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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.
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.
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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.
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.
Of course, most of the people in the IRC channel are core GNOME hackers who think this is really quite funny.
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.
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.
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...
Less rantish, and I agree with everything he says here.
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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:
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
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.
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make install -not war
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
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
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.