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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.
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.
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.
if "linux" is going to compete with Windows, the first thing it needs to do is standardize on one GUI and stick with it. Instead we have linux+ext2+QT+KDE+redhat stuff vs linux+reiser+gtk+gnome+suse stuff vs 5 million other permutations vs Windows.
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home
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.
Press Ctrl+L in the new file selector. Then you have a nice completion-line. Works in Spacial Nautilus, too.
:P
There is an expert mode. You just have to be an expert to use it
My other car is first.
Reverting the button order just because inferior systems do it differently is a very bad idea.
Well, they are percieved errors. The GNOME developers had a good reason for puting the primary button on the right, and don't see it as an error, thus it is perceived by Ali Akcaagac.
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
I wouldn't say never. There are a heck of a lot more people working on Gnome and KDE than there are working on any commercial GUI interface. It might take a little longer. It's definitely not a task I'd look forward to with Aqua as the example of the near perfect GUI. I'd be more interested in seeing a UNIX desktop like Aqua. Windows really isn't going to grow much GUI-wise until they get rid of that horrendous START button tree/maze/jungle and come up with something more intelligent.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Why are we competing with Windows? Windows sucks. Look at Apple. They are interested in being the best, not in getting the biggest share of the market. Linux should be the same. We have this terrible confomist mentality that if 95% of the people don't believe as we do then there is something wrong with us. Linux is great and does not need to try to be Microsoft to get ahead.
Choice is a _good_ thing.
"how much better might things be if the GNOME and KDE teams were working together instead of separately?"
Possibly much worse.
Without users leaving Gnome to use KDE instead, there would be no incentive for Gnome to fix any of their problems, or re-think any of their usability issues.
Without users leaving KDE to use Gnome instead, there would be no incentive for KDE to tidy up their user interface, or re-think any of their usability issues.
You said you had issues with Gnome's usability. Imagine how much worse it would be without a choice, or without PROOF that things can be done better. How would you ever get some of Gnome's "we-know-best" developers to acknowledge any of Gnome's weaknesses then ?
That's not to say every Gnome developer has a "we-know-best" attitude. But some seem determined to re-invent the wheel - and make it square this time (because some newbies just can't get used to wheels that insist on rolling around all over the place).
I give him 2 months before the project dies. I think he is just a user ranting, and I saw nothing to convince me that anything useful will be done.
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.
How anyone figures open source is a curse due forking is only a result of failure to realise the mainstream proprietary systems have a ten year head start over open source.
And even when that gap shrinks due ten years becomming a smaller and smaller percentage over time, there is still the matter of proprietary taking from open source such ideas that it then focuses on to polish for sales.... where open source is a much larger force that does NOT deny possibilities...
About forking..... well guess what.... the good things that various forks expose can then later be reintegrated to come up with something even better than what proprietary would have been able to on its own..
Forking is just one part of a bigger picture... the other part is re-integration of good things...
Ali Akcaagac is well known for long rants and flames, but not much for contributions. Although it must be noted that he can develop and has contributed to GNOME. However, because he is very unhappy that GNOME does not go in the way he wants, he has unsubscribed from all GNOME mailing lists and now publishes long rants about how everything is wrong, and announces a fork. The "mission statement" itself is offensive, as most of his posts on mailing lists. Talk about community.
Just ignore them, save your time and mood.
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
Here's what I posted a while back about this in my livejournal:
So why is there absolutely no indication whatsoever that this is available ?
All it would take is a short text label, or a mouse-over tooltip.
Seems like a strange concept of "usability" to me.
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
Sure, computers are tools. But I think that statement isn't really that revealing.
My desktop is not a fucking hammer. It's not simple. The things I do with it are not simple. I stare at it for 8 hours a day at work, and several more hours after I get home. I do a million disparate, discrete things with it.
So a better analogy for it would be my ENVIRONMENT. Much like my house and my room within my house, is an environment. Now, if someone were to come in and tell me that "yeah, your room should be a cube, because it's 'simple'. And oh yeah, you can't put a fan _there_, it doesn't make sense. And you have to put your CDs _there_, because that's the most aesthetically pleasing, and your monitor goes _here_ and your desk goes _here_", I would tell them to fuck off.
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.
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.
-Laxitive
Doesn't come with automatic instalation of "free apps".
Seriously, the only advantages over Mozilla that Internet Explorer has, out of the box, are Java and Flash plugins included - but that doesn't count, as they're both outdated.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Choice is something that the experience user wants.
This is precisely why Linux on Desktop sucks.
Look at Apple as a good example. What is Apple? - It is just cover company for ideas of Jobs. Why is Mac consistent? Because there is Steven Jobs - and there is no choice. People at Apple do not waste their time arguing on mailing lists about better desktop. Jobs has vision - and he drives company according to this vision.
KDE? KDE is made of people who enjoy desktop. Probably they are not greatest GUI programmers - but they like what they do. They are enthusiasts of what they do. Not consistent, Not polished - but with load of features. Great utility from people who have enjoyed doing KDE.
GNOME? GNOME is made up from pollitically correct corporate sponsored full time developers (RedHat, Sun, FSF). They are more to politics and to deliver on corporate business plan, than to listen to their users. It was absolutely funny how Havoc Pennington (of RedHat brainwashing fame) was arguing on list against end-users that he has statistics from end-users at hand, and every-one on the list is wrong, because some has given him statistics and - well - he doesn't care, he has a road map ha has to adhere since RedHat is planning release of next RedHat, etc, etc, etc.
IOW, Democracy - like one found in GNOME - is no substitute to leadership (Apple, Enlightenment). Republican structure of KDE performs here better too.
Linux will not get good Desktop until someone will step forward as a leader. And I see more chances for this to happend in KDE, rather than in GNOME project. Only if someone really disgusted will decide to fork off GNOME, what is IMHO not worth doing.
P.S. Best Linux desktop to date is Enlightenment (E). It is shiny and brilliant. It is finished, polished and complete. Why? Because guy who did it - Rasterman - really cares. And he is driving his project forward. Not fast, but GNOME as was two years behind of E - it is now the same two years behind of E in usability & eye candy.
P.P.S. Forking off GNOME. Well it might be not the worst idea. After all even XFree86 was sucessfully forked, pushing development of both - X.Org & XFree86 - ahead on new wave of competition. If someone will fork GNOME, providing good desktop - it might attract some independent developers working on GNOME, potentially making viable alternative to old fans of good old GNOME.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz