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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."
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.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
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.
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."
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?
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.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
What about the vector graphics plans?
Is a SVG based window manager so far away?
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 :)
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
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
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.
Deleted
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.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
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...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It works on my Fedora system.
Download an RPM, double-click on it, voila, it is installing!
Get out of the dark ages.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
No, he didn't open the floodgates. You just did.
.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.
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
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
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).
... 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.
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?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
* 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.
May we never see th
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
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.