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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.
...from the previous releases. Looks fantastic - and actually looks like the interface was *thought through*. Good job team.
Why would a release of OpenOffice make it the year of Gnome? Isn't OpenOffice independent of Gnome (I run it fine in KDE)?
Also, the header is soo misleading (I thought I had done timejump or something)
Je ne parle pas francais.
You can see Suns influence on gnome here!
My pics.
Wow what year is it? I haven't checked out Gnome for a while and I missed 7 versions already!
I'm so behind the times using Debian here.. I only have 2.8, and here 10 is released? Wow. I thought all the "Debian is old" jokes were stupid, but now I know for sure that they were right all along.
One of the things I keep hoping GNOME will get better at is file handling. Konqueror is a great tool for splitting windows, drag'n'drop between ftp sites/websites/etc, and the FILE DIALOG in KDE is pretty decent too...
Why can't the GNOME one get better? The 2.4 and pre series was a JOKE and this new one, even with all it's vaunted HIG stuff, is still horrible imho. Why can't I see thumbs? Previews? A decent file tree? Bleh.
The open dialog is still that horrible atrocity. I'd really, really be glad if they reverted to the 1.4 open dialog. I hate KDE.
I just dont like the Square scroll bars, they look kinda cheesy, but I think its just the theme they used. I cant wait until Gnome has the funtionality that Macosx has. Oh wait it does....
keanmarine.com
Actually, it is pronounced, guh-nome and guh-nu.
That being said, I pronounce GNOME as "gnome", and GNU as "guh-nu".
The mime sniffing is still a pain. I have to drag and drop to open certain types of files, even occasionally plain text files like .cpp which on rare occasion it mistakes for a file I never heard of. Just double clicking the files or right clicking and selecting "open with" gives a security warning and it refuses to open, even when both both the sniffed filetype and the filetype matching the extension open with the same application. A fix for the problem involves changing about 4 lines of code in 1 function.
I'm all about the HIG-enabled stuff. I dig it a lot...In most cases. I think the HIG-powered windows are great when you're going through your ~/, but I think it stinks when you're going across to other parts of the FS, like /usr/lib/gettext.
Plus, I think it'd be outstanding if I could simply get different desktop pics for my different workspaces. As it is now, you can't. Isn't part of the HIG to make it as intuitive as possible? However, we can't know what workspace we're looking at unless we look at the little applet on the taskbar. Having different images (like in *cough* KDE), would be fantastic.
Not according to the Gnome website.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
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.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I blame Tony the Tiger.
but RMS founded gnu, and he pronounces it guh-noo. Are you going to tell someone who invented the name that he pronounces it wrong?
Oh, and the G in gnome stands for gnu, therefore is pronounced in the same way.
of course, i dont actually care either way, but you were on a high horse...mine is higher.
i wish i was but oh well
They'll catching up to win95/OS8 in no time flat!
/I'm sorry... no 'wow' factor at all. Maybe they should get Enlightenment's people to build up a visually appealing gnome demo?
...we've had 30 comments already and nobody has pointed out the typo in the story summary.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
So, in the sense that you are completely, utterly wrong, yes, that was an insightful post.
Hello?! What's 2 in binary?
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 agree on the dorkyness count, but that said Miguel, Nat, and all the other Ximians say "guh-nome" in real life.
But seriously, Gnome and KDE are so close in functionality that I've honestly only chosen to use KDE because it looks nicer.
They are both great desktops. KDE's latest offering (3.3) even added convenient single-file theme packages (*.kth) which strangely hasn't seemed to generate even a tiny bit of buzz. That means its fully themeable without any complicated packages! Just import your best friends theme and use it.
Which all mean I don't understand the Linux communities relationship with their desktop at all. =)
Maybe Gnome will add something like this and realise how popular theme support is (and push it). Who knows.
Quack, quack.
I couldn't quite tell from the article, but are true transparencies going to be supported in, say, gnome-terminal, using the Composite module?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
might i also thank the grandparent post for giving me this opportunity to boost my karma.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
...it's binary?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.
.. 2004
Could be worse...I have a friend that pronounces it "gee-nome"
'Guh-noo-nome' it is. Beat that KDE.
The question is whether the spatial metaphor is always useful. I usually know where my files are, I just need to get to them. I'm not searching for random crap I might have around somewhere. Gnome's interface gets in the way of that.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Those screenshots look HOT!
It also looks like they've fixed a long standing gripe of mine - namely the fact that creating Samba shares under Gnome is (was(?)) a pain in the neck.
I cannot wait to get my hands on 2.10. Does anyone know if Ubuntu Hoary is going to use it?
If this preview is anything to go by, the UI offered by Gnome as it matures and its feature set becomes complete will be a serious contender gainst the other major GUI's (namely KDE, Windows and Aqua).
Kudos to the Gnome team and keep up the great work.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
With years of slashdot stories asking "Will XXXX finally be the year of Y?", will 2005 finally be the year of slashdot retiring that stupid phrase?
See, I totally agree with the grandparent poster. If you want everyone to pronounce GNU - GUH-NEW, you spell it accordingly. I have, and always will, say GNU - GEE-EN-EWE, why? BECAUSE IT'S A FUCKING ACRONYM! I pronounce it in the most sensical, straight forward way, because acronyms are meant (in theory) to simplify things. I don't give a fuck what RMS thinks. If he wants us to pronounce it Guh-new, maybe he should have named GNU something that, when acronym-ated, sounds more like Guh-New. GNU is three letters, G, N, and U. I pronounce it accordingly. RMS started a great thing, and seems to be an...eh...interesting guy...but i'm pretty fed up with Geeks, engineers, et al forcing their God complexes on us and dictating the RIGHT WAY to do things. Free software is about Freedom, right? Well i reserve the right to be free in my choice of acronym pronunciation. Thank you, and Goodnight.
So, umm, KDE is bad because it is more like Windows, and the solution to this is to...be more like the next version of Windows (Avalon)?
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).
This looks really nice. Makes a wonderful impression on someone who last used GNOME at 2.0. Loads better than KDE, especially with Keramik for the default scheme.
Damn.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Perhaps this makes sense to the casual user. Perhaps not. I certainly am too much of a geek to pretend that I know what the casual user wants/needs.
Certainly the GNOME storage idea is much like that of Google.. I'd rather type something in Google than look for a bookmark much of the time. But if I can't really remember the name, that's when things like bookmarks and hierarchical structures become usefull. Indeed most of the time, looking at the site favicon in my bookmarks dropdown is what triggers my memory most... that and the categorizing. So I guess, imho, spacial is not a complete replacement for hierarchical, but hierarchical can be a complete replacement for spacial.
Also, for people that manipulate files and collections of files a LOT - possibly from multiple locations on the disk - I'm not sure that spacial makes much sense. My mom and family sure don't like it. (At least their experience from Mac OSX... and lets not pretend GNOME's system is that much different. KDE rips Windows quite often but the same can be said of OSX and GNOME). I guess it depends on your perspective... but right now, the KDE file dialog works, but the GNOME storage stuff is not distributed. =P
Windows XP looks like a Fisher-Price toy unless you alter it to something better.
The default WinXP gui freaks me out like few other interfaces. I'll rather have the CDE-gui than the deafult WinXP-gui. No flamewar intended, but the WinXP gui really, really looks like it was designed for a 2 year old to play with, not for people to work with.
"A new exiting interface" my ass...
/oldschool
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
It's not blandness, it's usability!
...ok yeah, they're bland.
Right guys?!?! Right?!
So was every year from 2001 to now. While Linux is great, it could use some better GUI tools for new Linux users and lazy bums like me.
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.
Dey took ahr jawbs!
Yep, all this seems great, but still there's one thing: I'd like to see a _real_ PDF reader in GNOME (with type ahead find if possible :). KDE is going to have one in 3.4
Anyone knows if, say, Evince is going the way kpdf is?
It's pronounced "nome". Not "guh-nome"
As in,
"nome": small crockery chap who sits in your garden pretending to fish
"guh-nome": an operating system, recognisable as a GNU project by the hard "G" in the name
While I agree that saying "Year of the..." has definatly become a cliche, perhaps there is some logic behind it? Maybe it is simply because things are always improving. Gnome today is better than it was last year, and it was better last year than it was the year before that.
However, the poster saying that "this could be the year of the Gnome" sounds pretty biased, as if KDE or XFCE or whatever will be inferior.
I sure hope there will be a graphical way to edit the menu. With Windows you right click on the menu with Gnome you -er- I donno.
Can we do without the misleading and sensational headlines please. You might get me to read the story, but my respect for Slashdot will only dwindle.
While the animal gnu (also called the wildabeast) is pronounced with a silent G, as is the mythical creature gnome, when you start getting into acronyms (that's what all those capital letters mean) then you're allowed some leeway.
A whole bunch of file dialogs from different OS are here. Panther's looks kind of similar to the current GNOME one - the old GTK dialog looks like the older MacOS style.
isn't 2.10 the same as 2.1, so that would mean that 2.8 is larger than 2.1 so how is this new release not the same numerically as gnome 2.1?
With Novell (who also owns Ximian) via SUSE and other large companies like IBM. The default desktop for *all* of the commercially successful desktop distros (commercially successful, since you're talking about commercial alliances). Connected to state contracts with national governments like Germany's Kolab project.
KDE does have plenty of connections, as does Gnome. I'd hardly say that either is ignoring that aspect of their projects. Both have excellent people working toward commercial advocacy.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
gnu Audio pronunciation of "gnu" ( P )
Pronunciation Key (noo, nyoo)
The "g" is silent, just like in gnome.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
The question is whether the spatial metaphor is always useful.
I'm convinced the spacial thing only came about because they didn't feel like fixing the tree view sidebar.. There's just no other reasonable explanation.
There was Gnome 1. Then it was Pango. I thought different Gnome-native IME would be implemented (some already have been) but to this date a lot of people still are waiting for the CJK IME...especially since other input modules don't have good integration and sometimes just don't work well at all.
Can anyone shine some light on it?
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..
I've been asleep. Can someone point me to the release policy mentioned or precis it for me?
Sent in the correction while it was still "in the future", redly ... sometimes they pay attention, sometimes not.
Infuriate left and right
Seriously. Yes, the interface is now cleaner but only because the layout of every screenshot bar the open/save dialogs looks like a complete and utter copy of Windows.
You mean like the main desktop menus on top, the different button naming and order, the spatial file manager or the background chooser?
Yeah, this post is a lot of whining about 2 products I don't even use (linux & windows)
That's what I thought...
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.
I'm certain these developers that volunteer their time are eagerly awaiting your consent as to what projects they may work on.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
Do you really need Bookmarks and Go in a help browser?
I know I need Bookmarks for help items I need to read periodically. It saves me to repeat a search.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Like with everything, why copy what you proclaim to be better than.
But I agree with you; I always pull people up when they talk about SCUBA diving. I prefer to pronounce it as ESS-SEE-EWE-BEE-AY diving, as any sane person would. Same goes for when I use a ELL-AY-ESS-EEE-ARR. Or the other day, when the police pulled me over for speeding. I had to correct the officer when he insisted I had been detected with a radar, when in fact it was an ARR-AY-DEE-AY-ARR. Join the fight brother; together we can de-acronise the world!
Any idea on which distros will be shipping with 2.10? I'm guessing Fedora will be one of the first.
Everytime I turn around I'm going in a different direction
That was more interesting than I might have expected. I like the dialogs that put me in context - above and below - in a single window. I hated the Mac OS-9 system of having to click in a separate area to go up a directory. Windows 3.1 version and the Red Hat 9 version were ones I liked because with a quick little click, you could go up a level:
Having to select a lower level from a drop down box takes so freakin' long - I've never liked it that way.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I love Gnome/Ximian for Mono and GTK, for Evolution and Gimp, for AbiWord and Gnumeric, for Gaim and Rhythmbox.
Yet, somehow, I use them all on my KDE desktop.
No flamewar is necesary. I guess thats part of the beauty of linux. Maybe we can all get along after all.
Cheers,
Adolfo
Hmm, it seems that GNOME has copied the Mac OS X open/save dialog. I use OS X regularly, and haven't felt limited by the open/save dialog yet. I don't suppose I would feel limited by the GNOME one.
I like KDE's open/save dialog as well. But to be honest, I never type the name of the file in and use the tab completion. The most I'll ever do is manually change the filter.
I can't imagine Apple putting that functionality in their open/save dialogs. The average Apple user probably wouldn't know what to do with them (what's a wildcard?).
Interesting, I just opened the open dialog in safari, and while it shows all the files in a directory, any files that aren't registered to be handled by this program are greyed out. There is no way to change the filter either.
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
I can't make it clear enough how important it is for the product to reflect it's own unique culture in it's UI design.. and not say the culture of Netscape on Windows 3.1 with just a few more gradients.
Congratulations for something that looks consistent, but zero points for them trying to be the better alternative that they claim to be.
Disregarding any 'con' has been the plight of some open source projects for quite a long time. It's not aggressive, it's constructive, take them on board remember them for next time, evolve, and today it's 'don't rip off windows we all know it's lame'.
Look at the difference between the interfaces in 99% of other UI's.
Look at a screenshot of NeXT, a screenshot of BeOS, a screenshot of IRIX, a screenshot of MacOS, a screenshot of Amiga Workbench, a screenshot of Windows and a screenshot of KDE/GNOME. Which two look most alike to you? Which two act mostly the same. Which one do we constantly bitch about? Innovate for fucks sake or you'll forever be playing catch up.
All? Mandrake is pretty successful. In fact, the first two most popular distro's according to distrowatch are Gnomeish desktops:
http://distrowatch.com/
Jason Lotito
By that argument, why not G-Nome, as in "genome"? Sounds cool, and it makes sense.
Yes we know gnome et al aren't entirely original and have to copy -something- here and there, it's inevitable that they'll endup copying something that was used sometime in history.
However their direction(i.e what to copy) is best served by looking at which products still exist today despite the overwealming MS market, if you're going to copy something, copy these products as they clearly have something which MS can't quench.
This isn't off-topic - it's on-topic for a metatopic. At least read the entire thing (particularly the end) before modding me in any direction, be it up, down, or along the imaginary axis.
First off, this is Slashdot. For software announcements, see Freshmeat. It's not like the two are in competition with each other. Next, the title of the article contains an error in the version number of Gnome being announced. But we'll let that slide, since it got caught within a few hours and an update was posted.
Now, into the meat...
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10, scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005.
This is incorrect in one way or another. Either Mr. Madeley wrote an article entitled "A Sneak Peak at Gnome 2.10" and the submitter failed to capitalize the A, he wrote an article entitled "Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10" and the submitter added an extraneous A, or he wrote a generic sneak peek at Gnome 2.10 and the submitter erroneously capitalized "Sneak Peak." Additionally, is the article scheduled for release on March 9, 2005, or is Gnome 2.10 scheduled to be released that day? Finally, I didn't have to be told that it's the March 9, 2005, as only one such date exists and rules of usage insist that you not tell me which one even if you are ambiguous as to year.
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.
The grammatical error of leaving out any subject for the verb looks notwithstanding, there are a few errors here. "Gnome's new release policy" would have been correct - note the omission of the extraneous hyphen and specification of whose release policy is being mentioned. Also, the word sought here is "off," not "of." I'll let "couple of" slide because it's a part of the vernacular.
Also (finally) a mozilla-stylee type-ahead find has been implemented in Gnome's Open/Save dialog.
Stylistically, "finally" should have been set off by commas, not parentheses; but it's not technically incorrect. However, "Mozilla" should have been capitalized and "style" has only one E. Also, the last time I checked, the "open" and "save" dialogs of most programs are separate, even in those cases where the "save as" dialog is just called "save."
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?"
Unbelievably, the submitter completed an entire sentence without any real errors. It's irrelevant to the story at hand, which is itself outside the scope of this site, but, as far as the English language goes, it's correct! Good work!
Revised, this reads:
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a sneak peek at Gnome 2.10, which is scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005. It looks like Gnome's new release policy is starting to pay off, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple new ones are added. Also, a Mozilla-style type-ahead find feature has finally been implemented in Gnome's open and save dialogs. 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?"
That didn't take me all that long to do. If submitters would do the same, there would be a lower rate of submission and each submission would be higher quality. If the editors would also do this, there would be fewer duplicate stories, fewer already-dispelled urban legends posted as fact, and higher-quality content, all of which would lead to higher subscription rates and greater income. That's how real newspapers make money: they produce a quality product that's worth the price they charge.
That's pretty damn close to apple's finder window. Can they do that without issues from Apple?
Not that I don't like it. Looking at this, I may consider going Linux someday...
Correction - I never used OS-9, I realize now it was Mac OS 8 (honestly hated it on a beige Power PC that crashed more often than windows 3.1)
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
KDE & Gnome for people who like windows and uhh, maybe windowmaker for those who want something a bit different.
Thats funny - I use windowmaker on my work computer, and Gnome on my home computer. I use them both essentially the same (one app per desktop, ctrl-alt-right/left to switch desktops (and hence apps)). I use gnome at home since I am usually not worried about conserving processor power there, and it is nice to have some added functionality, like the ability to drag applications from one desktop to another in the pager.
Sometimes I use windows too - and I use it almost the same way. I keep all apps maximized, and use alt-tab to switch between them. For all practical purposes, all three desktop environments work the same way for me. Yet windowmaker is supposedly the "different" one.
In windowmaker, I use gnome-volume-control as my volume mixer. It behaves in an intintive way. I don't want anything different. Just because windows did something, doesn't mean that it should be forbidden for any other DE to also use it.
What I'd like to know (and I could probably figure it out if I wanted to spend 15 minutes hunting the answer) is whether Gnome and its HIG are based on solid research into human interface methods, whether they piggyback on others' research, or whether they're just good guesses. I - personally - like Gnome better than KDE (KDE looks to me like the markdown stripmall it's-all-on-sale suburban desktop, i.e., shallow, garish, and overwhelming), but things like using the checkbox for the drive capabilities is perplexing.
:)
Why not just have two lists "Your drive is designed to" and "Your drive is not designed to" and then list the relevant items underneath each? My first thought when my gaze swept across the image was "Oh look, there's a way to activate and deactivate certain attributes." Oops. Exactly the errors that Windows used to make but makes less and less because of the millions of dollars MS spends on interface design. The Fisher-Price theme may not be attractive, but it's mostly consistent (3rd party apps are another matter entirely).
Anyway, nobody will ever see this comment since it's all buried down here in Purgatory..
Windowmaker for something a bit different?
a -menu window managers like fluxbox etc. Surely somebody in the open source community can come up with a clever, minimal solution to what we do with a desktop environment/window manager? I mean seriously, what do we do? Configure a few things, move some files around, launch applications? Even just some improvements on the second function would be welcome rather than that interminal right-mouse menu nonsense. That stuff works great for context-sensitive stuff in applications, but only with small menus. Huge, monolithic RMB menus are the tool of satan!
Different from what? The 957,000 other UNIX window managers that all have the perplexing misconception that right-click-and-you'll-get-a-big-nested-menu is good UI design? About the first thing I read about UI design was "BIG NESTED MENUS SUCK BALLS!" or words to that effect.
They do, too.
Seriously, I can't stand it. Why is it that on Linux we have to choose between slow, Windows or Mac-alike desktops (Gnome, KDE) and an incessant, constant stream of Just-click-the-right-mouse-button-and-you'll-get-
Because it sounds like something that Snoop Doggy Dog would have on his goddamn lawn, that's why.
Every graphical program these days is designed around the same paradigms of icons, toolbars and windows, regardless the platform. Only implementation details differ. There are also many things the Windows user interface got right in its various iterations. Not learning from those things just because they look like something windows did before would be silly.
That said, both KDE and Gnome are application frameworks. You suggest using Windowmaker instead. Fine, but Windowmaker is just a plain window manager which offers you no functionality apart from drawing a neat border around your windows and prodiding a couple of application launchers in the form of docks. What applications that are not based on Qt or GTK are you going to use to actually get work done?
Having windowmaker running with a couple of xterms and doing your wordprocessing, image editing and other tasks on the commandline or in textmode surely will provide you with an aura of being different in a 1980's retro-unix kind of way and may gain you respect in some obscure subcultures of the computing world, but if its terribly productive is an entirely different question. Even windowmaker was originally developed to be the windowmanager for the GNUStep environment, and as such a component of a larger application framework environment.
a text box to type the name of the file, with tab completion
Press Control-L. No, I don't know why it's hidden.
titles justified to the left (I'm aware this can be changed, I'm mainly talking about defaults here)
window managment icon on the left
task bar on the bottom
launching icon bottom left ala start button in KDE with show desktop to the right of it
application menus in each window
scroll bars on right
buttons in dialog boxes say things like "OK" and "Cancel" instead of say, "Save" and "Don't save"
My computer type icon top left hand of desktop
trash on desktop
clock at left of taskbar
toolbars funtionally and usually aesthetically identical to windows
single click icons implemented exactly like active desktop
tree view in things like KDE control centre and konquer bit for bit copy of explorer.exe tree view
This is all just from glancing at a couple of screenshots, suffice to say if you can't see the similarity to windows go and get your glasses replaced. A simple look at the bottom 1/4 of http://static.kdenews.org/mirrors/kde-cygwin-shots /kde-cygwin-normal.png proves my point.
Well, you can't say Gnome is not trying. :)
Ubuntu 5.4 Preview will ship with Gnome 2.10 on the day of its release, and Ubunbu 5.4 Final a week later.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Next time you read a slashdot post where someone says "...and windows was giving grandma so many issues that I put linux on there, changed the theme and she can't tell the difference (except she's annoyed because she can't find solitaire hahaha)" go and reassure yourself that KDE & GNOME haven't taken 90% of their design cues from Windows. No really.
Which would be true, except that it's an acronym, and takes the 'G' pronunciation mode from the pronunciation mode of the first word of the acronym.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
the common non-tech-savvy person often will choose a version of Windows over a distro of Linux simply because XP just looks nicer and easier to use.
GTK+ is fully themeable, but the default GNOME theme has many restrictions -- basically, it has to look good for everybody. And as others have mentioned here, the GNOME theme is actually more "useful" -- less space taken up by big blue curvy things.
For reference: the default theme actually did change in GNOME 2.8 (and my, was the older theme ever outdated). For an overview of the design issues, check out this mailing list thread.
Actually, GNOME Storage is a pretty dead project. What people probably want to see screenshots for these days is Beagle. Beagle gathers metadata and indexes content instead of replacing the filesystem. And it Just Works. Has done so for months.
Not if the Enlightenment guys manage to do a release.
The words "Hell" and "freezing over" come to mind. Isn't GNOME's 6-month release cycle great!
...Windows 3.1 or NT 3.5.
I think Gnome/KDE and distro maintainers should stay as far away as possible from bland blue+white+grey themes and Arial lookalike fonts. Leave that crap to MS, and come up with something at least a little original and distinctive. Like Unbutu Linux has done, for example.
In fact, I always encourage the graphic designers I know to contribute to my favorite OSS projects, although none have so far. I'll try again, but everyone else out there, please do the same... engineers and programmers are generally not good at user interface design.
Unmentioned on that page: Epiphany extensions can now be loaded/unloaded on-the-fly. The epiphany-extensions package comes with an extension which lets you do this. And the adblock extension is coming, dammit!
And there's also "pyphany" in CVS. It lets you make extensions using Python. Included in the CVS module: a Python Console extension, which is probably the best way to prototype extensions (you can, say, connect a signal to change the zoom, with just a couple of lines of code).
It's a Network Object Model Environment, you insensitive clod! ;)
In fact, Mandrake started out as a clone of Red Hat with KDE instead of Gnome. It's come a long way since.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Yes, but the Gnu (or wildebeest -- the Afrikaans name) is GNU's mascot, as seen on their site. This makes the arguement for the pronunciation a little more difficult.
Wikipedia has a writeup on the wildebeest that may be a source of the mispronunciaiton: (Link)
And for some quick facts about the Gnu (if you're feeling desparately metaphorical): (Link)
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
I've wanted to check this out for awhile, unfortunately most of the requirements are not met by debian unstable. Looks like it would take a fair bit of system hacking to get it in there.
Just FYI, an acronym is, by definition, a shortened form of a longer phrase meant to be pronounced as a single word.. Examples include SCUBA, LASER, RADAR, and GROSS (the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club). So you are actually suggesting that GNU is not an acronym, but rather an initialism.
Initialisms include the NSA, CIA, WTO, WHO, and many other three letter organisations.
This distinction, of course, is only maintained by pedants, but I thought maybe you'd like to know anyway.
That said, I pronounce GNU as RMS does.
So, OS X isn't ready for the desktop? What does it mean to be a pure GUI OS other than to lack a command line?
If you mean that Linux GUIs needs to cover a broader range of system functions, then I agree with you -- but that is not mutually exclusive with a powerful command line.
Guh-eh!
My sig can beat up your sig
ROTFLMAO!
Thank you!!!
--- Tao
I like to point out that that is fine example how open source works - someone has very good idea, but wrong implentation. Project goes down. Someone re-evaluates idea, extract functionality and get it done differently, but more effiecently. Job is done, we, users, get functionality, which idea is best is proven by real world, not by marketing crap.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Or, we could just fix X instead, like Freedesktop.org and X.org are doing. Would that be okay with you?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Really? I mean, really? Here's Davyd's screenshot of the Gnome help browser:
p -full.png
a ndsupport.jpg
n /images/hcp.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/images/yel
Here's some XP help browser screenshots, courtesy of Google image search:
http://www.winona.edu/its/techsupport/images/help
http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/security/bulleti
Hmm, so they both have Back buttons. Oh, and scrollbars. And look, they both display formatted text! Those Gnome developers are just a bunch of copycats.
For the record, I blatently copied the OS X help browser, not the XP help browser.
Do you really need Bookmarks and Go in a help browser?Regarding Go: Do you know what's under that menu? It has Back and Forward, and it has Previous Section and Next Section. I really doubt the menu itself is used that often, but the actions in the menu are very commonly used, either by toolbar buttons or by keyboard shortcuts.
Regarding Bookmarks: For most simple application help, it really isn't necessary. You see some dialog, you think "What the heck is this option?", and you pull up the help. You don't want to spend time in the help browser. You want to get back to your work.
But then there are people who look up function references for Gnumeric. And systems administrators who have to refer to certain bits of system documentation often. There are people for whom bookmarks are incredibly useful. The interface is still very simple, and the addition of bookmarks doesn't really hurt those who don't need them.
I get the impression that you just wanted something, anything, to complain about.
we, users, get functionality, which idea is best is proven by real world, not by marketing crap
No, that's not really true. Storage could have been great, but had only one person working on it. For free. And thus not all that much. As for Beagle: look through its AUTHORS file and you'll see an awful lot of @ximian.org's and @novell.com's. These guys are getting paid to hack.
In this instance, the end result seems to be good. In fact, there actually is a pretty nice "look how cool open-source is" story. Before Beagle, there was Dashboard (an always-open window which is supposed to give you links based on what you're doing -- e.g., who you're talking to in Gaim). Dashboard simply never took off. Then somebody came up with the idea of turning it into a search tool.
As an Epiphany fan, though, I simply can't agree with that comment about open-source not being affected by "marketing crap". Ubuntu's choice of Firefox as default browser was because of its brand name recognition. (Yes, I can back that up.)
Anyway, my point is: "open source" isn't really a panacea for great software. Free Software isn't free from the real world. The open source world isn't perfect; it's just better than the proprietary one.
Well, the list goes like this:
1 Mandrakelinux
2 Fedora
3 SUSE
4 MEPIS
5 Debian
6 KNOPPIX
7 Ubuntu
8 Gentoo
9 Slackware
Of those, 1, 3, 4, 6 are KDE-distros (Slackware has excellent KDE-support, so you might want to add it there), while 2 and 7 are Gnome-focused. Rest (Gentoo, Debian and Slackware (unless you put it in KDE-camp)) are desktop-agnostic.
So, what were you saying again?
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The first word is gnu, (GNU's not Unix) so it is right.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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.
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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
tree views are a usability nightmare
So in what way does completely removing the menubar, toolbar, and sidebar help anyone? The content pane is the same either way, its just more difficult to navigate.
looks the same as 3 years ago.. just the plain and simple old look.
Is there any plan to support fd.o composite extension for transparencies? I know the support in current xorg implementation is rather slow and not completely backward compatible, but up till now I've seen very little activity on this subject: metacity support is almost unexistant (in fact, if you want to use a composition manager, you'd better recompile metacity without composite support or switch to xfwm4). The two features I'm looking forward more shadows and transparencies and something like expose (currently there are only a couple of unmantained hacks.. see expocity and Skippy)
I don't know, I can't guess. Please show me hard statistics on which is more popular. And no I don't mean bogus distro comparisons which conveniently ignore Fedora (how many times have I seen that now?). I mean hard, solid statistics.
I think you can't give me any because there are none. Now, anecdotal evidence we can chuck around all day. I know more people using GNOME than KDE. Not a lot more, but it's definitely more. I'm sure the reverse is true for you
No, for people who shove a million files in the same directory and then use regular expressions as a replacement for, you know, folders - for them I guess it's not as good. Guess what? Those people are by no means the majority. Meanwhile real users do wacky stuff like put question marks in file names, so you really don't want to overload metacharacters with special meanings if you can avoid it.
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that the X Damage and Compositing extensions would fix the flicker and speed problems....
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The only real statistics I've seen was done by SuSE and RedHat. They had both asked their customers what desktops they were using. Despite GNOME being default between 30% and 40% of RedHat users used KDE. The SuSE numbers were more consistent and 80% used the default KDE.
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.
eliminating user-visible preferences to an extreme)
Not quite right. It is about eliminating *useless* preferences, for things which should be autodetected or depending on current state. See this insightful piece why and how eliminate obsolete preferences.
:wq
Now ask Ubuntu users... :-P
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Mandrake is pretty much neutral.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Last time I used Mandrake, it was pretty much dsktop neutral (and used gtk for the system tools)
Well, Mandrake offers Gnome as well, but defaults to KDE. If you consider Mandrake to be neutral, then you should also consider Fedora to be neutral as well (they default to Gnome, but offer KDE as well). So we are left with just one Gnome-focused distro (Ubuntu).
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I have to agree, KDE 3.3 is quite nippy.
I usually get about 400MB ram consumption but that's at least 40 windows open at a time (konqueror sessions end up running for weeks hidden in the fray) I'm running 64bit too so perhaps 400MB isn't typical.
they default to KDE. If Mandrake is neutral, the Fedora is neutral as well.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
"Must have hit a sore spot, since you have basically resorted to name calling."
The only possible name calling I can see in my post is "Java Developer" and that's taken directly from the sig so I don't think it's terribly offensive.
Cheer up!
I don't know anything about Fedora but I don't think that defaulting to foo does make the whole distro a foo-distro. Mandrake ships a very nice Gnome and you can choose not to install KDE at all, Mandrake will even default to Gnome in this case. There's even the little thing about Mandrake's GUI config tools using GTK. I don't see how Mandrake is a KDE-disro, it's just a default.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Mandrake started as a fork of Red Hat with KDE added. And KDE seems to be their preferred desktop. But hey, if we wollow your logic in determining what is the preferred desktop of the distro, then we are left with just one Gnome-distro in the top-9, since fedora offers KDE as well.
And what does Mandrakes use of GTK have to do with their desktop of choice? Or do you think that GTK == Gnome?
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But if I can't really remember the name, that's when things like bookmarks and hierarchical structures become usefull. Indeed most of the time, looking at the site favicon in my bookmarks dropdown is what triggers my memory most... that and the categorizing. So I guess, imho, spacial is not a complete replacement for hierarchical, but hierarchical can be a complete replacement for spacial.
You have your names wrong. Spacial is not exclusive with hierarchical, they're ortogonal (i.e. a hierarchical filesystem interface can be spacial, or not). Indeed, in the case of searching for a file in which you remember its position but not its name, spacial only helps and completes the tree-like filesystem by placing each folder in the same place that you remember it.
Surely you should have said "navigational" vs "spacial", which are mutually exclusive.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Just yesterday, I was messing around and I installed what there is so far of Enlightenment 0.17 on an older (Celeron 667) machine running Linux.
It's really not quite there yet, it's really not quite stable yet, and it really has quite some way to go yet. But what is there is just incredible. I am extremely impressed.
I have been stuck on the current Enlightenment, 0.16, for quite some time now, and I use it on all of my personal computers, but on this older computer I have Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, I tried ion yesterday as well, but out of curiousity I had to try E 0.17.
I imagine that Gnome, as well as KDE, will have much greater commercial success, but the smoothness of E 0.17, even on this 667 Celeron, is just out of sight. It's smooth - it's fast, and it's incredibly beautiful without being over the top. Of course, not all of the components work, many things are still being worked on, and it's probably a long way off before it's going to be ready for prime time. The login manager (entrance) is incredible, although, again, I am having issues getting it to start up automatically upon boot. Things like this are to be expected.
Maybe it's just me, but I've cycled through all the desktop environments on this machine - Gnome, KDE, etc... but I can honestly say that I've never been quite as impressed with any of them as I am with this E 0.17. Even though this computer is just sort of a testbed for different things, and a computer I use to demonstrate to friends and family what Linux looks like (I use KDE for that) - I can't stop going over to it and turning it on and being impressed. E 0.17, whenever it's going to get done, is going to be well worth the wait. It's way, way different - the previews of Gnome don't even come close. I'm just so impressed I can't stop thinking about it. Still has a long way to go though.
Surely that should read "KDE does have plenty of Konnections"
Or am I missing something ?
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
This allows the use of Fitt's law that screen edges are "infinitely tall/wide" - you can move the mouse up with abandon, knowing that you will stop when you hit the edge (virtual desktops being discussed below). This makes it easier to select menus for the app.
There are difficulties with this approach:
www.eFax.com are spammers
This contrasts with "console", which is "konsole", and all the other names of apps in KDE that people think are "cute spellings" because they don't realize that other countries have developers.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I like Gnome's development tempo. They seem to make improvements gradually. It makes it easy for users to adapt and respond to each new release.
I love the clean efficient look of the default Gnome desktop. Most other desktops try to "wow" users with eye-candy. That "wow" effect wears off pretty quickly for anyone who spends a lot of time using the system.
I like the sound of the developer improvements for gedit and the samba/nfs share setup. They made great improvements to the file dialogs and panel applets in 2.8. I'm looking forward to trying out 2.10.
it just shows that from the start, their purpose was to bring KDE to the desktop, since Red Hat was not delivering. It has been commonly accepted that Mandrake is a KDE-centric distro, and the fact that they also happen to offer Gnome does not, IMO, change that fact.
Mandrake doesn't ship with "Gnome configuration-tools", they ship with GTK configuration-tools. GTK does not equal Gnome. Why do they ship with GTK-tools and not Qt (for example)? Go ask them. Maybe their tools are closed-source (I honestly don't know), and if they wanted to use Qt for them, they would have had to buy a commercial license. But that doesn't IMO reduce their focus on KDE.
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Mandrake hasn't been Rad Hat with KDE for a long time. There is nothing KDE centric in Mandrake with the exeption that KDE is the default desktop if installed. I did not say that GTK equaled Gnome, their tools are quite desktop neutral. They are also under the GPL, so no legal reason not to use Qt.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Qt is a bit faster than GTK. KDE feels faster on X terminals than Gnome.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
If you convince yourself that KDE is "Unix for Windows users", then you'll do yourself a grave disservice. I last used Windows on a regular basis in '97 (and only used it then because I worked tech support at a small ISP), but switched from Gnome to KDE a couple of years ago because I liked the extra control it gave me and loved the Unix-like way applications are built from discrete parts.
Gnome's still OK - I certainly wouldn't make fun of someone for using it - but understand that quite a few advanced users prefer KDE for reasons that have nothing to do with Windows.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You did a great job of missing the real point. Remote URIs don't have treeviews in the GTK+ file chooser.
Note that I'm not complaining about the filechooser itself, but the fact that they hid the location bar to save 10 pixels. And yes, I have spoken to some of the design cabal about it - we just disagree, I think.
Any GNOME application would run fine in KDE, so that is not a very valid comment :)
OpenOffice do correctly not have its root in the GNOME community. The plan however is to integrate it more and more into GNOME as time goes by (this is from the OO roadmap) and a lot of the work that has been done in regards to theming etc. have been with GNOME integration in mind. A lot of this integration work also benefits KDE, but their stated goal is that of integrating as closely as possible with GNOME.
I would love to see a Mac OS/X Quartz native port of GTK and GTK+
QT right now runs on Mac OS/X, Windows, and Linux. It would be very nice to have a "free" multi platform system. Before anyone flames me it is IMPOSSIBLE to produce GPL software for windows using the latest version of QT.
If GTK and GTK+ where ported to MacOS/X would mono be far behind?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Release every 6 months
No, the first word is GNU (GNU's not Unix), so it's deliberately ambiguous. ;)
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
Google is an excidentally faulty spelled 'googol' by the founder. And as it turns out again the founder is always right.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Um, I don't think that one is right.
Haha, anata wa hentai desu ka. nihonjin ka. And in case you have even worse japanese than me, nice score getting hentai as a user name. Are you japanese or a fellow j-phile?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
It's a reference to Calvin & Hobbes, dumbass :)
It's primary goal was i586 vs i486 binaries.
Hi, I'm an E user, too. I don't see how you can call GNOME hard to compile if you've ever tried building E (E16 not so much anymore, but E17 definitely so). :)
GNOME has this reputation because it's split into many tarballs (like E17 and unlike KDE). There are advantages to both approaches, IMHO neither is really "better".
Anyway, there's a simple list anyone can go down in order (or even mostly out of order). Or you can do like most people and use jhbuild or garnome.
Pat's reasons have less to do with this and more to do with the design of several GNOME features (like GConf). Long story short, they're great for sysadmins but somewhat hard to package.
it's green.
I'm certain these developers that volunteer their time are eagerly awaiting your consent as to what projects they may work on.
So, let me get this straight: I'm not allowed to express a valid opinion, but you're allowed to assume that I must be arrogant and must want to tell people what they're allowed to do?
Seeing as how I did nothing of the sort, stop insinuating and come up with a good response.
It's amazing how on Slashdot, the contrary opinion always gets modded up to +5 regardless of how baseless it is.
Gnome's still OK - I certainly wouldn't make fun of someone for using it - but understand that quite a few advanced users prefer KDE for reasons that have nothing to do with Windows.
That's exactly it.. advanced users, myself included, usually prefer KDE because it has a richer interface (more widgets, more context sensitivity, more features, more options, more extensibility, etc.) And yet, from what I've seen, most Windows users are more comfortable with using KDE than GNOME because it has a more familiar file dialog box, file manager, etc. So you have a huge community developing for the needs of a very tiny population. It just doesn't make sense. Software today can/should be modular enough that you can plug in alternative components when special needs arise. (such as user-specific sets of HCI guidelines)
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.
Despite the fact that GNOME is written in C, they have developed a standard set of extensions that allow developers to use object-oriented design. Some would call that a hack. Others would note that C++ itself was a hack. (: Point is, the language difference is not an issue. There are also GNOME bindings to just about every major language in existance. (same with KDE) Qt vs GTK+? Well, Qt has better API documentation and does a lot more in itself -- GTK+ apps rely on dozens of other libraries. In the end, you can get the same functionality out of both.
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?
Modular design. Use all the same core libraries, but have teams work on pluggable GUI components that suit their taste. Now everybody is happy and the only 'duplicated' effort is that which is actually unique to alternative ideas. This is my contention with the KDE vs. GNOME situation. It's fully possible to accommodate diverse ideas without having two huge, separate, disconnected communities.
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.
I wholly disagree with this argument. There's no reason why competition cannot come from within a community (such as competing sets of pluggable GUI components as prior mentioned). The reason why XFree stagnated was that its development was effectively closed to outsiders. There was no way to get involved and then introduce change from within -- no opportunity for 'new blood' and fresh ideas. Compare to the Linux kernel. There are hundreds of people competing *within* this community to get their improvements accepted into the mainstream codebase. In some cases, the end user can choose which components to use. (think of all the competing filesystems!)
Regarding performance and stability, this is really beyond the scope of reasonable discussion here. It suffices to say that based on what I have seen, there is a lot of room for code optimization in both KDE and GNOME. (Fortunately it is happening, if slowly..) As for stability, I've found dozens of bugs in Kmail and Konqueror. Most don't cause a crash, but they are still annoyingly incorrect operation.
Oh I see, thanks. Please substitute "foreigner" for "dumbass", though, it's more accurate. :) I have only ever read Calvin & Hobbes in Dutch.
So the new desktop would use both GTK AND Qt? And kparts and bonobo? etc. etc. Isn't that wasted resources? And I would guess that it would make the end-result even more resource-hungry, since you would have two separate, yet functionally similar libraries/technologies running in the background. All that would make the desktop even more bloated and it would be a nightmare to maintain.
Well, they are not THAT disconnected...
I trust you reported these on bugs.kde.org?
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That 270MB is not "for a desktop". It's for SEVERAL desktops (three simulatenous desktops for three different users who are logged in on the machine), together with SEVERAL running applications, X.org, several background-services (some by Linux itself, others by the desktop) and the like. And since absolute minimium amount of RAM in PC these days is 256megs, I think that's pretty good.
But hey, if you really want to use as little as RAM as possible, how about something like Ratpoison? Or Fluxbox? Or Xfce?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Sorry, even open software projects don't get to redefine English pronunciation by fiat.
Sure you have. I believe it because you said it.\
And as for that trash about Win XP doing network transparancy, I believe you're talking about the VNC-like remote desktop thing they have. That's not network transparancy. And I'd be surprised if it were secure, but I don't use Windows XP, so I've never bothered to check.
My comment regarding technological differences (language, toolkit etc.) is also relevant to other things besides those two. What about other technologies? KDE uses DCOP, Gnome uses CORBA. KDE uses kparts, Gnome uses Bonobo.
That's true.. they each take a slightly different approach, but the end result is the same. Therefore, they are technologically equivalent. Neither is significantly behind the "state of the art" in any area.
There are simply so much differences between the two that merging them is not really possible. And you can't really merge the developer-base and start a new project, since some developers would prefer Gnome-style, whereas other would prefer KDE-style.
I'm not suggesting a merge because that would, indeed, be impossible. However, there should be a way to compromise between the two. Since there's no dominant technological advantage to developing for either GNOME or KDE, we're talking solely about personal preferences here. Sorry, but that's really not as important as the bigger picture. Developers on both sides should suck it up and agree to disagree but still work together on a single, unified desktop environment. As I mentioned before, it's not so much about KDE vs. GNOME. It's the fact that for every KDE app, somebody wastes time writing a nearly identical GNOME app and vice-versa. In the end, both apps do the exact same thing. They don't really compete with each other. No matter which way you cut it, that's a waste.
So the new desktop would use both GTK AND Qt? And kparts and bonobo? etc. etc.
No, the new desktop would be either KDE or GNOME at its base. For example, GNOME developers could port their HCI-based GUI design to Qt and KDE developers could add a layer of abstraction if necessary allowing the key GUI components to be swapped out.
Isn't that wasted resources? And I would guess that it would make the end-result even more resource-hungry, since you would have two separate, yet functionally similar libraries/technologies running in the background. All that would make the desktop even more bloated and it would be a nightmare to maintain.
And we don't have that today? Honestly, how many people use strictly GNOME or strictly KDE apps? There's always one or two apps that one desktop simply has the better version of. It sure is a shame that all those apps aren't competing within the same desktop environment. For example, I wouldn't give KMail unfair weight over Evolution just because I use KDE and that makes it more efficient for me. See how this wasteful divide can actually *diminish* competition?
Well, they are not THAT disconnected...
Yes, the situation is improving slightly. Of course the ultimate irony is that in the next 10-15 years, the today's concept of a "desktop" is going to be obliterated by both server-centric and distributed technologies. How's that? Well, for instance, users aren't going to be so much worried about "finding / organizing files on their local disks" Most data will be stored in a centralized repository with rich association and context sensitivity. Office suites will be replaced by web-enabled document management systems and extremely rich database tools. Most new applications will be written for the platform that evolves out of today's web browsers. (think: vector graphics, full multimedia capabilities, etc.) Ironically, Open Source may never usurp the desktop from Microsoft. It may simply obsolete it before they can adequately respond. By the time that happens, KDE vs. GNOME will be so irrelevant that either one will fade away or they will have merged into the same technology. In the meantime, it's just a waste, IMO.
I trust you reported these on bugs.kde.org?
The repeatable ones, yes. (:
Not gonna happen. Seriously, if the new desktop used (for example) Gnome as their base, why would KDE-developers work on it? They would look at it, and think that "We already have a working desktop. Why should we throw it away and work on their desktop instead?". Yes, they would bring along some of their technology, but in the end, they would still abandon their desktop. If KDE-developers wanted to work on Gnome, they would already be working on Gnome. But they aren't. They want to work on KDE instead. You couldn't force them to work on Gnome. If someone deciced that "we will take the best of KDE, and port it to Gnome, and work on Gnome for thereon", they would simply say "no way! I like KDE, and I will keep on working on KDE!". Same thing applies to Gnome-developers.
No, it would not work. WHy do Linux-hackers work on Linux and not *BSD? Why do FreeBSD-hackers work on FreeBSD and not on NetBSD? Before you say "but all those people cooperate quite a bit!", I can simply say that Gnome-hackers and KDE-hackers also cooperate quite a bit.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
both LASER, RADAR, and SCUBA are pronounced the way they look. GNU is not. Guh-New? If you pronouce it the way it looks, you should just say "New," however that's not the perfered, "proper" way, right? That's the argument. I have no problem with acronyms that are pronounce the way they look. If you have to tell me the right way to pronounce and acronym, then it's not an acronym - it is, indeed, an initialisation. Acronyms are meant to make things easier, not to make engineers feel even more like they're God and can tell people how to do things.
Not gonna happen. Seriously, if the new desktop used (for example) Gnome as their base, why would KDE-developers work on it? They would look at it, and think that "We already have a working desktop. Why should we throw it away and work on their desktop instead?". Yes, they would bring along some of their technology, but in the end, they would still abandon their desktop.
.NET arena.
Obviously, nothing is going to change overnight. But that doesn't mean that change isn't necessary. I think the realistic answer is this: Both projects need to set a standards base goal for say.. 3 years from now. By that time, there should be no such thing as applications "developed for" either GNOME or KDE. As stated prior, that's really where the big problem is anyhow -- duplicate applications. Instead, applications should be written such that they are fully neutral to the desktop environment and simply use the services made available. (which might not necessarily be provided by GNOME or KDE anyhow!) Incidentally, this is the direction that all cutting edge technologies are moving already, whether from the Java or
And as I said earlier, today's concept of "the desktop" is dying anyhow..
It's all nice and dandy, but it seems like nobody's willing to fix the biggest problem GNOME has: Its collosal waste of screen space.
Every button is twice as big as it should be and has an obscene amount of space between it and the next.
Although this may be a problem inherent in GTK itself, I guess. Windows gaim suffers from the same problems.
Does OpenOffice also use GTK? Because I've noticed that it to, wastes obscene amounts of screen space when compared to Word.