The GNOME Journal, January Edition

Bates writes "The latest issue of The GNOME Journal has just been published. This regularly published online magazine features original content and commentary for and by the GNOME Community. This second issue covers some technical articles, including CD/DVD creation, connecting to remote resources, and how to get help from the GNOME community. Also, will GNOME pass the Liberal Arts major test? Developer topics are also covered, as Seth Nickell takes at look at the 'Experimental Culture' surrounding GNOME development and Christian Hammond sheds light on the concept of desktop presence."

Comments

slightly OT

[nocomment]

Anyone know where to get good gnome themes? Freshmeat doesn't have a whole lot.

Re:slightly OT

[sn0wman3030]

Yeah, gnome-look.org is a good site for gnome artwork.

Re:slightly OT

[Brandybuck]

Freshmeat dropped the ball on themes. For KDE themes go to kde-look.org, and for GNOME themes go to gnome-look.org. Finally, theme sites run by people who care...

Re:slightly OT

[mike_sucks]

How about art.gnome.org? That's where I get mine from.

-mike

GNOME themes would make more sense.

[jbn-o]

Making GNOME look like MacOS X doesn't make sense to me when clearly the focus of the journal is GNOME (hence the name "The GNOME Journal"). The CD/DVD burning article makes it look like this is focusing on MacOS X (or a slightly not-quite-right MacOS X look and feel).

Hence, I suggest using a theme that comes with GNOME by default (something everyone is likely to have) or picking a popular GNOME theme that doesn't try to make it look like something it is not.

Re:GNOME themes would make more sense.

[jbn-o]

I should have been more clear: I'm talking about the screenshots used in the articles.

Re:GNOME themes would make more sense.

[jimmy_dean]

Yeah, for the next issue, we plan on using the GNOME default theme just for the very reason that you brought up. Thanks for the reminder! :)

Re:GNOME themes would make more sense.

[BrokenHalo]

The CD/DVD burning article makes it look like this is focusing on MacOS X

True; furthermore, that article appears to rely on the user running an implementation of Gnome that includes hal/dbus for autoloading of media.

I don't know how many distributions do this by default, but I have found very good reasons for excluding it from my Dropline Gnome setup.

Re:GNOME themes would make more sense.

[Bates]

Well, almost any modern distro based on Linux will have hal/dbus... I know it works with Debian and Gentoo, I assume it works with RedHat, and of course it works with Ubuntu (which is very gnome-centric). That isn't a huge requirement....

Re:GNOME themes would make more sense.

[Bates]

Oh yeah, and if you don't have HAL/DBUS, you can always just select the CD Creator from the Places menu on any nautilus window... the window just doesn't come up on it's own.

Place your bets.

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict there's going to be a lot of GNOME sux post to this story.

Anyway they're doing some nice stuff. There's even a GNOME Daemon out there that helps solve the X11 clipboard problem.

KDE vs GNOME

[molnarcs]

[RANT=ON] You read the title of my comment :) Now a disclaimer: I'm not a GNOME user. And usually I don't post in GNOME related news b/c most of the time I don't read it. Now I did, and something strikes me as curious.

We all know of the KDE vs GNOME debate. There can't be a KDE announcment posted on OSNEWS without GNOME-fans spamming the thread with "konqueror is sooo cluttered I can't use it" kinda messages. Well, that's why you use GNOME, don't you, so why do you want KDE to be like GNOME if you already have something that satisfies you, and we, KDE users have something that satisfies us. That's what I usually think. I don't know about GNOME announcments for I don't read them. Maybe KDE users - well, lets call them for what they are: zealots - spam GNOME announments as well, I don't know. I don't say a KDE guy shouldn't comment in GNOME threads, or vice versa - it's just beating the same horse over and over again is not quite useful. WE LIKE FEATURES, and I don't feel like I can't use Konqi because there are 4 extra buttons on its toolbar compared to firefox.

Anyway, what prompted me to comment on this is that I thought that this is only a small but vocal minority of the overall user-base of GNOME. Afterall, projects with a significantly large userbase will have its share of zealots. But the very first link I clicked in this announcement begins with this (well, the first comments after the quotes):

I would argue it was already an in accurate caricature when it was written, but was spot on only a year or two before. When I first read that page, on balance, I thought it made it sound better to be a GNOME developer than a KDE developer. At least GNOME developers sounded creative and lively.

Today, I would argue that the caricatures are almost reversed. GNOME is a paragon of usable, restrained, unimaginative, corporate development. KDE is lively, nimble, cluttered, and a little crazy. What happened? How can we get the good aspects of "old GNOME" back without returning to diagramming in puddles of spilt beer, urine and vomit?

This is quite dissappointing. Why does the GNOME JOurnal have to begin with talking about KDE? Who writes GNOME journal? Is it "official"? Because this preoccupation with KDE, the irresistible urge to compare and judge (we the HIG people, they the Clutter people) the rival project is somewhat pathetic. Now I didn't read the rest of the articles - and I may be in the wrong here, but I find it sad that what ruins most of the discussions in KDE vs GNOME debates (because an interesting discussion _is_ possible I believe) is exactly the kind of crap we read in the opening lines of an (at least semi)official journal.

[RANT=OFF]

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[theantix]

Excuse me? "we the HIG people, they the Clutter people" is pretty much a summary of the difference between the two projects. Epiphany vs Konqueror, Nautiuls vs Konqueror, Konsole vs. gnome-terminal, Kedit vs Gedit, koffice vs gnome office, k3b vs nautilus/coaster, Kopete vs gossip/gaim. In each of these applications the KDE app has more features but the Gnome app is more streamlined and simple. Hell, you can even find this pattern in the games each project ships, the dialog boxes, the panel, the configuration settings. Nearly every aspect of the projects, where they differ the important difference is Simplicity vs. Features.

The projects are increasinly moving towards each other in some way, soon will be sharing a gstreamer backend, and are ditching the historical C/C++ divide as non-C projects are able to be included into Gnome (and probably non-C++ into KDE, but I don't know that for sure). They are co-operating in freedesktop.org in many important respects. Increasingly, the difference between Gnome and KDE are the choices required in the balance of Simplicity vs. Features. This observation is not a troll or exaggeration, though it is clearly the basis of what trolls use for material.

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[BrokenHalo]

I don't quite see what your point is.

The journal in question does not "begin with talking about KDE". It links to an article where KDE is mentioned in the context of desktop development, which IMO is entirely legitimate.

I'm not buying into which desktop is "superior" as I'm no longer as partisan as I used to be; I'm a longstanding (since ~1997) Gnome user, but I now find myself using KDE about 40% of the time. Both have their strengths, and both have their weaknesses.

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[molnarcs]

Well, you're right, the article is not bad at all (nor are the others). My point is neatly underlined by the post above yours ( theantix ) - we have a good number of users repeating this over and over, and now we have this stereotype encoured from semi-official sources. I think that "cluttered" is somewhat pejorative compared to "feature rich" for instance.

I'm no longer that much of a partisan either (well, sometimes the 'old fire' - hehe - still shows through, as you can see from my post above) - and I find myself using fluxbox-devel more and more (with a number of gtk apps).

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Being able to control every aspect of your desktop is not "feature rich". It just means you can control the behavior of any particular feature.

Really, both desktops offer pretty much the same thing. The technology is a bit different under the hood it's relatively the same. The manner the features are presented are fairly different.

KDE appeals to people who wish to control the desktop's behavior. This is usually linked to the fact that the people who use it tend to look at their computer as something that they must conform to their particular environment. (it's why some people still use twm or fvwm over a modern desktop)

GNOME tries to take an approach of using sensible defaults so that you cut down on the number of decision making that you have to do when you do a task. Hence it's very task oriented. This appeals to people who use the computer simply as a power tool and nothing else. One example is if you look at the Totem, the multimedia program to play DVDs and what not, you'll notice that it does not distinguish between opening a DVD, VCD, SVCD or what not but rather has a simple action called "Open Disc".

Both projects need to exist because of who we are. KDE and GNOME are moving towards to a common architecture but with different approaches and thats great because we borrow from each other through the freedesktop umbrella.

Read the previous GNOME Journal issue, and you'll see I wrote an article talking about this.

sri

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[molnarcs]

Both projects need to exist because of who we are.

Well, that's my point, you only managed to put it in one sentence instead of my clumsy and somewhat hasty (and by now I admit it) arrogant comment. What is clear from the so many flames I read that there is no way to create a desktop that a hardcore gnome user and a hardcore kde user will be comfortable with. Probably the way I set up kde would be a nightmare for a gnome user :) Furthermore, there is always a choice for a distro maker to customize the defaults, even for distroes that ship vanilla kde. In FreeBSD I can install the kde metaport (that includes everything and the kitchen synk) or kde-light which is basically kdelibs, kdebase and qt. If one chooses the latter,the KDEmenu (and other menus) are hardly cluttered. Nor would I find all the goodies I became to like (various service menus, additional menu entries in konqi menus, etc.).

Anyway, the article is good enough and can stand on it's own without the unfortunate metaphor it begins with.

Cheers.

Re:KDE vs GNOME

[Sri Ramkrishna]

You may note that the article starts off somewhat Anti-GNOME. :-)

sri

Poag was right?

[Anonymous Coward]

..shouldn't this have been addressed 4 years ago?