Gnome 2.8 RC1 Released

Too much like MS? by TheUnFounded · 2004-09-01 16:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'll probably get blasted for this, but like it or leave it, MS is known for making an interface that's usable to the masses. Want Linux on the desktop? That's the way to do it.

Re:Too much like MS? by MarcQuadra · 2004-09-01 16:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

I disagree, I run WindowMaker, and most kids who come over and sit at my desk figure it out quickly enough, they really dig the dock, and they LOVE the 'start menu whenever I right-click the background'. Almost everyone figures out the multiple-desktop thing too, when they see the pager with eight screens that shows a mini-screen for each one.

It helps that my menu items are named after the FUNCTION rather than the application that provides it. When you see 'music' it runs juk, when you click 'web' it opens firefox, etc.

The Windows-style taskbar interface is pretty weak if you intend to keep your session running for days or weeks instead of hours.

Everyone remarks how 'clean' and 'simple' my layout is, and the geekier note that 'it takes a lot less mousing around to get stuff done'.

The trick is that every corporate desktop needs to be uniform and MANAGED by someone who does the stuff like rename menu items to functions and remove all the excess cruft that the heavier desktop environments populate interfaces with.

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"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Re:Too much like MS? by InfiniteWisdom · 2004-09-01 17:46 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think button 1 does something, button 2 does something else is a lot more intuitive than button one does something if you press it for a short time and something else if you press it for a long time, and yet another thing if you move the mouse while you;re pressing it for a long time
Re:Too much like MS? by 10101001+10101001 · 2004-09-01 18:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

On that note, why should a click, two clicks, and a double click be treated differently? It's actually the third that's the issue, since with all the things that in Windows were made to require double clicking people double click on hyperlinks because they've come to understand a double click is what you use to activate a stand-alone widget (and MS stole this idea from Apple, clearly, who probably got it from PARC).

Fundamentally, a mouse is a pretty horrible tool to do a lot of things. Things like a second or third button and adding a scroll wheel all only attempt to overcome various limitations in control design inherent in trying to use a pointer in a 2D space. It's also a core reason why people are so attached to their keyboard, as it's often the case a lot quicker to just type a number into a spinbox or type in part of a url and arrow down to the right one (or finish it most often since your history has deep urls). Anyways, enough of that rant. :)

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Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Re:Too much like MS? by swv3752 · 2004-09-02 01:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

There is another school of thought that says: Design for the upper tier not the Lowest Common Denominator. Who wants something designed for fools and morons?

One must learn to drive a car, ride a bike, row a boat, swim, operate power tools, et cetera. Why should one not have to learn to use a computer?

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Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life

more like windows? by dnotj · 2004-09-01 16:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

Commentary in article submissions now...

Personally (as a long time KDE user) I don't find windows all that much like KDE. I sat down at an XP box the other day to try and accomplish some simple editing in a word document with embedded visio and felt lost. Perhaps Gnome is becoming more KDE like?

BTW: open office has trouble saving (via crashes) documents with a large number of embedded visio drawings. :(

.dn

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No more Micro$oft bashing from me. Its like bashing at the special olympics.

It's not KDE by steveha · 2004-09-01 16:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

I looked at all the screenshots, and nothing on there jumped out and bit me and yelled "Windows! IE!" I have no idea what FlipmodePlaya is complaining about.

It looks to me like it's just the GNOME 2.x that I know and love, with subtle, very incremental bits of polish. FlipmodePlaya, perhaps you could be a bit more specific?

P.S. I'm really looking forward to some of the new features, specifically Volume Manager and the new MIME handlers. GNOME 2.8's MIME features won't just be easier to use than previous GNOME versions--they will actually be easier to use than Windows's application association system.

steveha

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lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely

Re:It's not KDE by RevAaron · 2004-09-01 19:05 · Score: 3, Insightful

this is in response to a lot of people talking about this...

If you don't see any striking similarities between KDE and Windows, then you've been using Windows too long. GNOME has a lot of the same similarities that KDE has with Windows, though oftentimes they seem to steer away from the level of borrowing that KDE does. It could be independent thought on the part of the GNOME developers, or they may just be borrowing from other sources, which is fine by me.

A lot of folks don't really see many similarities. Why? They assume that all of these features that KDE or GNOME borrowed from Windows are just the way that any desktop would do them. They take for granted the way things look and feel, first on Windows where they got started, and then on Linux using KDE and/or GNOME. Not all desktops need to look like Windows, KDE or GNOME.

Most KDE developers grew up using Windows first, rather than the Amiga, NeXTSTEP, BeOS, Mac OS Classic or CDE. They associate the idea of a desktop environment with what Windows provides. The Windows desktop is the benchmark for a person who has been using Windows. That's fine, especially when they are targeting Windows converts, making the move from Microsoft Windows to Linux/Windowsish on the same x86 PC easy enough. It makes sense, but it shows. Most regular Windows users- and most regular KDE/GNOME users and a very high percentage of KDE/GNOME developers only have substantial experience using Windows. Most folks have used Mac, but it's Windows that is running in VMware while they try to put together analogous features *not* those other OSes/desktop environments.

P.S. Just out of curiousity, how will GNOME 2.8's MIME features be easier than the Winders way of doing things? From the screenshots in some of the replies to your post they really don't seem much different. IMHO, the GNOME version is ultimately better, as it depends on a MIME type rather than the extension.

Although with our current file systems, it is the file extension that tells the DE what MIME type it is- but down the line, when we are finally all using more flexible databases for data storage rather than random containers of unstructured binary and textual data that MIME type system will come in handy, I expect. Or on a file systems like BeFS or HFS+ where you can have metadata tagged on specifying the MIME type regardless of what goes after the past period in the filename.

But how easier? Both are pretty straight forward- you got a file type. You tell it what apps can deal with it and choose a default. When you double click the file, it opens the default, but when you right click you get the option to open the document up in any of the associated apps. The Windows version seems to add a little more power- that is, you can specify different actions (open, edit, print, analyze, whatever makes sense for that file type) that calls those different apps, etc etc. Perhaps GNOME 2.8's MIME system has that but isn't something I'm seeing in the screenshots, but if not, it's something they should add and I'd expect they would.

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Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Re:It's not KDE by CaptnMArk · 2004-09-01 21:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

Not using file extensions on today's file system is a bad idea. They are the easiest way for most people to identify a type of file. An icon is much worse most of the time and a separate column with file type is often less visible (and in some views not at all).

Most clueful windows people enable file extensions immediately. They are very useful between separating safe-to-click files and unsafe-to-click files. They are also a hint to the user about what will happen when they click on the file.

And if the above is not enough. I haven't seen anyone proposing elimination of .c and .h extensions yet.

Submissions by entrigant · 2004-09-01 16:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

My opinion: the GUI changes look too much like Windows/Internet Explorer for my tastes; I guess it's not just KDE."

You know it wouldn't kill the slashdot editors to EDIT submissions instead of just dumping them as is into the main site. Especially when one is as unprofessional as this. Flaming does NOT belong on the front page of slashdot. This is absolutely rediculous. First "four of parts", and now this bull? Why, Slashdot, do you feel like you can ask me for money when you pull crap like this?

Re:Submissions by stor · 2004-09-01 17:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

I hate to agree with you but I do.

The snide and brain-dead remarks/trolls/flamebait should be left to the posters, rather than be in full view on the front page.

Otherwise you end up with patronising posts such as this one =)

Cheers
Stor

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"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Re:Submissions by optikSmoke · 2004-09-01 18:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

Um, its a copy dialog. Really, it's ok. If they've decided to make it a dialog, there isn't much else to do with it. It looks like they put the progress bar at the top instead of the bottom........ but there isn't much else to put in there, so I don't see how it can be considered "copying" windows. If you take the simplest dialogs as an example, obviously there will be similarities.

Anyway, I don't understand people's outright negative reactions when things "look like" Windows. Some parts of most desktops look like some parts of others, it's just a matter of choosing which parts are best for inclusion, or building something better if that's possible. Windows may not be the best in all areas (I'll be the first to admit my annoyance with some of its behaviour), but in some areas it has good UIs -- and I don't see why making a similarly good UI is frowned upon. However, in no way do all of either KDE or GNOME resemble Windows or Apple, and both desktops have their own pluses over other systems.
Re:Submissions by prockcore · 2004-09-01 18:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

Look at dialogues such as this and tell me it doesn't look as if they went out of their way to make it look like the Explorer copy/download one.

Looks exactly like the OSX copy/move dialog box. No reason to be different just for the sake of being different.

Evolution does not belong !! by Qwavel · 2004-09-01 16:50 · Score: 3, Insightful

Evolution should not be part of Gnome - it should be added by the people who build the distro's.

If you start adding applications to Gnome, where do you stop? Are they going to add OpenOffice or AbiWord/Gnumeric to the next version of Gnome? After all, a word processor is pretty basic.

The Gnome people should focus on making it easy for distro builders and end-users to add (well integrated) apps. Don't build the apps into the desktop.

Re:Evolution does not belong !! by Eric+Smith · 2004-09-01 17:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

good reason why Evo is being included -- having the contact information centralized and standard in every Gnome installation means that other Gnome applications can use that data.
If having that data is valuable for other applications, then it would be reasonable to include a system component that provides the storage and APIs for that data. Then Evolution and other Gnome applications could use it. But that doesn't justify including the entire Evolution client as a standard part of Gnome.

Explorer Easy to use? by Luineancaion · 2004-09-01 16:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

I don't think that microsoft have done a good job of making computers easy to use at all, for a complete beginner it's completely confusing, when my father first tried to use a windows box he didn't know at all what to do with it to get the stuff he wanted done. Since using Gnome he hasn't asked me a single question and has found it incredibly easy to use. Keep it simple stupid.

Re:Explorer Easy to use? by ciroknight · 2004-09-01 18:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

Important question: Had he used Windows before GNOME?

I only ask because the skills learned in Windows are easily portable to any current GUI, and visa versa. I personally believe that I could sit down at any computer and figure out the GUI, but then again I was like this when I first started using computers with Windows 3.1 on them. So it's really important to look and see how GUIs are alike and how they are different.

Today, the main functionality of a GUI is virtually the same in any operating system, under any Windows Manager (minus a few frenge ones...); we are getting to the point that we are "desktop-agnostic". The only thing that remains in Linux is to get video accelleration up to Windows/MacOS X levels, and once there, start sprucing everything up with a bit of eye candy (drop shadows rock eye-candy wise, fast window transforms like in Mac OS X, etc). But I do have to admit that Linux, at current, is far more themeable than either Windows XP or Mac OS X, and I believe it will probably remain that way for a long time... (bad for new users, good for established users).

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"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush

Not necessarily bad... by FiReaNGeL · 2004-09-01 16:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

Ressemblance to Windows / IE goes a long way toward new users migration for Microsoft, keep that in mind.

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Eureka Science News - automatically updated

I see these +0.1 releases discussed often, but.. by SpookyFish · 2004-09-01 16:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

I use linux and 'doze both daily, but spend ~70% of my time hacking code on linux. The WM doesn't matter that much to me, because it just needs to be a good way between 4 desktops full worth of bash shells and vi windows.. but both gnome and kde feel weak when it comes to the 'everyday' stuff I usually do on windows .. email, browsing, office apps, etc.
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the real BUT, though, is this thought - Would it help the (big) open source groups to start being more feature focused?

Look at many dot releases from M$ or Apple.. 90% is NEWNEWNEW and a little is 'does xyz better, zyx works now'

The geek stuff needs to be available, sure, but "higher level" messages might go far to boost adoption.

My thinking is, Average Joe just dipping a toe into 'non-conformist' ways, and sees a big new announcement.. he looks in and sees a ton of stuff he doesn't understand, and a long list of bugs fixed that makes him think 'ugh, this still has too many problems.'

If he looks in and sees mostly "Now imports Word 2006 docs with perfect formatting! .... New graphics engine leverages 3d hardware to be 80% faster! .." he is going to have a very different view.

$.02

Too much like Windows!?!? Oh, Heaven Forbid!!!!!! by ZuperDee · 2004-09-01 17:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

My opinion: the GUI changes look too much like Windows/Internet Explorer for my tastes; I guess it's not just KDE.

Since when does "looking too much like Product X" automatically make something bad? Are you really that much of a zealot that you concern yourself more with how much it "looks like Windows/IE" than with how USEFUL GNOME IS AS A PRODUCT IN ITS OWN RIGHT?

Good grief, man!!! I'd hate to break it to you, but I hate Microsoft just as much as anyone here, if not MORE so... They *ARE* an evil company, no two ways about it. HOWEVER, having said that: it IS possible for even the most evil of people/corporations to have a good idea once in a while. (Need I point out that Hitler, for all his evil, was the one who started work on things like the Autobahn and the Volkswagen.)

If I were to take your argument to an extreme, I would have to say: Ogg Vorbis is no good--after all, the concepts behind it sound too much like MP3 or AAC.

Heh. No wonder Slashdot has so little credibility with some people.

Brave New GNOME by Doc+Ruby · 2004-09-01 17:50 · Score: 3, Insightful

The inclusion in GNOME of the improved MIME lookup engine, with configurable renderers, is a tremendous step. Apps should use IPC to exchange data, each handling only their own processing specialty. Transport apps that merely retrieve data per specified protocol (eg. FTP, HTTP, torrent), and presentation apps that merely render data per type, and accept user interaction, with standard APIs among them, make the entire system more stable. And easier to expand. Sometime soon we'll have apps which include layered, overlapping window panes each rendering and accepting user events, calling across to mixed logic components, and down into any data source, whether local storage, network, or sensors. Compilable flowcharts, anyone?

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make install -not war

Re:Yeah by Brandybuck · 2004-09-01 18:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

The big desktops are becoming more difficult and time consuming to customize "just right*.

If XFCE is customized "just right" out of the box for you, then great. Someone must have been reading your mind. But for me and a lot of people, it is NOT customized just right out of the box for the way we like to use the desktop. Frankly, there's way too many people and way too few desktops to expect very many instances of people finding a desktop whose default settings perfectly match their preferred customizations.

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Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!

Damned if you do and damned if you don't by Alioth · 2004-09-01 20:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

Well, from the screenshots, I don't think it looks anything like Windows (other than having the features that all GUIs have, so there will always be some similarity).

But part of the problem with Free desktop critics is you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you make your interface look like Windows, these critics will have a go because it looks like Windows. If you make it look unlike Windows, they will criticise you because it's "unfamiliar".

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Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows

Too much like Windows? by 10Ghz · 2004-09-01 23:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

Answer me this: Why is anything that even remotely resembles Windows automatically a bad thing? Is this just a case of "Windows? It's made by Microsoft. And since Microsoft sucks, Windows suck as well. And since Windows and Microsoft sucks, the Windows UI sucks as well!".

I don't think Gnome looks like Windows. Well, of course it (and KDE as well) shares some common things with Windows. They all have windows. they have a taskbar. They have a start-menu or equivalent. And they all offer integrated system with similar look 'n feel between apps and tools. Are ANY of those things bad things? Why? Just because Windows has them as well?

Why don't you whiners start your own GUI-project. Call it UTIADFWAP, or "UI That Is As Different From Windows As Possible". Make sure that it doesn't look anything like Windows. Maybe then you will be happy. Who cares about usability or consistensy, at least it would be different from Windows! And it seems that many people think that being different from Windows is the primary feature of a Linux/Unix-UI these days!

Some "anything but Windows!"-zealots usually whine about KDE that "it looks too much like Windows". I use KDE at work (occasionally I boot to W2K for a game or two) and XP at work. I don't think KDE and Windows'es look that much alike. Well, the file-dialog is a bit similar, but that's it. And that's not really a bad thing, since I think the Windows file-dialog serves me well. The one in KDE looks somewhat similar, but it's alot better.

Yes, I dislike Microsoft as well. And Windows the OS has it's share of problems. But it's UI is OK on the basic level. Yes, the UI does have problems as well, but luckily KDE (and Gnome I think) fixes those issues.

repeat after me: just because something can be found in Windows does not automatically mean that it's a bad thing.

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Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.

Re:Outsider's Take by ajs · 2004-09-02 00:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

Look and feel are uninteresting except where they are expressions of unique features. Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker and dozens of minor desktops I've probably never heard of are all themeable.

The real test is how FUNCTIONAL your desktop is. Does it have modern internationalization and accessibility featurs. Does it provide a framework for application cooperation? Does it provide a framework for user management of desktop features that is consistent, even for external elements?

Pretty baubles are easy and relatively universal. Functionality is hard.

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