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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.
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?
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
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'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.
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
Could you provide an example of a UI problem that they've said "Well, that's how they do it in Windows"?
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
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?"
Ratpoison is the only window manager anyone needs.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
What is so wrong with Gnome?
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_.
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...
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
You just said "can you provide an example" and "windows" in the same sentence. That's a new concept here.
Steve Jobs did that on March 24, 2001.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
The point is that KDE and the early GNOME both offered more configurability without having to delve into things that resemble the Windows registry.
Here is the difference in our philosophies:
Current GNOME advocates:
- Configurability means learning curve
- Learning curve = bad
- Remove configurability, users be damned
This simply refuses to serve those who are not in your majority (and I should note that I don't at all buy that this homogenous "majority" of users exists; to be confused by too many options is one thing, but to suggest that all users therefore want the *same* desktop is a huge logical disconnect).
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
What GNOME advocates of your ilk are saying is "if you don't like it, don't use it, even though we once provided what you like and it would be simple and unobtrusive to add it back." Now someone else tries to add it back, and GNOME advocates are freaking out.
With that attitude, the GNOME community shouldn't complain when all of the people you've told to get lost (including app developers and the sorts of Linux users who go to *help out* at installfests) abandon you in droves. It is, after all, what you wanted. We're the users you didn't want to serve.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
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.
*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)
(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.
--
make install -not war
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 :)
Now I'm two clicks removed from my pron. Not good.
He doesn't even know how to spell pr0n correctly!
The world changes. Are you going to change with it?
OF COURSE NOT, not if it doesn't change for the better. What are you, a sheep?
I am not complaining. I am agreeing. This story is about someone who doesn't like the direction that GNOME has been going. Within the context of this story, it is YOU and YOUR "ilk" who are "complaining."
This attempt to patch GNOME doesn't take anything away from people who like GNOME as it is... unless more people start to use it than vanilla GNOME and vanilla GNOME fizzles.
But then, by your very own logic, the majority will have won.
So what, exactly, are you complaining about?!
So many GNOME evangelicals claim that everyone else is trying to stifle them when in reality they are projecting; they want to eliminate choice, whether it's within vanilla GNOME or by attempting to talk other GNOME work (like this story) out of existence.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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
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
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
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.
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
you're right. the gnome devels need to stop aiming for the lowest common denominator. I've been on GARNOME and CVS builds for a loonnng time and am growing tired with how they are detracting features/abilities from their work. it's sad. metacity is screwed because of mr pennington's simplicity over features mantra. He takes this minimalism paradigm to a new level. so then you go and get a decent WM to replace it, and you find a ton of them have the standard "gotcha" type bugs with GNOME. wether it be standards compliance or what, it sucks, and i can believe that I'm not the only power user dealing with this BS. this is why GNOME suffers.
:D IIRC it once meant "Kool Desktop Environment".
dont make me switch to KDE.
riiiiiight.
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.
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
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!
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.
Then, what was the reason?
Because in most languages, people read from left to right, so the leftmost button is the first button seen. Yeah, after reading the eye may stop (or rest) at the right edge. But when the right button has been found, there's no need to read the other ones. If you wish to click yes, you don't have to know where the no button is.
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.
That's the way Sun wanted it.