide such functions. In Debian 'apt-cache search' will find a package's name, and you can use any of many GUIs (aptitude, deity, dselect, synaptic, etc.) to browse the full package-list, organized however you want.

That said, someone needs to write a simple app that associates itself with package files and puts up a Windows-like installer GUI. Aunt Tille doesn't want to 'apt-get install' anything.

Exposing C++ APIs

[roystgnr]

Because it's very easy to expose a C api to practically any language in existence

Absolutely.

but very difficult to expose a C++ one to anything except C++, and in fact it's generally done by flattening the API to a C one

Are you sure that's still true? It was true the last time I checked, but doing a look around today, it seems that SWIG has become very good at wrapping C++ in anything from C# to Tcl.

Re:language (Nazis + Godwin)

[Anonymous Coward]

And so forth, you're a Nazi...Godwin's law...end of thread.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[irix]

I was simply saying that it's stupid to assume that any piece of software you're looking for is packaged using the particular package format your distro uses.

If you use a main-stream distro (RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo) then most software that your typical desktop user wants is going to be available packaged for your distro. My point is that anyone can write "app X" and release a tarball, but that anything mainstream isn't only available in that form.

That software isn't going to get on the APT repository by itself, you know.

Software I have written is in Debian, so yes, I know.

I was saying that if you don't know the package name offhand, you're going to have to go searching for it, much like you would with Windows.

You probably have one place to look though.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[ViolentGreen]

Anyways my point is that dependancy checking is handled automatically now.

Well that's not what I got out of it.

Even if that's the case, it is extreemly annoying for those of us that do not have broadband. For the vast majority of downloadable Windows applications, you just download it and install.

This is not always the case in the *nix world. If you download something that you believe is 20 MB on dial-up, it takes some time. It is very frustrating when you try to install it and find out that it has two dependencies which are also 20 MB. So what do you do here? Spend time downloading the two files and hope they don't require anything else?

I don't. I boot back into windows, download one file, install it and I am ready to go.

Better than just text copy/cut and paste

[Alain Williams]

I note that:

1. Improved cut and paste/drag and drop format documentation, to allow better interoperability in this area.

is long term, this is highly important, a lot of people that want to do things like copy an image from the web browser and paste it into the word processor, etc, and it doesn't work. Having to save to a file and then insert from a file just isn't good enough.

Anyway: that is what I thought the ome of Gnome stood for.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[spankfish]

Where's the list of applications - indexed by function?

That would be here.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[swv3752]

Actually one could just run a scripted install. Many commercial packages work this way, like LokiGames. The old Star Office installer did this too. It can be and has been done.

If something is FOSS then it one can just let the Package maintainers for a particular Distro handle it though.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[dpw2atox]

There is already a LSB v1.1 which has been created and it is included with redhat/fedora and several other distros which I can't remember off the top of my head. I know for a fact though debian is choosing not to adopt it. The main reason it is a challenge to adhere to these standards is that they have been doing things their own way for so long that it is a lot of work to change things. A prime example is rpms...several distros use rpms but due to package names and dependancies it can sometimes be almost impossible to install a fedora rpm on say suse. That is one of the problems with open software is that many users have different thoughts and opinions on how to do things. Personally I use fedora though and all the software I try and run and install works fine and I never have any problems with it.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Nasarius]

Even if that's the case, it is extreemly annoying for those of us that do not have broadband.

Like minkwe said, get out of the Dark Ages ;-)

Seriously though, you're right. It's one of the problems that Gentoo solves - you can build a package with whatever options you want. One of my biggest frustrations was getting aspell and all sorts of other crap just to upgrade Gaim on Mandrake or SuSE. With Gentoo

USE="-spell -crypt -nls" emerge gaim

will get you a nice stripped-down version of Gaim. Once Gentoo matures and someone builds a nice GUI on top of it, it'll be great :)

Questions, questions, questions.

[jbn-o]

From the roadmap post:

Accessibility support interoperating seamlessly with Web, email, office applications, and other GUI toolkits.

Does this mean I'll be able to search inside OpenOffice.org and Abiword documents for textual content through the Nautilus file finder? This would be very nice. A friend recently switched to using RTF documents so he could do this (OO.org documents are compressed and not easily searched from the Nautilus search panel).

Mozilla ships the Firefox browser, which has similar goals to GNOME's Epiphany browser. We would like to work with the Mozilla foundation to settle on a common direction for the web browser.

I like how integrated Epiphany is into the GNOME functionality and how easy Epiphany is to use. I would not expect Mozilla Firefox to be so integrated into any desktop because it would decrease portability.

Integration of CD burning into rhythmbox.

Is this going to be based on Coaster?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[MenTaLguY]

Smaller.
Faster.
Better.

Pick two.

Uh oh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm..

* Blogging integration.

* Peer-to-peer data sharing.

* Metadata framework
- Possible implementations include Novell's Simias, GNOME
Storage

I'm thinking p2p blogging will result. Well, you gotta do something when solitaire gets dull..

Here's my quick list

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Improve the task/panel bar. M$ has a much better one. Study theirs, and change GNome's. This is one of the most frequently used item, so as usability thing, 1st priority. Things such as resizable using the mouse to resize, fixed size icon, but variable size panel, icon arrange in the order of creation time, coloring of the selected/open icon and the minized icon must be easily identify, etc.
2) Add add/remove software management. This should be one tool that knows what's install, what's not, and how to remove/configure each one of them.
3) Improve the mouse software. M$ has a much better/smoother experience with a same mouse. This is the most frequently used device, please improve on this.
4) Double click on RPM to install/reconfigure, add uninstall infrastructure/standard so software makers follows
5) Easier way to manage the Menu. With M$, you open a folder, drop shortcut into it. You can right click and open the menu folder, etc.
6) Improve the file dialog/chooser. Double clicking on a file/folder many times edit the name of it. Lengthen this time much longer to distinguish between edit a name and double click/select. Add last directory button to the file dialog, so that clicking on it will go to the last time users use the dialog (regardless of application).
7) Many times, users have to use "su" to do things. Make this completely graphical, such as popup asking for this if needed.
8) All of the configurations must be able to do through GUI, including fixing misconfigured computer.
9) Instead of having user's settings under user home's hidden folders, all of those should be under user home's "Settings" or "Preference" folder/sub folder. (this is a standard thing, because it's the software, not GNome do this, but GNome should set the standard, and api for getting this (such as : GetUserSettingDir())
10) Create/edit short cut, start in location, running under different users should be easy and GUI.

11. Delete files from Floppy should put it somewhere un the trash inside the floppy that can be empty, not just make it hidden, and the floppy still is full.(this could be a bug though).

nautilus out, gnome 1.x control-center in

[EeeJay]

i don't like nautilis, in the three years thats its sitting here on my desktop i barely used it twice, but it crashes on me every day, not to mention the very strange (and backward?) shape it took up in gnome 2.6. gnome could lose that file selector to, i miss bash-style auto-completion. what i really miss from gnome 1.x is the control center that had all of the preferences applets under it. and there were alot more preferences to choose from. especially window manager preferences, metacity barely leaves you any tweaking, not even in g-conf. one good thing i could say about gnome today is the configurable international keyboard they added.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[swv3752]

Anymore you select the package and let the package manager download it and the dependncies. For instance with Mandrake and urpmi:

urpmi foo

To satisfy dependancies package bar and bar2 must be installed Ok to proceed Y/n?

It then proceeds to download, and install or upgrade as needed.

GNOME wishlist

[0x0d0a]

* A gnome-terminal that can open multiple windows without requiring multiple processes.

* Faster startup time and lower memory usage for GNOME applications.

* A GUI method of enabling emacs keymappings and user-rebindable accelerators.

* User-rebindable accelerators on contextual menus, rather than just regular menus.

* OpenOffice working like the rest of the GNOME applications.

* All config directories (dotfiles and dotdirectories) being moved from ~/.appdir to ~/.config/appdir (including gnome/gnome2 stuff. Less garbage in ~/.

* More types of data being supported in cut-and-paste in GNOME apps. This means being able to cut-and-paste from the GIMP or Inkscape to Open Office and back again.

* The introduction of an "infinite progress bar" widget containing barber pole stripes, a la the Mac OS, to be used on tasks with an indeterminate completion time.

* The finishing of *some* instant messaging client for *some* protocols. All of the GNOME-based IM clients have issues. This is mentioned in the roadmap. IM is a standard feature even at many businesses. To use GNOME, I need to be able to send/recieve files with it and send encrypted messages. This is currently a tremendous pain in the ass (for some reason, encryption support *still* has not been merged into gaim mainstream, despite the fact that the US no longer places encryption limitations on people).

* Security. The GNOME people are busily putting in auto-discovery stuff and the like. If GNOME talks to the network, it needs to be tied down very tightly. I get *very* unhappy when my desktop environment needs to talk to the network.

* Network management. GNOME's GxSNMP is currently dead, and there are no GNOME network management apps. There is nothing like Intermapper.

* Make a GnomeTreeView that's a more intelligent GtkTreeView. It should natively have the ability to reorder or hide columns (say, a popup menu can come up from clicking in an icon in the title line of the GnomeTreeView that has a checkmarked list of columns to make visible) -- this sort of functionality shouldn't really require the application to do anything.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[FooBarWidget]

"And yet, somehow it happens in the commercial software world: Windows and OS X, Microsoft Office"

Uhm no. Only Microsoft and Apple themselves are involved in the development of their own OS. Third parties make third party apps, that's all.
And there *are* duplicated effords in the Windows world. How many Win32 text editors do you think exist? How many Win32 HTML editors? How many Win32 firewalls? How many Win32 virus scanners? How many Win32 image editors? Etc. etc. etc.

In other words: no, it doesn't happen in the commercial world.

"when that time would be better spent concentrating on making the "superior" piece of software even better."

That's only assuming all those people will actually work on the same single project. If you kill off GNOME there's no guarantee all GNOME developers will work on KDE. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of them just quit programming entirely.

"instead of aimlessly pouring effort into "100 different, equally crappy solutions""

So where's your proof to back up your point? Those 100 different solutions are not "equally crappy": they're designed for their own niche market.

"You just want to shake your head and pretend like it can't happen, simply because it doesn't happen in the world of Linux and OSS."

As opposed to you nodding your head, pretending like it will happen every second?

You are so full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem. This is such a blatant troll--I can't understand why it consistently gets modded up when it's not even remotely true. For example, we have the wonderful world of Gentoo:

emerge foo

My God! It installed itself and all its dependencies automagically! Wow! Oh wait, foo sucks ass! Let's get rid of it!

emerge unmerge foo

Aaaaah, that's better.

Now explain to me, Mr. Troll Guy, just exactly what is insane about that?

Re:You are so full of shit

[stor]

Now explain to me, Mr. Troll Guy, just exactly what is insane about that?

I'll explain it: a newbie doesn't want to drop to the CLI and type emerge whatever.

It's like expecting a Windows user to drop to an MS-DOS shell to type "addprogram bonzi"

Of course, this is after they've added http://www.bonzi.com/bonzibuddy/ to their c:\Progr~1\addremoveprogs\sources.lst mirror list using dos "edit".

Cheers
Stor

Re:You are so full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll explain it: a newbie doesn't want to drop to the CLI and type emerge whatever.

It's like expecting a Windows user to drop to an MS-DOS shell to type "addprogram bonzi"

Every time I hear this argument it makes me wanna holler. Basically what you're saying is that the typical computer user (who uses word processing software and participates in forums where they have to--*gasp*--type!) is *incapable* of using a command prompt!

What rubbish! It's not even like it's something arcane or anything like sed, vi, or (God forbid!) emacs! It's an easily remembered English word for crying out loud!

You're seriously saying that this is beyond the grasp of an average user?

Windows, you may be right. But on Linux with KDE? It's a friggin' built-in: Press ALT-F2, type "emerge foo". How hard is that? You type more when you log into Slashdot!

Re:You are so full of shit

[stor]

Basically what you're saying is that the typical computer user (who uses word processing software and participates in forums where they have to--*gasp*--type!) is *incapable* of using a command prompt!

No. I'm saying they don't have the inclination to do that.

Windows, you may be right. But on Linux with KDE? It's a friggin' built-in: Press ALT-F2, type "emerge foo". How hard is that? You type more when you log into Slashdot!

Ahh! The user-friendly ALT-F2 dropping to a CLI and typing some command the user is supposed to know from Reading TFM. Coz everyone knows that the first thing the average user does is RTFM. I take it all back.

Cheers
Stor

Linux dependency handling

[Zirtix]

synaptic, yum, urpmi

Not to mention that if you download a third-party/proprietary app, it is likely to be binary-only and statically compiled, or at least only depend on glibc.

eh ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I write assembler, have done for years

still do

love it

don't think it should be the language of choice for the majority of development

there are times when it has to be done in assembler

but generally if you can do it in something else, you probably should

C++

[Markus Registrada]

You can't even get the GNOMies to consider compiling the core libraries with G++. If they did, the core code could be enabled to field exceptions from user callbacks in other languages (including C++ and Java, and probably C# if anybody would bother to write a native Gcc front-end for it). Then there would be a lot less pressure to force that stuff into the core.

Of course the core libraries, and the apps too, would all be a lot less leaky and crashy if they were actually written in C++, but superstition rules all.

Re:C++

[Anonymous Coward]

For there to be any reason to create a C# frontend for C#, there would need to be a CLR backend for GCC (so that any language could target the CLR). Because of the way GCC is design, creating a stack-based backend with their virtual register-machine is not worth the effort. It would be easier to rip out GCC's register machine and replace it with something that understands register and stack machine targets.
However this would be an enormous undertaking. You're essentially rewriting 90% of GCC.

No one wants to rewrite GCC, and no one wants to make a gjc hack for C#.

Re:C++

[Markus Registrada]

It would be stupid to make a CLR backend for Gcc. Native code is a Good Thing, in the Free Software world. When MS comes around enforcing their patents on CLI, those people suckered into writing their code in C# will be glad to have a way to run it that can't be threatened by Microsoft.

Re:C++

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, that means ditching C support, since it can't handle exceptions. And did anyone mention to you that C++ exception support is still broken? Also, C != C++, so it's not as simple as 'just compiling with g++'. Extensive rewrites are often going to be necessary to work around keyword/namespace conflicts and the like.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[jazman_777]

That would require setting aside this childish "Linux has to do every single thing that every single person on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues the community.

So what you're really saying is that Linux (GNU/Linux/KDE/GNOME/Etc.) is a system designed by a committee of camels?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[macshit]

For the vast majority of downloadable Windows applications, you just download it and install.

You understand the reason for this, don't you? It's because Windows `install bundles' include every single library etc they will use. This is a simple method, but it is hugely problematic:

1. More often than not, the bundled libraries replace existing installed copies of the same library -- and the `new' (bundled) version may actually be older, broken, whatever. If it installs its libraries into a separate location, of course you then end up with n copies of every library, many of which are seriously out-of-date -- security updates? Hah!
   
2. It (obviously) means that install bundles must contain every non-standard subsystem they use, and so can be huge -- which obviously is not good for you poor people without broadband...

The Windows installer stuff is a seriously horrible ball of hair; that it works at all is more a testament to the sweat lavished on it than any inherent merit.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[GedConk]

With Gentoo, you can view the portage tree under /usr/portage

Here is a sample of how it looks: Check under code listing 2

it's cool to see what packages there are. You can also do emerge search nameofpackage

Of course, if you have no idea what you want to install, then it is no better or worse than any other install method.

Major irks.

[m1chael]

Gnome feels slow.
Gnome panel has a pathetic autohide (which feels slow too).

Gaim is not good (mainly because of it's GUI). Kopete all the way...

Gedit is way behind. GTKSourceView has weak syntax highlighting.

By the way, I have both Gnome and KDE installed and switch between them often.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[jazman_777]

Linux _has_ standardization. Choose a distribution, and stick with it.

Exactly--once you make your choice, the road is clear. Why do so many people point to the profusion of distros and assume that each company will have to manage among at least several of them? They just have to figure out the _one_ distro they're going to use. And it really should be Slack, BTW.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[gmhowell]

Hopefully trollback has seen this comment. You really riled up the fanboys.

Ditch aspell and ispell, standardize on MySpell

[Quietti]

From a written works author's perspective, nothing more frustrating than finding out that the GNOME people insisted on adopting a spellchecker framework for which hardly any dictionary is available outside the realms of the English language. Please dump that aspell crap and apply the MySpell/OpenOffice spellchecking infrastructure across the board ASAP!

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[calica]

It is entirely possible to focus software development efforts into making "the best solution" instead of aimlessly pouring effort into "100 different, equally crappy solutions".

But you're forgeting that each of those 100 different solutions is best for 100+ different types of people. FOSS allows that fragmentation. Commercial software needs to take the "shotgun" approach. Throw a bunch of features and hope some of them hit. FOSS takes the the "sniper" approach. Choose the right caliber bullet and aim for the kill zone. The analogy even carries over to availablity. There are a handful of shotgun gauges available while a large selection of caliber for rifles.

Wow, I'm sounding like ESR now.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just stupid. Linux is ready for the desktop when companies can happily develop programs for it, just like they do for Windows (and Macs). When they can have 2 folders on the CD that they sell, one labelled Windows, and one labelled Linux. Inside the Windows folder, you have install.msi. Inside the Linux one, right now, you have...

1) install.rpm
2) install.deb
3) install.tgz
4) install. no_space_left_on_CD...???

We need a unified install mechanism, which, I believe, is where http://autopackage.org/ comes in. Believe me, we need it.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Khazunga]

Most distros, including all significantly large ones, adhere to the most important part of the LSB: The filesystem hierarchy standard. As for the rest of the standard, it varies. Adoption of the LSB is not that bad, actually, even if people aren't talking about the LSB left and right.

ActiveScript anyone?

[clem]

I've always thought that a GNOME equivalent to ActiveScript would prove useful. Imagine adding scripting capabilities to your application and allowing the user to choose whether they want to use ECMAScript, Ruby, Python, Perl or *gasp* VBScript.

Hmm...anyone know if this already exists for GNOME?

Real virtual desktops == Multiple X sessions

[JCholewa]

> You know what I'd like to see? Real virtual desktops. The current "virtual desktops" are
> really just virtual screens, not desktops. Full virtual desktops should act as completely
> separate desktops, with their own set of icons, etc. Obviously this would not be for
> everyone, but I would love to see it as a user-selectable option.

Well, you can kind of do that my editing inittab (or placing an extra xinit entry somewhere in your startup scripts) so that it starts up multiple X sessions. Let's say, one desktop on :0 and another on :1. Then, you can hit CTRL+ALT+F7 to get to the first desktop and CTRL+ALT+F8 to get to the second desktop. And you could probably add an icon that binds to that key combination or does something else to switch to the other desktop. And you could have KDE in one and GNOME in the other, or you could have two XFce desktops (though they'd probably have to be under two separate users, though not necessarily).

There are perhaps problems with this approach (for instance, switching from one vterm to another could take a second or three, and that's annoying if you want instant switching), but it is essentially what you're asking for.

For what it's worth, KDE supports Mac-style menu bars. This works for any KDE app and probably most Qt apps (with the Opera web browser, it works, but you have to tell Opera to hide its menu bar or you see the menu bar in both places). Also, KDE remembers which desktop you asked a program to load in. Not that I'm evangelizing or anything....

--
-JC
FreeDominion, a WIP Civ clone
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/

so uh

[PenguinX]

when will it sucking ?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[DarkVein]

Why not just make a working desktop first?

That would require setting aside this childish "Linux has to do every single thing that every single person on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues the community.

As opposed to that childish "Windows has to do everything that anyone or any company on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues Microsoft?

I think you're completely missing the point of what's going on in Libre-Desktop Land. GNOME isn't a monstrous application which does everything everyone could want, whose responsibility is the administration of a software system. The current focus is on the model. Gnome can't do all these marvelous things. Gnome can enable all these marvelous things, and then someone goes out and writes a 500 line program to demonstrate it.

Observe the focus on freedesktop.org. They're working on making the design of GNOME communicate with D-BUS. The killer feature of Gnome 2.x is GCONF. They're working out the communications layers of the system. What you COULD do with Gnome is breathtaking at this point. What you COULD do with D-BUS in Gnome 2.8 will be even more so.

So, why can't you yet? Two reasons. First of all, there aren't quite as many developers as in the Windows world, simply due to relative scale. Secondly, the Gnome developers are thinking this through. I mean, they're really thinking this through. Here's an example:

Do you see a Clipboard Viewer yet? No. You won't. The Clipboard Viewer circa Windows 3.1 was a hack to give you access to a feature that hadn't been fully fleshed out. I had to use the clipboard viewer in Windows 3.1. It just didn't work completely right. Drag and drop was a joke, and a major feature of Windows 95 that turned into a gimick for demos of Office 95 that never really worked right, and were stripped out prior to shipping.

There have been very long and surprisingly interesting conversations about the idea of a clipboard, and exactly what it's supposed to accomplish, and what exactly it should do, and especially how. For example, if you copy some data from within an application, and close the application, what happens? What is the status of your copy?

Let me start with something else. Let's say you copy a bit of styled text, with bolds and underlines. Now, you want to paste it into an application that only understands plain text. Should you be denied? Quietly? Loudly? Gnome developers feel you shouldn't be. It's text. You should be able to paste it. The thing is, you can't just go duplicating any bit of data that happens to be selected as "copied". What happens is that when you paste, the application you copied things from has a list of data formats it can export some bit of data out as, and it tries to match the best choice with the application's acceptable list. If you paste that rich text into a hypothetical program that only accepts text/html, it could get converted to HTML 4.0 Transitional.

They're working things like this out. You don't see much of it on top of things. They're doing things like GStreamer, which isn't a program, but there's a program called GStreamer which uses GStreamer. They are, as you contradicted, working out standards. Where applicable, they're working with freedesktop.org to develop and impliment those standards. One day in the not too distant future, you'll probably see Apple, and then Microsoft, announcing support for the industry standard D-BUS Interface, or some such.

KDE does this, Slicker

[chendo]

Actually, I believe KDE has something like this.. I just tried opening a konq window and switching, and it opened in another window. What I also like about KDE, is that if you use the KGestures thingy and make it open a new tab for a gesture, the command opens a tab on a window on the current virtual desktop (if any), otherwise, it just opens a new window. Funky stuff.

Plus, the Slicker project (which seems to have been abandoned) is an interesting concept. Screenshot. Although the damn thing compiled and ran, I got nothing to show up. Clues?

Fluxbox is great

[csirac]

It's very lightweight. I use it on machines with 32MiB RAM or less (like my laptop).

If you use ssh X forwarding, you can start a gnome panel remotely and you've nearly got a gnome desktop.

Although, you don't want to start nautilus... only thing that doesn't really work in this scenario is the workspace changer. You can do remote gnome panels + working workspace changer with XFCE though.

"Me too" as well

[Crazy Eight]

There are some things about GNOME development that strike me as falling short in comparison to the KDE team, but I could never prefer KDE over GNOME on the basis of looks alone. KDE seems to start out taxing on the eyes and then stays that way (for me).

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[beakburke]

I think it was FA Hayek who said that people hate freedom/capitalism because they are forced to choose, they are forced to make tradeoffs. Summarily, communism is attractive because these people BELIEVE that these tradeoffs somehow magically disappear because they aren't the ones doing the choosing anymore. Basically, it's appealing to a certain psycological mindset that we have to want things simpler. The morlocks and eloi as it were.

Get a grip

[Crazy Eight]

Dude, I don't want my particular installation to end up anything like your vision of a linux desktop. I don't want "uninstall links" embedded in an application launching menu. I don't want programs launched behind my back to "save" 7 seconds. I don't want to fumble with cdroms that contain outdated drivers when I can automagically install them off the net in the first place.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be up to the distributer? You really don't need to install the entire GNOME Desktop to have functional "GNOME". Gentoo has a light version of GNOME that only includes basics:

metacity-2.8, gnome-session-2.6, eel-2.6, nautilus-2.6, gnome-terminal-2.6, control-center-2.6.0.3, yelp-2.6, gnome-mime-data-2.4.1, shared-mime-info-0.14, gnome-vfs-2.6, gtk+-2.4.0-r1, pango-1.4, atk-1.6, glib-2.4, gconf-2.6, gnome-panel-2.6, gnome-desktop-2.6.0.1, libbonobo-2.6, libbonoboui-2.6, libgnome-2.6, libgnomecanvas-2.6, libgnomeui-2.6, librsvg-2.6.4, libglade-2.3.6, libwnck-2.4.0.1-r1, ORBit2-2.10, gnome-icon-theme-1.2, gnome-themes-2.6

Doesn't come with a blogger, or a media player or anything!

You don't run it inside the JVM

[MarcQuadra]

Java VM is just too slow

Well I would assume that the code would be written in java, but compiled into native machine-code by GCJ or something and run at native speed.

From what I understand, you don't need a JVM to run java apps that have been compiled into machine code, just for java apps that were compiled into Java bytecode.

I also remember hearing something about how when this is done the speed difference is negligible compared to other languages.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[aztracker1]

unknown command 'apt'

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[aztracker1]

This is exactly why commercial vendors are picking one or two vendors of linux to support, most of them being behind RedHat or SuSE, one gnome, one kde based... Okay, this leaves us with GTK+, and QT for primary gui interfaces... now, if we could get at least most distros to agree on a "default" install that will have libraries x, y, and z, so that they can be programmed against.. something akin to the windows api, and direct-x... pretty close with kde or gnome with opengl, but linux audio support falls short every time I try a few different distros... graphics isn't much better... if there were at least some core libraries that an author can *count on* to be there, and where it belongs, or at least in a means of being able to find them, this would be a great start.. now add in a higher level platform like java and/or mono, and there you go... if LSB, or whoever would make a concentrated effort to make this area rock solid, could still use any number of things above this for your specific solution... you can replace explorer as your desktop interface in windows, and programs generally still work... because the core apis are established, this isn't even 50% true in linux. that is the problem..

/rant

Bigger scarier fish - but no sockets or files

[dbIII]

rather than concentrating on what KDE are doing, they are focusing on bigger fish

I can see the gnome develepers as they aim high now. What does windows have that linux distributions don't have? One thing is the very confusing configuration database called the registry. Along come the gnome developers who are giving us gconf - they can give us an even more obfiscated registry, have it only globally modifyable with a command line utility that does NOT have a man page, and have one registry style database for every user.

It's a set of programs that run on versions of unix guys - systems that are multiuser, where everything is a file, where you have pipes and sockets and don't need to re-implement weird windows style OLE stuff that didn't work properly on windows for the first six years anyway.

Gnome became popular because it was good when they focused on code instead of politics, but now they are going all political again aiming to make a better MS Windows than Microsoft.

What I would like to see on gnome is either plain text configuration files, or a configuration database that is actually accessable, old *nix traditon of providing man pages (or info if you really have an emacs agenda to push) and a documentation web page that does more than list that a ceratin person wrote documentation on a certain date (actually letting people read it would be nice). Several packages have been abandoned as being complete while still having major flaws, like gdm needing root intervention to delete files to get X going again if a session of X crashes or a user presses CTRL ALT BACKSPACE to get out of X. Gnome is big, so they are not bothering to maintain it all - join mailing lists on moribund projects like gdm if you don't beleive me.

There are a lot of good things about gnome, but some things do not appear to be done well, and the whole obfiscated MS windows registry style thing should have been finished before things like gnome-panel used it. Years after it's introduction you still can't migrate to panel settings of one user to another. It's a multiuser system guys, and a "filesystem" is not a collection of pictures, it's how the operating system gets things off the disk - didn't the leading lights of gnome pay attention in the indroductory CS class that engineers take for easy credit?

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

no, inside the Linux one you have an install shell script and the stuff you want installed; this is no more difficult than using a .msi

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

I want all the added "features" to be add-on programs.

PLEASE get some genius programmers working on a fork of Gnome and remove 70% of the cruft? or they can do KDE... I dont care...

Wow, I wish I had mod point to mod this up.

It's really painful to have to use the crippled components they keep building into the window manager instead of special purpose apps that do one thing and do it well. The damn desktop-file-browser-thingies should be the first thing to go.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[Anonymous Coward]

ok smaller and better...

because smaller equates faster no matter how you look at it.

examples? Sure, palm OS...

better than anything microsoft has conjured, massively smaller than the competition and is certianly faster as it runs perfectly on a really slow processor.

if we cant do as good as palm OS then as open source programmers we all suck really freaking bad.

Re:Wow. Out of touch..

[GenSolo]

I frankly don't see the point in the unix style "binaries in this folder, config files in this one, data in this one" thing. I like the c:\program files\nameofprogram and "My Documents" way of handling things. That'll never change in unix land, but it sure is nice.

"My Documents" = ${HOME}/
"c:\program files\nameofprogram" = /opt/nameofprogram

Granted, your home directory in Windows contains much more than just the "My Documents" folder, but the rest is essentially what you get in hidden files and directories (~/.foo) in Linux. Also, if you'll look inside your "c:\program files\nameofprogram" directories in Windows, you'll often find that they have binaries in one subdirectory, config files in another, and data in another. Sometimes they mix and match, and sometimes they just dump it all together, but often it looks a lot like a "/opt/nameofprogram" directory tree in Linux.

dump Esound in favor of Network Audio Sound

[Quietti]

Esound requires too much manual fiddling to get working accross networked applications, while NAS was designed with exactly that in mind. NAS also happens to be supported out-of-the-box by several X terminal devices made by HP, NCD, etc.

GNOME Roadmap

[vaibhavkhattri]

Its very important that the GNOME community develops a elegant framework for developers, so that normal developers can design applications for GNOME. Currently, the framework is difficult to understand with documentation adding to the woes.

The community should focus more on Ajunta, and make it a superior IDE like Visual Studio.Net.

If people can build simple GNOME applications using Wizards, something like with Visual Basic.. it will give a great boost to the environment.

Java may be promoted for development because already there is an established army of Java developers... GCJ can be to avoid java speed-pitfalls... so a java subset may be used.

In short, the focus should be on developers...we need a compiled and interpereted language for
the environment... Java and Perl are good contenders.