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Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10, scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005. Looks like the new release-policy is starting to pay of, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple of new ones are added. Also (finally) a mozilla-stylee type-ahead find has been implemented in Gnome's Open/Save dialog. Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?" Update: 01/18 01:40 GMT by T : Oops - the "2-point" got chopped off in the headline; still a while until GNOME 10.
I know it's not *that* important, and represents something that the user could (I hope) change, but the nasty garish colors used for syntax coloring in that text editor screenshot have got to go.
A more muted palette would look more attractive. Drop the saturation a bit, use darker colors than hot pink and neon purple. Muted blues and greens like the ones in slashdot's Developers section and Main section. Those would look nice.
Using the bright colors also makes it look primitive, like it's limited to using a Windows 16-color palette.
You don't need to dress up the text editor like a $5 ho just to get the point across that it can do text in color. Pink text doesn't make the point any better than a muted blue would.
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The GNOME-Mozilla-Mono "alliance" makes sense when you look at Avalon. It's a good move that is sure to give Linux and other OSS users an option that doesn't involve going to Microsoft. Soooo where is the KDE team in all of this?
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the KDE guys have really missed the boat here. It seems like they are so caught up building a traditional desktop that they haven't realized that their competition is much more aggressive now.
Not trying to be a troll, just noticing that GNOME and Xfce seem to be getting better and better whereas KDE just seems to be becoming more like Windows in the worst ways.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I'd agree, and I hate GTK 1.x. The old file selector allowed you to filter file lists, so you could type "*.mp3" then hit tab so only mp3 files would be shown. This is not possible in the new file selector, and the Mozzila style searching is not an acceptable substitute.
This regression is probably a result of the GNOME developers simplicity-at-all-costs attitude, and they probably want filtering to be done by the application, eg. the mp3 player shows only mp3s, and using the MIME type system instead of extension. This might seem a superior solution, but actually it is not. The old file selector allowed any combination of wildcards in the search, so you could do things like "*report*" or "Track??.mp3". I think it even allowed regular expressions. This is a much more powerful system, and it didn't confuse newbies because they didn't know it existed.
A couple months ago, Anders Carlsson quickly touched upon deprecating age-old library cruft from GNOME and thus making the environment leaner and easier to understand. Unfortunately, he says that such a thing wouldn't be able to happen at least until GNOME 3.0 rolls out. This can't come soon enough.
Personally I think it looks really smart, clear and uncluttered and of course it is easier to downlaod and apply your own themes than windows which should appeal to the average home user.
I tend to change my theme every so often so as not to get bored, but on windows it was a case of blue, silver or classic and I would argue that all of them arn't as nice as industrial or gartoon in gnome
Why not embrace Linux for what it is (UNIX), and not try to make it something it is not (fisher price).
Well done Gnome.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
The really remarkable thing is that in spite of having only a fraction of the corporate support KDE is far more usable. Yes, a few things are clumsier than I would like, but they seem to have avoided the completely idiotic design decisions that GNOME has made (the spatial browser, the hideous file selector, eliminating user-visible preferences to an extreme).
The really pathetic thing is that GNOME and KDE today are pretty much duplicate efforts. This situation has become a terrible waste of community resources. From a technical perspective, there is no significant advantage to either platform. From a user perspective, most people are more comfortable with KDE because it is closer to Windows, which they are used to. GNOME is idealistic; KDE is practical. Guess which more people actually use.
That being said, KDE needs some serious improvement in few performance areas and the stability of apps under its umbrella. Kmail and Konqueror come to mind first..
It's pretty crap that it doesn't do the wildcard thing, considering that I remember file dialogs on the Amiga doing that as long ago as about 1993 or 1994 - even on the crappy system-supplied GUI library in Workbench 2.x And remember folks, that was a machine that could run the entire damn OS from a small ROM and a floppy disk. I agree, the file open/save dialogs are the worst parts of Gnome at the moment. You don't have a field where you can type/paste a file path, and half the time when you hit "Save" you actually have to click another control in order to be able to save it anywhere other than the current folder or a few fairly retarded locations like /home or / ... I mean seriously, I do a lot of work for a whole bunch of clients, why do I always have to go:
Save -> Browse For Other Folders -> find my Folder -> Type a filename
That second step is totally pointless and confusing, and there's no obvious or intuitive way to turn that bastard off the first time you see it, unlike most of the annoying GUI features of Windows. Teaching people to understand how file structures work in an intuitive manner is one of the functions of a file open/save dialog, and the Gnome one just muddies the waters by acting as if Saving Somewhere Else is some kind of advanced "super user" trick that needs a Special Super User Button to enable.
Hopefully there's a way to turn that off, but it's not obvious enough to be user friendly if there is.
And, also - this bugs me... why on earth does Gnome have a Windows-style registry? The registry is one of the worst, most annoying, dumbest features of Windows and a big reason that I like working in Linux. So why on earth would you want to copy it? Please tell me. Has Windows corrupted our minds so much that we think editing registry keys is COOL? Or are we just gearing up so that we can have nice programs like Registry First Aid as well?
However, you can rest assured that the GNOME development team thought long and hard before they decided *not* to include [different backgrounds for different workspaces]. It takes a lot of guts to say, "no, this isn't really necessary."
No, it doesn't. "I don't need this, therefore you don't either" is an incredibly easy line to take. It takes no guts to say it. Nor does it take guts - only time - to put in the effort, research the issue, and find out what your end users (both novices and experts) have to say.
What does take guts is to back down and admit that you were wrong, if your research does not agree with your expectations. And what I see in the GNOME development team - and their detractors - is not guts but religion. The GNOME team worship simplicity. The question they ask of any proposed feature is not "will this be beneficial to our end users", but "does this fit in with our design aesthetic".
I'm not criticising that. Simplicity is a valid goal, and it's one that KDE has not chosen, so it reduces the duplication of effort that so many people used to whine about.
However, it seems somehow implausible that the GNOME team considered this particular feature long and hard; given that it seems like a logical extension of the spatial metaphor, it seems to me that its absence can only suggest that they barely considered it if at all. Can you point to the relevant messages on the appropriate mailing list? I'd be interested to see what research they actually did, and what were their other arguments against making different workspaces visually distinct.
Of coarse, we can. The whole world is about many choices, not the holy one. :)
:) They both rock, dude.
And in exchange, I still use K3b and Kbabel at my GNOME desktop
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Not really. Gnome is written in C, KDE is written in C++. Gnome uses GTK+, KDE uses Qt. What makes you think that Gnome-hackers would be good KDE-hackers, or vice versa? I mean, the two are technologically quite different. And what makes you think that Gnome-hackers would even want to work on KDE, or KDE hackers on Gnome? Each group has created a desktop according to their vision of what the desktop should be like. And they apparently have quite different visions. How exactly would you merge those two? And if you did, large part of the developers would spin off and start their own desktop-project, and you would be right back where you started!
Right now Gnome and KDE provide each other some good competition. having one big project with no competition is not necessarily a good thing. Just look at what happened with Xfree! it stagnated for years. and users had no real alternative to it. If Gnome-guys start to rest on their laurels, KDE-guys would annihilate them. And if KDE-guys started doing the same, Gnome-guys would wipe the floor with them. So they can't afford to be lazy.
"serious" improvement? I haven't seen any problems with KDE's performance or stability. I did a comparison to Gnome few months ago (I believe it was Gnome 2.6 back then), and the performance was more or less comparable. Gnome started up few seconds faster (which doesn't really matter in the end, since you only start it up once), but it was a bit slower on some other things. All in all, the two were more or less comparable.
On my computer, Konqueror and Kontact appear more or less instantly after I start them. Well, Kontact shows the splash-screen for a second or two, and then it's up 'n running. And I haven't been able to make it crash yet. And, as far as performance is concerned, 3.4 should (Again) be quite a bit faster than the previous version was. And 3.3 was faster than 3.2 was. I like that trend quite a bit.
Seriously, it seems to be fashinable to whine how "KDE is slow! It hogs memory!" with very little facts to back those claims up. On my computer, RAM-consumtion seems to be about 140-150MB, and that's with fully functional KDE-session running with several apps (Konqueror and Kontact notably) and services (Kwallet, Kopete etc.). I really think that's not too bad, and this is a 64bit machine, where the memory-consumption is a bit higher than on 32bit machines.
I have seen the RAM-consumption climb to something like 270MB. But that was after prolonged use of the desktop, with several apps and several KDE-sessions running in the background. Again: more than reasonable.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Here we go again.
... like leaving your windows in one place and doing some programming in one of them. Maybe you could even improve X?
You're that same guy I replied to last time, right? The one with the 300 Mhz Celeron and Trident video card, and who absolutely insists that the only test that should be applied to a graphics system is how well your POS hardware can render a Mozilla window being dragged around like crazy on your desktop.
I'm not surprised it flickers. Upgrade your hardware. It doesn't flicker on mine, and even if it did, I wouldn't care, because I don't sit there dragging around windows, watching the speed they redraw at, and tossing off over the fastest system I can find. There are more important things to do
In Galeon you can middle click on the icons "next","back", and "up" to open in a new window. I would like to do the same in Nautilus.