Stirring The GNOME Fires

uninet writes "Tim Butler and Ed Hurst have discussed GNOME quite a bit. Tim likes the current trend, and Ed doesn't. Read Ed's alternate perspective at OfB.biz."

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Re:Stir me up a candle

[Chess_the_cat]

The grandparent is right. It's STOKING the fires. You don't stir fires. You stir ashes and that's when the fire is already out. Source: Canadian Scout Handbook.

Re:Uhoh..

[edderly]

Over the past two years or so, Tim Butler and I have discussed GNOME quite a bit. He likes the current trend, and I don't. Tim's article, "Why GNOME's Got It Right" was partly stirred by the Slashdot article but also by our discussion.

I'm just an aspiring writer. Most of my stuff will never see the light of day, outside a small circle of friends. When I write for that tiny, narrow audience, I often take a good bit of license and engage in hyperbole, dramatic overstatement, and loads of sarcasm. I keep asking when the folks at W3C are going to include an attribute for sarcasm, because most people won't detect it unless they know the writer. My blog entry about the birth of GoneME was full of noise, and bit of substance thrown in for good measure.

By no means am I any kind of coder. I am just barely able to write a brain-dead simple webpage manually. I learned that much because it's the easiest format for storing my archive. I don't use a word processor much at all because I know how to print with HTML and a printer style sheet. Beyond that, I have no real interest in code. I write about computer technology as a side-line, simply because I write everything on my computer. When I discovered Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), I found the best writing tools ever. I'm also by nature a teacher, and I try to teach what I learn about Linux and Unix. Most of what I know about Open Source is what I experience directly or skim from a few technology news websites.

What I have to say about GNOME comes from having used it. Starting with "October GNOME" up through 2.6.1, I've at least tried it out on both Linux and FreeBSD. The new GNOME is not aimed at folks like me. I have little use for it. That's no different than saying pure CLI is not for me. I can get by in both, and have quite a bit at times, but neither of them is home. If you see in that something that marks me as inferior, I'd say that was your personal problem. FOSS is largely about freedom to choose, finding or making what meets your needs. If you can't code it yourself, you are left using what comes closest to what you would if you could. Most humans will make such choices in part from pure logic, but seldom by that alone.

It doesn't matter what I prefer instead, since every other desktop and window manager is competition, in a sense. The point of all this noise is GNOME, and it's virtues and failures as measured by its usefulness to each user. The last time I really liked GNOME was 1.4. Since that time, the project has taken a different path. Never mind whether that path was right; there's little chance it will change. The new GNOME is what it the project leaders make it, for whatever reason. How sad for me. At first I tried to make a bit of noise about it, but that got nowhere. People working on the project itself who dissented were told in various ways to forget it. I have no way of knowing how many went along and how many have bailed. That's the way it works when "free" as in liberty is a primary objective. That same freedom allows the project leaders to ignore my wishes.

Who can say where the watershed was, but somewhere along the way the complaints built up to the point someone decided to do something about it. He started with a patch to allow him some options he felt were missing from the project. His patch was rejected from the mainstream of the project, so he decided he would take his own path. Since he knew there were plenty of coders and users who felt as he did, he published his idea and got noticed. In a week's time, he was swamped with email. Enough of it was positive that he went ahead and established a new project. Enough coders joined right away that it was agreed to make a complete fork from GNOME.

Nobody on the Goneme Project is interfering with GNOME. The project page lists planned modifications to the GNOME base. That so many seem to take this list as a personal assault is beyond silly. How fragile is GNOME's place in the Linux/Unix world? Does it need rabid defense to prevent its evaporation? Persona

The articles.

[Anonymous Coward]

[Timothy]

"Why GNOME's Got it Right
By Timothy R. Butler
Editor-in-Chief, Open for Business
July 30, 2004, 02:17:00 EDT

Desktop Computing
Last week, some developers disagreeing with the direction of the GNOME Project decided to create what appears to be the beginning of a fork of the project -- GoneME. Like many from KDE Project and elsewhere in the community, GoneME's major complaints boil down to what has proven to be GNOME's most controversial move: simplifying the user interface. While naysayers, including the GoneME developers, seem to feel that the simplification of the interface, undertaken with the encouragement of such GNOME leaders as Havoc Pennington of Red Hat, is actually just "dumbing down" the interface, I think these critics are actually missing the point completely.

A Newbie in the Land of Penguins
Six years ago this month, I bought my first GNU/Linux distribution. I had become intrigued with Linux several months earlier when I had seen a feature in Byte magazine about a new desktop emerging called the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), and decided to figure out how to give this mysterious operating system a whirl. At the time, GNOME was not installed by default yet -- it was too early in development, I would find out -- and when I finally did get it installed, it turned out to be a very big disappointment. Yes, of course, it wasn't even at the alpha stage of development yet, but I did not realize that when I had gone out and purchased a copy of GNU/Linux. All I did realize was what I had read in the press: GNOME was a rising star that looked extremely promising. It was next to impossible to even get it started, a fact that, at least for a total newbie to GNU/Linux, was enough to make me feel discouraged not only about GNOME but also about the operating system. Let's face it: FVWM 95 never was and never will be a dream desktop, and that, along with the similarly undesirable Afterstep and FVWM 2 were the choices included with Red Hat Linux 5.1.

I had not figured out how to get a modem configured on GNU/Linux yet (these being the bad old days of manual configuration), so I rebooted into Windows and spent some serious time researching the options. I kept coming across a desktop named KDE, which had just reached version 1.0 and decided it was something I needed to try. I couldn't find any packages for it at the time, so I downloaded the source. KDE was much smaller then, but I was also running a lot slower computer, so it took what seemed like an eternity to compile. Not surprisingly, even simple compilation errors are daunting if you've only been using GNU/Linux for a few days, but after several weeks of head scratching and tinkering, I finally booted into KDE for the first time. It was pretty nice, perhaps it seemed doubly so after all of the hard work.

But it was not nice enough to get me to switch from Windows. And so it stayed for several years. Finally, a few months after KDE 2.0 came out, I started to become convinced that the GNU/Linux desktop could meet my desktop computing needs, and so I made the switch. Throughout all this time, I kept looking at GNOME, but it always seemed less than satisfying. It had so many options and programs; need I remind you that this was a desktop that did not even have a single window manager at first. Everything about it seemed rudimentary and unpolished from the standpoint of a Windows user or a KDE user. KDE remained my primary desktop.

Doubts Creep In
Despite my overall happiness with the project, nagging questions about KDE's planning started to occur to me as I observed it. Projects like Twister, which would have made Kontact -- the Outlook-like PIM that premiered in the last release -- a reality several years before it finally came out, were looked over while time was spent adding multiple address book backends, CVS clients, a growing collection of games and edutainment applets, an ever growing list of features in Konqueror and other interesting, although questionably n

part one.

[SoSueMe]

...never got to part two before OfB was C'd-f-B.

Why GNOME's Got it Right
By Timothy R. Butler
Editor-in-Chief, Open for Business
July 30, 2004, 02:17:00 EDT

Desktop Computing
Last week, some developers disagreeing with the direction of the GNOME Project decided to create what appears to be the beginning of a fork of the project -- GoneME. Like many from KDE Project and elsewhere in the community, GoneME's major complaints boil down to what has proven to be GNOME's most controversial move: simplifying the user interface. While naysayers, including the GoneME developers, seem to feel that the simplification of the interface, undertaken with the encouragement of such GNOME leaders as Havoc Pennington of Red Hat, is actually just "dumbing down" the interface, I think these critics are actually missing the point completely.

A Newbie in the Land of Penguins
Six years ago this month, I bought my first GNU/Linux distribution. I had become intrigued with Linux several months earlier when I had seen a feature in Byte magazine about a new desktop emerging called the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), and decided to figure out how to give this mysterious operating system a whirl. At the time, GNOME was not installed by default yet -- it was too early in development, I would find out -- and when I finally did get it installed, it turned out to be a very big disappointment. Yes, of course, it wasn't even at the alpha stage of development yet, but I did not realize that when I had gone out and purchased a copy of GNU/Linux. All I did realize was what I had read in the press: GNOME was a rising star that looked extremely promising. It was next to impossible to even get it started, a fact that, at least for a total newbie to GNU/Linux, was enough to make me feel discouraged not only about GNOME but also about the operating system. Let's face it: FVWM 95 never was and never will be a dream desktop, and that, along with the similarly undesirable Afterstep and FVWM 2 were the choices included with Red Hat Linux 5.1.

I had not figured out how to get a modem configured on GNU/Linux yet (these being the bad old days of manual configuration), so I rebooted into Windows and spent some serious time researching the options. I kept coming across a desktop named KDE, which had just reached version 1.0 and decided it was something I needed to try. I couldn't find any packages for it at the time, so I downloaded the source. KDE was much smaller then, but I was also running a lot slower computer, so it took what seemed like an eternity to compile. Not surprisingly, even simple compilation errors are daunting if you've only been using GNU/Linux for a few days, but after several weeks of head scratching and tinkering, I finally booted into KDE for the first time. It was pretty nice, perhaps it seemed doubly so after all of the hard work.

But it was not nice enough to get me to switch from Windows. And so it stayed for several years. Finally, a few months after KDE 2.0 came out, I started to become convinced that the GNU/Linux desktop could meet my desktop computing needs, and so I made the switch. Throughout all this time, I kept looking at GNOME, but it always seemed less than satisfying. It had so many options and programs; need I remind you that this was a desktop that did not even have a single window manager at first. Everything about it seemed rudimentary and unpolished from the standpoint of a Windows user or a KDE user. KDE remained my primary desktop.

Doubts Creep In
Despite my overall happiness with the project, nagging questions about KDE's planning started to occur to me as I observed it. Projects like Twister, which would have made Kontact -- the Outlook-like PIM that premiered in the last release -- a reality several years before it finally came out, were looked over while time was spent adding multiple address book backends, CVS clients, a growing collection of games and edutainment applets, an ever growing list of features in Konqueror and

Re:Gnome

[Deusy]

Ok, I'll bite...

"It's icons hardly achieve the brilliance that KDE's SVG icons have had for the past year."

My GNOME 2 desktop has had SVG icons for over a year. You're talking out of your preverbial arse with this one.

"And then there was the fiasco with the new Nautilus. Which they still haven't fixed, and probably won't for 2.8."

I wouldn't call it a fiasco. A controversial design choice, but not a fiasco. And it's not a bug, it's not something to be "fixed".

In fact, the single most issue that has caused almost all the debate is the lack of a simple way (read: not using the GConf editor) to default to browse mode. The browse mode has always been only 2 clicks away (right click and 'Browse Folder') but it appears the Nautilus developers are relenting and adding an option to default to browse mode.

"Gnome is about as relevant as XFCE and E in the Unix desktop wars of today."

Uh, yeah, ok Holmes. And Microsoft is about as relevent as Be Inc in the Desktop wars of today.

Re:"Average user"

[Sunspire]

Let's look at it a bit further. Right clicking on the clock and selecting "Time and Date Format" (not "Configure clock" which a newbie would likely select) gives you a nice dialog where I can select my country. What the fuck that has to do with "Time and Date Format", the context entry you select, is anybody's guess.

But we tab to the "Time and Dates" page and continue on, probably saving the programmer a few lines of code. No 24H setting here either, but there's a dropdown that allows you to choose between "HH:MM:SS" and "pH:MM:SS". "pH?, wtf" the user is thinking about now. A google search only turn up programming related matches. That's right, it's the fucking formatting string of the unix date function. According to the help the 'p' is "locale's upper case AM or PM indicator (blank in many locales)" modifier. But we can plug in 'N' for nanoseconds if we want, so it's ok!

The user doesn't know shit about any of this of course, so through trial and error we see that the first selection is indeed a 24hour format. But wait, there more! KDE needs to be shut down each time you change something related to the "Time and Date Format" functions, joy. It tells me this in a friendly pop-up dialog (incidentaly the title on the dialog doesn't fit the window).

Re:"Average user"

[dggonz]

Gnome never took out the option of running with a different Window Manager.

You just need a Window Manager that conforms to the WM spec publish at freedesktop.org.

Currently there are several window managers that implemente the spec: kwin (kde), metacity (gnome),
fvwm, openbox, enlightenment & icewm.

Yup...

[qtp]

Debian (Sarge)

Blackbox windowmanager

Lyx for creating formatted documents

OpenOffice for Microsoft Office compatible stuff

TkDesk as a filebrowser (I know it's old, but it works and it's what I like)

vi for text editing (programming, html, etc)

Xine for media (it runs OK on my 450MHz pIII)

Firefox

mutt (I've tried Thunderbird, nice app, but I still like mutt)

I've found that it's easy to avoid Gnome and KDE if your dist has a shitload of available apps, and Debian fills all the requirements quite nicely, I had a few problems with xine bitching about the slow processor, but that went away when I started using a preemptable kernel.

Maybe I'm a luddite when it comes to my desktop install, but I'll choose a clean appearance and simplicity over bells and whistles any day. I'm not sure that this ghost they call "intuitive" will ever be found, as I'm quite certain that you have to learn each app no matter how well designed the interface is. People migrating from other environments always seem to complain about non-intuitive interfaces whenever they encounter something that does not resemble what they've used before.