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Project GoneME Fixes Perceived Gnome UI Errors
An anonymous reader writes "Project GoneME is the first attempt to try moving the GNOME Desktop into a new direction. The intention is to create a community of people, who are willing and interested to help fixing issues brought up by people for a very long time and make the vision of a usable Desktop in the means of good old Unix fashion become true. In case you are interested to help, please join the project. Plenty of people have shown interest and welcome this step and the IRC channel got filled up within a short time." Update: 07/26 02:33 GMT by T : A project mailing list has been set up for anyone interested in taking part in this endeavor.
I assume this was submitted by a Gnome developer/apologist.
Much as I'd love to see GNOME succeed (with all the industry support it has)... I can't use it. Frankly, it drives me nuts at times, the way that, say, Windows 95 did.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Glad to see someone improving it, but we always have to ask the question -- how much better might things be if the GNOME and KDE teams were working together instead of separately? That is, coding/philosophical differences aside. Granted, choice is good, and it's their choice what they want to work on.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
kde, gnome, sun java desktop goneme, how many desktops will there be before one of them becomes truly useful.. or is the linux community not concerned with this?
Actually, I could care less about such wonderful things as GUI Errors for the moment. I would just love File Types to work properly. Then again... when I add a new File Association, it is kinda fun to keep adding it over and over until I get mad and go watch TV.
Isn't this only going to really amount to anything if it does turn into a new Gnome fork?
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Instead of fighting for one signe UI, Gnome should have two modes: beginner and expert.
beginner mode would be where Gnome is currently heading. Export mode is where us, the experts would like to see Gnome go. For instance, why not have two types of file selector dialog? The current one, and if in export mode, a new one which allows people to actually type the full path if they want to? No spatial Nautilus when in expert mode.
Actually, in any of the modes, one should be able to easily configure a feature according to the needs. For instance, maybe a beginner would still like to type a full path, so somewhere (not in gconf only) there should be an option to enable it.
Out of the box, Gnome should be made for the common user. But we should have options for the power users.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
spatial nautilus. of course you can argue it both ways but IMHO and a lot of other people's, it was a step backwards.
Please change the name first. It reminds me of Windows ME.... I always liked GNOME looks'. It always striked me as the sleekest guy around for (GNU)Linux, but it always suffered from serious technical usability issues, especially when compared with KDE. Nowadays I use Konqueror as my file manager, inside good old Windowmaker. I'd love to see (a fork of?) GNOME reach a level that brings it up to date with KDE in usability issues. So thumbs up to your project. ;)
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
This is that oGalaxy guy, right?
He's been complaining about GNOME post 1.4 for a long while, mostly on OSNews. I have no idea if the fork will succeed, but at least he's putting his money (time, code, effort) where his mouth has been.
I prefer gnome over the other choices (too many to list) because for the most part, stuff just works. However, I for one wouldn't mind seeing the ability to put different desktop pics on my seperate workspaces. Maybe this functionality is available now...If so, it's not easy to find.
The order of the buttons. I think the GNOME guys were correct in 'mimicing' the Mac button layout. I think their quest to change that portion back is a mistake.
Otoh, yes, GNOME is bloated and getting rid of the registry concept is a good one. Spatial Nautilus sux as well. Yuk.
Of course, most of the people in the IRC channel are core GNOME hackers who think this is really quite funny.
I know I personally patch GNOME often, since I hate various little things. I really hate the new file dialogs, but I haven't had time yet with work and school to rewrite those. I've redone metacity, xemacs-gnome, etc before. The main problem is people like Havoc, who control a lot of the process only want one way. Should I really have to add my own edge flipping to a window manager when they could just make it an option to disable it? I think we should have kept sawfish, since it's still superior to metacity in many ways.
Frankly spatial nautilus shows something amiss indeed! There should be an EASY way to revert back to navagation. If you didn't know what gconf was how would you even know you could revert? Why are we moving away from application preferences dialogs to no way to change at all?
*I've switched off xemacs to emacs-gtk, since imho xemacs gtk/gnome development has been dead too long and they stopped taking patches for even crash fixes.
It's called Fluxbox.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
After reading this guy's site, he basically seems to want a cluttered interface. Lots of options, lots of what he's used to. GNOME is about simplicity and clean-ness, as well as trying out new UI paradigms. Spacial browsing is much better after you get used to it. But he wants it to be like Windows. GNOME is not a Windows clone.
Maybe he should try KDE instead? That does everything he wants, and has tons of configurable options. I think you can modify the Earth's rotation speed in the KDE Control Center.
That said, I'm sticking to GNOME. It's very simple and clean, and doesn't get in my way. I really love GNOME 2.6 (actually I'm an XFCE user but decided to try it out today... it's niiiice).
My other car is first.
I just finished reading the rant/mission statement on the project's home page. This looks like some guy is unhappy because GNOME doesn't quite fit his vision of what a Real Man's Unix Desktop should be, and he's ready to mobilize the entire FOSS community to 'fix' things. He seems to take some of the UI choices in GNOME really personally, too.
I'm willing to give this effort a year just to see whether the rhetoric is backed by any ability.
Why not consolidate quality standards between major open desktop before continue working separately on each of them?
I can understand KDE and GNOME developpers does not aim the same goal (else they would really work together) but at least, to make good things created on a side usable on the other in a decent and easy way, why not put some efforts in setting well understood and followable standards?
Parts of Gnome's GUI that need to be...Fixed? Try overhauled.
That's what you get when you blindly mimic Windows, without stopping and thinking whether or not it's a good idea.
The sheer fact that this project (GnoneME) exists is proof positive the Gnome team basically doesn't know what the hell it's doing when it comes to interface choices. They fell into the same trap alot of projects do---design by consensus..You end up with a completely inconsistant, schitzophrenic design that neither makes sense visually nor ergonomically. Their design rationale is basically insane---On the one hand, they proudly boast that Gnome is better than Windows......yet, on the other hand, if you call any bad UI designs of theirs into question, it's simply chalked up by the Gnome folks as "Well, thats how they do it in Windows, so, who are YOU to question it?", which is absolute horseshit.
There are plenty of projects, whitepapers, and ideas out there that have yet to be even given mainstream exposure. If you want to see where the magic things are, and the way things will be once somebody sits down and actually thinks about what is good design versus eureka, yaay it werkz!, then keep your eyes on this project.
Cheers,
Bowie
PS.. Here's a good example. With any luck, a design like this could finally drive a railroad spike into the head of whoever thought up heirarchical-menu-based launchers. The only problem is, nobody knows about it yet.
Reverting the button order just because inferior systems do it differently is a very bad idea.
In GNOME 2.8 spatial nautilus will be the default, but there will be a visible nautilus preference to turn it off.
In GNOME 2.6, the option still exists in gconf, but not in the UI.
So, stop whining!
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
I'm glad somebody else really cares about linux desktop usability, but this is too little, too late, IMO. We should have had a better solution than Mac's Aqua/Quartz open on linux long ago... all with a consistent user experience. Friendly defaults for newbies, but simple option settings for power users.
We should be innovating. We're several years behind on the desktop now and playing catch-up. I think most of the communitiy is apathetic.
Still dreaming of the day...
Note to geeks: Design Matters. Usability Matters. Make it a mantra. Live it.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
the visible nautilus pref should have been there from day one. Having a user have to go through a regedit like program to turn off an unusable feature is unusable in itself.
This is just the kind of attitude that keeps Open Source projects behind commercial projects. Cant we just all get along and stand united behind one project. It's just plain stupid to use limited coding resources on a yet another fork.
I have a friend who first learnt Linux using Gnome, and switched over to Window-Maker eventually (slow PC). I gave him Slackware 10 the other day - and as he has a faster computer nowadays, he gave Gnome 2.6 a spin. It wasn't a happy reunion. He now uses XFCE.
How do you set short-cut keys in Gnome nowadays, anyway? "Advanced options" shouldn't necessarily yell at your face, but they should also not be so completely buried (or worse, absent), that your power users end up being frustrated.
One of the main goals of GNOME is to achieve consistency. This will only hurt the project. It's hard enough to achive consistency with GNOME vs Mozilla vs KDE vs OpenOffice, we add a forked GNOME to the mix then things will get out of hand.
There's nothing wrong with the button order. Perhaps there's nothing right either, but it doesn't matter. We have to pick a button order and stick with it.
And I think the leader of this project is seriously understimating the amount of effort involved in forking a whole desktop! He should spend the same effort trying to fix what can be fixed in GNOME, keeping in mind that some things, like button order, aren't broken or can't be fixed.
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
It's ironic that making the button order a preference is something the GTK+ developers want because GTK+ has a win32 backend. See
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74669
The bug has been open for ages. If somebody would actually come up with the simple patch needed, people could have a gconf preference for the button order.
It makes absolutely *no* sense to fork GNOME for this reason.
I have no idea if the fork will succeed, but at least he's putting his money (time, code, effort) where his mouth has been.
;-).
I guess you mean he's putting his money where his mouth *is*. Your version appears to have unfortunate freudian connotations
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
It's just tedious. A similar project has already been in the works for some time now:
http://www.dropline.net - a i686 and minor tweak/fixes to the Gnome 2.6.1 packages, built for slackware.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
"He's been complaining about GNOME post 1.4 for a long while, mostly on OSNews."
And other places.
"I have no idea if the fork will succeed, but at least he's putting his money (time, code, effort) where his mouth has been."
A house divided. We'll as you said, at least he's putting everything were his mouth is, although his answer to why it wasn't started on Sourceforge, isn't exactly encouraging.
Ratpoison is the only window manager anyone needs.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
What is so wrong with Gnome?
I have a little thing called Pogo that I built. I like to think of it as an alternative to GNOME and KDE's "panel"..the area in KDE and GNOME's design where things begin to go horribly, horribly wrong.
Pogo is a programmable application launcher. It has no menus. Instead of running your mouse up and down and around in circles going from menu to menu to find the program you're looking for, everything is right up front. If it's not, you use the mousewheel to rotate new launchers into view, You can color code them, move them around, and best of all, you can control each icon's appearance using shell scripts. It comes with a simple command you can use to send Pogo messages, like "flash this icon 3 times", or "move this one icon 3 spaces to the right, and change the color of this other one to blue", lotsa stuff..It's flexible enough that you can use it as a graphical front-end to shell scripts. Pogo comes with a nice looking clock, for example. All it is, is a bash script running in the background, extracting the hour and minute values from
Here's a link to Pogo's Development Page.. Youll find screenshots and everything there.
For example, I have a co-lo out in New York. To keep an eye on it, I have a little shell script running in the background on that machine that sends my Pogo a message about once every second. Meanwhile, here in Arizona, one of my Pogo's icons flashes once per second, to indicate the server is alive and well. It will turn blue or yellow, depending upon how much CPU activity is taking place on the box. I could have another script running that could cause the same icon to flash red if there's something weird appearing in the system log. Clicking on the icon then brings up an ssh session with the box. It's not that hard, believe it or not. Pogo's build for that sort of thing.
Hopefully you'll find it useful. It's free.
Cheers,
Bowie
Well, first of all, Gnome is unusable junk. It's so slow (with "Nautilus") on my Linux machine that it's not even worth trying to use it. KDE is no better, so I continue to use fvwm 1.0 for the 11th consecutive year. Fast, stable, makes sense to my parents.
I'll probably get modded down for suggesting it, but the model for a usable desktop should be Mac OS X. Ignore Windows, KDE, and the current Gnome/Nautilus. OS X makes them all look shabby and thoughtlessly designed.
In some respects, the question of a usable desktop is pointless when someone un-technical, like my mom for example, can sit down at a Macintosh and figure out how to do everything she wants to do without reading any documentation--digital photos, movies, music, email. The desktop may be great, but the OS and its associated user-space programs *must* achieve this sort of ease-of-use if they're ever to be taken seriously by Joe Desktop.
The Gconf/Windows registry comparison is wrong. The only thing is that it contains configuration data stored in one frontend. This interview with Havoc Pennington might clear up some of the misunderstandings.
I'd recommend everyone who wants to be a part of the UI debate to read the Gnome HIG before talking - that too contains information about both how and _why_ Gnome looks and acts like it does.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion. And, there are tools in Gnome that are very powerful, yet very simplistic. Look at it this way: Most often, it's not the tool, it's the user. Having more features won't make the user more powerful. It will make the average user less powerful and confused, whereas the power user will have no problem using the simple interface. I consider myself a power user, and I've been using Gnome since 2.0. In every part of my life, as a programmer, student, musician, whatever - I prefer simplicity to advancedness. Because something simple created to perfection will always be better than something advanced. This is what Gnome gives me now - Simplicity and concistency.
This new project surprises me a little bit. It's not because it's a good thing, but because I'm amazed that this man actually has the opportunity to gain support anywhere. I always try to be objective and understandable, but in this case it's not possible: Ali, or oGALAXYo, tends to troll around on osnews, and formerly the gnome.org mailing lists, accusing people, and generally being angry, and when people tell him to stop he replies with yet more accusations of how people attack him. He's kinda like Dave on Paradise Hotel (Yeah, I've seen it a couple of times).
I have absolutely no faith in that Project GoneME will do anything successful for the Desktop users. Especially when led by a man who in one post love a part of gnome, then two days later hate it - or suddenly hates Gnome as a whole and loves KDE. Then, all of a sudden, KDE is the wrong part. I'd love to see a roadmap for this project. And I'd love to see it change every day.
First of all, it complains massively about simple things as button orders, things that users don't notice on any other plan than an intuitive one - and he says things about f.i. esound (yes, it needs to be replaced) that are just cluttered with ignorance - a sound daemon has its use, ask any distributor.
Oh, and Gnome has a bugzilla. That's the place to tell anyone if you've found a bug or feature missing.
To end this post, I'd just like to say that I'm not a Gnome official in any way. I do support and participate in the community, but many people seem to think that everyone talking about Gnome positively belong to the Gnome set of developers, and often end up talking negatively about Gnome because of things that _are not part of Gnome at all_.
Gnome has been running backwards for a long time. I think this is a very good idea and wish them luck. On the other hand, I think in one area they are not taking it far enough. Nautilus, in every form, should die. It is a bloated piece of dinosaur shit that replaced a very well working, light weight, file manager.
They need to revert to GMC.
I have been thinking of not using Gnome anymore because of the way they keep changing things. Every time I upgrade it sets defaults that are horrid and I have to spend hours finding how to change them, if I even can because many get permanently set and the option to change disabled.
I hope these guys can get some momentum going and save Gnome.
NR
Surely if these folks are wanting to evolve gnome into something else. A more appropriate and funkier sounding name would be "GeGnome" (pron. genome)
...
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Hehe. The guy you replied to is really funny. It's nothing short of amazing how much of a religious issue people make this out to be. The button order's wrong, kill all the infidels. Oh no, spatial! Burn'em at the stake. I can't change the color, DOOM, DOOM3 I tell you. The funny thing is that everyone's forgotten the KDE guys behaviour when RH made all their changes. For all the geeks talk. I really think we're not ready for change.
Anyway as I said above. I hope this isn't a house divided (North and South), hurting more than helping.
Ugh! When will the splintering end? Splintering of distributions (eg. RedHat->Mandrake, Slackware->VectorLinux), splintering of X driver development (XFree86, X.org), splintering of Desktop Environments (Gnome->GoneME), splintering of Office Suites (StarOffice, OpenOffice)....
Whenever I bring up my distaste at the constant fracturing of development in the Community, people always tell me that "freedom is good, and we should have the right to choose". Well I agree, but the difference between Gnome and GoneME will be so slight it will be like choosing between apples and slightly different apples. The PROBLEM is that when you have to make such a choice in the Linux community, you end up having to SACRIFICE something that is only available in another development thread.
I shouldn't have to switch from using project A to using project B, giving up attributes a0, a1 and a2, just because I want to have attributes b0, b1 and b2...There should be project M, where ALL possible attributes a0,b0,c0,...a1,b1,c1,... are included and available!
Another thing this constant fracturing creates is a lot of duplicated and wasted effort and resources. If more project groups just worked TOGETHER instead of separately on virtually identical projects - imagine how much more functional and robust our software would be!
Imagine if Linux projects were more like the kernel -> there is only ONE kernel, and although you you have the FREEDOM to change it any which way you want, it still remains the same kernel.
E Pluribus Unum
Just a shout out for GNOME. I like GNOME and I like the way it's going. I've read the GoneME list of 'issues' and I disagree with them all.
Who cares where it's started? The important thing now is that there's someone addressing the major problems with Gnome, as reported by users over and over again and ignored by the few central Gnome developers over and over again.
We, the existing Gnome user base since version 1.x wants a nice desktop to use. We've been frustrated with the new commercial "Let's emulate Windows in order to get a few users to switch, and ignore our current user base" direction since day one, but we've been _constantly_ ignored.
Now someone is finally doing something about it!
Steve Jobs did that on March 24, 2001.
That self-centered pedophile's opinion is worth less than CmdrTaco's. JWZ is the epitomy of software faggotry gone bezerk. Hey JWZ, go back to your day job fellating goats you worthless faggot. You suck as a programmer. I've shit better code than what comes out of your "brain".
Less rantish, and I agree with everything he says here.
t ml
m l
http://www.whiprush.org/2004/07/ten_gnome_nitpi.h
Oh, he also talks about GoneME. He has a very low opinion of it.
http://www.whiprush.org/2004/07/its_not_a_joke.ht
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
... and IMHO and a lot of other people's, it was a step forward.
What really needs doing is some actual research on how many people prefer each to decide which should be default. I think spatial is better for new users (and old users too, if they're prepared to change how they think).
Of course, next GNOME major release there'll be a preference anyway.
Here's what I posted a while back about this in my livejournal:
"the name [...] reminds me of Windows ME"
That seems appropriate, since it sounds like most of his complaints boil down to: "it's not enough like Windows." (Except for the ones that boil down to: "it needs to have a bunch of options that you'll only ever use once out cluttering the interface all the time." Frankly, I'd rather do my configuration with a text editor, and have it out-of-sight, out-of-mind the rest of the time, which is probably why I use XEmacs as my file manager, inside good ol' FVWM - both heavily customized).
Still, I see no reason why this guy shouldn't go ahead and build his little project. It'll be an interesting experiment, and maybe useful things will come out of it. And if not, well, maybe the fact that it didn't will be useful information.
"Gnome has a multi-year strategy, which compromises some functionality today but will pay off with time. "
And there in lies the problem[1]. A large majority aren't use to thinking five, ten, or even twenty years down the line. It's always NOW, NOW, NOW. Spatial for example will come into it's own when Gnome-storage is further ahead. ReiserFS will be a good backing for it.
[1] The other part is all the Win-baggage that ex-windows users are carrying. From button order (the IBM way) to GConf (oh lookie, registry) to spatial (oh lookie, winclone). A superficial look usually results in a superficial conclusion.
Why he should he stop whining? Gnome F'd up and pissed off a huge portion of their usebase with spatial. Why do you think Gnome is making a visible effort to make it easier to turn spatial off? The whining about Spatial is going to stay until Gnome 2.8 ships so you might as well get used to it and stop harping on users who voice their opinion.
He's actually not proposing a fork per se, more like a place to collect patches to the mainline gnome that are unlikely to be accepted into mainline gnome anytime soon.
-jim
I think what all these UI efforts and all this discussion in the Linux community show is that people realize that with OSS, they can actually make a difference. And it also shows that there are many different preferences and needs when it comes to UI.
The biggest problem is the language people use to talk about these sorts of projects. Talking about "GoneME fixing perceived Gnome UI errors" is a good start. But the GoneME developers themselves should be aware that they are just developing something different for a different community, and that they aren't necessarily "fixing UI errors". I mean, the Gnome 2.6 developers aren't stupid, and they didn't set out to create a system with "UI errors" (personally, I think spatial Nautilus is a slight improvement).
With Windows or Macintosh, you get whatever Microsoft or Apple tell you is best: you can buy it or you can leave it. Complaining about usability problems with those systems is useless--the companies aren't going to listen anyway.
A house divided.
Good point, but there has been so much smoke and brimstone over his "issues" that an actual, measurable metric to see how many don't like the situation could be helpful. I can't see how a button order change could take more than a week to get over, but something must be upsetting them based on the number of ex-GNOMErs I see using KDE.
If a large number of people start using these patches, then perhaps the RedHat/Sun/Novell corporate types leading the GNOME project these days may rethink top-down "shut up, we know whats good for you" decision making. If GoneME vanishes without leaving a trace, we'll learn something about how much smoke a few arsonists can create out of trivialities.
The sooner people realize that there is no single "best" user interface and that all UIs still have lots of problems, the better for everybody. Furthermore, anything that you change about a UI is going to make some people unhappy. The good thing with Linux, X11, and its choice of UIs is that UIs really are in competition.
Does anyone besides me find it somewhat ironic that it's the supposed "Power-users" who want to get rid of Spacial mode, but who are afraid to use the advanced config tool?
And really, honestly and truly Gconf is not that bad. If you take a little time to actually *use* it, you'll realize that it bears little to no real similarity to regedit. (which seems to be the crux of everyone's argument against it)
I like spatial nautilus, it is more convenient when messing with photogs
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
There you go.
"The good thing with Linux, X11, and its choice of UIs is that UIs really are in competition."
I'd like to see the UI design process made easier. For example, how easy it is to change the Mozilla interface (I'm not just talking skins). XUL and Javascript make it easier for everyone to be a "developer"(1). Apple and Nextstep realized this with their GUI design tools, and Microsoft is soon realizing this with XAML, and AVALON. A good design is lot's of trial and error, and the easier you make that process, the better.
(1) Including all those artsy, craftsy guys everyone sneers at, as well as UI designers.
GNOME project must have more features
havoc pennington is bloated guy
he's arrogant guy who think that users are
stupid.
take a look at mono project and include it on gnome or at least we must fork.
OK, sounds good so far. No bloat. That's why I want to get Windoze completely off my home network. But then I read on ...
WHOA, NELLY! You can't talk about simple and un-bloated software, then praise emacs as a "quality piece of software," and expect to be taken seriously.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
I prefer a simple window manager like blackbox but still
use many of the KDE and Gnome parts.
It is for example possible to start a gnome-panel within
blackbox by typing "gnome-panel" into a terminal and then
get rid of it, if no more needed. For KDE applications, one
often gets annoying messages like
" QPixmap: Cannot create a QPixmap when no GUI is being used"
and sometimes the application does not work.
I would like to see more elements of different windows managers
to coexist peacefully with others without actually have to run
a specific window manager.
I wrote a review for a now defunct publication way back when GNOME 1.0 was first released. Comparing it to KDE at the time, my review said that it would have been a toss-up if GNOME 1.0 hadn't been so unstable. Anyone who remembers GNOME 1.0 will remember just what a crash-happy bugger it was.
I liked it a lot at the time, however, and I faithfully stuck with it (over KDE) for several months.
If GNOME had stayed on essentially the same track, adding only polish, features, unity and stability, I'd still be using GNOME today.
Instead, each new release of GNOME has taken away or changed more of the things I used/liked about it (read any Slashdot story, including this one, for a users' lists of grievances) and sometime during KDE 2.x, I went back to KDE. I've continued to track GNOME releases (I've got a fresh Fedora Core 2 install right now, so I've had a chance to test the most recent distributed GNOME desktops) but GNOME continues to travel farther and farther away from where I want my desktop to be.
Meanwhile, KDE has continued to steadily improve and with each new KDE release, I find myself happier and happier with my desktop.
It's a shame, but at least for some audiences (myself being a part of them), the height of GNOME's usability and coolness was probably the crash-happy GNOME 1.0. Instead of fixing the stability and polish problems and making it a nice desktop, the developers have gradually turned it into a less and less usable environment, an environment that I always feel is talking down to me while it tries to keep me in a kind of straitjacket.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If your eyes will naturally rest on the far right when looking a row, wouldn't it be better to read from right to left?
... left-to-right.
No, right to left buttons is not sensible at all for left to right readers.
A study that says that the right handed mouse users tend to look right of center is a wrong minded study. A sensible study would be independent of pointer device and would ultimately conclude that left-to-right readers will find it more natural to read choices
A short sighted study that suggests a UI that fits around the current common pointer device, ignores finding a more universal natural UI, that would work also with: left handed people, keyboard users, right handers that mouse on the left (mouse injury), touch screens, PDAS.
Gnome is my prefered desktop and I like the changes made.
Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
While a great deal of what makes of great HCI (imo) is 'common sense', you have to step back and look at how many thousands of applications ignore that common sense before opening one's foot cavity and stating that it's redundant and useless, er... gobble goble sounds.
/. crowd... I read the frelling manual.
A SIMPLE and fantastic example is defining in clear terms what an OK and CANCEL button should convey, and their relation to one another. The button on the RIGHT is ALWAYS the ACCEPT dialogue. It is the "make it so". Cancel should NEVER be "oh, well, you mean cancel this dialogue, but continue along the process anyway." Cancel is always Stop! Drop! Roll! A user clicking cancel enough should revert back to a completely unchanged state from when every dialogue popped up, in as much as is possible (obviously if the dialogue is "You lost net. Redial?" then CANCEL can't logically reform the original state). Common sense, right?
I bet if you paid me a nickle for every application you could find that obeyed that 'common sense' rule - ie, what a complete non-expert to the system would expect as the behavior - and I paid you a quarter for every one I found that disobeyed, I could retire somewhere nice today.
And that's for something as BASIC as a confirmation dialogue. What about menu selectors? Drop down select boxes? When is the best time to present information in a drop down box versus a validated data text field?
Yeah. There are a load of nitwits who throw around HCI terms and act all hot because they're so five minutes right now, but there are a load of nitwits who throw around programming terms and act all hot because they're so teh leet hax0r.
There's more to good UI design than deciding how to fit your million options on the same dialogue. Yes, any software developer worth their salt can figure out how to fit them all together, but like any skill, a great many lack the 'vibe' to do it right, and say, "Gosh, maybe our users don't need to be able to set what language encoding they're viewing the page as in the middle of the text render area." Things like depth to discovery, learning curve, Fitt's Law (how big should your OK dialogue be?), and gosh, a whole course of study await those who wish to engineer properly.
Just because you've been to a hospital does not make you an expert on medicine and medical care. Just because you've written code and run programs does not make you a HCI/UI expert (or sufficently expert to discredit the field, at any rate). So yes, their 'wiser than thou' attitude to which you are clearly responding (and other commenters have gone out at specifically) is justified. They're experts. That doesn't make them infallible. But seeing the Emperor's new clothes does not make you a tailor, either.
Look at Firefox. Where are the options? How are they clustered? How deep are some things? Generally, the more expert a user who would care about the setting, the more remote it is.
Gnome is not all things to all people, nor should it try to be. Yes, they made a load of mistakes, but that always happens with a (*sigh*) paradigm shift, but you're dealing (and, I guess, a part of) a culture that is the command line interface. Gnome will always be your antithesis. There's always a terminal. Use it. Gnome is looking to me like something for those people who always go exploring with the clicking on random options, end up 'breaking' something ("Oops, I uninstalled Windows... was that important?"). I'm sorry the limit to options is a nuisance to you, but believe it or not, there are more things in heaven and earth...
Finally, if anyone's still reading, I'm not in the HCI field. I just did something really, really crazy to some of the
Basically your definition of better and better, and worse and worse is if it goes the way you feel it should? Selfish? Yes, but then people are selfish. That's why the Windesktop has a "My Computer", "My Documents", etc. The question at this point shouldn't be "what desktop fits my vision?", but what "majority" rules in this case? At least with OSS the "majority" is closer to home.
we do not need 2 modes, we just need to remember a few things:
When you talk about a beginner mode i suspect you are talking about a UI where everything is a simple as possible. while this is a good, it does not necessarily mean the UI is easier to use. things expressed in simplest terms oftem means showing all the work. remember high school algebra? show all the work? its great to learn, but sucks ass because sometimes proofs can take a long time to write down.
your so called expert mode is a mode the user should be able to express their needs as precisely as possible. ultimately the only limitation of a precise interface is how you creatively use this interface to accomplish a task. linux cli is a very good example of this. extremely versatile and precise. but there is nothing simple about the cli.
imo, a GUI will only ever be elegant when precision and simplicity are as close together as possible. just for kicks BeOS had this closeness.
the good thing about elegance is that it can be expressed in terms of style. macosx has its own style of elegance but its measureable if we find a way to measure simplicity and precision of interface options/controls. kde has its own, tho many might argue that kde isnt really elegant. kde spends more energy being precise and not necessarily simple. and gnome is oversimple.
Beep Media Player and Rhythmbox are elegant apps from an interface perspective but they both have different styles which i am suggesting can be measured.
Please, someone, ask Sid Meiers (of Civilization) to help. He knew more about effective User Interfaces 15 years ago than anyone else seems to know today.
Even back in the days of Railroad Tycoon, he was able to present understandable and usable information at the single pixle level.
User Interface does not, and should not, mean "looks like MS Windows".
If Sid Meiers isn't willing to help (lead) the effort, then study his best work before starting.
Xfce4 is built with GTK2, so it will display pretty antialiased fonts. It already has an Enlightenment-ish desktop root menu and pagers, and it can be easily configured to behave more like E as well. For example, you can turn off the taskbar and replace it with an iconbox. In my experience, Xfce4 is quite stable, and it doesn't seem to hog system resources, either.
Gnome has been going downhill ever since the switch from Sawfish to Metacity. I know that sawfish has certain 'issues', but this is hardly an excuse to switch to an alternative that is missing most of the features.
Somewhere the Gnome people got the idea that usability and configurability was a negative and their best bet was to make an unconfigurable unusable interface.
Pathetic.
Well I can certaily see why you're getting the response you are. I have a secret for you. People hate change. Mac people hate change. PC people hate change. Linux people hate change. Change in it's more extreme reactions is Luddites. People have even died trying to bring about change. The best kind of change starts with an individual. In this case, you. Once you've made your changes, then you do the FOSS thing and share it with the rest of the world. If the majority like it? Great! You'll be the Linus of GUI's. But don't be surprised if you end up the Richard Stallman of GUI's instead.
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Has anyone else noticed the "warnings" have been turned off? And a flame-baitey article shows up. Coincidence?
There are degrees and types of expertise - it's not a linear order, let alone merely binary. My favorite "recent" Windows innovation was the "don't show this widget again" checkbox. A more flexible and open system like a Linux desktop should go all the way with that kind of flexibility.
The base widget class should include properties to represent a default value, whether the widget appears at all, and possibly a "shown default and disabled" state. The base widget container class should include a widget for managing the default values and display states of contained widgets. Then the desktop containing all those containers and widgets could have preset collections of widget states, identified as a range of expertises, and a collection of user-configurable setting collections.
It would be easy to set some apps to more expert states than others. That could be done remotely, or at login, by an administrator. Suites of apps could have "expertise overlays" which set expertise for more options in the GUI when performing operations with different sets of apps. And a learning feature could offer to hide infrequently used widgets in their new default state.
--
make install -not war
A "per-installation" config button like that belongs in a "Preferences" dialog. Leaving it out entirely is worse than cluttering up the session GUI.
--
make install -not war
Until the Gnome Menu Editor (or whatever they will call it) is again present and working (which, of course, means "I know it's there"), then Gnome will be unuseable to me.
Launchers are all very well, and are useful. And so are auto-hiding palettes. But even taken together they don't compensate for the missing menu editor. I am also disgusted by menus that use generic terms for applications. For categories it's fine, but applications should show their names. If I want to use Mozilla, or Firebird, I shouldn't have to guess what "Web-browser" means!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If your eyes will naturally rest on the far right when looking a row, wouldn't it be better to read from right to left?
... left-to-right.
No, right to left buttons is not sensible at all for left to right readers.
A study that says that the right handed mouse users tend to look right of center is a wrong minded study. A sensible study would be independent of pointer device and would ultimately conclude that left-to-right readers will find it more natural to read choices
A short sighted study that suggests a UI that fits around the current common pointer device, ignores finding a more universal natural UI, that would work also with: left handed people, keyboard users, right handers that mouse on the left (mouse injury), touch screens, PDAS.
How DARE anyone criticize OS X! Blasphemer!
*flame mode* ...
Oh, I don't like it, and I don't like it, oh, and it is broken because of Spatial mode which I can't get to
*/flame mode*
Ok, first of all, about fork - I don't get a news. This guy gets too much attention, it is not worth that for even himself. If he will get anything done, then we can welcome him as proven his point. Until then, he is simply... a flamer.
BUT let's look at the problem from other side - fact one, there are many (however, we can't count how much percent of GNOME user base) people who doesn't like the way GNOME drives away from childishly old UNIX style of thinking (in GUI case, not in overall) and thinks that all this HIG thinky is stupid and so on and so on. fact two, many people simply dislike GNOME because of serious companies backing it - and guess what, again it is partly of HIG and simpliness/coolness GNOME provides. It's all against everything geeky, in their opinion.
So there is very practical solution - write a Control Center-like superb GNOME tweaking program for expert mode!
Or there is second, emotional solution - prove your point maybe with providing details and all info for another Usability Guide. Prove your point that buttons should be in that order you have used to use, not how current HIG suggests. HIG doesn't have to be perfect, so if you have something really to add, then do it. Don't rant.
p.s. While I wrote this post I read that someone compared Windows Registry with GConf. Sights, if they have EVER used it, then they won't be talkin bullshit. GConf rocks, I would really love that many programms of GNOME would use it. It is easy to hack, easy to use, easy to change from ssh session for client, easy to make lot of kickstart options for bunch of users. It's all very simple and useful XML conf structure, nothing of big fat one file Windows registry.
p.s.s. rembember, there are ranters and flamers in all kind of camps - GNOME, KDE, Linux, BSD, Windows, Apple, whatever. I don't hate those people, however, I hate the whole process. It's all useless.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
When I first read the /. post, I was excited, because this is exactly what I wanted to do with GNOME as well. But after reading the introduction, I am a bit taken back by some of the phrases the author used, such as:
It's totally regardless for them what the opinion of users are, what only matters is that they must be right because they say so.
and:
I on the otherhand think that some decisions have upset quite a lot of people including me and there was no possibility to bring these problems up on the GNOME Mailinglists or the IRC channel without getting yourself trapped into ugly discussions, slandering, defaming, mobbing or even stalking.
and this:
It would be nice if they could do their own little thing in their own world without convincing everyone else that they must change their stuff the way they like because they said so.
While I agree with the project goal in general, the use of such spiteful language may drive some developers away, especially if there are some GNOME developers who want to participate in both projects. Even for me, now I am afraid that I would be signing up for a war against the GNOME project.
I know the feeling you have, being ignored and even mistreated, but the introduction of your project home page is no place to amplify these complaints.
Be positive, I believe that will win you more community support.
"GNOME is about simplicity and clean-ness(...)"
"This is what Gnome gives me now - Simplicity and concistency."
Well, I know the ultimate solution to those who want the ultimate simplicity and consistency. Enter the following commands:
It's completely simple (it does nothing) and completely consistent (the keyboard LED's will flash, always, at the same frequency, on every PC you use these commands on).We need a freely available desktop poll.
Possible votes:
1) gnome
2) kde
3) xfce4
4) cde
5) java
please add others (note not window managers e.g. fluxbox, fvwm, enlightenment, icewm, scwm, windowmaker, blackbox)
Nuff Said.
(referring to spatial Nautilus:) "it was a step backwards."
I disagree. The navigational Nautilus found in versions 1.4 - 2.4 looked too much like a web browser. It was confusing for both Windows users, and KDE users. When a program has a navigational toolbar along with a location field, I for one would not think it would be unreasonable to assume that it has web-browsing capabilities.
I think that there's a few issues that means that free desktops need to play "catch up" with the likes of Windows.
When a free software project starts, *GENERALLY* (not all the time) the coders are writing the code because they want/need it. They aren't coding with users in mind, they're coding something that they want and think might be useful. So the project is designed for a skilled computer user, and if usability comes after that as a result of enough requests, it is already "playing second fiddle". The reason that a certain usability feature doesn't get into the code might (but of course not always) be simply because the coder uses the desktop system, and considers the addition to over-simplify the system to the point of almost being patronising (There are many examples where Windows can be considered extremely patronising to a "power user").
Speaking of being patronising, there is also a notable point in regards to the attitude of many geeks/hackers. As the "Portrait of J. Random Hacker" says in the "Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality" section:
That, and the brief mention of "Stupid People" in the section entitled "Things Hackers Detest and Avoid" is also part of the problem. Hackers/coders tend to react very badly to timewasting tasks and stupidity, so when an inexperienced user has a problem with a current system, they tend to receive ridicule and/or abuse, rather than their concerns being taken on board. This doesn't happen in every case of course, but the most common answer to a technical question is "RTFM". It's ultimately hard to really take what inexperienced users need on board when you just consider them to be stupid for not being able to use your current system.
Another thing is really the power of the (normally Bash) shell. A lot of *nix users are people who grew up on the system before GUIs really became popular, and they have got so used to a command line system that they often shun the very idea of a GUI system. When you're so comfortable with a shell window where you can do just about anything you need to, there's less of a focus on usability of a desktop system. Provided you have a basic file browser, which is usable and functional, there's a danger of not fully developing the file browser, on the strength of the fact that you can get to where you want to go much more quickly with cd /home/blah or similar at the shell. With Windows, the command line is so utterly piss-poor by comparison (yes you can get 3rd party Unix command line apps, but on it's own, it sucks), you're basically forced to use GUI systems for just about everything.
There's also a bit of a Catch 22 situation about it. Unless you get more inexperienced users on the system, you won't get more design suggestions from the usability viewpoint. But if you don't make the system more usable, you won't get more inexperienced users.
So what to do if you don't have your own basic user focus groups like Microsoft? Well, you use some of the resarch that they have done. While UI designers have been accused many times of making desktop environments too much like Windows, at the end of the day, that is what people are used to. If you want to move a user from Windows to *nix, they will have a much better experience if they are sitting infront of a system which is similar enough to their previous system that they can find their way around with little assistance. I know that many people try to set themselves apart from Windows users (although there is a large degree of elitism about that) but at the end of the day, Microsoft have been de
When Nautilus is going to add multi-column icon view at smallest size (16 px), that's when it gets into my usable apps list.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
I like the MIME association facility in GNOME. In fact, I use it as a simple IPC mechanism for handing off remote data found by one app to be consumed by another. I would love another facility for handling protocol associations. Similar to /etc/services , a database of preferred apps for transferring data per protocol, like "HTTP: /usr/local/bin/mozilla". The data transfer app (eg. mozilla) would get the data, use the MIME lookup for handing off to the presentation app (eg. mozilla for HTML, XMMS for M3U, etc), which can return data to the calling app without that calling app needing specialized logic to determine which app to call.
Those two facilities would give flexible, comprehensive support to the data and presentation layers for any app, and between any intercommunicating apps. We're still stuck with a paradigm of a central app with logic for "quarterbacking" IPC among retrieval/storage and presentation apps. But once we've codified the now-standard MIME and protocol techniques into OS-level databases, innovation can focus on standardizing direction of data through logic-only objects.
As the interfaces are standardized, the entire OS can move towards an interobject IPC system. Windows and other GUI objects can send data to any object that processes that datatype, while network/filesystem/sensor data can be sent to any logic processor or presentation widget, again depending only on datatype comprehension. Datatype mungers and metadata skimmers can be made small objects which interconnect otherwise incompatible data handlers. Then every app can deliver a toolkit for any other app, and lightweight apps can add features to any other apps, without revising the source code. The possibilities for integration and customization, including total simplification, among all apps - and more importantly, all data - will be unleashed.
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make install -not war
photogs
Typing with one hand, are you? :)
Nautilus: organize porn faster!
Sorry, couldn't help it!
I was using fluxbox until gnome-2.6 hit debian unstable couple of monts ago. I was curios how it would suit my tastes, it was perfect (I even use epiphany-browser now instead of firefox). The best part is that my girlfriend liked it more than her old windows so she also using linux/gnome now :)
The other guy is just a fool. "Couldn't care less" is the correct way to say it. (I'm a native speaker, BTW.)
It's just that illogical people say it "could care less." But these are the same people that write "could of" instead of "could have" and use double negatives, so what can you do? If they thought about what they were saying, they would see that it doesn't make sense, but they don't think about it.
Anyway, see here for more discussion of this idiom. That site is a great reference for such things.
i'm too busy to read ALL that. Dear author, please put up a summary page up front instead of your life story. Thanks.
"It is, after all, what you wanted. We're the users you didn't want to serve."
The world changes. Are you going to change with it? Or are you going to complain about being left behind? Linux is growing, and growing-up.
"I simply believe that a better philosophy is:
- Configurability means learning curve
- Design intelligently to minimize learning curve
- While maintaining configurability
- Thereby *potentially* serving *all* users"
Mac's haven't achieved this. Windows certainly hasn't. What makes you think you and your "ilk" can strike the balance between "design intelligently", "maintaining configurability" while "potentially serving all users", while pissing off "no users". Who then come on Slashdot, and complain about how they're not being served.
Absolutely, I see your point totally. There is no point in changing the user interface, change the user instead, and get someone who doesn't whine, but actually agrees with the interface.
What do we give the guy who wants to change the interface? Why, we let him do his own version of the interface.
Doesn't this make apportioning blame between user and interface a bit of a zero-sum game?
Now I'm two clicks removed from my pron. Not good.
He doesn't even know how to spell pr0n correctly!
I suspect an answer would be more forthcoming if we look at the actual demographic doing the complaining. How many are old-guard, and how many are ex-windows users? How many are even from platforms like the Mac, or Amiga? I suspect that there's a "group" that feels they're being left behind, forgotten like grandpa in a nursing home.
You're seeing this not only with Gnome, but the command-line as well. There's going to be more and more of these battles, for the "old" dislike changing from, as much as the "new" like changing to.
Let's start another fork!
But I don't think that confusion is good enough of an excuse to remove the usefull functionality.
After testing the new GNOME, I seriously wonder if they should just follow Mac HIG instead of writing one (the open / save dialogs are pretty much the same, for example), cos they seem to like it a lot, including errors.
If the Linux-based UIs don't imitate first and innovate second there is little chance that Linux will considered as an option. To most users, computers are a tool - nothing more. It just needs to work. The hassle associated with switching to a new OS, especially if it requires substantial re-learning, can be a major turnoff. The first objective, then, should be an alternate environment that will be fairly comfortable, even though it's not Windows.
KDE is close with www.kde-look.org but I'd really like to see a DE pull it all together and create a dynamic user/developer environment.
Comments.
Ratings (good for both artist/developers *and* users)
Pictures! (eyecandish interface and background picutres! you want to attract artists and excite users!)
Oh, and no patronizing, but it sound like you got that part already!
Quack, quack.
...the same 95% of people using and developing for linux now come from a windows and unix background, and not a mac background? they sort of emulate what they were the most familiar with. Macs were put down for a long time because they were easy to use, no lie, I actually heard that a lot of times. "too easy to use, too simple". I thought that was a funny thing to say for a put down, but I heard it.
Anyway, I really don't know. How many ex-mac classic developers went to linux, instead of just migrating to developing for OSX, compared to ex-windows developers/users going to linux? I bet that's a big part of what's going on with the linux desktoop now. Like, what is the default "meaning" you think of when someone says they made a dualboot machine? See what I am getting at? Is it any wonder that the main drive is to reproduce a free windows-like experience then?
I'm definitely in a minority here, but my biggest complaint about Gnome is the way the source code is distributed.
I've developed a perverse habit of wanting to compile large portions of my system from scratch. Gnome is a nigh-incomprehensible mass of interdependencies and it's a mess trying to figure out what the minimum set of packages is that I need for a particular package.
There IS a mistaken impression that KDE is simpler in this regard because it has "fewer" libraries, but I don't think that's true - it's just that most of the necessary libraries are collected into a much smaller set of source trees. The Gnome equivalent of QT (a single source download) is "Glib and GTK [and Pango and ATK?]". Gnome requires "Orbit" and "Gnomelibs" and "Gnomeui" and "libidl" and "gnomeprint" and "gnomeprintui" and "bonobo" and "bonoboui" and "gconf" and "gconf-editor" and "gtkhtml" and "gnomecanvas" and....probably a dozen others that I've forgotten - and if you want to compile them up "by hand" (which I often do, glutton-for-punishment that I am) you waste half of your time trying to figure out which order you need to compile them in because the interdependencies aren't obvious.
It appears that most or all of the discussion of Gnome improvements has to do with user-interface issues, though, so I don't think anyone on the Gnome side feels this is an issue.
As far as I can tell, KDE actually DOES have equivalent individual libraries to all of these...but all or nearly all of them are part of the combined "kdelibs" source package. I think this kind of coordination is why KDE is often perceived to be more cleanly "integrated" than Gnome (whether it really is or not).
I wouldn't care except that some of the individual Gnome applications really do seem to be really nice. There doesn't appear to be anything remotely approaching GnomeMeeting for KDE, for example...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
XFCE. Seriously, if he's all anti-bloat and whatnot and is all up in arms about GCONF and lauguages other than C, then he should go use XFCE.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Sun's CDE is freely available?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you. <------------- You are here.
Then they forget about you.
I do have problems with GConf, though.
1) I have seen God-knows-how-much breakage with apps trying to talk to gconf over the years, or gconf crashing, or claiming that they couldn't connect to gconf or what-have-you. The design may be justified, but it's broken an awful lot over the years.
2) GConf is too often used as an excuse for creating a GUI option by a number of GNOME developers that have confused "ease of use" with "hiding all advanced features". I don't use the GNOME DE, but I do use GNOME apps in preference to KDE apps, and I see this too much. Simply shunting every advanced option off into the depths of GConf or the dotfiles, frankly, sucks.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work.
Fine. Have "Advanced" tabs that are always visible, if you want. You're using Windows as the golden standard for usability, ne? That approach has certainly worked acceptably for Microsoft.
May we never see th
Out of his entire list there are perhaps two things which are even half good ideas.
For the most part this guy doesn't want to improve anything, he wants to jet us back into the stoneage.
He wants to get rid of views in nautilus.
He also would like to see an end to the HIG (and no he doesn't want something to replace it), in fact he also wants a stop put to cooperation with KDE and other WMs. Freedesktop.org, is evil as far as he's concerned.
This is *exactly* like the "disabled on a vanilla system and must be re-enabled through a config file" user-rebindable accelerators in GNOME. There are too many features that are simply *hidden*, tucked away to leave the GNOME hackers that demand them happy and keep whatever UI person that insists that limited functionality is the only way to make a UI usable happy. For the love of God, you could make an entire "advanced control panel" just to turn on all the useful features of GNOME if you want (Emacs keys, user-rebindable accelerators, file selector usable by a bash person), but for the love of God, stop hiding it. At least tuck away a couple of checkboxes somewhere to enable all the useful features. Please.
May we never see th
That still doesn't mean that it shouldn't be easily changeable.
I used the Mac for years. I fell in love with spatial file-browsers. I *hated* using Explorer, which wasn't spatial.
On the other hand, a number of Windows users bitterly hated using the Mac, because it forced you to open a new window each time (well, you could hold down Option while you were using the computer, yes), and the windows kept "moving around".
I see *no* reason not to allow both methods of operation. Literally zero, except for the times when Person A is using Person B's account, which they shouldn't be in the *first* goddamn place. If your problem is people having configs that differ from the default, we should work on migrating configs around computers, not on forcing everyone to use one config unless they spend months trying to figure out how to get away from said config.
Also, GNOME has neutered a number of projects that it's come in contact with. At some point, the GNOME people decided that "viewports and multiple desktops" were both very similar. Okay, fair enough. Users had managed just fine for years, and it'd be easy to just tuck viewports in an advanced tab, but some GNOME person decided that there should be only one, and that multiple desktops were better than viewports. So, all of a sudden, GNOME suddenly forced you to use multiple desktops.
For a while, Sawfish, a beautiful GTK-based WM that can be rewritten in lisp while running, much like emacs, became the default GNOME WM. And in that period of time, all kinds of features were ripped out of it -- focus settings, viewport support, etc. A lot of it could be pulled back in an unsupported manner, but most of it started getting buggier and buggier as things broke.
Now, GNOME has decided that there's zero point to having LISP-based configurability -- that configurability is actually *bad*, because it might possibly cause something to operate differently than users expect. So they came up with Metacity, which is possibly the most brain-dead WM in existence. They left, in their wake, a ruined sawfish. Thanks, GNOME.
May we never see th
"It's sheer arrogance for someone to suggest that I don't know how best to arrange my environment.. even worse for my aesthetic tastes to be usurped in the name of an almost-mythical "average user" that the GNOME developers claim to understand intimately."
You must really hate the Mac then. Every decision Apple makes for it's users smacks of "sheer arrogance". How dare Apple make those decisions instead of their users. And all in the name of "ease of use". gosh darn it, I want my interface to have more buttons than the space shuttle, and require the same amount of education. Poo on anyone else who may want to use a Mac, as long as I get what "I" want.
"I'll use strong words to try to relate how emphatic I am about this point: FUCK THE AVERAGE USER. I'm the one that has to use my computer 12 hours a day, NOT the average user. And if a desktop environment is going to make it a pain in the ass for me to get it to work the way I want it, then I'll use something else. Simple as that. I really don't give a shit what you, or the gnome developers, or the waitress at Wendys, thinks the 'average user' can handle, or what is 'aesthetically pleasing'.. as LONG as it doesn't interfere with MY ideas on what is appropriate. If it does, then I'll pack my bags and leave."
I'll use even stronger words. Since Apple can't deliver the experience "I" want I show them by moving over to Windows. That'll show them. Treat me like an "average user" will they? They'll rue the day they turned their back on me. *sniff* They'll be sorry.
The gnome project tried expert mode.
There were 3 levels
Beginner
Intermediate
Expert.
It didn't work.
People had different expectations of what features/options should be in which level, and so in the end, everyone just switched to Expert all the time, so that they could see all the features.
And this is *exactly* where the GNOME Project started ignoring their users. Yes, the users *turned on Expert mode* because they *want* all the features. Really. If the GNOME developers cannot manage to visually differentiate to the users between "advanced" features and "basic" features (via an Advanced dialog or tab or whatnot), they are free to ask for users to make mockups or suggestions of how the two should be differentiated. Hiding features is just *not* good, wastes time and effort of advanced users, and helps basic users not at all versus simply just differentiating advanced features.
May we never see th
Frankly, it drives me nuts at times, the way that, say, Windows 95 did.
I know what you mean, but I don't think that it's just a problem with Gnome. Linux is now overrun with pretty-looking facilities that only help marginally with our ability to do useful work, and in some cases they actually decrease our overall ability by making the system more obscure.
Linux and the BSDs are primarily tools for power users, because that's what their remote ancestor and inspiration was, namely Unix. Anything that dumbs down these extremely powerful tools just so that they can appeal to Windows users or to granny is completely wrong. Any dumbing-down interface needs to be entirely additive and optional, and not given pride of place as if it were a leading-edge goal.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
For short I want to list all the issues mentioned in the article and give my personal opinion on it.
1. The button order.
There are serveral ways to order buttons in a dialog. The first thing where we all will agree on is that the order should be the same across all applications.
The new way in GNOME is a copy of the Mac philosophy which has its advantage. To say other application frameworks use a differnet layout and therefor GNOME should use a less usful approach just because all other systems do is not a good idea. A good idea instead would be to make the gnome-HIG the standard Unix-HIG on freedesktop.org
Things like Openoffice and Mozilla could adopt to that very quickly. Also the button order is or at least should be the same in all gnome applications and this is a good move.
Lately I red something about KDE working on its own HIG which will be very similar to the gnome one. And the gnome HIG as much in common with the MacOS-HIG.
2. Spatial vs. Navigational Nautilus
He hates spatial mode. Because he learned to use the navigational approach over the years. And often if people learned something they do not like to throw that away for something new. I can understand that. But hate is not an argument.
There are several good points about spatial mode. One is, it is closer to the real filesystem layout. It handles folders and files as objects, which is the way people think. The major problem with spatial mode is deep file hierarchies. In such environments it is hard to get to the files as new need to open a lot of windows just to get there. Well you could auto close the parent folder by opening the folder with the middle mouse button or the wheel-button. But with some mice this is not that good, because the wheel is too sloppy. But this is in some cases more a hardware problem.
As an alternative way of doing the same thing is available for those, this is not such a big issue.
But still you cannot see the path you walked down without clicking somewhere to get that information.
So the issue with deep hierarchies still exists. The question here is: Why have we such deep hierarchies in our home folders?
As I talked to a lot of people using different operating systems and desktop environments there are some causes for that.
1. We use deep hierarchies to store meta information in the directory tree.
2. We work with big projects, which needs separation. And this separation can be done with folders.
3. We have no real philosophy how to group files in our home directory, so we produce folders to attribute files. And as we have no plan, we use different way to do so for the same purpose. That is why we use the search tool so often to get the files back.
There are more reasons (and I would like to hear from you about them) but for those above you just need different way to solve those problems.
As we all know, deep hierarchies e.g. in menus are not a good idea and users get confused by that. Even expert users. So flat hierarchies are a good approach to solve that.
Meta data should not be expressed in folders. It is a lack of the OS if the filesystem cannot handle that. Well Apple solved that problem so gnome should adopt that idea.
For big projects it could be neccessary to have deeper hierarchies, but normally you work just on one or lets say not more then ten projects an the same time. As you normally work on a project for several days, weeks or months, place a link on the desktop to that project and often you cut of several hierarchy-levels. Also you have a real impression on which projects you are really currently working.
3. Views
Well I didn't get that point. They removed at least in spatial mode, all views, as it is better to show file contents with applications rather with nautilus. The left views are:
- icons
- list
- images
- cvs (well that does not work)
Views for folders are really great. Not all make sense. The icon and list view are really useful and should remain. The cvs-view woul
The user is handed a really sweet gun, but the clip is half-empty, and the gun is jammed.
KDE: User shouts "hand me a gun!"
13,000 different guns fall from the sky onto the user's head, crushing him to death instantly.
Why should Linux-based OSes and BSD-based systems be dumbed-down to fit newbies? Wasn't it said elsewhere that newbies stays as newbies for a short time, but once they learn their systems, they remain power-users for the rest of their lifes? What newbies should have is good documentation (and with Linux and *BSD, they do have it), not dumbed-down systems that would hinder experienced users. Computers are not adaptable, this is a feature of carbon-based systems (read: humans). We can learn how to interact with a computer, but the computer cannot know how it will interact with humans. Therefore, let the C-based systems adapt to Si-based systemsn, not the other way round.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
that competition is the driving force. Considering there really isn't money to be made. I believe both would still improve just fine, actually with larger communities due to the absence of the other, one would progress faster. It's amusing, having programmed numerous algorithms, I find it hard to recall all that many examples where competition ended up solving a problem, usually it was the cooperation of a variety of parts.
Look! We fixed the GUI issues!
http://i386.kruel.org/index_goneme.html
I think there's a lot of problems with GoneME, so I'm going with Project GoneAM-ME.
On a more serious note, some ideas are good, but the way he's going about it is wrong. And patches to make the button order different is silly - if you could just stop for two seconds and actually read the buttons, or see the icon.
Maybe he should stick to the console, how can someone so purportedly knowledgeable about a UI to write such an article and patches and also come up with the following sentence:
"but changing something a user got used too for many years is not the best decision ..."
Actually, nautilus does have webbrowsing capabilities, it's just that noone uses them.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
http://i386.kruel.org/index_goneme.html
"The people that I met and whom I was able to read and talk with, pointed out how much they dislike changes such as Buttonorder, Windows Registry (often declared as GConf), the gnome-desktop module, pango, glib, atk, mono, java, c, Nautilus, things like general consistencies, real progress, fast code, smaller modules, instant apply, scrollkeeper help functions for those who are too elite to RTFM and many more."
Real "power users" don't mind installing an extra bit of software to do what they want, their way. They don't mind tweaking a few config settings.
A lot of "power users" these days seem to get all scared and hysterical if the UI isn't set up exactly to their specification by default or there isn't some massive in your face option button to make it so.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It isn't that a spatial nautilus was a bad idea it was the change. I frankly think nautilus is better in spatial. However it does freak people out who have been using nautilus forever.
Gnome's mistake was not allowing seemless integration. If someone was used to old nautilus then they should have not gave them spatial behavior. These users should have been left with the old behavior and let them turn it on at their leasuire.
open source is not always about choice:
1) it is about openness and standards. Some standards are defined by committees eg Posix, other's by market leaders (HTML4).
2) It is about freedom to innovate and experiment. Like what the GnomE patches aims to do. It allows users to write new UI's and applications without having to rewrite all the other bits that didn't matter to them.
As a project moves towards maturity, it needs to settle down more, and have less radical changes, while an experimental branch hosts the more controversial changes like the spatial windows.
How does this even get posted on /. ?
... essential stuff only
./ headlines
First, the site hosts many closed-source projects, one (the "seven level button" monitor) where the author proclaims he'll (paraphrase) "kick yer arse if yu tri 2 get a copee."
Okay onto the subject at hand:
- Spatial Nautilus?
they didn't go far ENOUGH i say! Why revert? useless. use gnome1/kde and have a nice day.
- playing well with kde/motif/etc.
not within the scope of the gnome2 project.
- the name of the project GoneME
!@#$'ing windows whore. die.
- button order
if you ask me, it never makes sense no matter what you do with it. gnome2 is going to be customizable in this respect, just not yet in 2.6 so keep your pants on
- gconf a.k.a. windows registry
die. die. die. gconf isn't all that amazing, but for what it does it is suprisingly efficient. user-split registries of information (try THAT in some wincrap system).
- should have
when you don't have a lot of money for advertising, and do the work for free, then you make a "family" style group of products like gnome2 is doing. i see nothing wrong with this. if you want a more naked framework, go chase natalie portman around naked and petrified with a bowl of hot grits and GNUstep.
- dumbifying people down
moron.
- DIG DEEPER
shut up already and open a gnome-terminal
- removing scrollkeeper and docbook
moron x2.
- Asthetics
i personally hate the way ohsex looks, so there's no way for me to add to this. the gnome2 interface (gtk+2.4x) is fine for me, but very few programs have jumped on the GNOME2 HIG boat.
- touching everything
wash your hands
- mozilla as a gnome toy
hello!? can we say 'Epiphany' ?
summary: pointless rant by another moron who doesn't like what he's been crap-fed for years, yet doesn't want to move on and use something even remotely different.
another note, this should never have made it through to
Mod me down, i had to say it, there's nothing but troll-chalking on this story
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
Everyone keeps pointing to articles by the all and wonderful Havoc. He is a fucking asshole. Did any of you ever post a bug against GTK and have to deal with Havoc. He talks down to everybody and will not listen to reasons about why something is wrong. I think he is one of the main reasons GTK/GNOME will fail in the end. Just read some of his responses to Bugs on the GTK bugzilla. He is very arrogant and a drain on the GTK/GNOME movement.
Ah, so you bitch about the interface being dumbed down and inaccessible to experts, yet you're unwilling to learn the incantations that essential define "expert" from "average user"?
Looks like you're not an expert, but an average user with different tastes.
Agreed, this dumbing-down of the interface is (as far as I am concerned) a fault, but not only in Gnome. KDE does it too. Trouble is, if they make the UI so simple that a total moron can use it, then only a total moron will want to.
Everyone seems to be waltzing around the dead moose in the middle of the ballroom, so I'll perform a faux pas and point directly at it: who do we imitate when Windows is no longer a monopoly?
Imagine that Microsoft loses its market dominance (it's easy if you try) and we end up with a consumer desktop OS market of 45% Windows and 45% OSX. Imagine a bit further and envision a world with three or four competing desktops. Who do we imitate then?
If your premise is that new users will not switch to GNOME/KDE/Whatever without "substantial re-learning", then you have to imitate something in order to succeed.
Wouldn't it be much better in the long run to innovate first? I would much rather have an innovative, fresh and original desktop then another milktoast clone of whatever the computer illiterati use.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"It seems to me 99% of the whiners about "power user" desktops don't even want to know how to use their desktops. Toggling every single one of the 3 bajillion options put in front of you does not make you an expert. Knowing your system makes you an expert."
That's because they're the MS version of a "power user" not the Unix one. The MS power-user knows all the options in any MS product. The Unix power-user either wouldn't be bothering with GNOME, or would at least have terminals everywere.
Quite frankly I hope those "elite" GNOME hackers ignore the majority of it. There's good reasons for doing so
That's the great thing about Linux. It can be all things to all people, morons included.
Cogito, ergo sig.
I sell Windows software. Microsoft is dying and I want to get out.
I will port my software to the Linux GUI when such a thing exists. Gnome isn't the Linux GUI, because there's KDE, KDE isn't the Linux GUI because there's Gnome.
As a user, I will move to Linux when there is such a thing as Linux software. Linux software is something that runs on the Linux GUI. But until there's such a thing as the Linux GUI...
Search for "OpenMotif" and "OpenCDE" the sources are out there and freely downloadable these days AFAIK, though I don't believe they qualify as "open source" according to the OSI-or-whatever defintion.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I beg of you to provide examples. In the end, aren't both ways just aspects of navigation? The organization underneath it isn't still based on a tree in both cases? Then how can spatial navigation improve organization? You could achieve the same improvement with classical navigation after you've reorganized your files. Did Gnome get the fabled search-based-filesystem to work too, along with spatial navigation? Because if they didn't there's no way you can claim the spatial navigation alone affected your file organization.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
For some reason, I thought the antialiasing was going to wait until E17 came out. I knew that E16 was still in development because every now and then, a newer version would appear in Debian's unstable repositories, but I haven't looked at any changelogs or news in a very long time, so I had no idea as to what aspects of it they were actually improving.
I like to compare all this pointless debating about which is better to my philosophy concerning the opposite sex, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You like something because you do, no one should force you to like something and you shouldn't force someone else, you have the choice here, choose what suits you.
Virtually every discussion involving KDE or gnome branches into the old argument about freedom of choice versus duplication of effort. However... I have yet to see anybody talk about this in terms of just how much extra effort is required. For example: IIRC, Mozilla was originally written using the GTK toolkit... right? The Trolltech people, with volunteer assistance, ported it to KDE as an example of what can be done with KDE, although it is unsupported (and presumably dead). So... Realistically speaking, how much duplication of effort is there? Does it take twice as developer effort to have gnome plus 200 applications *and* KDE plus 200 applications? Or would GPL code sharing allow the effort required to be 1.5X or 1.3X instead of 2.0X? Wouldn't the *amount* of duplication of effort be a valid consideration in this old argument?
... a top of the line PC IS going to cost you 3k, and it's still going to lag in the FSB. Even if a few other components are faster.
;-) Oh, and if I'm building a PC to last, it's gonna be SCSI. Wasn't an option on my G5, though I've no complaints about SATA. SCSI drives the cost up considerably (as well as the MTBF! :D)
:P
My workstation gives me:
Optical in and out, headphone jacks (front and back), three USB 2.0 jacks, two Firewire 400 jacks, one firewire 800 jack, gigabit ethernet, bluetooth capability, wireless capability, three PCI-X slots, and AGP. One standard 40-pin IDE bus and two SATA connections.
On. The. Motherboard.
Oh, and it's dual 64-bit.
How much does a dual 64-bit amd box with all that bling on the motherboard go for these days?
Hell, I could hit the three grand point on a PC box just by getting one with a decent workstation video card in it.
Admittedly, you can spank a G4 quite handily for ~1200$ these days, and maybe get most of the motherboard stuff.
You'll also get more internal expandability- drives, optical, etceteras. And you'll also be needing it.
I believe that people will need to have something familiar in order to make the switch. There are simply too many different things outside the windows desktop for the average computer illiterate to cope with at one time. Once a user has made the switch to GNOME/KDE/other-windows-clone they will slowly expand their view of the world and be more ready for enlightenment/fluxbox/other-specialized-wm. I think we need both the people who are immitating windows and the innovators. The enlightenment team is still at work and has made some really nice steps towards E17 which I believe will be as innovative as E16 was. Once the average user has made the switch to the windows-clone-ui he will be less scared by the prospect of E. But it is a whole new world and we should not expect the computer illiterate to accept all of it at once.
What are you talking about? KDE and QT has been under the GPL for years.