Feature Preview of Gnome 2.8

Leonardo writes "The GNOME foundation should release the new version of this desktop environment on the 15th of September. While we waiting for version 2.8, Foot Notes has a link that explains what's new in this release. Improvements include both core parts (like VFS and Nautilus) and UI modules, like a new applet manager, an improved gconf editor and a new theme. In addition there are some proposed modules like new system tools and a new VNC server. Take a look at Davyd Madeley' site (mirror) if you want to view some sweet screenshots."

Comments

System Tools?

[Speare]

I haven't RTFA, but it seems to me that GNOME isn't the right project for system tools. It's nice when gui-oriented system configuration features are made available in a GNOME style, but does it make sense for GNOME itself to have system-specific features?

The GNOME project and all its core features should be independent of what OS is running underneath, relying on a minimum of required components like suitable graphics, sound, pointer and keyboard services.

Re:System Tools?

[zerblat]

The Gnome System Tools are separated in frontends and backends. The backends are system specific, but the frontends are supposed to basically be the same on all system. Also, this separation means that it would be possible to create a non-Gnome interface (although I don't think one exists).

Re:System Tools?

[The Kiloman]

It's great that you didn't RTFA, but you obviously haven't read anything about GST either.

As another poster mentioned, the frontends are all Gnome and C, will look the same on all platforms. The C frontend calls into a standard library of Perl functions to do the distro-specific backend bits, the whole idea being that regardless of whose distribution you're using, the config tool will look the exact same and do the same things.

Pontificating is wonderful and all, but when you haven't RTFA and have no clue what you're talking about, what's the point? Just karma whoring I guess...

Re:System Tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat (now the Fedora Project), has many excellent GUI system config tools for GTK2 (GNOME), and is still actively developing new ones, and updating the current tools. There is also the currently unstable GNOME System Tools project.

Re:System Tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd partially agree - (but please, do the reading). It's plausible that the "system tools" component could be optional, though it's a bad sign that they talk about specific linux distros.

I think it would be very nice if we could start seeing the DE's manage sensible system elements consistently rather than having a big mish-mash of distro-specific pieces.* Time/Date and networking, which they have listed, seem pretty useful. Printing and filesharing would be a boon as well. (Gnome CUPS manager is pretty flaky on my system, and SWAT will be too unintuitive in a context where most config is not being done through the browser).

If they are being smart, those tools will be looking forward to either some sort of system specific back-ends or just compiling to whatever 'nix they might be thrown at. The backend model would seem consistant with the existing harware abstration layer for the volume manager. Maybe the fact that they are calling them "system tools" instead of "linux system tools" is an indicator of things to come?

* I should say, a system-tools component for the DE should be worked on in close conjunction with the overall DE project, for consistancy and integratability. One hopes the DE won't become dependent upon a particlar sub-project.

Re:System Tools?

[GileadGreene]

I think that what the parent was getting at is that GNOME should be independent of Linux, not just independent of a given distribution. There are other OSes out there than Linux you know. Some of 'em even use GNOME.

Re:System Tools?

[The Kiloman]

Re-reading the post now that I've had some coffee, that may be so. However, I think I can still say the same thing - GST is designed to be OS-agnostic. (I think they even use that term in the documentation somewhere.)

However, it seems more likely that the parent poster thought that the existance of GST meant that GTK was suddenly mucking around in his OS internals. I don't think he's aware that Gnome is not GTK... which is an important distinction to make. I can see how he might be confused, since they tend to rev Gnome and GTK at the same time.

Re:System Tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, KNetWorkConf is using the network bits in them.

Re:System Tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, FreeBSD is also supported, support for others will come.

Re:System Tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Windows? I find it a little disconcerting that it's now 2004, and I still can't administer my Windows system using GNOME on X11 on Cygwin.

Really, if GNOME is to be ready for the desktop, I think they have to put more effort into making it work on the most popular desktop operating system.

Re:sso what?

[dcstimm]

umm, did you look at the screenshots, they look beautiful

Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they keep bolting more and more stuff on ? Isn't it big enough already ?

I really wish projects would deal with getting stuff actually working and working well (bug-free and fast) before they start adding even more functionality.

There must be a million and one OS projects out there... ...but how many of them are actually usable ? Mose (like Gnome - and I'm not just picking on Gnome here) are buggy, increasing bloated, slow and memory hungry. ...not that many. And yes, I don't doubt someone will come up with a couple of examples that ARE quite good, but they are the exceptions.

Gnome (like the linux Kernal and loads of other stuff) is getting way t0o bloated to be useful - instead of adding more stuff, they should be slimming it down to core functionaly and the other stuff should be seperate projects.

OK, rant over

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloat is when a system has features that you don't need or use. IMO Gnome has done a good job at keeping unrelated applications seperate so if you don't need certain functionality you can simply not install the appropriate package. Adding additional functionality so that the Desktop is even easier to use for users switching from Windows and afraid of the command line is a good thing.

Re:Oh no !

[Xpilot]

Why do they keep bolting more and more stuff on ? Isn't it big enough already ?

And some say Gnome doesn't have *enough* features. Man, you just can't win. Maybe it's just fashionable to bash Gnome.

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

It's open source -- you can fork it if you feel that strongly about it. If you're not putting any effort in, then just sitting there and carping isn't ging to help.

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot agree more. If only more projects would follow the path of Firefox.

It was the one thing I hated about using mozilla, it was bloated and slow(I don't know what it's like now... but firefox is just peachy), and did a lot of stuff I didn't need.

And I also get the distinct feeling that the linux desktop(As in big distro's) is developing new features way too fast to propertly debug and optimise them.

Ok, rant on rant over.

Re:Oh no !

[IamTheRealMike]

You realise that most of the changes in 2.8 are about fixing bugs and polishing, right?

The new MIME system is "fixing" the old one by totally replacing it, no other approach would work. The new system by the way is a lot easier to use for both users and developers, and is a freedesktop standard shared with KDE :)

The rest of the desktop is not receiving any major new features really, just lots of bugfixing too small to go in these sort of "what's new" pages and various cleanups. Actually Gnome seems to have slowed down in this release as a lot of the Red Hat and Novell hackers are tied up with non-Gnome work as they round out the rest of the Linux desktop (so, hardware integration, management tools, backwards compatibility work etc).

Re:Oh no !

[Mornelithe]

Perhaps you should use something like XFCE that aims to be a slimmed down desktop environment. Or Fluxbox that's just a slim window manager.

Gnome aims to be a fully featured desktop environment, with all the apps a user needs (more or less). If that's not what you want, then you probably shouldn't use Gnome (or you could refrain from installing all the applications).

And how is the Linux kernel too bloated? Would you rather they not support any new hardware drivers or something? Do you have specific examples?

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

Specific examples ?

The linux kernel has grown enourmously over the years.

Yes, you need to support new hardware and stuff but it's not sustainable to keep adding it into the core product. If you do, you end up with something like MS Office - how many gigabytes is Office now ?

As is often pointed out, our machines get faster and faster every day (3GHz+ is MASSIVELY fast !) and contain huge amounts of memory, but actually using them is no faster - as more and more stuff gets added in, it eats memory and processor time so we are no better off.

As someone once said to me, "why is it I can click "print" and it takes ages for it to do anything ?". He was referring to MS Word, but he could have been talking about any bit of desktop software... ...and he's right ! If you have a machine chugging away executing countless millions of instructions a second, WHY does it take so long to do anything ? I should be able to hit "print" and the printer should start wirring away immediately. I don't mean in 20-30 seconds time, I mean immediately !

It's rubbish !

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone once said to me, "why is it I can click "print" and it takes ages for it to do anything ?". He was referring to MS Word, but he could have been talking about any bit of desktop software... ...and he's right ! If you have a machine chugging away executing countless millions of instructions a second, WHY does it take so long to do anything ? I should be able to hit "print" and the printer should start wirring away immediately. I don't mean in 20-30 seconds time, I mean immediately !

Let me make sure I understand this correctly: Printing sucks with all desktop software (MS included), therefore the Linux kernel is bloated?

Re:Oh no !

[nuggetman]

Why in $diety's name is this modded insightful? Telling someone to fork the project themselves when they complain about something is equivalent to the "I'd like to see you do better!" defense when you say someone can't sing/act/dance/play an instrument/etc.

Not everyone is a programmer, and not everyone has the know how (or the time/desire to gain the knowhow) to work on GNOME/any other OSS project themselves.

The idea is the developers take input from those who CAN'T develop, but DO use the software, and make adjustments accordingly.

Re:Oh no !

[blixel]

The linux kernel has grown enourmously over the years.

Yes, you need to support new hardware and stuff but it's not sustainable to keep adding it into the core product. If you do, you end up with something like MS Office - how many gigabytes is Office now ?

There's a world of difference between hiding a 3D maze inside of Excel and the Linux kernel having *optional* support for hardware that you dont' own. The kernel source code may contain - what you unjustifiably call bloat - but that "bloat" isn't being used by your system at runtime if you don't have a need for that particular part of the kernel.

And it's not fair to call it bloat just because you don't have a particular piece of hardware. The Linux kernel would be completely useless if it only supported 1 network card and 1 motherboard chipset. Sure it would be tiny, but it would be useless to 99.99% of the population.

Re:Oh no !

[Mornelithe]

Yes, you need to support new hardware and stuff but it's not sustainable to keep adding it into the core product.

What do you base this on? Do you have any evidence?

You can choose to compile drivers into the kernel or as modules or not at all. Some people use the Linux kernel in embedded devices. It isn't necessary to compile most things into the kernel.

Third parties can also maintain drivers that are separate from the kernel and are loaded as modules. Do you think Windows shouldn't include drivers for hardware on its install CD?

He was referring to MS Word

Do you have any Linux examples?

Printing doesn't happen immediately because it's necessary to convert the data into a format the printer understands. Printers don't understand Word files or PDFs or whatever. They can't magically see what's on you screen and begin printing immediately.

Maybe back in the days of daisy wheel printers it was easy to generate stuff the printer would understand, but these days you need to produce postscript or something else. Unless you want to edit all your documents as postscript, it's going to take some processing beforehand.

But you know, personally I think the output of modern printers actually looks good. You can have good looking printouts, you can have speedy printouts, and you can edit in whatever document format you want, but you can only choose two of the above.

I know you were implying more generality, but I think you're wrong. Yes, you can't use brand new Gnome on old hardware. But that's because it's made to take advantage of new hardware. It does more stuff than old fast applications did.

If you want a speedy desktop, you can use XFCE or Fluxbox. Or you could use bugfixed versions of older apps/Gnome/KDE if they exist. Gnome isn't designed to be super speedy.

Re:Oh no !

[AstroDrabb]

How is this AC Insightful? You see, the thing with F/OSS is that you have a chioce. If you think Gnome is bloated, use an earlier version such as Gnome 1.4, or KDE, FluxBox, BlackBox, XFCE (pretty nice and fast too), etc, etc. You think the kernel is getting bloated? Um, go and download an older one, like 2.4, 2.2 or even 2.0. Hey, you can go out and grab an old distro like RH 7.x or 6.x or Debian unstable : ). Use what you want. Exactly how is GNU/Linux going to keep up with technology with out adding "bloat". How would the Linux kernel support new hardware without adding "bloat"?

If you have written your own non-bloated kernel, OS tool chain, and desktop, please submit them to the OSS community so we can all enjoy your excellent, non-bloated work.

Re:Oh no !

[ajs]

Why do they keep bolting more and more stuff on ? Isn't it big enough already ?

Simple answer: because it's important and no.

Complicated answer: because it's important and yes.

I like to say (permuting an old saying about open source) that open source succedes because it scratches a niche. The more niches, the more success.

"Gnome" is not a single application, it's a distribution of applications that meet a plethora of needs based on all of the niche audiences that use it.

You can say that having an IRC client is just bloat, but if Gnome didn't have that some people wouldn't be using it, and they'd be using a desktop system that was inclusive of their needs.

I really wish projects would deal with getting stuff actually working and working well (bug-free and fast) before they start adding even more functionality.

Actually, Gnome works pretty damned well circa late 2.6. It's been a long time coming. 2.4 was a big change (as the version numbering implied), and a lot of people had a lot of good and constructive feedback that shaped 2.6. 2.8 is clearly taking the next steps in becoming the desktop environment that we can all rely on, and I'm happy with that.

As for bugs... well, I guess it's a matter of perspective. From where I stand, 2.6 is not bug-free (nothing ever is), but it's moving substantially in that direction (kaizen if you will). As for fast... I run a suite of applications on my desktop at home that do things my poor little 300MHz Pentium 4 years ago could only dream of, so I'm a bad judge. I'm quite happy with the current suite of Gnome video and 3D tools in terms of their response and bandwidth, though. I don't really use a file manager much, so that I can't speak to. The Web tools are slick and fast. The high-level object drag-and-drop seems like it could be faster, so there's a place for improvement.

But seriously, do you think the addition of system configuration tools is going to slow down the desktop?

Gnome (like the linux Kernal and loads of other stuff) is getting way t0o bloated to be useful

Well, let's look at Gnome and the Linux kernel. Both are highly modular, allowing the user to strip away what he/she does not need.

Both have many, large components that provide functionality so powerful that most users DON'T go without, at the expense of resources.

Both address the needs of dozens of niche users (internationalization, accessibility for disabled users, strange hardware, etc).

So... I guess I have to ask... what exactly is the bloat that you're not happy with, and how willing are you to configure your system so that that's not a problem?

I've seen Gnome running on top of Linux on an iPaq, so I'm not really buying the "bloated" party line. I just think you're too lazy to configure it to your needs.

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome isn't designed to be super speedy.

Then why's it written in C?

Honestly, these days speed is the only reason to write in C - speed and low-level hardware access, which is irrelevant for Gnome (but is why the X server and kernel are likely to stay in C).

Oh, and portability to weird hardware, but I seriously doubt anyone's going to want to run a desktop environment on an embedded Z80 microcontroller.

For everything else, there's C++ for traditionalists, or a whole range of higher-level languages for modern thinkers - Perl and Python, Java and C#, the MLs and Lisps - which offer flexibility and safety, and in some cases (particularly that of the ML family) don't even sacrifice any noticable performance in interactive applications. All of these can run anywhere with a POSIX API and an X server, which means they're as portable as Gnome.

But Gnome ignores all these quicker, simpler, and safer options, and is mostly written in C. That tells me it's designed to be super speedy.

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Indeed, all open source projects, including GNOME, aim to create something usable. They are open source so that developers and users capable of the coding can make the changes needed. Normal users just use it, they can't make changes.

Saying that it's wrong to complain when you can get the source and make the changes is basically the equivalent of saying "spend a couple of years learning C so that you can spend couple of years coding it so that you can start using it". While at the same time Slashdotters are trying to get the Joe Average to use Linux.

Really, that's completely wrong attitude and it's far too widespread. As long as it's so common Linux (and other open source products) will not be able to spread. The aim is to produce a product that can be usable without any adjustments needed, it's not the job of the user to put the effort in developing it. Or should open source be for hackers alone?

Re:Oh no !

[0racle]

Will they also be fixing all the bugs they ignored from 2.0 to 2.6? I know fixing bugs isn't the most glorious work, but Gnome seems to just be ignoring them all.

Also, do I still have to kill the toolbar or log out when I make a change to a menu or have they got their thumb out and fixed that too?

Re:Oh no !

[xjimhb]

Actually, Gnome 1.2 is pretty nice. I dunno what that "Nautilus" thing is (I thought Nautilus was one of those torture machine they have at the gym), but GMC makes a VERY nice file manager. And most of the rest of the stuff is pretty friendly, and reasonably fast, too. Did upgrade from the Enlightenment WM to the Sawfish WM, that's OK too. A few things break now and then, but I got the RedHat 7.0 complete with source, so I guess I COULD fix them if I really wanted to.

If it isn't BADLY broken, don't fix it.

Re:Oh no !

[Mornelithe]

Then why's it written in C?

I don't have any definitive answer to that question. But there are reasons besides speed to write in C.

For example, it's easier to make language bindings for other languages from a C API. If you write GTK+ in OCaml, how easy is it to make Python and Ruby bindings? You'd need to use an OCaml -> C bridge and then use the Ruby -> C bridge to interface. Most languages have a C interoperability API, but the same can't necessarily be said of Lisp or ML. How easy is it to bridge between Perl and Python?

Or, maybe the people who wrote GTK just like C better. Personally, I like C better than C++, although I like Lisps and so on better.

Also, C is more widely known than ML and Lisp.

Also, perhaps GTK (which came about before Gnome, b the way) was once designed to be speedy. That doesn't mean that everything built with it needs to be speedy, or that it can't go off in another direction. Gnome was a lot more lightweight in the 1.x days, but it's changed. That doesn't mean it makes sense to rewrite all the libraries in a different language and make all old applications port to a new language.

I'm not saying that the Gnome people don't want to be as speedy as possible, but their primary objective is to build a comprehensive desktop. If you want lightweight stuff, go use lightweight stuff. Saying "Gnome uses C so it therefore is trying to be speedy" is not really logical.

Re:Oh no !

[starnix]

Um, enable famd and you won't have to kill the toolbar to make it refresh. They have had that working for many releases now. Don't blame the gnome hackers for something your distro left out.

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

You can say that having an IRC client is just bloat, but if Gnome didn't have that some people wouldn't be using it, and they'd be using a desktop system that was inclusive of their needs.

An IRC client is an application. GNOME is a desktop environment. Desktop environments should include basic administrative tools (e.g. a text editor, file manager, control panel, etc), but it shouldn't contain full-blown applications. Apart from anything else, it couples application development too tightly to the slow desktop environment development.

Re:Oh no !

[FooBarWidget]

"Also, do I still have to kill the toolbar or log out when I make a change to a menu"

Install FAM. It's used for file change notification.

Re:Oh no !

[bogado]

And this is exactly what it is now. X-chat is only an application, but it is usualy installed when you install gnome in distributions (in fedora/redhat at least)

Re:Oh no !

[b-baggins]

--- ...but it would be useless to 99.99% of the population.
---

Which is different from now in exactly what way?

Re:Oh no !

[Lumpy]

Most of the time the problems with Gnome are not gnome's fault but the distro that has to screw with it before shipping.

I use Gnome exclusively now, and afte rthe past few months of wading chest deep in Mandrake 10 teaching newbies and learning the new stuff I built a fresh "economy" machine and installed Slackware 10.

when I launched X and used Gnome I was blown away almost completely. It looked so much nicer, aced more correctly (I love the mycomputer/drives list in a window!! it makes everyone elses's bastardization of Gnome look silly.. I was so impressed and enamored with it that I decided to do a double blind comparason with my GF who is very new to linux.

She prefer's the slackware untouched Gnome to the Mandrake and Fedora's "customized" Gnome.

most of the time it's not Gnome's or KDE's fault. it's the guys rolling the distro that think they know better than the people making the app.

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Office 2003 comes on one CD.

Re:Oh no !

[Proc6]

Cool attitude. "You don't like it? Use something *older*". I'd trade that for developers that get from point A to point B, then stop and refine the journey over and over, tightening it up, always looking for faster, cleaner ways. Generally speaking the desire to "add shit" outweighs making existing content faster, trimmer, tighter, righter.

Re:Oh no !

[Proc6]

Yes, you need to support new hardware and stuff but it's not sustainable to keep adding it into the core product. If you do, you end up with something like MS Office - how many gigabytes is Office now ?

Man, Ill be the first to say Office is the work of Satan and should be extinguished from the face of the earth, but where do people get this when they say this all the time? I unfortunately *have to* install Office, and all I do is pick "custom", and check Excel, Word, Access and Powerpoint. All those take like 260 megs of hard-drive space.

260 megs, OMGZ!!!11!

gigs?

Re:Oh no !

[Mornelithe]

The 2.4 kernels (and possible 2.2, I'm not sure) still have new releases coming out.

How do you want to support new hardware and new features without adding to the kernel? Also, the kernel is modular, so you can choose to either not compile certain features at all, or to compile certain features as modules so that you don't use memory unless you need it.

And if you don't like how much stuff is in Gnome, you can choose not to compile some of it, or you can use one of the other 4 examples he gave that aren't old. KDE is generally regarded as faster, but there are other applications that slim down more. XFCE is a minimalist DE, and Fluxbox (and tons of others) are minimalist window managers.

The purpose of Gnome is to have a whole bunch of applications that integrate and work together to provide for most/all of a user's needs. If you don't want that, then, yes, use something else.

Re:Oh no !

[Slime-dogg]

The kernel source code may contain - what you unjustifiably call bloat - but that "bloat" isn't being used by your system at runtime if you don't have a need for that particular part of the kernel.

Hell, to take it one step further, if you compile your own kernel, those "bloat" features don't even get included in the kernel. That's why you see little things in the configuration "notes" that say things like "results in a smaller kernel..." and "choosing this will have no effect if you don't use it, but your kernel will be bigger."

It's not bloat if you have control over what gets included and what does not. I have gnome installed, sure. That doesn't mean that I have to have the gnome-games installed, or run it with Metacity, etc. I run gnome with enlightenment as the wm, sans nautilus, because I dislike using nautilus. An install progam for an 800 mb application package that has 4 installation options (full, not full, and minimal) is indicative of bloatware. I.e. I install Windows and automatically get a pinball game, notepad, IE, OE, 10,000 services, and a sleiu of other applications. And there aren't really any install options. (The argument against is the bits & peices windows installation that you can create through MSDN, but that's mostly for OEM's and huge companies).

Re:Oh no !

[FauxPasIII]

You ever notice that after a while "bloat" stops even sounding like a real word?

Re:Oh no !

[rainman_bc]

Yup, you're the first to say it. Drive space is really inconsequential. When a 100GB drive is standard on most new computers, and it's pretty hard to find anything with less than 40, I'd say 260MB is pretty trivial. There's plenty of stuff worth bitching about, but disk space isn't one of them.

Re:Oh no !

[golgotha007]

1996 just called.

they want their user back.

Re:Oh no !

[0racle]

I build Gnome myself so it doesn't run like molasses and the Gnome docs state you have to kill the toolbar or log out to enable changes, so yes I will blame Gnome for functionality that should be included.

However thanks for pointing me to famd.

Re:Oh no !

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why's it written in C?

Because at the time many of the core components were written, it was the only language that could be relied on to compile and run on different platforms maybe?

C++ is more standardised now, but even so you can't depend on a sizable C++ program to build with different versions of gcc, let alone on other compilers. My LFS desktop currently has a dozen or so packages patched for gcc 3.4 support, almost all of them for C++ compatiblity issues.

That, and because C provides a really good base for building on. I think it's reasonable to use it for the core components, as long as bindings for other languages are available and easy to use (which they are). To take a few examples, the Straw RSS reader is Python, the Muine music player is C#/Mono, and Inkscape is C++.

What *is* desirable is to see those bindings made a core part of the Gnome platform, so that apps written in other languages can become part of the official platform.

Re:Oh no !

[ericdfields]

In order to achieve the high-level of functionality coupled with ease of use that the Gnome project is striving for, it must - simply put - be bloated. Features like DBUS and HAL implementation via daemons, CD burning, etc create an immensely intricate desktop experience. Too many people forget that the Gnome project aims at being an extremely accessible desktop while catering to as many needs as possible in an unconfusing way.

It may seem 'bloated' compared to other DEs out there, but we compare the 'big boys' of the Linux DE world not to their peers, but to their foes: Windows and OS X. In this light, is Gnome really that 'bloated'?

Re:Oh no !

[ajs]

An IRC client is an application. GNOME is a desktop environment. Desktop environments should include basic administrative tools (e.g. a text editor, file manager, control panel, etc), but it shouldn't contain full-blown applications. Apart from anything else, it couples application development too tightly to the slow desktop environment development.

You have a point. A really good point. In fact, about 4 years ago the Gnome folks made some substantial changes based on that point. Check out the way Gnome is developed and packaged. A significant distinction is drawn between infrastructure and application, and the "slow desktop environment" that you refer to, often out-paces the application development, but that's fine because they're not tightly coupled.

HOWEVER, Gnome does need reference applications. These applications serve to provide a basic "distribution" if you will, but also they provide developers of equivalent applications with a starting point in terms of features and integration with the desktop.

If you're talking about libraries and infrastructure apps (e.g. nautilus and metacity), then I HAVE to disagree with you. Nautilus got much faster in 2.6, and the move to Metacity in 2.4 was AWAY from sawfish which was getting too feature-laiden and slow (though the Metacity folks have found out the hard way that much of the slow-down was because of features that users DEMANDED be put back, and while Metacity is still fast and light, it's not nearly as fast and light as it was).

It's a good idea

[ninjadroid]

It does make sense. Providing a uniform interface through which common configuration tasks can be performed is an excellent idea. If gnome can configure network devices, and you know how to use it's configurator, then you also know that wherever you go, if gnome is installed, you can setup the network. This is superior to having every individual distribution provide it's own custom interface, at least from the perspective of consistency (which is a valuable quality in UIs).

Even though different distros may have different internal solutions to configuration, I see no good reason why a consistent front end can't (or shouldn't) be provided. Furthermore, I'd rather have many hands working together to achieve the best interface once, rather than divering talent toward reinventing a boring wheel to mediocre effect.

Re:It's a good idea

[jimmy_dean]

Absolutely, I 100% agree with you.

Re:It's a good idea

[dcstimm]

Wow you hit the nail on the head with that, I have always thought that since I tried Mandrake out back in the redhat 6.2 days. I thought it was silly that every distro had its own UI for things like this. It just feels the more Gnome ages the more it becomes usefull, I remember back when WindowMaker was amazing, and I used netscape 4.6, opensource apps sure have come a long way, Now I use Gnome 2.7, Firefox, evolution, gimp 2.0, gaim, gqview, beep, abiword 2.0, xchat 2, mozilla, gnome-terminal, and Naut. I love how all my applications are compiled with gtk2 and they all share the same common look and feel. And with these applications I have become so productive with Linux its amazing..

Re:It's a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine how productive you'd be with a less bloated WM!

Re:It's a good idea

[dcstimm]

like windows or macosx? hahahahhahahahah I must say Macosx is alot more bloated than gnome. and Windows, well we wont go there. And I dont see any speed drops because I am using gnome vs WMaker. (but of course I have dual xeon 2.4ghz cpus with 2gbs of memory)

Re:It's a good idea

[bicho]

But is there a consistent backend?

Re:It's a good idea

[nuggetman]

Yeah well I have QUAD xenon 4.2ghz cpuis with 9gbs of memory!

my e-penis is bigger than your e-penis!

Re:It's a good idea

[adam mcmaster]

Even though different distros may have different internal solutions to configuration, I see no good reason why a consistent front end can't (or shouldn't) be provided.

That's very true. In fact, Webmin already achieves that for a lot of stuff - it can auto-detect which OS or distribution it's installed on. It should be very easy for the Gnome team to do the same.

Re:It's a good idea

[Robert The Coward]

Problem is witch windows, Windows 98 or Window XP. Windows 98 running fine on my P1 233 with MMX laptop and 64 Megs of Ram. I tried to install Fedora 1 and it took 10 Mins to boot. I have no doubt that windows XP would even boot on that machine but no one is designing Distros for that old of hardware and older distro are no longer supported so my laptop is stuck being windows 98 for now.

Re:It's a good idea

[dcstimm]

well, turn off all those services, and you will notice fedora will boot up alot faster than you think, remember fedora comes with over 2000 applications, while windows comes with maybe 100 intergrated apps. BIG DIFFERENCE

Re:It's a good idea

[black mariah]

"Turn off everything useful at startup, and it'll fire right up! What do you mean GUI?"

Re:It's a good idea

[Robert The Coward]

Trust Me I did. I turned off everything. I installed several other distro. Text Mode was fine but once I went to lanch X it would take several mins to load. The HD was slow and the memory went a swappen. Trust Me I use linux were every I can but unless I want to use the laptop as a text mode wordprocessor then I am stuck with windows. I haven't a distro that is designed with low end hardware in mind most are designed to take advange of the lastest and greatest.

Nice UI - better for Linvirgins?

[grunt107]

The inclusion of system tasks in the UI graphic selection seems to be a good way to allow the Linux newbies to more easily understand and control their non-Win computers. Once they get acclimated to the commands, they may venture into the faster cmd-line that 'experts' like to use.

This may even help faster corporate adoption, with the remote control software and other networking tools.

Re:Nice UI - better for Linvirgins?

[benjamindees]

If anything, putting system configuration abilities into the hands of end-users will *delay* corporate adoption rather than speed it.

Re:Nice UI - better for Linvirgins?

[Uerige]

If anything, putting system configuration abilities into the hands of end-users will *delay* corporate adoption rather than speed it.

D'uh. You still need the root password to edit system files. What's new is that there's a GUI to it.

Re:Nice UI - better for Linvirgins?

[steveha]

Once they get acclimated to the commands, they may venture into the faster cmd-line that 'experts' like to use.

If the GUI tools are done right, then many tasks can simply be done with the GUI and there would be no reason to go to the command line.

For example, if you want to shut down your Wi-Fi, you would probably be content to right-click on a widget on your desktop; going to the command line wouldn't be better.

steveha

Re:Nice UI - better for Linvirgins?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

With a good Graphical User Interface there should be very little reason to venture to the 'fast' Command Line Interface.
If anything a clear comfortable GUI will discourage you from wanting to edit inconsistant poorly documented config files using a text editor (unless that is what you are already more comfortable doing).

The Command Line is only faster if you have spent the time to learn the settings and even then it is only faster if the task is repetative.

For infrequent tasks the learning is not worth it but for frequent repetative task the command line, or more importantly some form of scripting interface is extremelly useful.

Re:Nice UI - better for Linvirgins?

[angulion]

I'm not sure if you can remove configuration tools totally from windows, but I know that all such, including "Settings" (or similar) folder entry in the menu can be removed in gnome.

A corporation will most likely make an own distribution (set of pakages), and if config-tools isn't desired, they will not be included.

Re:sso what?

[bustersnyvel]

Indeed, it looks very nice! There are a few reasons I use Gnome, and one is it's looks :)

Haha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the screenshots - they have a shortcut to Adequacy.org's most infamous article "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?"

Re:Haha!

[Yer Mom]

I like the one where the CD burning app appears to be about to write to a DVD-ROM...

No skip button for copy dialog

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a utility I used in my Mac back in 1995.

I still have hope for gnome.

[aussersterne]

But here's what would have to change for me to use it:

1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in .gnome or something

2. Resurrect the old GNOME control center

3. Give me a default window manager with the ability to select focus-follows-mouse mouse

4. Construct a usable menu editor somewhere so that I can customize my menus

5. Choose: either a) reincorporate gecko into Nautilus for Web browsing or b) go lightweight and jettison Nautilus for the old gmc

6. Create a base distribution of official GNOME applications from a lot of the GTK stuff out there, based on which authors agree to follow a rigidly follow a GNOME style guide and use the GNOME API rather than just GTK, so that there is more desktop consistency

7. Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)

8. Give me an "advanced mode" to turn on all kinds of extra GUI configuration bells and whistles like keybindings, autoraise, MIME types, etc.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[JanneM]

1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in .gnome or something

gconf _is_ a tree of text config files in .gconf .

2. Resurrect the old GNOME control center

What did it do differently than the preferences view in nautilus?

3. Give me a default window manager with the ability to select focus-follows-mouse mouse

Settings->Windows, choose "Focus follows Mouse".

4. Construct a usable menu editor somewhere so that I can customize my menus

Not sure what you feel is wrong with the current method?

8. Give me an "advanced mode" to turn on all kinds of extra GUI configuration bells and whistles like keybindings, autoraise, MIME types, etc.

keybindings - in the preferences already. autoraise windows - you find that in the same preference dialog as focus-follows-mouse above. MIME type editor - already exists, improved for 2.8. For other things, gconf-editor _is_ your advanced mode.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in .gnome or something

gconf _is_ a tree of text config files in .gconf .

XML files are NOT plain text files, pure and simple they are human decodeable nor readable. Plain ini files are superior to XML when used as configfiles.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, you want GNOME 1.x

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[LWATCDR]

"5. Choose: either a) reincorporate gecko into Nautilus for Web browsing or b) go lightweight and jettison Nautilus for the old gmc"

Or c) put more file management functions into Epiphany. I for one think haveing a tabed file manager would be just as usful as a tabed browser

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[v01d]

gconf _is_ a tree of text config files in .gconf .

gconfd-2 is also a broken database server. On my two systems using Gnome 2.6 (Solaris and RedHat), gconfd periodically goes rogue and eats all configuration. Gnome poorly implemented what was a bad idea in Windows.

Consequentially I use either WindowMaker, WinXP or OS X.

Not sure what you feel is wrong with the current method?

So is there a menu editor? I've never spotted one anywhere.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[BRSloth]

1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in .gnome or something

Guess what, gconf is a tree of plain text files! XML is plain to me.

2. Resurrect the old GNOME control center
I don't play too much time on control center to need it as a whole window opened on my screen. And, when I open it, I just want to change one thing, not the whole list of options.

3. Give me a default window manager with the ability to select focus-follows-mouse mouse

You can. Applications -> Desktop preferences -> Window.

4. Construct a usable menu editor somewhere so that I can customize my menus

Just right click inside a menu. A whole list of options to customize it will show up. Also, the new menu specification from FreeDesktop.org will make all applications add their own menu entry.

5. Choose: either a) reincorporate gecko into Nautilus for Web browsing or b) go lightweight and jettison Nautilus for the old gmc

Nautilus is a file browser, not a web browser. Mixing those two is just plain confusing. And current Nautilus is lightweight.

6. Create a base distribution of official GNOME applications from a lot of the GTK stuff out there, based on which authors agree to follow a rigidly follow a GNOME style guide and use the GNOME API rather than just GTK, so that there is more desktop consistency

The "base distribution of official GNOME applications" is the GNOME desktop itself. You can also count Fifth Toe as a distribution of unofficial GNOME applications, as some of them are there because a) they are not mature enough to desktop b) don't fit on a desktop release.

7. Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)

Well, I can see this as a personal opinion, since there is just one KDE style that I think isn't bloated and so full of bell and whistles that take away my atention, and it isn't even an official one.

8. Give me an "advanced mode" to turn on all kinds of extra GUI configuration bells and whistles like keybindings, autoraise, MIME types, etc.

gconf-editor.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[MrNemesis]

Cue lots of "me, too!"-ness and "new GNOME sucks!" luddite-ness.

I first started using Linux with MDK 8.2 Cooker, and decided I liked GNOME (1.4 IIRC) better, mainly due to the aceness of Sawfish, hands down the best WM I've ever used. It fixed so much of what I hated about the windows UI (although Nautilus was dog slow).

My next step was RH8 and then 9, with GNOME 2. Hated hated hated. ALl my beloved options seemed to have disappeared, and the WM had been replaced by some hideously oversimplified contraption callde Metacity. I understand that sawfish was unmaintained, but was it really neccesary to use such a brain damaged WM? The only improvements were a (much) faster nautilus and prettier widgets. Since then, I ditched GNOME as being too power-user-hostile.

Like a great many people here have already said, I'd love to be able to select an "advanced" GNOME with all my beloved setting and config tools - AFAICT, lots of the config options still exist (tear-off menus!), they're just hidden deeply in the mass of confusion that is gconf.

I think until GNOME lets the more confident/reckless users get out of the incessant hand-holding GNOME seems to foist upon me in it's last few iterations, Ishall steer well clear of it. It might just be I'm not their target audience, but I always thought that less choice was always a bad thing. The choice doesn't even need to be displayed to the average user, hence why so many people are clamouring for an "advanced" option.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Jodrell]

1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in .gnome or something

If you're a system administrator, gconf is a godsend. You can "lock down" certain preferences so your users can't break things or waste time playing with useless preferences. Another win from using GConf is that it's "process transparent." This means that if I change a setting from one application, it instantly updates in all other applications that are interested in that setting. This technology is vital for the snazzy "instant apply" UI of GNOME, and vital for writing applications made up of multiple out-of-process components.

3. Give me a default window manager with the ability to select focus-follows-mouse mouse

GNOME Menu -> Preferences -> Windows, then select the "Select windows when the mouse moves over them".

5. Choose: either a) reincorporate gecko into Nautilus for Web browsing or b) go lightweight and jettison Nautilus for the old gmc

Nautilus isn't a web browser, use Epiphany for that. Nautilus's performance has come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, particular between 2.4 and 2.6.

6. Create a base distribution of official GNOME applications from a lot of the GTK stuff out there, based on which authors agree to follow a rigidly follow a GNOME style guide and use the GNOME API rather than just GTK, so that there is more desktop consistency

More and more of the GNOME API is moving into Gtk+ - the icon theme implementation, for example, and the new UI Manager system. But GNOME can't coerce other developers into following their guidelines, they can only encourage them.

You may also find that things like the GNOME Fifth Toe has what you want.

7. Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)

Check out this project for a Gtk-Qt unifying theme.

8. Give me an "advanced mode" to turn on all kinds of extra GUI configuration bells and whistles like keybindings, autoraise, MIME types, etc.

gconf-editor and GNOME Hacks are your friend :)

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[IamTheRealMike]

GTK themes can have their colours changed as the BlueCurve sets in FC2 show, however their is no GUI for setting whatever colours you like. There could be, it's just that nobody wrote one yet. Why don't you do it?

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Jodrell]

8. Give me an "advanced mode" to turn on all kinds of extra GUI configuration bells and whistles like keybindings, autoraise, MIME types, etc.

gconf-editor and GNOME Hacks are your friend :)

I should also add that GNOME has had dialogs for key bindings and MIME types since version 2.0.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[hey]

I especially agree with:
"4. Construct a usable menu editor somewhere so that I can customize my menus"

In Windows you can right click on the Start button
and add something to the menu. No such luck with Gnome 1.6.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[AstroDrabb]

You can also count Fifth Toe as a distribution of unofficial GNOME applications

What happend to Fifth Toe? The site doesn't have any packages on it. : (

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[chefren]

1. XML rules. And it is really no less plain text than .ini files. What we need is a *powerful* gconf-editor. Searching is still very basic stuff, if fact gconf-editor was hopelessly broken without it. We also need a mechanism that makes sure old stale config keys don't get left in the registery. Better stuff would be metadata for keys.

2. A nautilus view with all the capplats would be nice.

4. Nautilus is your friend.

5. No..not gmc..Nooooo! Why would you like to browse the Internet and your local computer with the same software?

6. Ximian desktop? (I don't use it) Isn't this what the distros do?

7. How about creating a toolkit-neutral theming system that both kde and gtk+ can use.

8. There are 3rd party config software available for this.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Laur]

I for one think haveing a tabed file manager would be just as usful as a tabed browser

It is. Konqueror does this and it's quite nice.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[TuringTest]

That's only because you're not editing them with the proper tool.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not on my version of Windows (W2k) you can't. However, on the version of Gnome (2.6) I'm using, right-clicking on a menu-item in a menu offers an option to add an item to the menu. Hmmmm.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Mornelithe]

Not on my version of Windows (W2k) you can't.

Right click the start menu/folder you want to add to, and select "Open". Then add your shortcuts there.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[nutshell42]

while you're at it could you help me too? =)

How can I get case insensitive order in the gnome file dialog/nautilus etc.

This has to be one of the most stupid default settings btw. If you're doing a desktop for new users and are ready to piss off lots of people to achieve that goal why oh why would you use something so unintuitive

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Brandybuck]

Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)

Not having written any GTK themes, I nonetheless beleive that GTK has that ability. If they are true theme "engines:, then you can apply whatever color scheme you want to them. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do in the "new and improved" GNOME.

Why the GNOME leadership considers color schemes distinct from widget themes to be too difficult for newbies to use is beyond my understanding.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[ScRoNdO]

So is there a menu editor? I've never spotted one anywhere.

Well, it's disabled in fedora, but in a default Gnome install, like on slackware, you simply open Nautilus, go to Applications://, and edit it's subfolders. Really, it couldn't be simpler.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[juhaz]

and add something to the menu. No such luck with Gnome 1.6.

Yup, there absolutely can't be such functionality in gnome 1.6 since that version does not exist.

It is, however, in 2.6, that's disabled in Fedora, but it's hardly Gnome problem if RedHat decides to customize some features away.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[hey]

Ooops, yeah I meant 2.6 with Fedora Core 2.
How did you know oh wise one.
I don't suppose there's an easy way to turn in back on?

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound perfect for GoneMe
http://www.akcaagac.com/index_goneme.html

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

basicly nautilus sucks. And it being propritary and uninstallable dosen't help. Give me gmn any day.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in .gnome or something

If you're a system administrator, gconf is a godsend. You can "lock down" certain preferences so your users can't break things or waste time playing with useless preferences. Another win from using GConf is that it's "process transparent." This means that if I change a setting from one application, it instantly updates in all other applications that are interested in that setting. This technology is vital for the snazzy "instant apply" UI of GNOME, and vital for writing applications made up of multiple out-of-process components.

Gconf a godsend for sysadmins??? Where are you living? We have NFS-mounted homedirectories for our users and every other day I have to tell one of our GNOME-users to "rm -rf ~/.gconf;rm -rf ~/.gconfd" so that he can login again. Why did these gconf-morons decide to use file locking arghhhh! This just istn't reliable via NFS. Every now and then some flaky GNOME-app blows up (or the whole thing bombs) and leaves some locks on gconf-files behind which prevent the desktop from starting. Gconf is a NIGHTMARE for sysadmins!!

BTW, I never had any problems like that with our KDE-users.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Bloater]

> 5. No..not gmc..Nooooo! Why would you like to browse the Internet and your local computer with the same software?

With *my* unreliable ide controller, there is very little different between the local disk and a remote disk. Latency and reliability seem to be about the only difference, normally.

I suppose you really meant browse the web, but even the web is made up of many concepts, there is the document, the image, the animation, the video, the song, the interview, the chat room/channel, the bulletin board.

There should really be a separate "app" for each of those. I use the double-quotes since the word has been very poorly defined for the last 10 years. You can have one app that spans multiple processes, and even multiple countries, and several apps all in one process. You can now even have several apps in one process across several continents.

However, the "common" theme is that of browsing, there is a history, back/forward buttons, index/contents. There should be a common theme to the UIs for that part, but that could be in the form of shared libraries or embedded display (running a specific "app" with an instruction to draw to a window in the "browser" task). That way, you can disembed an app when you want to treat it separately to the browsing you were doing.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[dbIII]

gconf _is_ a tree of text config files in .gconf .

No, It's some kind of XML variant which is so obfiscated that you can't touch anything without breaking it unless you use the gnome tools - and that means poorly documented command line nastiness like gconftool-2 (no man page exists folks) in distributions as recent as RedHat9.

Another thing that would be nice if someone told the gnome people that most operating systems are multiuser now - and that permissions of lock files should never be changed to root without good reason (gdm is part of gnome too) in case users ever want to start up X again.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[dbIII]

If you're a system administrator, gconf is a godsend.

Nay, a curse. If a user looks at the gpanel of another, and sees a complicated mass of icons aand "drawers" full of icons that will work well for them too, you can't just copy a configuration file like you could with almost everything from fvwm on - you have to constuct the whole thing mouse click by mouse click.

It would be nice if the gnome people got away from the MS Windows single user non-networked PC idea. Having portable configuration files would be good. Even changing the name of a users home directory screws up gconf in a big way, involving lots of hunting through the database and changing the keys one at a time with gconftool-2 - it's as user unfriendly an experience as using ex as an editor.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[juhaz]

Not particularly hard to guess since it is enabled in everything else...

And no, I don't suppose there is. There was an easy way to turn it back on in rh8 (9?) - fc1, but no more. It's not insanely hard either, just turning one #define from 0 to 1 or so and recompiling.

Perhaps in time for FC3... here's the page if you want to keep up with this http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?i d=81215

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Knuckles]

poorly documented my ass.

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[Knuckles]

That's an issue of your locales I think

Re:I still have hope for gnome.

[rjstanford]

Well, it's disabled in fedora, but in a default Gnome install, like on slackware, you simply open Nautilus, go to Applications://, and edit it's subfolders. Really, it couldn't be simpler

Emphasis added.

Seriously - not meaning to troll - this is the kind of low-level knowledge (easy once you know how but about as unintuitive as you can get), the avoidance of which has made OSX what it is today.

Even the Windows way - want to edit the menu? Use the "action" button (ie: right-click) on ... wait for it ... the menu! Interacting with the object (or its representation) directly is, after all, one of the reasons that GUIs are traditionally easier to learn and use than non-GUIs.

Heck, I've been using graphical UNIX systems for well over a decade (although not Gnome) and I doubt that I'd have stumbled across that particular sequence of events without some kind of documentation. Right-clicking on the thing I want to change though has become easy - sure, its a learned behavior, but its a consistent one (right-click on anything to interact with it in interesting, non-default ways) rather than a specific one, such as that method for using the browser to edit your menus.

Now, can this really not be made any simpler?

it's all about xfce

[TimODonnell]

Anybody who still hasn't settled on a wm, take this advice: try xfce. It's fast, it's customizable, it's simple, but it still feels like a desktop environment, not just a window manager like fluxbox. It's the middle ground between the two huge desktop envirnments and the dozens of ultra-lightweight window managers.

It's gnome without the bloat.

Re:it's all about xfce

[cronot]

I do use XFCE too, plus the Rox pinboard - makes the perfect combo, and still keeps the environment lean and fast.

However, I beg to disagree with your last sentence. The "bloat" in gnome is something relative - it may be heavier on the system, but Gnome and its apps feels far more integrated than XFCE. XFCE is pretty much only the panel, an eye-candied window manager, and a taskbar, and while it comes with easy to use configuration tools, they are very limited in the sense that there aren't not much room for customizing - something that gnome surely wins. The taskbar, for instance, have no real meaningful configuration, and always lives separated from the panel - IMHO, it should be a plugin, so you could attach the taskbar to the panel, thus freeing desktop space.

I can live with that tough. My main beef with the state of desktop on Linux is the fragmented situation of the GUI Tookits (mainly QT vs. GTK, though there are lesser ones). The problem is not having many toolkits per se, but the fact that this leaves the desktop with an unconsistent appearance. I'm all for having toolkit choices, but I wish they'd unite to create a standard themeing format, so a theme could be used on both toolkits, thus leaving a more or less consistent appearance to the desktop (there's still the GUI guidelines).

Well, not gonna happen anytime soon, tough... :-(

Re:it's all about xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

And for anyone who doesn't need the crutch that is a "desktop environment", grab yourself a copy of fluxbox or FVWM and get back those many megabytes of useful RAM that would otherwise be wasted on irrelevant "features" like themes and icons.

Re:it's all about xfce

[ajs]

No offense, but that's spoken exactly like someone who has no idea what a desktop environment is.

Gnome is 90% the application libraries that manage inter-process data, configuration, internationalization, accessibility, theming, common invocation semantics, error reporting, etc, etc.

That 10% that you're thinking of (window management, applet baubles, desktop layout, file management, changing the root background, etc.) is nice, but if you still have to have all of Gnome around for the important parts (the applications that integrate with the desktop), what exactly is the point.

If xfce is a Gnome- (and implicityly ICCCM-) compliant window manager, it will work just fine in the Gnome desktop, but that doesn't make it a Gnome-replacement.

What people love to refer to as bloat in Gnome (and KDE for that matter, I'm not playing favorites here) stop seeming like bloat the moment you a) want to know how to configure 20 different applications at once b) want to change all of your applications to use LCD-friendly font-smoothing c) speak a language that isn't the default (and perhaps has strange rules like being written backwards) d) can't see / hear / type / use a mouse / etc. ; or any other sort of desktop-level strangeness.... then you actually want a suite of tools and libraries that support your needs.

Re:it's all about xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure, but it seems you don't understand at all what xfce is all about.
You can do all the things you said previously, using gnome tools, but once you're done, switch to xfce. You'll get all the configuration because xfce is a gtk apps. But your desktop will fly.
I'm not good at explaining. You should really give xfce a chance. It's really gnome without the bloat.

Re:it's all about xfce

[ajs]

grab yourself a copy of fluxbox or FVWM and get back those many megabytes of useful RAM that would otherwise be wasted on irrelevant "features" like themes and icons

And for those who thought the above made sense:

See FVWM themes here and Fluxbox themes here both of which are full of fine icons....

What you're really concerned about isn't memory usage (my task bar, just to use one example, uses a fair amount of memory under Gnome, but most of it is rarely used and often swapped in favor of things like OS file caching, etc.), but FUNCTIONALITY.

For example, a Gnome desktop can universally change the smoothing mode for font rendering across all applications at once to, for example, switch to an LCD display. That (in a generic sense, not just for the one special-case) takes a lot of hooks in a lot of places, and that code and all of its special cases certainly requires my desktop to "think" a lot more about a given chunk of work. Now, there are optimizations to be had, and that kind of thing will get faster over time, but it will never be as fast as back in my fvwm days when I couldn't do that, and the window manager didn't have any real communications path (other than ICCCM) with applications. Then, it was easy... if limited. FVWM didn't have any say in how an application represented data, what direction text was laid out in, what language was being used, what accessibility features were in place, etc., etc. That was back in the good old days when we didn't care about an awful lot of niches. Now we do.

Think of it like stepping up from tokenizing to scanning to parsing to compiling semantics. First you had windows that applications directly managed. Then global window management. Then session management. Gnome is working at a layer above all of that at the "desktop management" level. It's a lot of work, and that can be more cumbersome than just slapping a window up Windows 3.1-style... it also happens to be much more powerful.

Re:it's all about xfce

[Scarblac]

Gnome is 90% the application libraries that manage inter-process data, configuration, internationalization, accessibility, theming, common invocation semantics, error reporting, etc, etc.

That 10% that you're thinking of (window management, applet baubles, desktop layout, file management, changing the root background, etc.) is nice, but if you still have to have all of Gnome around for the important parts (the applications that integrate with the desktop), what exactly is the point.

Do people actually use that 90% part though? I've been using Gnome for years, but all I use it for is a bar with a few easy to click icons on the top, and system monitor and workspace switcher applets.

What applications are there that 'integrate with the desktop'? That's a serious question, I don't think I've ever used any. That Xfce thing sounds pretty much OK to me (except that Gnome does everything I need, even if that's only 10% of what Gnome does).

Re:it's all about xfce

[Florian]

No offense, but that's spoken exactly like someone who has no idea what a desktop environment is.

No offense, but you replied exactly like someone who has no idea what XFCE is.

Gnome is 90% the application libraries that manage inter-process data, configuration, internationalization, accessibility, theming, common invocation semantics, error reporting, etc, etc.

Almost half of what you mention (configuration, internationalization, theming) is GTK stuff, not Gnome. And those aspects managed by Gnome are used by only very few programs. Most so-called Gnome applications, like The Gimp, are in fact GTK applications and have no Gnome bindings. Of those programs linking to Gnome libraries and middleware (Bonobo, Gnome-VFS, gconf), few if any make full and consistent use of them.

If xfce is a Gnome- (and implicityly ICCCM-) compliant window manager, it will work just fine in the Gnome desktop, but that doesn't make it a Gnome-replacement.

No, XFCE is an integrated desktop environment which includes a window manager (xfwm), a panel (xfce-panel) with applets, a file manager (xffm), a backdrop manager, and a printing manager. All these components are based on GTK and freedesktop.org standards, like the XDND drag'n'drop protocol or the wm spec which also the window managers of KDE and Gnome (kwin and metacity) implement. XFCE can be fully configured over its own GUI menus, which is another difference to window managers which aren't really desktop environments.

What people love to refer to as bloat in Gnome (and KDE for that matter, I'm not playing favorites here) stop seeming like bloat the moment you a) want to know how to configure 20 different applications at once

Well, except that this doesn't work because you will hardly find 20 applications running parallel on your desktop that support gconf. If you refer to themeing and color settings, this is generic toolkit (GTK) stuff for which no Gnome is needed. (After all, you can set GTK themes and colors in XFCE as well.)

want to change all of your applications to use LCD-friendly font-smoothing

Another shoot in your foot. This is GTK, not Gnome stuff again and can be set in the XFCE control panel as well.

speak a language that isn't the default (and perhaps has strange rules like being written backwards)

Again, GTK stuff, not Gnome library stuff at all.

can't see / hear / type / use a mouse / etc.

Mouse and keyboard settings can be configured within XFCE as well.

Your post explains nicely why Gnome's code is bloated, adding 10-15 megabyte of memory- and cpu-eating stuff on top of GTK whose usefulness can be seriously questioned. Check out XFCE to see how you can implement a DE in about 4 megabytes, running screaming fast on PII class hardware, that builds on nothing but GTK and freedesktop.org standards and still is a sufficiently integrated GUI.

Re:it's all about xfce

[blackmonday]

I just installed xfce based only on your post, and thank you sir. It's beautiful. I installed it under Red Hat Professional Workstation, and it installed itself as a session option at login. Nice. Its much lighter than wither Gnome or KDE, and the catch is that it still runs all gnome apps (or kde), it just loads the libraries. I'm actually running WebSphere Studio, EditPlus under Wine, and VMWare running Windows 2000, all usable with 1 gig ram. Couldn't do that usably under gnome! Thanks for the post.

Re:it's all about xfce

[Mornelithe]

I don't use Gnome, so I can't tell you about it. I can give some KDE examples, though.

Lots of KDE apps are designed as kparts with wrappers around them to be actual applications. For example, KGhostview can view PDFs. But since it's written as a kpart, Konqueror can load up that kpart in itself and display PDFs. In fact, Konqueror isn't much but a wrapper for a whole bunch of kparts, which is how it can work as a browser (khtml) and also display images, text files, PDFs and so on.

Another example is kwrite and kate. Both use the text editor KPart, but kwrite just has a toolbar, while kate has a console built in (probably another kpart), and a file browser sidebar (another kpart), so it's more of a programmer's text editor.

Kontact is another example. It's a lot like Evolution/Outlook, but for mail it uses a KMail part, and for your datebook it uses a korganizer part (or something like that).

I believe Gnome has a similar API (bonobo, CORBA based). I don't think it's used quite as much as in KDE (a lot of "Gnome" apps are simply GTK apps, after all, and don't really make use of this kind of stuff. True Gnome apps could, though), but the functionality is there.

Re:it's all about xfce

[ajs]

Almost half of what you mention (configuration, internationalization, theming) is GTK stuff, not Gnome.

Much of this functionality that has been trickling into Gtk+ over the last year or two is being moved there from Gnome to allow non-Gnome applications to participate in the desktop, but let's not confuse things like Gtk+ internationalization and accessibility support with Gnome... they work at different levels of abstraction.

Well, except that this doesn't work because you will hardly find 20 applications running parallel on your desktop that support gconf.

Wrong.

I'm running metacity (WM), glade, evolution, xchat, galeon, multiload-applet-2, stickynotes_applet, notification-area-applet, wnck-applet, pam-panel-icon, evolution-wombat, nautilus, xscreensaver (hackish Gnome integration only), gnome-panel, gaim, gnome-terminal (x 11), gdm, gnome-session, bonobo-activation-server, gnumeric, gimp (Gtk+) and a number of other things.

You might not think of bonobo as an application, but I'm going to be pretty upset if it doesn't change when I set a parameter in gconf that tells it to!

Mouse and keyboard settings can be configured within XFCE as well.

And mouse and keyboard settings do NOT comprise accessiblity. Managing accessibility desktop-wide is a HUGE undertaking, and an area in which Windows and MacOS had long held the high ground over Linux, BSD and other POSIX operating systems. We know and understand that some people (like yourself) are going to be very unhappy with the "bloat" associated with supporting people with different needs, but that's why you get to go off and use xfce while the rest of us move forward and operate at a higher level of abstraction.

Your post explains nicely why Gnome's code is bloated, adding 10-15 megabyte of memory- and cpu-eating stuff on top of GTK whose usefulness can be seriously questioned.

Question away, I'll wait.

Check out XFCE to see how you can implement a DE in about 4 megabytes

When you want to change the anti-aliasing mode in your browser and spreadsheet app, does xfce do that for you, or do you have to know how to configure those two apps seperately?

If seperately, wouldn't it be nice if (while continuing to use xfce) those apps could have a convention of some sort that allowed them to communicate that information? Of course, xfce would then want in because there are cases where it could use that information to the advantage of the user.

This is called being a Gnome-compliant window manager. Welcome to the 2000s.

Re:it's all about xfce

[Scarblac]

Ok, I see.

But the apps I actually use are, say, OOo, Mozilla, emacs, xpdf, GAIM (hey, that's Gnome, isn't it?), eboard, Scid, mplayer, some mp3/ogg player... and a bunch of development stuff. That's about it. A lot of terminal windows, too.

Those are fine, I don't really see the point of switching to similar-but-probably-inferior apps that do similar things but that happen to be part of Gnome (or KDE).

Re:it's all about xfce

[Mornelithe]

Yeah, you certainly don't use the functionality. :)

Some of the KDE stuff is kind of nice. For example, kmplayer wraps Xine/mplayer in a KPart so you can view videos in web pages (I know, there are similar plugins for Mozilla).

There are other interesting things you could do with it as well. for example, you could theoretically specify a vim/emacs kpart (only vim exists, as far as I know) as the default text editor part, and then kwrite and kate and so on would all automatically have vi/emacs behavior.

But I won't claim that you'll gain much with all of that. It's interesting and nice to see all applications integrating together so well, but if you have specific apps you prefer, you're probalby not going to get enough out of switching to make it worth it.

Re:it's all about xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes. XFCE4 is incredible; it looks great (GTK2-based), is very customizable and easy to use AND very fast and light on resources. The next relase (already in RC) includes desktop icons and a session manager, which IMHO are the only things lacking from this DE.

I said it before on another forum; XFCE is what GNOME should be today. Both KDE and GNOME are way too bloated for their intented purposes today, and XFCE strikes the right balance between features and bloat.

Re:it's all about xfce

[Lisandro]

Oh yes. XFCE4 is incredible; it looks great (GTK2-based), is very customizable and easy to use AND very fast and light on resources. The next relase (already in RC) includes desktop icons and a session manager, which IMHO are the only things lacking from this DE.

I said it before on another forum; XFCE is what GNOME should be today. Both KDE and GNOME are way too bloated for their intented purposes today, and XFCE strikes the right balance between features and bloat.

(Ignore my previous post as AC. I forgotted log in)

Re:it's all about xfce

[ChaoticLimbs]

Xfce and IceWM are both pretty nice.

The media device manager...

[Anonymous Coward]

is the best upcoming feature of 2.8 IMO. I will finally be able to just plug in my various USB drives into the computer and have them mount (and unmount!) automatically.

For me personally, this means that my non-ubergeek wife (who isn't aware of the root password or the commands mount -a and umount -f), and will be able to download pictures off of the camera without asking me to unmount the camera or to fix the multiple mount points that cropped up since she plugged in the camera multiple times.

Thank you Gnome hackers!

Re:The media device manager...

[anynameleft]

It is indeed great, but it also has a big usability problem, you need to enter a command. That's simply the wrong way, to be really user-friendly, it should offer a list of applications to choose from. By the way, the same problem is in the new mimetype editor. GNOME seriously needs an application list like the one KDE offers when associating applications.

You can be fully HIG-compliant, non-bloated and whatsoever, but I think it are these things that make the difference between being only seemingly or really user-friendly.

Re:The media device manager...

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't tried the new mime stuff in 2.7, but at least the "old" one (as in 2.6) does allow for a list of applications in addition to manually specifying one, it's just that not very many "register" themselves so that they end up on that list.

Re:The media device manager...

[steveha]

The media device manager is a huge step forward. Yes, entering a command is less-than-ideally-friendly, but they can put in a list of applications later (2.10, perhaps).

They shouldn't delay a good feature on the grounds that it's not a perfect feature.

steveha

Re:The media device manager...

[Lumpy]

I pretty much have this now and had it for at least 2 years.

edit your /etc/fstab correctly and your USB devices will work well for users.

you still have to unmount them, but all real OS's require you to unmount the media first (CD's can do an auto unmount by detecting the eject button) I cant count the number of times a windows User comes crying to me because they hosed their presentation by saving to their thumbdrive and then yanking it out of the hub before unmounting it.

It's not new, many Linux users have had it for a long time.... Redhat 8 had it.

Re:The media device manager...

[ceswiedler]

I have the same setup (Fedora Core 2 does a nice job of automounting my camera) but a real problem is that FAM (which monitors drives for changes and alerts Nautilus) has to keep file handles on the mounted drive open in order to monitor directories, and this prevents unmounting the volume. The easiest workaround I know of is killing FAM (actually by restarting xinetd), which is ugly. Unfortunately, from what I understand, it's a kernel problem: the file/directory monitoring API requires open file handles, and last I heard the kernel hackers didn't have a solution they liked. Does anyone know if this is fixed (possibly by DBUS)? I imagine the solution is more in the unmounting code (possibly alerting FAM that the volume is trying to unmount) rather than the monitoring API.

Re:The media device manager...

[Dever]

a question about this though. why / what exactly are the positives to having to unmount devices (perhaps it's just not the best way for a flashdrive?) ?

i mean, i hate to bring up windows (and i don't really miss this tiny 'functionality') but i could just yank out the drive and it'll be fine.
what has to happen and why, in linux that it can't just write the data to the drive? is it because it's all in the RAM cache? i wonder if you could change that behavior for certain devices ...

Re:The media device manager...

[Anonymous Coward]

i mean, i hate to bring up windows (and i don't really miss this tiny 'functionality') but i could just yank out the drive and it'll be fine.

Um not it wont. If you read the parent post comlpetely, if you do not wait for the Xfer to complete and for windows to sync the disk then it has corrupted files... this happens all the time to people I know, and the parent poster also said this.

Macintosh has ALWAYS forced unmounting. windows is the only OS (other than DOS) that allowed the user to hose filesystems at will.

Windows 2000, yank a usb hard drive and it complains to high hell.. XP doesn't complain, but it knows that you should not do that.

and I dare you to NTFS format the flash drive and then yank it. you will have to chkdisk every time as it was not unmounted and you lose things fast as NTFS is designed for write-behind.

It's an illusion that windows users have that you can "just yank it" and it will be OK.

Re:The media device manager...

[juhaz]

a question about this though. why / what exactly are the positives to having to unmount devices (perhaps it's just not the best way for a flashdrive?) ?

There are no positives, just common sense. If OS doesn't know you're about to pull of the drive, it can't possibly do anything that might be unfinished.

i mean, i hate to bring up windows (and i don't really miss this tiny 'functionality') but i could just yank out the drive and it'll be fine.

Most of the time it might be fine, but there's NO GUARANTEE even on windows, every time you "just yank out the drive" you're gambling with your data.

what has to happen and why, in linux that it can't just write the data to the drive? is it because it's all in the RAM cache? i wonder if you could change that behavior for certain devices ...

It's not any different in linux, it's just that it doesn't encourage you to do stupid things like windows does, most of the times data will not be in cache any more, but it might be. You're free to take your changes.

And you can change the behaviour to try to keep the disk synchronized all the time, it's called "-o sync", if the mount manpage is up to date it only works with ufs and ext2/3, so no dice if your thumbdrives contain fat.

Re:The media device manager...

[Knuckles]

I think the fam issue has been already fixed in Gnome 2.6. At least, I saw this often in 2.4, and it went away when upgradin to 2.6 (Debian sarge)

Is Metacity still gnome's default window manager?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is there something else that is not as spartan as metacity but also not eye candy as E, and at the same time blessed (standard confirming) by the gnome community?

Gnome gets better all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome's been really impressive with their rapid turn around schedule recently. With their 2.8 release already, I wonder what kind of goodies they'll have to add before they can rationalize a bump to 3.x.

I'm looking forward to their plans to further integrate OpenOffice.org (though I can't think of anything off hand that they could improve) and once the Mozilla project changes to Firefox as the official browser component, hopefully Gnome will switch to it. (I liked Galeon for a while before I heard about Firebird, but now I much prefer the latter.)

However, being an Emacs user, I constantly find myself struggling between whether to do learn to do things in a more Emacsish way or Gnomish way. I know Gnome allows you to enable a few Emacs keybindings, but it's hardly the same experience for me. With Evolution's online calender thing, I'm tempted to switch from Gnus, but I just don't know yet.

Maybe an Emacs Bonobo component or something would suffice so when working on the email text buffer it's an actual Emacs buffer that I can use all of my keybindings and scripts in.

Oh well, good job Gnome team. :-)

Re:Gnome gets better all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

actually Epiphany is the gnome browser.
galeon was dropped a while back
(just in case you were unaware of that)

Re:Gnome gets better all the time

[dot-magnon]

3.0 won't be here for a long time, I think. We will probably see 2.12 or further before that time, and it seems that the GNOME Community is focused on improving 2.x as far as possible and relax a bit on the pressure of releasing major versions. :-)

Re:Gnome gets better all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Galeon was never dropped - it was never in in the first place. Gnome didn't have an official browser until Epiphany was added. Galeon was favored, but never actually distributed as part of the desktop as Epiphany is.

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Has gnome 2.6 been brought into stable yet?

I'll never see any of this new stuff until a year later. Or if I'm brave enough to pull it out of unstable.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

It's in Testing and should be included in Stable when 3.1 is released ("pretty soon now").

WAA..OH!

[nKBit]

I'm looking the screenshots! So beautiful! And always the GNOME-style I call it: simple! I've been a hardcore gnome user, well, a hardcore enlightenment user too! before e17 comes out, I'm sticking to GNOME B-) Keep going you BIG FOOT (Feet?)!

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[Gantoris]

they haven't, but apparently they are going to make it easy to turn the damn thing off!

Re:sso what?

[Anonymous Coward]

If gray everywhere is your definition of beautiful, sure.

Gnome is as ugly as it gets.

Re:Still #2 And A Very Cool System

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is just as fast as FireFox on my hardware. However, I use mail, address book, and calendar so what you consider bloat I consider features I need. That said, it's very easy to compile Mozilla without these additions, well, on Linux at least.

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah - but will it be off by default?

Re:503 errors?

[Anonymous Coward]

OT: 503 error? I assume you're referring to logging on to Slashdot. Clearing the cookies didn't work for me. I haven't been able to log on since yesterday.

Re:sso what?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, consistency and simplicity are beautiful. The gray is themeable.

But what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

But what about performance? Any enhancements on that side? Compared to Windows, Gnome is still noticeably slower. I run both Linux/Gnome and Win2K-Pro on my dual-boot machine, simply because there is so much software that doesn't run on Linux (and it's hard to tell whether it ever will).

Bigfoot

[SilentReproach]

Does it still have the goofy "foot" icon in the taskbar? I know this sounds trivial, but I swear it's the reason I chose KDE years ago (Although the "K" wasn't very attractive either in times past).

I don't think I'm trollin, I honestly want to know if that icon can be user-defined.

Re:Bigfoot

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use the taskbar, yes, the four-toed foot is their equivalent to "Start" or "K", but if you use the menubar like OS X, then the foot is smaller and just an accent next to the text "Applications".

Re:Bigfoot

[BenjyD]

Have they made that menubar actually MacOS like? As in it actually has the menu for the active application in it, rather than just displaying a static applications/actions menu like it used to?

Re:Bigfoot

[ajs]

It depends on the distribution that you use.

The way Fedora installs by default, no you get a ... wait for it ... Fedora.

But ... and I can't say this enough ... GNOME IS NOT A TOOLBAR, TASK LIST, WINDOW MANAGER or any of those other things you're thinking of.

Don't like the foot menu? Change it or install a theme that changes it. What Gnome is a set of tools, libraries and interfaces for allowing your desktop (infrastructure, apps, etc) to communicate and for providing a set of standards to which a user can hold their applications accountable (in areas as far-ranging as internationalization, accessibility, configuration, error management, bug-reporting, menu layout, etc).

If you don't like the default background, get another. If you don't like the default theme, get another.

But, don't discount all of Gnome because of these trivialities. That's like saying you don't like Linux because of the default console font.

Re:Bigfoot

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can I get the icon in cornflower blue?"

*smack*

Re:Bigfoot

[Chainsaw]

Unfortunately not. And it sucks ass. It's even more annoying when you have configured KDE to use a shared MacOS style menu, and Gimp or some other app chooses to do the "fuck you and your preferences" routine.

Unfortunately, this won't change. The people behind X seems to hate the thought of a general API for showing a button or a menu or a what-you-want.

Re:Bigfoot

[juhaz]

I don't think I'm trollin, I honestly want to know if that icon can be user-defined.

Yes, it can be defined. It's part of the icon theme, just like every other icon on the desktop.

Re:Bigfoot

[kabloom]

On RedHat 9, one couldn't override the red hat on the gnome panel without actually replacing the systemwide icon file. In Fedora, this has been fixed.

Re:Bigfoot

[ajs]

I'm not sure where that comes from, but I replaced my red hat under Red Hat early on (I like pictures of mushrooms, you see), and I didn't have to be root to do it. I can't remember what I did, but I think it involved creating a new "foot" menu and specifying the icon to use. Took 2 seconds and a mouse, no keyboard required.

Re:Bigfoot

[kabloom]

I'm using a redhat 9 box right now and couldn't figure out how to do that. Any tips?

Re:Bigfoot

[ajs]

Sorry, don't have one handy right now, and I don't specifically recall what I did.

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on, the usual response to your post is coming to me psychically.

oh meh god!11 you don't even kno what spatial means u nub loL!! spatial nautilus is truly advancement!! stop flamin it when u don't understand it! spatial is better!!11 mmhmm!! I give no reference whatsoever to what it actually is but yea its bettar!1 ummm kthx

Gnome 8

[Anonymous Coward]

When will they rename Gnome 2.8 to Gnome 8?

If Sun can do it....

Improved nautilus SMB support?

[illusioned]

I don't know if i'm the only one with this problem, but using the connect to server dialog to connect to a samba share is VERY slow to bring up a view of files, and copying is even worse. I have also noticed that if I used smbmount while gnome is running I sometimes get an oops.

Re:Improved nautilus SMB support?

[Anonymous Coward]

it is initially slow as it enumerates the available workspaces. as for an oops that is nothing to do with gnome, an oops is always a kernel problem.

Why VNC?

[MrNemesis]

I'm confused as to why VNC has been integrated. Most Linux users (and windows too...?), I would have thought, would be happier with X11.

I hope you can choose not to install the VNC server... it's of utterly no use to me, and seems to smack of copying XP's built in remote desktop functionality.

There are several good VNC client/server packages out there for Linux, if you really want to use it.

Re:Why VNC?

[moorg]

I'm confused as to why VNC has been integrated.

Look at the use cases for Vino, the proposed included VNC. Mark McLoughlin has done an excellent writeup.

If you follow GNOME development you'll notice the shift towards better integration into the other desktop applications. See: Evolution and GAIM speaking over evolution-data-server.

Mark's use cases answer your question.

Re:Why VNC?

[MrNemesis]

OK, point taken :)

I still hope you can disable it though. As you probabaly gathered, I don't follow GNOME development much, as I moved to desktops I found more tinker-friendly, and popular opinion has discouraged me from taking the time to install and configure it much these days.

I'm still highly wary of the windows "bundle everything in as default and make it impossible to remove" effect.

Re:Why VNC?

[kbielefe]

I personally don't use VNC at work because straight X is available and looks better in my opinion, but a lot of colleagues do because they can be working at their desk and then go to the lab and have all their editor windows, etc. open in exactly the same way. I use screen for the same reason at home. One of the nice things about gnome is that you don't have to have everything installed that's available. Most distros only install about half when you install "Gnome". Probably, you will have to install a package like gnome-vnc to get the extra (but tightly integrated) functionality.

Re:Why VNC?

[moorg]

I'm still highly wary of the windows "bundle everything in as default and make it impossible to remove" effect.

Just because a module is included does not mean it's a requirement to use the desktop.

For example, Evolution has been proposed for inclusion in 2.8 but is easily removed.

The intregration push is to get to that point where you can hand somebody a desktop system and know that things "just work".

Re:Why VNC?

[MrNemesis]

OK, well that's settled my qualms then. I haven't used GNOME for a while, and was still a n00b (but a tinker-junkie) when I decided to ditch it. I just thought that an integrated VNC app would be better served by an installable program rather than an inbuilt function that's going to be of fairly limited use to most people.

If it's easily pluggable, then no biggie.

Re:Why VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

XP stole the idea from VNC. Google is your friend.

Re:Why VNC?

[ezHiker]

I'm confused as to why VNC has been integrated. Most Linux users (and windows too...?), I would have thought, would be happier with X11.
Well, I'd say it's partly because KDE has already VNC (krdc) integraded for a year or two :-)
But the main purpose of this is for remote user support. At my company, we have used VNC for years to support our Windows desktop users. Nothing like being able to see the screen they're looking at when they call with a problem. If we were to ever migrate desktops to Linux we would need this functionality.
Xvncserver has been available for a long time, but the problem with it is that it starts a whole separate X session than the one the remote user is looking at... nice for graphically working in the background, but it is useless for when you need a user to show you an error that they are getting, or if you need to show a user how to do something. The VNC that is integrated into KDE shows you the user's screen. I'm assuming that the Gnome version would do the same thing.

Re:Why VNC?

[jag164]

Never worked in an environment where IS team just can't keep a stable network, have you? :) X just doesn't work to well when you have consoles and windows flying all over the place and then *whoops* network goes bye. Now where was I? Recovery is possible, but by the time you get back to where you were, whoops their it goes again. Xvncserver works well for that by 'preserving' your desk across outtages and inbetween the office, test lab, and the offsite developer who just got a wierd error that you can witness. But the real pain of vnc is the workstation/lab have two seperate displays.

I'm not keen on getting the latest version of anything, but the 'integrated' VNC will be a blessing. (Sorry, I like Qt, but I don't do KDE)

Re:Why VNC?

[dbIII]

I'm confused as to why VNC ... would be happier with X11

Gnome is coming from the MS windows perspective and not the unix perspective - and that is certainly not always a bad thing. The are a lot of VNC servers out there, a while back it was the trendy thing to do a window manager, now it's VNC, and many introduce new features which are nice (eg. export local display to VNC with x11vnc or built in ssh tunnelling).

Re:Why VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still highly wary of the windows "bundle everything in as default and make it impossible to remove" effect.

I've always perceived that as much bigger problem in KDE than Gnome, it seems just running kedit starts kdeinit which includes everything and a kitchen sink. Gnome is more modular.

Re:Why VNC?

[MrNemesis]

I'm aware of the fact that VNC came looong before XP's incarnation of it... I was just commenting on the integration bit :)

As an aside, readin other peoples posts I guess it does make sense, I was just being small minded again!

Yes, yes, yes! I'm close to tears ;-D

[Anonymous Coward]

GConf Editor now with searchability!!!
Finally! Yes!

Seriously, I still think gconf editor shouldn't be the weapon of choice when it comes to advanced options but now at least it is searchable. As I'm not using gnome as my main desktop I allways spend what seems like hours hunting through gconf to find out if an option I need or would like is actually available and if so where to f***** enable it.

Some of the other stuff looks good too and I'm really looking forward to the next release.

Re:Yes, yes, yes! I'm close to tears ;-D

[Anonymous Coward]

Hooray for usability improvements in the gconf editor :)

Re:Yes, yes, yes! I'm close to tears ;-D

[Knuckles]

Not aimed at you, I was just in search for a gconf-editor post to attach to :)

What I find amazing in all the gnome discussions lately is that there is a class of (non-)users who assert:

1.) Nautilus in spatial mode sucks. I love to browse my filesystem. I am an expert, and I really get deep hierarchies. I have everything ordered by categories branching out to more categories, so that I find my stuff easily

2.) gconf-editor is a piece of shit. It is a mess of incomprehensible hierarchies and I can't find anything in it.

Frankly, I don't get how the 2 opinions go together

Window Manager?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, the correct answer is, "Waimea".

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, "Spatial" aka "MacOS finder" interface is teh 5uck.

Re:503 errors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, what's up with Slashdot? What did they do?

I keep getting 503 errors. Sometimes not, but often yes.

Cripes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they keep concentrating on fixing bugs all the time? Isn't it stable enough already ?

I really wish projects would deal with getting a core set of proper features to match OS X and Windows before they spend all their time making the code work perfectly on everything.

There must be a million and one OS projects out there... ...but how many of them actually have enough features ?

blah blah blah whine bitch moan blah blah blah

Re:Cripes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Features are nice but polish is important too and os X is a good example of that. Consistency will make using an enviroment a lot nicer, trust me. I personally like well behaved apps that do a few things right much better than clunky / ugly / hackish apps that do lots of things in lots of different ways and keeps you guessing at them .

Please please please

[djohnsto]

Fix gnome-terminal. Any terminal that uses more cpu to display the text from compiling software than is needed for the actual compile is just broken. Miguel complained (and stopped using gnome-terminal) about this more than 2 years ago! This is one of the few reasons that I have stuck with KDE.

(Yes, I know I can run konsole within gnome, but aside from the inconsistent themes, it sucks up a lot of memory to load both the gnome and kde libs at the same time.)

Re:Please please please

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen! I was wondering why changing *mouse focus* on gnome terminal was causing DVD frames to drop in xine. And this is on an Athlon 64 FX-53!

gnome terminal is a complete hog.

Of course it is also the tip of the iceberg. gnome 2.4 + nautilus + Xorg on gentoo hogs over 90 MB RAM, as evidenced by running "free" before and after calling startx.

Re:Please please please

[juhaz]

It's nowhere as bad as taking more cpu than the actual compiling, though granted the overhead is quite sizeable...

Besides, you're assuming the problem is in terminal itself and not the underlying font layout and rendering libraries (pango and xft).. full unicode support and anti-aliasing take a toll.

Can't you just run rxv/x/e/aterm if you know you need to run something that's going to put a LOT of stuff to stdout, if gnome-terminal isn't fast enough and konsole hogs as much memory as running the whole KDE?

Re:Please please please

[djohnsto]

For some smaller files (when run compiled with the help of libtool), yes, the terminal takes more cpu. After delving into it a little a few months ago, I found the main culprit to be the vte terminal emulation library. It eschews the stock X11 terminal emulation and is flexible enough to emulate pretty much anything (with text that reads forwards, backwards, updside down, and perhaps inside out). The problem is, it's REALLY slow. And while it does slow down compilation a little, the real problem is doing something like a full screen vi inside gnome-terminal (something I need for analysing simulation runs). The lag is just unbearable.

From a user's perspective, the only thing vte buys me is the ability to click on links and have it launch a web browser (although there might be some real xterms that allow this too?). That's something that konsole can't do.

Also, while pango might be slow, konsole using qt and xft runs just fine with unicode support and anti-aliasing - including the full screen vi test.

Re:Please please please

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus people, just redirect the fucking output to a temporary file or to less(1) if something is going to flood the terminal.

Are slashdot users retarded or is it just me?

Re:Please please please

[eloki]

Jesus people, just redirect the fucking output to a temporary file or to less(1) if something is going to flood the terminal.

The problem is not that it floods the terminal; that's what you expect to happen from a build. The problem is that gnome-terminal is slow and takes a lot of CPU to draw the output. You can say 'just save it to a file then' but that's just a workaround for the real problem of gnome-terminal being slow compared to xterm/Eterm/etc.

If Epiphany started up too slowly, you wouldn't say 'just browse in w3m then', it's a weakness of the program, not of the way people are using it.

Re:Please please please

[jelle]

Yes, gnome-terminal's CPU usage when scrolling is just nuts.

It's one of the _main_ reasons why I finally switched from gnome to KDE.

Re:Please please please

[jelle]

"Are slashdot users retarded or is it just me?"

I'm sorry to inform you, but it's you. Scrolling in a full-screen 1600x1200 terminal window on a 1Ghz machine is _slower_ than what I can read. Konsole is more than 20 times faster.

And 'outputting to a temporary file' is only an option if you're not interested in the output...

Re:Please please please

[_|()|\|]

Fix gnome-terminal.

The GNOME terminal is really just a shell for VTE. (It may still be possible to build it with ZVT.) 90% of the bugs associated with the terminal should really be filed against VTE, the maintenance for which seems to be a low-priority task for Nalin Dahyabhai at Red Hat.

If you want to help, try testing some of the unconfirmed bug reports, or some of the patches, such as 143914.

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[VertigoAce]

When I installed Gnome 2.6 under Gentoo, it had some sort of "Browse Filesystem" shortcut in the Applications menu. This started Nautilus in browser mode at your home directory. There wasn't even a shortcut to start Nautilus in spatial mode (maybe one on the desktop, but not in the menus). Regardless, it takes all of about 10 seconds to switch it off.

I know it's been discussed before

[Dalroth]

I know this has been discussed before. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it. My current install of Nautilus alwas opens every folder in a new window.

I hate that.

I can't find the setting to turn this off! Can anybody help me out?

Thanks,
Bryan

Re:I know it's been discussed before

[TheFlu]

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser true

Re:I know it's been discussed before

[anynameleft]

Sure, you can do this with GConf-Editor, from what I heard one of the greatest inventions of GNOME usability. I don't have access to a GNOME system right now, so sorry, I don't know what exact option it is.

Re:I know it's been discussed before

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold down the shift key as you open the new folder.

Sure, going into the gconf settings tree and Like, Totally Stickin' It To The Man With His Spatial Nautilus Bringin' My Down will make you feel l33ter, but I've got better things to do with my time than hack gconf settings.

Re:I know it's been discussed before

[RustyTaco]

Now THAT is intuitive, and unbelivably user friendly. Wow.

- RustyTaco

Re:I know it's been discussed before

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold down the shift key as you open the new folder.

Which doesn't actually work I might add.

Re:I know it's been discussed before

[nathanh]

Now THAT is intuitive, and unbelivably user friendly. Wow.

If you want to run in expert mode then you need to be an expert to enable it.

Not that it's exactly hard to find that option. Gconf-editor is in the main menu (Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor). All of the "registry keys" are described. That particular key had this description.

If set to true, then all Nautilus windows will be browser windows. This is how Nautilus used to behave before version 2.6, and some people prefer this behavior.

If you couldn't find that then you're a newbie and you don't want to be running in complicated browser mode. Stick with the easier nautilus mode until you gain some more skills.

Standards are the key

[metalac]

One key point that Gnome has, btw I use Gnome as my one and only WM, are the standards. I think there should be more of this and similiar things in Open Source community. The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines is a great way to let the developers know what's a good way to code the apps so that when you make them those apps don't look off from the rest of the desktop. I believe that if every project at one point had a version that standardized it, we would get much better software at the end of it. I know many people are all about freedom to do whatever the hell they want, and they should have that freedom, but if there are few standards set then the interoperability of Open Source software would be much easier to implement and it would be much easier on a user to use and on a developer to code and write new features for.

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[jcupitt65]

From the interview:

• There are some small features in CVS that might be interesting though:
  * Visible preference that allows you to disable spatial mode

Re:503 errors?

[boudie]

I believe it is both a Mozilla/Firefox problem and a Slashcode problem. Works in Opera 100%. Last couple days with Mozilla, about 50%

Gnome isn't too big, nor is it ugly...

[EzInKy]

...as some posters seem to claim. It actually can be made to look quite nice and really is no bigger than it needs to be to perform the tasks for which it was designed. The only real problem I have with it is the way it identifies some applications in its menus with generic terms such as "web browser" and "editor" instead of the actual name of the program.

Why does it do this? If all applications were identified this way a user could end up not knowing which item to click to launch the correct program. If the idea is to make it easy for new users, wouldn't a submenu system make more sense...such as Net-Browsers and entries for available choices?

Re:Gnome isn't too big, nor is it ugly...

[waferhead]

OK...But have they fixed the bit where it randomly crashes every 5 minutes?

Not meant as a troll, that is exactly why I gave up on Gnome years ago, and started using KDE.

Every time I upgraded RH (several versions, we're talking years here) I gave gnome a shot, and every time something (button click/standard app/config tool) caused gnome to leave a smoking crater within 5 minutes.

I NEVER had that problem with KDE. If I wanted flakey, I'd run Windows.

Re:Gnome isn't too big, nor is it ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the idea is to make it easy for new users, wouldn't a submenu system make more sense...such as Net-Browsers and entries for available choices?

The counterintuitive (but correct) answer is "no". Every time you insert another step in a user interface process, you introduce the opportunity for confusion and error. Instead of saying "I want to browse the net, so I click on Net Browser" now the user will say "I want to browse the net, so I click on Net Browser... uh, er. There's four different things here and all of them have weird names. Which is the right one? Do they all do the same thing? If I pick the wrong one will I damage anything?"

This is why there's one clock applet in GNOME 2, even though there were five clock applets in GNOME 1. And instead of being only one-fifth as usable, it's more like three times as usable. 99% of the time, the user doesn't want to add this specific clock right here, the one that tells time in octal and binary, they want to add a clock. And the other 1% of the time, they can RTFM.

Re:Gnome isn't too big, nor is it ugly...

[andreyw]

No offense, but you should have reported the bug to Red Hat. This is clearly a distribution problem. Give another distro a whirl. Try SuSE, Gentoo, Debian or Slackware.

Re:Gnome isn't too big, nor is it ugly...

[Dever]

"OK...But have they fixed the bit where it randomly crashes every 5 minutes?"

Ohhh....uh, yeah. the 'Clicky something crashes' bug...

uh huh, they've fixed that.

ouais...

[flibuste]

It still doesn't look nice...

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, "Spatial" aka "MacOS finder" interface is teh 5uck.

It's so crap that even Apple have moved away from it in their recent Finders. Gnome seems to want to be MacOS ten years ago, as opposed to KDE who are trying to be Windows five years ago. I'm not sure which I find more contemptible, which pretty much guarantees a -1, Flamebait for this post...

"Re:System Tools?" and other proposed models.

[kandresen]

I agree, system tools in itself should be in a different product, and now we see that they are proposing to do the entire system more like windows with only one option for mail client, etc, etc...

Luckily this is all only proposed addons, so hopefully the majority see the problem and say no.

Re:"Re:System Tools?" and other proposed models.

[Anonymous Coward]

only one option for mail client

Yeah, I hate the way that every time I start Mozilla Thunderbird, it instantly dies and GNOME pops up a dialog box saying You are using an incorrect mail client, worthless human slave. Choose Evolution or choose death. (I can make your car explode.) You'd think they would just include a standard mail client in the default distribution instead, and put an option in GNOME Menu > Desktop Preferences > Advanced > Preferred Applications to change it.

KConfigEditor

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, KConfigEditor which is a KDE application has support for GConf and makes a better job of editting GConf entries than gconf-editor. IIRC, it was also the first to support actual searching of entries in GConf. Even though I use GNOME I started using KConfigEditor. Especially that it has the idea of "backup and propagation scripts", which allow me to edit one master configuration and send the propagation scripts to my users to have those propagated. Pretty cool stuff.

Re:503 errors?

[kalirion]

I havent been able to get slashdot to work on IE for days. Just found out the site was even up by following a link from googlenews.

Bummer..

[Anonymous Coward]

All that work, and it still looks like crap.

font smoothing actually contradicts your argument

[spitzak]

In reality font smoothing on all new KDE and Gnome programs (and also many other programs using other toolkits) is controlled by the file ~/.fonts.conf. (they use Xft and Freetype2 and Fontconfig to draw the fonts, these are all shared just like KDE and Gnome all use X11).

The problem is in fact these "desktop environments". Both try to write the fonts.conf but neither correctly reads the settings stored by the other program, and I think Gnome just reads it's own data and ignores the fonts. I discovered this annoyance when I found that Gnome control panels could get much nicer font smoothing than KDE, and if you ran KDE control panel it would gradually mangle them.

Finally I figured this out and saved the .fonts.conf file from Gnome and fiddled with it until KDE does not mangle it (it now adds a block to the end every time I log in, I just checked and there are about 100 copies of 8 lines of XML, perhaps I should truncate it...).

This is not user-friendly in any way whatsoever. Internally I believe the implementation is correct, but we need a "set up the fonts" program that does ONLY the job of setting up the fonts with a GUI, and that any program can call. "Desktops" are the wrong answer.

Re:503 errors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to be a problem with logins.
Remove your cookies and try again.
(AC because of that ...)

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[Enucite]

"Gnome seems to want to be MacOS ten years ago, as opposed to KDE who are trying to be Windows five years ago."

So in the end, they're both really going for the same objective?

Use Internet Explorer

[rd_syringe]

Off-topic.

If you use Internet Explorer, strangely, the 503 errors don't appear. What's going on, Malda? This is another one of those funny things Slashdot critics will be using against Slashdot from now on.

Gnome: Good... Metacity: Bad...

[SixArmedJesus]

I really like the Gnome desktop. I find the spatial nautilus very useful, but there are two things that I really don't like about the Gnome desktop. First is Metacity, the window manager. I can't stand it that I cannot middle click or right click on the maximize button and have it maximize the window vertically or horizontally. That is on of the most useful features that i've seen for quite a few window managers running under Linux and *BSD, and I see no reason for Metacity not to have it. (btw, if someone knows how to set that up, let me know! I'd love to change it...) My second beef is with gnome-terminal. It's WAY slow. I find myself installing rxvt just to have a fast terminal, even though it's not as pretty... or tabbed, which I miss when I have to use rxvt.

Other that that, Gnome is great, and I look forward to updating it on my Linux/BSD box.

Better use of GNOME developers' time!

[Anonymous Coward]

To the GNOME developers:

I am not yet halfway down the page but let me be the first to say, ignore the cliched bashing, let your fans defend your work, so you can focus on the work at hand: coding for the release. Responding to criticism shouldn't be your specialty or your concern right now.

All I have to say to the critics, serious hardware with serious muscle is here. Time to use it, or at least make the CPU sweat even a little. You'll know if you're better off with the other WMs/Desktops the second you start whining.

More power to the GNOME dev team!

Re:Did they kill "spatial" Nautilus yet?

[FyRE666]

So they're still leaving it as the default even though it's obviously an incredibly stupid idea? Guess it's easier than admitting it's a stupid idea ;-) Dunno why I'm moaning though, it just convinced me to return to KDE (after searching for the disable switch for 10 minutes - there isn't one in FC2, although there's apparently some command-line tool to do it - kind of defeats the purpose of a GUI, but still ;-) and I doubt I'll bother with Gnome again.

One way maximize

[octothorpe]

You can set keyboard shortcuts for vertical and horizontal maximize in Gnome 2.6 but no, as far as I can tell you can't do that with the mouse. The other problem I have is that you can't set the "raise window" action to only happen when you click on the top bar of a window and not when you click in the window. These two things seem like simple things that most other window managers have.

Re:One way maximize

[SixArmedJesus]

Ah yes. I had forgotten about the keyboard shortcut setup for the one way maximize. I'm still not thrilled with that, though. I'm a half-throttle power user, and trying to retrain my brain to do that is just more effor than I'm willing to expend at the moment.

I know that there are supposed to be window managers that are Gnome compliant, so maybe I'll look into trying to switch out Metacity for something else. (the new version of XFWM is nice...)

WTB: Innovation

[Proc6]

At what point will the OSS community start breaking new ground like OSX with it's Quartz layer and beautiful scaling UI? The 2 mainstream Linux UI's are just boring knockoffs of Windows. Surely the OSX UI would be cake for a world-wide community, even something better?

No excuses, just make KDE and Gnome go away and make OSX look bad.

Re:WTB: Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Xserver, and its trio of extensions that will (as they are incorporated into the next release of Xorg as well) allow hardware accellerated compositions, and all the other fun things of OS X via cairo.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Spellbinder]

how many of those pirates just wanted to get it early and are reciving it a few days later?
or are just trying it out to see if it is worth it (and yes it is!!!!!)
if there is no demo out it is no wonder everybody wants to see something of it
i am going to buy it as soon as a linux client is out (or maybe even as it hits the stores)
this only means future games are going to be released over the web
i understand carmack ... but there are loads of people out there without enough money ( ok enuff to get a d3 pc) to buy the game anyway
take 1/4 of the sum they say they lost and it will still be way more then they would have got if ther e had been no piracy
file sharing is just another tool for people to strike back against corporations which try to fuck them
and sometimes it hits the wrong ones

One question!

[mshiltonj]

Where's the effing font management? How does my wife install TTF fonts without the command line or editing text conf files?

Re:One question!

[davydmadeley]

This is surprisingly easy, and surprisingly undocumented.

Open folder with fonts you want to install in Nautilus, open ~/.fonts directory, drag from one to the other. Fonts should now appear in fonts://. Ideally you should just be able to drag them to fonts:// but last time I tried this was broken, it might be fixed now.

(This is not a new feature)

Re:One question!

[IamTheRealMike]

It's also currently totally undiscoverable. At the very least it should appear under "Computer" or something.

Gnome logo of /.

[Eric Pierce]

When will Slashdot update their Gnome logo?

They're still stick on the 1.x Gnome logo which is.... the 1.x Gnome logo.

Re:Oh no !... I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome seem geared much more toward features than stability. Not that it's not stable as it is right now, but there are many tiny annoying bugs (ie: clicking a window's title to get focus and you end up dragging it without even holding the mouse button). It's a big project and, as such, it is pretty much usable, but...

There are a few things in Gnomes features I agrre and disagree with. All in all, what they try to accomplish is venerable, but I often think (like the initial poster) that some of the features should be defined at a level below the WM. For instance, seing the MS Windowish-like MIME association settings, it's very useful... in Gnome only. MIME could and should be defined system wide (it needs some thinking... like if you are in terminal or GUI,...). Same goes for the GConf that, even if it is a solution to bring under one common paradigm for defining software settings, it's only good in Gnome. There should be one made for the WHOLE system, not just the FWM.

But, like another poster said, it's a free project. The volunteers are free to give it the orientation they desire. If you're not happy with it, patch the code, fork the project, choose another WM, ... many choices are available and, at least, in true spirit of OSS philosophy, you have all the freedom in the world to do something about it.

Re:Oh no !... I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

. For instance, seing the MS Windowish-like MIME association settings, it's very useful... in Gnome only. MIME could and should be defined system wide (it needs some thinking... like if you are in terminal or GUI,...). Same goes for the GConf that, even if it is a solution to bring under one common paradigm for defining software settings, it's only good in Gnome. There should be one made for the WHOLE system, not just the FWM.

Try reading the article before bitching - the new MIME systerm *is* systemwide, not just for Gnome. It's based off freedesktop.org standards.

As for Gconf, it's not a standard right now - but it's a dependency for Gnome, not the other way around. There's nothing stopping anyone else from using it...

Looks exactly like Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing how similar to Windows this looks. Even some of the menu entries are stolen verbatim. It would be nice if some of the non-Windows UI clone WM's were getting more attention.

Unfortunately, Linux is more about "not using Windows" than it is about using new and interesting software to most people.

Re:sso what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, obviously it should look like a rainbow with neon signs.

Moron. You couldn't recognize beautiful it it hit you in the head.