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

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: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...

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.