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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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It would seem more and more OSes and DM are going to path of "please the unsavvy users FIRST!", and thus simplifying things down to a horrid level. This not only upsets those who have followed Gnome since damn near day one, but it complicated backwards compatability when us vets have resort to the command line yet again, because a crucial tool within Gnome was 'simplified' and the power of it removed.
Don't get me wrong, command line is amazing. But I'm in Gnome for a reason. Here's my idea:
Gnome needs to focus on developing a more intuitive interface that allows for seamless use between gtk2 applications and the Gnome desktop enviroment, while remaining elegant. Follow the slackware principle, basically. Don't include and modify to the point in which it's no longer the origonal intended product, and let people (such as redhat, slackware, debian, etc) modify gnome to their own extent.
Maybe Redhat will want to customize gnome from it's origonal state to make it more user friendly, while slackware wants to keep it the stock power/elegant/simple gnome. The point is that we should give the people a choice, rather than preassume that all vets have suddenly dropped ten years in experience and now need to rely on the bloat that if we wanted, we could find in Redhat.
Maybe I'm ranting, in fact I know I am. But there is a difference between making a DM work well with the OS, versus making the DM ideals forced upon only a certain area of people (linux novices).
Feel free to expand, I'm done.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
Um, am I missing the point, or does the last author completely forget KDE and others ? You already have the freedom, silly.
Maybe people want -more- freedom?
They may have liked where gnome was, and want to bring it back to that point (but as a project, because you have to move forward.)
I liked the way gnome 1.x worked better, even if it was more ugly over all. Although, I don't use gnome anyway, instead I use fluxbox, so whee, I got my freedom. :)
From the article: Everything about it seemed rudimentary and unpolished from the standpoint of a Windows user or a KDE user
This was 6 years ago and - to me - little has changed. I've used GNOME, and it is usable, but its far from polished, and this is its big failing. I'm a KDE user (for the most part, but also a fan of fluxbox) and I find the eye-candy a joy. I know eye-candy isn't a necessary requirement for any UI, but it helps. If its easy on the eye, its easier to understand whats going on and to get things done. Having said that, KDE has way more bugs/quirks than GNOME but its still easier to use.
Its not a troll. Its an opinion.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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 GNOME folks do have some distance to go as well. Desktop integration is still not quite there - some apps play ball, some apps don't. What GNOME does have in its corner is the apps that have the mindshare of most users - Mozilla, Evolution, GAIM, OpenOffice etc. I am not claiming these are "better", just commenting on momentum.
Whats next for both is something new. Both environments pretty much do offer a decent enough environment that you can point Aunt Millie at it. Both need to start innovating with new ideas.
I am all in favor of making Gnome newbie friendly - so long as it does not exclude us non-newbies.
Consider cars as an analogy:
First of all, there are many different models of car - this would be analogous to Gnome/Enlightenment/KDE/Windows/MacOS/*. Few sensible people would assert that we should all be driving Geo Metros or all be driving Grand Marquis or Peterbuilt trucks.
But even within a make of cars, there are degrees of complexity. Most people driving an automatic transmission vehicle use P, R, and D. Those other settings (N, 2, 1) are just needless complexity, right - shouldn't we just remove them? Nobody uses them, right? Now, go for a drive in the mountains. Sure, many people only use D - you can tell them by smelling for burned-up brake pads. Better drives use 2 and 1, and not their brakes - they NEED 2 and 1. And people towing a car need N.
My car has buttons for moving the pedals forward and back. The first thing I did when I took delivery was to run the pedals all the way down, being 193cm tall. Does that mean that NOBODY needs to adjust the pedals up, so we should remove that switch? Or what about the traction control off switch?
My point is that while Granny Fanny may never use those features, some of us will - SO LEAVE THEM IN YOU BASTARDS!
Put an "Expert mode" in. Default it to OFF. Let me turn it on. Let me configure whether I feel spatial navigation is right for me or not. Let ME determine what programs play MP3s if I choose to do so.
And don't treat novice users like read-only dummies - let them know there is more power available to them, should they be interested in learning about it.
There is a GREAT difference between "ignorant" (unlearned) and "stupid" (unable to learn) - and many newbies are the former, not the latter. Don't treat them (and us) as stupid.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The current trend is good, but I would really like to see some oddities gone.
The common dislikes include comparison of 'spatial' Nautilus and 'gconf'/gconf Editor to things that bear a resemblance to it on Windows, which were hideous. However, it is not so, and the GNOME team deserves credit for providing better and good stuff.
I would like to see GNOME's current setup as default, but certain oddities would definitely drive me away. Except for a well organized and very simple home directory with relatively few files, 'spatial' can be quite limiting and makes doing thing very hard.
There should be an option to show a handy location bar (pattern matching and auto completion, for instance) that can be set in the options, at least in the 'Advanced' section.
There must be an feature similar to the 'Explore' context menu item in Windows, since, there are a lot of times a hierarchical view where new windows dont pop up for each opened directory be good.
The file dialog should have a location bar, again a handy one, not just a dumb text box. Again, since GNOME/GTK folks think people are too stupid and get confused, it could be an option, at least in the advanced section. The current file dialog is click intensive and brings up one more dialog to enter our own path.
These features are either not available, or available only through keyboard shortcuts. Having spatial mode which is limiting and a neglected 'browser' mode is not good. Why have two modes in which the system works. The 'browser' mode can be a temporary thing (as in the context menu action of 'Explore').
This, I believe is more inclusive in taking care of wide range of needs without resorting to 'modes' or excessive clutter in which the fork-plan seems to be heading.
Pardon my ignorance.
Thank you Tim, just what we needed.
And an other article that completely misses the point.
Contrary what Tim and countless others want us to believe 99% of the people criticizing gnome don't critisize the simplyfication of the interface but other things, like the gconf-editor, the imho stupid decission to change the button order, introducing spatial nautilus without giving users the chance to easily revert back to managing their files the way they are used to...
So yet an other article not addressing these points but instead attacking some phantom menace simply is a shame to gnome.
And of course it goes without saying that writing an article that goes out to praise gnome and ends up trashing kde with bogus, uninformed arguments and fud doesn't really speak for the maturity of the author.
All in all gnome is a great project though it has it's shortcomings like any project of this size. The problem is that right now you can't criticize anything about gnome without a load of gnomefanboys and sadly some devs to attacking you like this was a holy war.
I installed Fedora Core 2 and used it for a few days, and I must say I don't understand those who think Spatial Nautilus is a boon to new users. The fact of the matter is, the vast majority of 'new' users are previous windows users, so emulating the Windows UI, even if you think it's flawed, is the only sensible way to ease the transition into Linux. I mean, how many people who are currently using Linux or are potential future users have never used Windows before?
Besides, I thought one of the selling points of Mozilla/Firefox was tabbed browsing, so I don't have 8 or 9 different windows open on my desktop. Now suddenly having 8 or 9 Nautilus windows open is newbie-friendly? Because the same obscure 5th level subdirectory (one of tens or hundreds of directories a user would browse) opens in the same spot consistently, that makes it friendly? I don't get it.
[Yes, I know this 'feature' can be switched off, same as the new XUL spoofing 'feature' in Firefox can be switched off, but it's about the defaults, right?]
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
So, basically, some people think that GNOME is going about things the wrong way, and are in the process of forking the project. Every time this happens, people have to be reminded that forking a project is usually productive in the long term. Take XFree86, for example. Months ago, the X.org fork was created in response to a collection of issues (the closed development model, and the licence changes, to name a couple). The object was to create a more dynamic (excuse my buzzword) project, quickly incorporating improvements to the codebase supplied by anyone. Fast-forward to today, and their fork is becoming the de facto standard, with XFree86 proper on the verge of disappearance; Darwin in action. I'm not an EMACS user, but I understand that the Lucid fork concentrates on new features, while the GNU version adopts a more considered approach. In that case, both versions have found their own niche.
In all likelihood, these disagreements and discussions about the future of GNOME will lead to one or more better desktop environments. Isn't that a good thing?
If we make the system so it has a easily modifiable interface, then the semi-technical users, instead of bitching about it their problems, can change it how they think it should be. Once they have something they think is good, they send their moddified interface back to the developer, who includes a library of interfaces, with the one that is currently felt to be the best "newbie interface" set as default. This gives us tons of interface developers, rather then the few on the gnome project.
This is the whole open source idea over again. By allowing semi-techincal users to modify it, and use their moddifications, the world can recieve multiple interfaces, and people can choose the best one. presumably the developer would pick the easiest to use as the default for his applicaition, but if not people would change that when adding it as a package to thier distribution.
So by the time the "beta testing" is done, we have a prety good chance that a decent interface is on any paticular application. Even if the developers HCI skills suck. In fact probably multiple decent interfaces would exist for the multiple levels of sophistication in the user base of the app.
(much of this came from a post from last time, that hardly got read. (hopefully some people will see it this time. and maybe i'll build up karma :)
My experience has been pretty much like the author's. I initially used KDE from it's inception, and found Gnome to be a cluttered mess. About a year ago, though, I gave it another try, and found it had improved a good deal, and I've been using it ever since.
Personaly, I've come to appreciate simple. Maybe it's just a function of old age and crankiness, but I really don't take much of an interest in tweaking my desktop to death any more. Pretty much my only interest in a desktop is an orderly way to click an icon and start an application, a decent implementation of cut and paste and drag and drop, and reasonable window management. Gnome has my needs pretty well covered.
Also, I have to agree with the author's point that while Gnome has become a more coherent desktop, KDE seems to have lost it's coherency. I can't exactly put my finger on it, perhaps it's partly a function of being overwhelmed with options, but I don't think that entirely explains it. Somehow, it lacks the feel of "togetherness" it originally had. It's basic infrastructure is still great, though, and I expect this is just a temporary slump. Both the KDE and Gnome projects seem to go through phases where they lose their focus, but usually correct themselves after getting complaints from their user communities. I'm still looking forward to checking out the next iteration of KDE. Perhaps it will be interesting enough to make me switch back. I suppose I'll continue switching between the two of them as they leapfrog each other. One nice thing about having 2 competing desktops - they keep each other honest.
The enormous amount of buzz about Gnome (and alternatively, about KDE) most often ignores the idea that perhaps there is no one way to serve all users with a single desktop (window manager, application suite, etc) and there is an inherent (although subtle) hostility directed towards other means of acheivin g the same end.
The "desktop wars" occur in an isolated (but large) community of people who somehow have come to beleive that "there is only one way to do it" and have taken as their model of excelence the very designs that many Linux (and BSD) desktop users came to OSS operating systems in order to escape (Microsoft and Macintosh).
I use no Gnome (or KDE) software on my computer, have no Gnome (or KDE) libraries installed, and am capable of the same level of productivity as those who do. I've been unimpressed with these highly integrated desktop environments, not because I beleuive them to be somehow "bad", but because I have found that they are quite limiting.
Gnome is a noble effort (as is KDE) to enforce consistancy onto a bunch of unruly OSS users, a beacon of conformity rising from what appears to be (but is not) chaos. But the truth is that all of the Gnome (and KDE) apps are needlessly complicated under the hood, use far too many resources when running, and have rediculous dependancies (why does a spreadsheet depend on a sound library) that clutter an install and are decidely lacking in Unix-like design philosophy.
That is to say that these desktop environments are lacking those qualities that make using Linux such a dream: elegance, interoperability with other programs and environments, clean non-interactive interfaces, human-readable config files, modularity, granularity, and choice.
I'm all for people continuing their work on Gnome, its fork and it's competitor, KDE. But when Gnome begins to demand conformity from reklated projects, or seeks to embrace other apps, in such a way that it makes those apps suck (Galeon was once one of, if not the best, browser available), it is indicative of a problem that can only be solved by a rewrite (ala Firefox from Mozilla), and I don't see that as possible within the enormously interdependant and complicated collection og Gnome libraries.
Read, L
"He doesn't ONCE mention what his "problems" with gnome are, besides the fact that apparently the devs are "arrogant twits."
Is that not enough of a problem for you?
As to technical problems with GNOME, I think the writer mentions that he filed several bug reports in GNOME's bugzilla. These bugs were never fixed. There would seem to be little point in re-hashing what he wrote in bugzilla, when the problem is of users' opinions being belittled (to quote your comment, for example: "Ugh, this dude comes off as being an Iiiiddeeeeottt.") and that the problem of a hostile environment for those trying to help needs to be fixed before discussions about technical issues become relevant again.
In short, I think he's probably standing on the right side of the fork. Isn't that what open-source people are supposed to do when discussions stop being technical and start being shouting matches? You try out your way of working, and see if it attracts more users than the other way of working. "other" in this sense, consisting of insulting anyone who disagrees with you.
I think the push Gnome made for user friendliness is fabulous, and like the first article author I switched to Gnome a few months ago.
:-(
... but even I think spatial nautilus is stoopid.
Sadly, it seems like a lot of geeks have deserted Linux for the Mac. This leaves only hard-core config crazies on Linux... hence not only the attacks on Gnome, but also the popularity of distros like Gentoo. Gentoo, to me, is a sign of failure. It has a source-based distribution - ie the whole software installation process is predicated on something that Granny cannot do. Gentoo's growth could be a sign that Linux is going to remain in the ghetto of tinkerers and enthusiasts.
Dave
PS
I never used ${APPLICATION}, but I thought I would ${ACTION} it after reading about it on ${NEWS_SITE}. The very first impression was that ${COMPONENT} was taking way too ${SPEED} to ${ACTION}, and I don't know why the ${THEOLOGICAL_CONCEPT} they made the ${COMPONENT} use the ${UI_CONCEPT}, unless they were all ${ALTITUDE} on ${ILLICIT_SUBSTANCE}.
I gave up after ${INT} ${UNIT_OF_TIME} of trying to make ${COMPONENT} work -- the ${UI_CONCEPT} is cludgy, the ${LAYOUT_CONCEPT} seems to have been written by a ${INT}-year-old, ${COMPONENT} is downright ${DEROGATORY_ADJECTIVE}, and such an essential feature as ${FEATURE} is not even present.
The reason why ${APPLICATION} functions so ${DEROGATORY_ADJECTIVE} is ${LACK_OF_DOUBT} related to the fact that it was written in ${LANGUAGE}. ${SOFTWARE_CATEGORY} should not be written in ${LANGUAGE}, as every programmer with even ${INT} years of experience knows -- ${LANGUAGE} should only be used for ${ANOTHER_AREA_OF_PROGRAMMING}, and not in ${THIS_AREA_OF_PROGRAMMING}. ${COMPETING_APPLICATION} is the ${PRAISING_ADJECTIVE} example of that -- it was written in ${ANOTHER_LANGUAGE}, which is precisely suited for this ${SOFTWARE_CATEGORY}.
After suffering for ${INT} ${UNIT_OF_TIME}, I switched back to using the ${COMPETING_APPLICATION}, which I would suggest to anyone who needs to ${ACTION} and actually have it done.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
The "new" Gnome IMHO is the first GNU/Linux desktop with a sensible default configuration and a simple, elegant and pleasant user interface. IMHO, it's the most pleasant, straightforward and stress-free desktop user interface available today; better than Windows, better than MacOS X, almost as good as the classic MacOS 7.x-9.x from which it has learned a lot. (Most longtime Mac users hate OS X for its flashy, unintuitive and inconsistent Aqua user interface, and rightly so in my opinion.) I also like that Nautilus was freed from the sidebar and toolbar bloat of today's file managers and defaults to spatial view.
On the other hand, I agree with the complaints about dumbed-down configurability and the horrors of gconf. I prefer KDE 3.x in that it allows to customize almost any aspect of the GUI directly through GUI dialogues and not arcane registry-like settings. The solution would be a desktop that is simple by default, but would have an "advanced settings" button in every configuration dialogue which then in turn would pop up a more complex configuration panel. There could be just one central control panel switch to globally turn the "advanced settings" buttons on or off in all dialogue boxes. (And it could be set to "off" for the default vanilla desktop setting.)
There could be two ways to approach this:
My real annoyance with Gnome is the discrepancy between its lean surface and its crufty and bloated code under the hood. I find it quite shocking to run memstat and see how many megabytes of RAM are eaten up by Gnome's components, with trivial panel applets that shouldn't consume more than a few kilobytes eating several megabytes, or the x86 executable of such a simplistic window manager as metacity taking up half a megabyte whereas desktop environments like XFCE show that the same can be done with a fraction of the resource usage. While KDE has a lot of code, too, its abstraction layers - like kioslaves, vfs, kparts - are actually used by K applications. In Gnome, comparable subsystems exist only in a half-broken state of competing, incompatible APIs (imlib2 vs. gdk-pixbuf, Corba vs. Bonobo vs. Mono, gnome-canvas vs. GtkGLArea etc.) that are not even consistently used at all in so-called Gnome applications.
The truth probably is that all these either KDE/Qt or Gnome/GTK specific layers/APIs/subsystems will be eventually replaced by common freedesktop.org standards and partly also improvements of the X.org X11 implementation through the work of Keith Packard and others. It would be a worthy goal for a Gnome 3.0 to eliminate all cruft in its code, standardize on one API for each subsystem, kick out broken layers and APIs to replace them with freedesktop.org's solutions (d-bus, mimedb), or, where technically feasible, KDE's proven solutions (kioslaves).
While choice and competing designs and implementations are generally good, some fundamental standardization of the GNU/Linux desktop is is necessary to allow the whole operating system to be configured and administrated over the desktop. Developers of system components such as bootloaders, MTAs, packet managers etc. need desktop standardization so that they can write GUI control panels which work on all desktops. Without that, GNU/Linux desktops remain relatively abstract, high-level shells, and free operating systems can only be run by people who either are commandline professionals themselves, or have knowledgable system administrators to help them out.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70