GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 Screenshot Demo

linuxbeta writes "GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 has just been released. There is a nice screenshot demo here. Also known as 2.9.90, GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 is the first pre-release intended for wide public scrutiny before the final release in March. It is packed full of tasty GNOME goodness. This release is a feature frozen snapshot primarily intended for wide public scrutiny before the final GNOME 2.10 release in March. Like the good old days of Linux kernel development, GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status. Please check the 2.9 start page for more info. - gnomedesktop.org/node/2138"

Comments

omg

[armtheproles]

Michael Sims Fired, Joins GNAA to Troll Slashdot Full Time
Michael Sims Fired, Joins GNAA to Troll Slashdot Full Time

FREMONT, CA (TECHNEWS) - After a heated debate at Slashdot executive offices, editor Michael Sims was locked out of the building and departed in a tirade of lisping insults, vowing revenge immediately. This morning, industry sources revealed that Sims has joined the infamous trolling organization Gay Nigger Association of America with the intent of trolling Slashdot fulltime.

In a short phone interview with Technews, Sims asserted that he was calm but resolved on his course of action. "The Slashdot editors and I had a disagreement," he explained. "I did it all for the users, but they..." he drew the syllable out painfully, resting on a case full of Little League trophies and certificates of participation from transgendered dating services, "They just couldn't take my truth. They were -- babies, just babies, oh, the horror, the abomination," he said, before being led away by three white-clad male nurses.

According to Harvard Psychology Professor Arnold Rothstahlberg, "trolling" is an internet phenomenon where dissenting users disrupt a site by flooding it with absurd or paradoxical information. "It satisfies the primal id," he said, chewing on a large, bulbous, phallic black cigar. "To justify themselves by forcing their enemies into hysterics. It's a compensatory mechanism much like getting back at the kids who beat you up in high school by installing Linux and using it to pingflood their XP boxes and Macs."

Slashdot editor CmdrTaco was reticent to comment. At an interview conducted in the crap-filled Ann Arbor bungalow he shares with his wife, to whom he proposed over Slashdot, he said, "Well, you know, Slashdot is just a web site. Michael should calm down about this. But if he doesn't, our corporate sponsors will sue him until he's giving $4 blowjobs on Haight Street."

From the GNAA corporate headquarters, a mysterious floating island off the coast of Newfoundland that few reporters have seen and even fewer have returned from with their sexual identities intact, GNAA "Head Programmer" timecop said he was glad to have Sims on hand. "From what I've seen of his postings on Slashdot," said timecop, "he's a total fag. Which is convenient as all our halfops need anal, and I can't handle the drama. That's what's worst about the net: the drama."

Sims has been involved in previous internet firefights, most notably the controversy over the censorware.org website in 2001. While Sims alleges that the site was his creation that was sabotaged by others, his coworkers disagree. Bennett Haselton, security consultant for the "Anarchy Anal" and "Chaos Cumshot" websites, said of Sims, "We set up this website, and left him the password. We have a disagreement, bam, the website goes down and someone raped my two-week-old Labrador puppy with an iPod."

Slashdot Editor CowboyNeal, who was entangled in a whale net after attempting to swim the English channel, spoke fondly of his former coworker. "Michael always brought a certain passion to the work, a passion that was easily ignited and led to many sweaty sessions in the corporate washroom," he said. "I'm not at all surprised he joined an organization of gay niggers. He always like something different and unique in his pasta salads."

Programmer Seth Finkelstein alleges that Sims is "totally unstable" and agreed readily to this interview. "Of course, I'm a disinterested observer," he said. "But anytime I see that closet psychopath and monkey nut-muncher stealing the spotlight from hardworking programmers like myself, I have to speak up, for the benefit of the people, of course," he said. Technews reporters were permitted to leave the premises only after making a PayPal donation to Finkelstein.

Mike Godwin of the EFF, who balances a career as privacy advocate with his hobby of making videos of teen swingers blowing goats, agreed. "I've never met another editor like Michael," he said

Re:omg

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears there's some veracity to the story.
Good riddance, Michael Sims. Enjoy Canada.

THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING - HEY TROLLS

[ThinkAboutYourBreath]

Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING

Yes that's right, THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING. Why you might ask? Well it's simple!

Your brain usually takes care of breathing FOR you, but whenever you remember this, YOU MUST MANUALLY BREATH! If you don't you will DIE.

There are also MANY variations of this. For example, think about:

1. BLINKING!

1. SWALLOWING SALIVA!

1. HOW YOUR FEET FEEL IN YOUR SOCKS!

1. THAT ANNOYING SONG THAT GETS STUCK IN YOUR HEAD!

In conclusion, the THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING troll is simply unbeatable. These 4 words can be thrown randomly into article text trolls, into sigs, into anything, and once seen, WILL FORCE THE VICTIM TO TAKE CARE OF HIS BREATHING MANUALLY! This goes far beyond the simple annoying or insulting trolls of yesteryear.

In fact, by EVEN RESPONDING to this troll, you are proving that IT HAS CLAIMED ANOTHER VICTIM -- YOU!

i guess im in wikipedia so i hit it bigtime, hows troling been

Re:THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING - HEY TROLLS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey buddy, I've been carrying on your work in your absence.

Welcome back!!

frist psot?

[Anonymous Coward]

?frist?

hurrah gnome

[ICeDX]

Looks awesome, gnome rules

Shitty SS's

[wdd1040]

Yeah... 640x480 screenshots with a shitty theme really show us the changes to Gnome.

Is it me, or does this look worse than the stock ubuntu install Gnome?

Re:Shitty SS's

[Coryoth]

Is it me, or does this look worse than the stock ubuntu install Gnome?

If you look through the screenshots, it is an Ubuntu install, and has a number of the Ubuntu customisations already, so it's not even very representative of what the general GNOME 2.10 user is going to get. All up, the screenshots aren't worth your time, head here to see what changes GNOME 2.10 has.

Jedidiah.

Re:Shitty SS's

[spectre_240sx]

I dunno, it was informative enough to tell me that Gnome still looks like ass...

Re:Shitty SS's

[misleb]

Some asses are actually pretty nice to look at. Although I am thinking more along the lines of "J-Lo" than GNOME.

Re:Shitty SS's

[Lisandro]

Seriously, those screenshots (640x480, are we back in the Win 3.1 days?) look like crap. C'mon, GTK+ can look damn nice, why the hell do they use those blocky themes?

I'm kinda disenchanted with GNOME these days.

Re:Shitty SS's

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, it was informative enough to tell me that Gnome still looks like ass...

Are you too 1337 for Gnome cool guy?

Re:Shitty SS's

[pcmanjon]

GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 is the first pre-release intended for wide public scrutiny before the final release in March.

This release is a feature frozen snapshot primarily intended for wide public scrutiny before the final GNOME 2.10 release in March.

Isn't the slashdot article a bit redundant?

Re:Shitty SS's

[HalWasRight]

Ooooh! Look at the screen shots of the PROGRAM MENU! You know that is such a distinguishing feature of the GNOME enviroment!

Booooring.

- Hal

Re:Shitty SS's

[dabigpaybackski]

Yeah... 640x480 screenshots with a shitty theme really show us the changes to Gnome.

Does the shitty theme come with bits of corn?

Re:Shitty SS's

[Feztaa]

I noticed only two screenshots that actually looked any different from what I already have in gnome 2.8, and even then it was only minor changes to menu layouts in a couple minor apps. But then reading the 2.10 preview that somebody else linked, there's actually a lot of good, new stuff in gnome 2.10. Stupid osdir screenshots are worthless.

Re:Shitty SS's

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait till you see the dupe's summary! Will it also contain a dupe of some of itself?

Now I got confused.

Re:Shitty SS's

[rjshields]

I think it it looks great. It's nice and simple and very tidy. I'm probably not representantive of the typical slashbot opinion here.

Re:Shitty SS's

[afd8856]

Actually, from the first screenshot, what it tells me is that Gnome is just as shity on small screens as windows xp is. I even think that windows actually wins here...

Re:Shitty SS's

[jav1231]

True, bad resolution. Yet I've seen one problem pervasive in Linux GUI's and that is the large amount of real estate that some apps take up. I don't know if this is a WM issue or an App issue, since I don't program. Gaim is hideously large, for instance. Even with my desktop set to small icons and my resolution at 1024x768 it looks more like a 640 or 800 desktop.

Re:Shitty SS's

[Tony Hoyle]

It looks like gnome hasn't changed much since the 2.0 release when I abandoned it (lots of reasons... none of which have changed apparently).

What's with the Windows 3.1 look anyway?

Re:Shitty SS's

[Anonymous Coward]

640x480? I'm not seeing what you're seeing. Shitty theme... you mean the GNOME default theme?

Fonts look nice

[Dancin_Santa]

But everything is so huge. The screen resolution looks really terrible. What is that 640x480? Did GNOme just enter the VGA world?

And I'm not sure I'd like that "Courtesy of OSshots" banner at the top. Ugly.

So my initial reaction, is, "Hey, that's cool. Where did the mouse pointer go?" Then my second reaction was, "It looks like every other window manager out there."

Screenshots are nice, but what are they trying to show us that can't be done with any other window manager?

Re:Fonts look nice

[Leroy_Brown242]

yeah, I love screen shots. But these aren't so great. Possibly to a more trained eye, but not mine.

Re:Fonts look nice

[maglor_83]

Looks pretty much exactly the same as the current version to me.

Re:Fonts look nice

[daijo78]

Would be nice with some comments and screenshots showing whats new. I really couldnt tell any difference from the previous releases (could have tried hrder but I m lazy:) Also that theme muust be the most ugly one they could have choosen...

Re:Fonts look nice

[kesuki]

it is 640x480, and apparently was done by someone who doesn't know how/didn't want to bother to resize larger resoultion desktops to smaller image sizes. and it looks awful in 640x480, and yeah Ubuntu (at least the Live CD) tends to default to 800x600 or if it can't configure your graphic card to 640x480... so perhaps Ubuntu was mis-configured.
I'm sure they've put a lot of work into it, but that it's very difficult for an end user to tell what has actually changed. what is signifigant is that this is a feature freeze, and that any new features will need to be impleneted in the next unstable release, and that only fixing existing bugs and vulnerabilities will be reasons for point releases in this release branch. Some distos will only use applications that have impleneted a feature freeze, so this will allow those distros to gradually incorperate this version, as it proves itself stable enough for use by those distros.

Re:Fonts look nice

[Coryoth]

Would be nice with some comments and screenshots showing whats new. I really couldnt tell any difference from the previous releases (could have tried hrder but I m lazy:) Also that theme muust be the most ugly one they could have choosen...

I think this is what you're looking for - of course this one is "old news" having been posted on Slashdot previously. It does a lot better of job of actually showing you what to expect in GNOME 2.10 than the selection of Ubuntu screenshots from OSDir though.

Jedidiah.

Re:Fonts look nice

[Anonymous Coward]

the screenshots are at low resolution so they load fast, thats all.

Re:Fonts look nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, how far off the deep end have you gone to assert that the "fonts look nice" in these screenshots? I suppose they look nice if you've been accustomed to mediocrity, as Linux desktops will. Certainly the text in these screenshots looks nicer than Windows XP, but that's a little like measuring the size of your penis against a cocker spaniel's.

If you want to see how a good desktop environment renders text, look no further than Mac OS X.

Re:Fonts look nice

[daijo78]

Thanks! Looked great:)

Re:Fonts look nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Having no screen shots is better than showing meaningless ones or worse, with crappy themes. Does no justice to the real Gnome.

Re:Fonts look nice

[Admiral Burrito]

If you want to see how a good desktop environment renders text, look no further than Mac OS X.

Seen it. Not impressed. Many vertical strokes were anti-aliased to be two pixels wide when they should render one wide. It makes the text look blurry. I've seen that on Linux before too, though it's since been fixed (problem with the font hinting?).

I use Gnome. Looks great on my LCD with sub-pixel anti-aliasing. I suspect the problem with the screenshots is that they use the default fonts (the free Bitstream ones I think). I use the Microsoft fonts, mostly Verdana. Verdana may not be pretty but it's designed for on-screen readability, and renders well.

Re:Fonts look nice

[McLoud]

That is the fourth time I've seen that link posted in this thread (yeah, i browse at +3 :P), but, really, the theme in these screenshots still suck! Someone has real screenshots with a nice looking theme? please?

Re:Fonts look nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the problem you speak of has been fixed on Mac OS X as well. This was chiefly a problem with 10.0 and 10.1; it was reduced in 10.2 and text in 10.3 is clear and beautiful.

Re:Fonts look nice

[mbaciarello]

One thing I noticed as I used Linux desktop environments is letter spacing (and related typographical settings in font rendering.) OS X superior looks have very much to do with the way it renders fonts, IMO, even when compared to Windows. Variables such as spacing or kern must be controlled at the OS level on the Mac, as they're often editable via the system-wide font selection tool.

I've only had very minor experiences with Gnome or KDE, but I remember the irregular, large letter spacing as the one thing that prevented the GUI from looking really polished and elegant to me.

I've seen the same thing when running X apps in OS X, both through Apple's and Xfree.org server, so I guess it's more of a X problem. This page shows a good example of lousy spacing, although IANA professional typemeister, so I can't really tell how much of this is due to the particular font used.

In any case, I see a lot of talk about system-wide anti-aliasing, vector graphics etc... in Linux but very little about improving these typographical "variables" rendering.

Re:Fonts look nice

[Anonymous Coward]

That's crap. I've used 10.3, and it's just as blurry ...

Re:Fonts look nice

[eric_brissette]

Or maybe it's just because that since most of the screenshots don't show anything but menus and dialog boxes, 640x480 shows everything you need to see and saves some bandwidth.

I wouldn't really care to download 1600x1200 screenshots of mostly empty desktop wallpaper.

Re:Fonts look nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the theme looks crisp and clean, myself.
If you want big, bubbly borders, maybe you should consider buying a Mac?

Re:Fonts look nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should visit an optometrist.

Re:Fonts look nice

[MooseGuy529]

Seen it. Not impressed. Many vertical strokes were anti-aliased to be two pixels wide when they should render one wide. It makes the text look blurry.

I totally agree. Mac OS X does have a "smooth" feel to it, but when you get down to actually looking at it, the fonts are blurry. They're smooth, but blurry. On the other hand, Gnome renders crisp fonts on my laptop with subpixel rendering, and smooths only in a positive way. Part of the problem, I think, is that X had font smoothing tacked on and thus the fonts had a good definition of where the lines were (sort of like hinting backwards--if you turn a bitmap font into a smoothed vector/TrueType/whatever font, the lines are still nice and crisp) while OS X doesn't really care. I guess OS X doesn't do hinting...

I suspect the problem with the screenshots is that they use the default fonts (the free Bitstream ones I think).

What's wrong with them? Beyond a couple of awkward letters (the "w" is one of them, and sometimes the zero looks oddly pointy on the top and bottom), they're quite nice, and scale down well. (I like using small fonts to make my 1024x768 screen feel more like 1600x1200 ;-)

niiiiice

[Anonymous Coward]

niiiiiiiiiice

What's Gnome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run KDE?

New GNOME release codename: DOGGONE

[Anonymous Coward]

ECFA COMPLETES TAKEOVER OF GNAA

The ECFA (Euthenasia for Canus Familourous Association) and the GNAA (G** N***** Association of America) are connecting into one ECFA. Stay connected. Both the ECFA (Euthenasia for Canus Familourous Association) and the GNAA share one common goal - A HAPPIER MANKIND! Members of the combined group, which will be called ECFA, will not be required to change their skin color or practice homosexuality as previously required to be members of an EVIL ORGANIZATION. The motto of the combined ECFA will be to protect our oxygen supply, to clean up our streets and sidewalks, and to curb noise pollution. The combined organization will be headed by the current leader of the ECFA and will be headquartered on EFNET. Employees of the GNAA will be able to apply for new jobs at the combined ECFA headquarters. We will be taking all existing GNAA content OFFLINE FOREVER on "ECF-day", when the two organizations will be merged into one. "We are expanding to target a much larger demographic, not just the homosexual and colored population," the CEO of ECFA's parent company was quoted as saying. While the GNAA trollers will continue, their message will be changed. The chatroom, movie, and illicit images will not be a part of the new organization, as it doesn't fit the new demographic.

About GNAA:
The GNAA has a vast membership of slashdot trollers who claim to have dark complexion and have a perverted sexual lifestyle. By harnessing the powers of the GNAA, the ECFA will be able to spread its message throughout slashdot much more effectively.

Are you G**, Are you a N*****, Are you a G** N*****? If you answered "yes" or "no" to any of the above questions, the combined organization is for you!

About ECFA:
The ECFA would like you to do one thing - KILL A DOG. By KILLING A DOG, you will ELIMINATE one USELESSLY RESPIRATING animal from this planet. Are you TIRED of having your TAXES increased? Humane Societies cost our country over $100 million annually. By eliminating DOGS, this money can EDUCATE OUR KIDS. OVERPOPULATION of DOGS is RAPANT in this country. Take a stand! Help rid this INFESTATION. KILL A DOG TODAY!!!!

Have you ever stepped in DOG DOO-DOO

Are you MAD?

Do you KILL DOGS?

Are you a MAD DOG KILLER?

If you answered "YES" to any of the above questions the ECFA (Euthenasia for Canus Familourous Association) is for you! Why change your sexual lifestyle or change your skin color to join an EVIL ORGANIZATION when you can simply INCREASE OUR SUPPLY OF O2! Did you know that DOGS turn BENEFICIAL O2 into CO2 simply to gain their energy to bark, drool, and howl? They LITERALLY BURN OUR OXYGEN SUPPLY!!! One dog can waste 2 moles of O2 PER HOUR! This country has MANY UNWANTED, ABANDONED DOGS that WE ARE PAYING MONEY TO KEEP ALIVE. We are FEEDING them our food supply while making the homeless STARVE! By using a Dog Killing Gadget, a dog can be turned into beneficial food, helping us all. We let children go hungry yet feed our **UNWANTED** dogs like royalty.

Save Our Oxygen! One dog can easily use the entire oxygen output of ten full size trees. One dog can output over 20 lbs of droppings daily. One dog can aggrivate the allergies of untold numbers of people with its fast growing hair. Kill a dog today!

Do you own a dog? Are you tired of its mess? Don't feel like planting ten trees and waiting 10 years for them to reach maturity? Then get it euthanized. Euthanasia is a painless way for a dog to... terminate. However, it can be too expensive to buy these drugs for the LARGE NUMBER of DOGS in the HUMANE SOCIETIES. It is thus proposed that these dogs be turned into food for the homeless.

We are connected with the GNAA to form one organization, called ECFA!

Re:New GNOME release codename: DOGGONE

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the GNAA press releases are written in proper English. Heck, they can even spell their own name.

Oh yeah, they're funny too.

YUO = TEH FAILURE!!!111

release date

[r84x]

I'm confused, according to their release schedule, this is due on the 9th. Is it really coming out 3 days early? How often does that happen?

Re:release date

[hazah]

Your sig made me giggle.

Re:release date

[a20vertigo]

You could call that... a siggle!

What about Nautilus

[jm91509]

A screen shot in there seems to hint that we'll be able disable the annoying feature where nautilus opens new windows for each directory you select instead of the real estate saving tree view.

Anyone know if 2.10 can have a tree view for directory hierarcies?

Re:What about Nautilus

[wdd1040]

You can do that now by going into your Desktop | Preferences | File Management applet.

Re:What about Nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been in the GUI preferences to shut this off since GNOME 2.8.1

Re:What about Nautilus

[sewagemaster]

Anyone know if 2.10 can have a tree view for directory hierarcies?

It's not nautilus, but try xfe. It has tree view and is LIGHTENING quick - even faster then Rox file manager. I've been looking for the ultimate file manager on linux desktop and this one might just cut it.

Re:What about Nautilus

[ftgow]

Run GCOnf. Go to Applications, Nautilus, Preferences Select 'Always Use Browser" There you go.

Re:What about Nautilus

[Rob Riggs]

Well, that's nice. But most of the civilized world does not run a distribution that ships with Gnome 2.8.1. My rather modern (4-month old) Fedora Core Mark III has not released anything past 2.8.0. It was a really *stupid* oversight on the part of the Gnome development team. But they've been on a real "lets piss off the power user" binge for quite a while.

Re:What about Nautilus

[hdparm]

Right-click home desktop icon, chose Properties and check `always open in browser window'. Someone else already mentioned where to chose default view.

Re:What about Nautilus

[theantix]

Actually in 2.10 there is a new feature: anyone beating that particular troll/flame to death on slashdot will be banned from the internet for 48 hours. At least I hope so...

Re:What about Nautilus

[joeljkp]

Piss off the power user? It's precisely the power user that has the ability to easily change back to tree view if he or she wants. Just make a shortcut with the proper command line switch, or go to gconf-editor and change the value. It's in apps > nautilus > preferences. Hell, in Gentoo, 2.8.0 even came with a premade shortcut for 'Nautilus - Browse Mode'. And now that 2.8.1 is out, you don't even have the lack of a handy GUI toggle switch to complain about.

Re:What about Nautilus

[mattyrobinson69]

if you have kde installed there's kommander which has a norton commander style interface, and can be set into tree view

Vectorized graphics

[st3v]

I hope GNOME will take a step ahead and use vector graphics. Then those of us that use large screen resolutions (such as those UXGA laptops) will have nice looking fonts without a magnifying glass. I know it might be easier said than done, but this will push the Linux desktop miles ahead.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[Leroy_Brown242]

yes, fonts have been a long time gripe for me as well. I end up running a lower res than I'd like, or just guessing what text says. making me unpopular on IRC. :)

Re:Vectorized graphics

[xenocide2]

Its been a while, but I'm pretty sure GNOME has already been using vector graphics for a long time. I recall my roommate doing a background in vector graphics, though that might have been an gdm login screen instead. It had a robot breating fire! Also, I'm pretty sure icons can be vector graphics as well. As for text, all I can really think of is sub pixel rendering, or whatever its called for X. There was an article not too long ago on the subject, just look for something like "cleartype linux."

Re:Vectorized graphics

[be-fan]

Fonts are already vectorial. If you've got a high-resolution screen, just go to "Preferences", then "Fonts", click the "Details" button, and set the "Resolution" spinner to get the fonts to the right size. For a UXGA laptop, presuming a 15" screen, 133dpi is the proper resolution, and 8-9 is the right-size for the UI font. I have such a screen, and I use Albany AMT 9pt at 130dpi, with sub-pixel anti-aliasing disabled (but the auto-hinter enabled). I've also heard of good results with 8pt or 9pt Tahoma at 133 dpi with sub-pixel AA enabled.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[be-fan]

Oh, I forgot in my other post. With regards to non-font rendering, GNOME is already planning on using Cairo (a vector-graphics library) for its core drawing routines.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[ticktockticktock]

Hmm. I thought the font issue was already solved, at least in SUSE, where font sizes at a given point are exactly the same size (or very close to it) in different resolutions. I vaguely remember reading somewhere, that it was actually an X related feature where it calculates the actual pixel heights/widths based on the DDC info from the monitor that contained the monitor's actual height/width, and if it cannot get that info, it defaults to something (I think).

Re:Vectorized graphics

[Leo McGarry]

I hope GNOME will take a step ahead and use vector graphics.

IRIX had them long before I used my first SGI machine in 1996. Great in principle, but the downside is that they were ugly as hell. A net loss.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[Rahga]

I'm sure that one day, GNOME will even ship with SVG-powered solitaire, minesweeper, and even klotski.

Yes, I'm bragging. Click here.

(For what it's worth, I don't care about using SVG for icons just yet. Perhaps one day, we will se people running at least 133 dpi regularly, then I'll consider it. That day is not today.)

Re:Vectorized graphics

[tempest303]

GNOME is taking steps toward greater SVG usage, but SVG isn't a panacea...

Re:Vectorized graphics

[Brandybuck]

Tell me about it. I did an SVG icon recently for an app of mine. It looked great at 48x48. But when I went to create bitmaps for the Mac OSX icon (which required a greater range of resolutions), I discovered that what looks good at 48x48 often looks like crap at 16x16, and fugly at 128x128. The problem is that when you scale an SVG image, everything scales, including the line widths. I had to manually tweak each resolution by hand.

Why would you need so many resolutions? Why can't everything be 128x128? Because that same icon is going to be used as the app icon in the folder or destkop, a smaller size if the folder is in a columnar view mode, as a quick launch icon on the panel, and as a mini icon in the titlebar or task manager. You will also have the rude heretic users who will change the GNOME defaults.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[prockcore]

I vaguely remember reading somewhere, that it was actually an X related feature where it calculates the actual pixel heights/widths based on the DDC info from the monitor that contained the monitor's actual height/width

I don't know if that's part of X or not, but Gnome uses the monitor info to determine the DPI for the current resolution and thus, all gnome fonts are drawn at proper size regardless of what resolution or monitor you're on.

You can hold a pica pole up to the screen and see that yes, indeed, the font is 12pt.. etc.

(I work for a newspaper, and so I happen to have a pica pole handy)

As far as I know, no other OS does that. OS9 assumes everything is 72 dpi, OSX assumes everything is 100dpi, and windows assumes everything is 96dpi. Windows does let you change it though.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[orcrist]

The setting you're looking for is:
Section "Monitor"
DisplaySize [x] [y] ....(other Monitor settings)
EndSection

where x and y are the screen width and height in millimeters. X then calculates the dpi from that. Most distributions seem to set this based on the 'usual' size for screens of a certain resolution, but that's usually way off for laptops. I just measured my laptop screen and set it appropriately.

-chris

Re:Vectorized graphics

[displaced80]

OS X v10.4 will support full resolution-independence. That's on a per-app basis too, so different windows can appear at different dpi's.

Quartz has apparently been able to do this forever, but the higher-level app stuff had to be put in place so it would work seamlessly.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[ion_]

set the "Resolution" spinner to get the fonts to the right size.

If the monitor doesn't tell its physical dimensions to Xorg, you can add DisplaySize xx yy (in millimeters) to the Monitor section of xorg.conf. Then Xorg will be able to calculate the DPI value correctly at any resolution.

Re:Vectorized graphics

[scarolan]

Try out the 'Gartoon' theme if you use Gnome2 - it's got some real nice looking, cartoony vector graphics. Looks great from 16 x 16, to infinity and beyond!

Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Any user of Mac OS X can see, in these screenshots, the wretched face of desperation--and an ugly face it is too. Compared to Aqua, the GNOME environment is misery embodied. So the question naturally presents itself: Why would anyone bother using Linux, when a brand-new Mac can be had for $499?

Face it, Linux advocates. Your time has come and gone. 2004 was the year of Linux on the desktop, and nobody noticed. Five years hence, GNOME and KDE both will lie forgotten in the dustbin of history.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that law-abiding citizens must pay $699 for a license to run Linux, it is indeed one of the universe's great mysteries why anyone would choose that exercise in mediocrity over Mac OS X.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[desplesda]

That's right. This screenshot tour is, of course, the official screenshot tour, delivered by GNOME. You can tell they're desperate for exposure - look! They posted a message to a mailinglist and everything!

Troll.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[maglor_83]

Why would anyone bother using Linux, when a brand-new Mac can be had for $499?

Maybe you already have an x86 that you want to use.
Maybe you already have a mac?
Or maybe you don't like the fact that a Mac Mini only has a 32MB video card which can't (officialy) be upgraded, when to run nicely, OS X really needs at least 64MB?
Or maybe you prefer the various desktops available for linux to Mac OS X?

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[mboverload]

Aye. I wish linux was purtyer. I am probably going to get a new mini instead of make a machine with linux on it. OSX with it's security and programs makes it a better option. If you had talked to me 5 years ago, I would be pissing on macs all day. However, Apple has make a great turn-around and the price makes getting a regular machine and putting linux on it unreasonable.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear desplesda,

Are you trying to say these screenshots look good to you? Only a slob with a face even uglier than GNOME could possibly espouse such a patently absurd opinion. How you can bear contemplating your own visage in the mirror each morning is truly beyond me.

Sincerely,
"Troll"

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[MuckSavage]

Or maybe you don't like the fact that a Mac Mini only has a 32MB video card which can't (officialy) be upgraded, when to run nicely, OS X really needs at least 64MB?


Who told you that nonsense?

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[maglor_83]

Well I guess my idea of running nicely is a little high. That and like to do fancy graphics stuff, which slows it down.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[hazah]

Um... yes, why indeed would anyone at all bother using linux. You have a flawd perception as to what linux is. Besides it being only a kernel (which isn't even the point here), it is, from the perspective of many, a highly adaptive system. A GUI, in linux, is NOTHING but a front end. It has a very specialized use. I don't think you'll ever find a linux user (one that actually knows how to use it, that is) that will brag about it's GUI. They probably don't care, and would laugh at the notion. Quit trolling, you obviously don't know what you are talking about.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[aristotle-dude]

I knopw that this was meant to be a troll but there is some truth to what you say. But I don't think looks are the main problem with it. The main obstacle for linux adoption on the desktop are some of its advocates who vehemently oppose movements like the LSB and commercial involvement with linux.

Face it guys, it's all well and good to have principles but the average joe/jane wants to have access to closed source apps on their platform of choice.

Linux advocates must also come to the hard realization that many closed source apps have superior UI's to their open source counterparts because those companies took the time and money to hire UI designers.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[mythicflux]

Any user of Mac OS X can see, in these screenshots, the wretched face of desperation--and an ugly face it is too. Compared to Aqua, the GNOME environment is misery embodied. So the question naturally presents itself: Why would anyone bother using Linux, when a brand-new Mac can be had for $499?

Absolutely right, just as five years from now Apple will need to produce yet another product to maintain it's relevence in the computer industry. Let's not forget how Apple's mainstream appeal tends to fade after the mainstream consumer market get's over the fad that Apple produced.

I mean obviously the iMac is still the powerhouse it was in 1998.

As for the $499 dollar price tag, nice move on Apple's part but to quote Mr Steve Ballmer "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS" which I'm sure that Apple will have in abundance once Linux moves into #2 in the desktop cosumer market (thus further erroding Apple's relevence).

But hey, you keep your narrow little Mac Zealot view of the world and all the Linux user's in the world will be there thumbing there noses at your elitist crap... Troll.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody here ever heard of GoblinX, a live cd distro that focuses on pretty gui's. Linux (even gnome) can be beautiful if you want it to be.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

"a Mac Mini only has a 32MB video card ... when to run nicely, OS X really needs at least 64MB?"

Not only does your bullshit reek to Rome and back, but also consider that there is no amount of VRAM that can make a Linux desktop "run nicely". You could cram your video card with four gigabytes and still fail to compensate for Linux's myriad shortcomings as a desktop, interface usability and beauty chief among them.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahaha! And you know what the worst thing is? You probably actually believe yourself.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I want you to remember this post in five years when even the most zealous of zealots have given up on waiting for a Linux desktop that doesn't cause ocular hemorrhage.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[ScytheBlade1]

Oh really?

Besides, I thought that personal tastes are just that. Personal.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Joe Tie.]

Depends what you mean by superior. I'd agree that they're often more on target to the audience in general, but that often comes at the cost of what the more geeky crowd wants. The windows interface is well suited to, say, my non-technically inclined boss. Personally though, it seems at times that it was created by studying what I like to do and then putting in an active effort to make it difficult to accomplish. KDE fits my style well, and if it comes at the cost of it arriving on the average Joe, than so be it.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think it's sad that in order to refute a post claiming that OS X's interface is superior to Linux desktop environments', you have to point to a screenshot of someone's desktop imitating Mac OS X?

Also, Mac OS X's usability aesthetic runs much deeper than anything you can patch onto GNOME or KDE with a simple theme. Don't be a cockcheesewad.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[ciroknight]

I'm guessing you've never owned a Mac. My iBook with its dinky 32MB card and 256 MB of ddr (before I added a gig) ran every graphical piece of eye candy completely fine until the harddrive got very full (98%). Then it seemed like the operating system swapped out a lot, causing it to be a bit slower. Even then, it was much better than anything I've seen in Windows, and its performance was still good enough to play World of Warcraft without batting an eye.

Apple can show you that minimalistic hardware can go a long way. No need for 256MB graphics cards on a daily user or an economy machine.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[callipygian-showsyst]

As for the $499 dollar price tag, nice move on Apple's part but to quote Mr Steve Ballmer "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS"

That's an excellent point (which I talked about here). In fact, the reason I switched from Macintosh development to Windows development is because the tools on Windows are many times better than Apple's crashy UI slapped on top of Gnu's Objective-C compiler and GDB.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Mornelithe]

Prettier than what? There are tons of themes out there for both Gnome and KDE, and many of them are quite pretty. In fact, I like KDE's plastik widgets more than Aqua.

But if you think that Aqua is the pinnacle of widget looks, then there are plenty of themes that make KDE and Gnome widgets look exactly like Aqua widgets.

Perhaps Gnome could use a sleeker default theme, but saying that Linux desktops aren't 'purty' is non-sense.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anubis350]

as both a mac and linux user I'm bothered by both you trolls, stop being jerks and actually realize that a) both platforms have their merits and drawbacks and b) competition is good.

[begin rant]

I'm getting goddamn sick and tired of fan-boy posts, be they linux, mac, windows, goddamn paper tape, etc. Take the time to actually use a platform and you'll realize that it probably has its merits (yes even windows). Go out, stop trolling, and get a life. Posts like the parent and grandparent are the reason why slashdot is sometimes such a pain to read.

[end rant]

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

As you must know, Mac OS X's beauty runs deeper than the way a widget looks. Fit and finish are paramount, and you really get the impression that every behavior in Aqua is precisely tuned. No mere veneer over KDE or Gnome can match it.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[hazah]

So a Pretty GUI is the beall/endall? Comon, linux functions on many layers, and a GUI is only one of them. Yes.. it lags behind your precious Darwin (of which I'm fond of, of course). But that's hardly an obsticle for the OS itself.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a cool desktop. Does justice to Gnome. What did you do to get it? What theme? icons? win decorations, etc.?

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I am probably going to get a new mini

Due to the astroturfing campaign, I'm not going to buy a Mac. I had been planning on getting one to play WoW, but all the +5 circle jerking made me decide on a beefy PC instead of a beefy G5.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

no one cares.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Leo McGarry]

I have seen uglier screen shots ...but not recently.

How are you supposed to tell which is the active window? Why are the window controls not vertically centered inside the window title bars? Why is the type incorrectly kerned? Why are random letters in control labels underlined? Is the scroll bar thumb the light gray part or the dark gray part? Why is some of the type antialiased and some not? Why is there a short horizontal line near the bottom of your "faux Finder" window? Why is there a white line on the left edge of your Terminal window? Where's the resize control on the Terminal window? Where's the scroll bar? And so forth and so on.

I thought that personal tastes are just that. Personal.

Most of the time, they are. But ugly is just ugly, you know?

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Michael.Forman]

I hate to say it but I just can't use Linux as a desktop any longer. I've completely switched to MacOS X for all my work both at home and at work. It gives me all the Unix goodness I'm accustomed to with a great zero-maintenance UI.

That's not to say that Linux doesn't have a place in my home, though. I currently have a headless box in my closet that's my home NFS server with several websites on it.

Michael.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[SnAzBaZ]

Most pretty screenshots I've seen like this are just that. Pretty screenshots. They are mostly awkward and horrible to actually use to get anything done with. OSX manages to look pretty while still being amazingly useful, consistent and intuitive to use.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[l3v1]

Hahahaha! And you know what the worst thing is? You probably actually believe yourself.

You know what, Mr. AC ? If we would judge an OS by it's looks, noone would ever buy WinXP or else, and Apple would've become world leader with OSX.

Thing is, which is not necessarily sad, but nevertheless true, that the most part of computer users are not in any way developers, nor do they want to do anything development related, nor do they wish to know the insides or power usabilities of any OS they ever coem in conatct with. And that means that usually the GUIs will not be suited for a power user.

From that point of view - developer, geek, power user, etc. - Linux could really prevail in the x86 world. And these prople also are in perfect knowledge of an OS's power lies not in the GUI, so your parent post has quite a bit of truth in it. On the other hand, a KDE GUI is much more user-friendly than many others, for the simple fact that be _very_ easily customized to one's needs. I've seen and heard many opinions according to whom this is exactly a drawback of KDE (too many places to tweak on too many locations), but I've come to appreciate this approach over the years.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahhahahahahha haahahahhahahhahahahhahhahaha. yea... no i'm not done. ahhahahahahahhahhaahhahaahahahahahahahahahahaahahh aha.

XCode and Objective-C own you. Have fun playing with microsofts fun VB and C# crap.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[mythicflux]

as both a mac and linux user I'm bothered by both you trolls, stop being jerks and actually realize that a) both platforms have their merits and drawbacks and b) competition is good.

I never said that they did not have there merits did I? The point I was making is that Apple products tend to not have longetity for the mass market. And unfortunetly, do to recent moves by Apple, certain long time developers who used to support (for example) Mac OS suddenly decided it wasn't worth their time. Apple is trying to maintain control of iTunes, the RIAA isn't exactly thrilled with the idea of future DRM being based on Apple's tech. Situations similar to that.

The computing industry is full of great products that died due to the fact that nobody bothered to develop technology for them. BeOS and Amiga come to mind.

What is hilarious is that I was modded as flame bait because I pointed out that Apple has a history of producing trendy products (good as they are) that don't really go anywhere after a few years.

I never once claimed that Linux was superior to Mac or Windows or that any particular technology was better (I simply stated that Linux would take a bigger chunk of the desktop market and as a side effect Apple would lose it relevence), but I guess people would rather assume that I am being a Linux fanboy because I'm calling out a Mac Zealot.

Take the time to actually use a platform and you'll realize that it probably has its merits (yes even windows)

Again did I ever state that I hadn't tried it? I have tried Mac OS X, find it to be a fine system, but ultimately when I use a UNIX environment I tend to not care about pretty graphics as I focus on the console.

So now you are making assumptions based upon notions you just came up with just as you are accusing me of. But hey it's /. so everyone will just spend time bitching about everyone elses opinion and then yell flamebait after which point Godwin's Law will come into effect and someone will follow with a link to goatse, all the while trying to figure out the 2nd step, which comes right before 3. Profit.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[mythicflux]

I want you to remember this post in five years when even the most zealous of zealots have given up on waiting for a Linux desktop that doesn't cause ocular hemorrhage.

And if I am wrong, guess what? I AM WRONG, no big deal, the world doesn't end because Linux didn't live up to the promise of what it represents, I'll just spend my time learning what ever else is out there, I'm a computer geek: I try to learn things.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[mythicflux]

That wasn't exactly what I was talking about, but that is also a good point too. My point is that if major 3rd party developers decide to abandon Mac OS because Apple produces a competing product (IE Adobe, Microsoft) then where does that leave Apple?

If there is no Photoshop for Mac but you can run it on Windows and (under Wine) on Linux, what is the incentive for say graphic design houses to still stick with Mac? (That is only one program, but still). The point is that if I am developing a product and I decide to cover two platforms, I'm going to use the two plaforms that have the greatest market share, if Windows is as 94%, Linux at 4% and Mac at %2 (these are not valid figures, just made up for the sake of argument) what plaforms do I use, especially given that the Windows and Linux systems are based of the same hardware (thereby less cost because you can dualboot your development machines (if you wanted) at really no additional cost).

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is a kernel, not a desktop.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[mythicflux]

I hate to say it but I just can't use Linux as a desktop any longer. I've completely switched to MacOS X for all my work both at home and at work. It gives me all the Unix goodness I'm accustomed to with a great zero-maintenance UI.

And that sounds great, you bothered to use Linux and decided it wasn't worth your time, but given your statements, I'm not getting the sense that you would feel the need to pull a fanboy statement that Apple is somehow proof that Linux systems suck (Apple made a great GUI for a UNIX system, Linux developers could learn something from it).

I'll be honest, I'm considering getting a Mac Mini at some point since the price tag is finally down to what I consider a reasonable amount, the only concern I have is that the Mac Mini will not be upgradable to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), but if it isn't no major issue.

That's not to say that Linux doesn't have a place in my home, though. I currently have a headless box in my closet that's my home NFS server with several websites on it.

I'm currently running a FreeBSD 5.1 driven Mini-ITX file server that I mount as a D: drive on my Windows machine and a /files on my Linux boxes (using Samba). I use it for internal web site development, file serving and as a general test system.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[lachlan76]

Holy shit! What's that running???

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I can relate to that :-)

I was really considering the option of a Mac laptop - the low-end powerbook + edu discount is almost cheap enough. But too much of the mac 'community' is beyond embarassing nowadays. Maybe it's a new wave of rich dumbos though[*] - I wonder how many of the Apple old-timers are getting the "use some other headphones on my ipod so it's less conspicuous and I don't get associated with those guys"-type of reaction.

So I guess I'll be waiting for those 90nm A64s to make it into cheaper notebooks. Choice is a good thing.

[*] wouldn't it be nice for the rest of the OS world if OSX collected all the useless self-righteous pricks so that they would stop bothering people who are really trying to produce some useful F/OSS? Won't hurt OSX, either, as Apple is by definition beyond criticism.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Mini review on anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.a spx?i=2328&p =6

"Despite what I had originally expected, the on-board Radeon 9200 is a bit of a performance limitation. I had the Mac mini hooked up to a 23" Cinema Display running its native resolution of 1920 x 1200 and was wondering why Exposé and a handful of other animations were choppy. After tinkering with resolutions, I found out why. At resolutions above 1280 x 960, the Radeon 9200's 32MB of local frame buffer isn't enough to handle Exposé of even just four windows - swapping to main memory, and thus reducing the smoothness of the Exposé effects. At 1024 x 768, it's great and it's even fine at 1280 x 960, but once you start going above and beyond that, you start running out of video memory real quickly."

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Macs are for faggots.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[fr0dicus]

Or maybe you don't like the fact that a Mac Mini only has a 32MB video card which can't (officialy) be upgraded, when to run nicely, OS X really needs at least 64MB?

Now the FUDees become the FUDers!

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

This is trollery, but it's all true.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[callipygian-showsyst]

This is exactly the attitude that cased me to run away from the Macintosh platform. C# and .NET aren't crap. In fact the Gnu folks and Novell's Open Source group are spending considerable time and effort with their own implementations. You don't see a lot of new Objective-C stuff going on outside Apple, do you?

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Michael.Forman]

I didn't just bother to try GNU/Linux (with fvwm or KDE). I was an early adopter in 1992 originally using Slackware (I remember running around campus with a huge stack of floppies) and have ecently moved to SuSE. I have not used MS Windows for almost a decade.

My wife bought our first Apple product, a power book, about two years ago. After adjusting to its interface and learning to make it act more like a GNU/Linux window manager (fvwm or KDE) and supplementing its version of Unix with GNU software via "fink," I found it had everything that my GNU/Linux machine had plus several very important features -- the user interface was zero maintenance, automatically updated, and beautiful.

Naturally, I use GNU/Linux where it has the greatest utility. I feel for a server, the time spent configuring the system is worth the extra effort. As for a KDE-on-GNU/Linux desktop, while it is better than running Windows for its GNU goodness, the Linux GUIs are not quite up to the MacOS level yet.

I think we are all various combinations of zealot and fanboy. I am much more of an anti-Microsoft zealot than a fanboy of either MacOS or GNU/Linux. I simply choose what works best for me out of the non-MS pool.

Michael.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Mornelithe]

Does this look all right to you?

Link

I assure you, it's plenty easy to use.

Then again, I doubt that the person in the original screenshot had trouble using his system. The only specific thing I'd find problematic with that particular desktop is that he has way too many windows open on that one desktop (assuming he restored all those iconified windows), but they're probably on separate desktops normally.

Even I put more windows in a screenshot than I usually have on a desktop, because otherwise it's almost like posting a picture of my wallpaper.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[flacco]

Your critique is stupid and sounds biased.

How are you supposed to tell which is the active window?

some of the windows don't have title bars. i suspect the media player is active. or possibly the unseen application taking the screenshot.

Why are the window controls not vertically centered inside the window title bars?

because who gives a fuck? because the designer of the theme wanted it that way? because the user decides what he likes and doesn't like - not redmond?

Why is the type incorrectly kerned?

it looks fine to me - but you may be more discriminating about that. whatever.

Why are random letters in control labels underlined?

they're not "randomly underlined". it seems that labels that are native to the interface are explicitly underlined, and labels that are variable simply underline the first letter unless the user assigns a specific letter to them. letters underlined more than once are sequentially selected with each access key keystroke.

Is the scroll bar thumb the light gray part or the dark gray part?

as is completely obvious to someone without an agenda, it's the light part.

Why is some of the type antialiased and some not?

again, the type looks fine to me. what part are you having difficulty reading, exactly?

Why is there a short horizontal line near the bottom of your "faux Finder" window?

it's obviously part of the selector control right below it.

Why is there a white line on the left edge of your Terminal window?

it's obviously part of the "raised panel" look of *every* (window-decorated) on the screen.

Where's the resize control on the Terminal window? Where's the scroll bar?

they're hidden, just like the owner of the desktop wants it. transparent terminal windows without decoration are pretty common on *nix desktops.

And so forth and so on.

it's possible you're just being a jerk-off because you have a hidden agenda. on the other hand, it's also possible that you're so used to sucking on microsoft's and/or apple's tits that you can't appreciate a customized desktop.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Leo McGarry]

Now that's good satire. I especially like this part:

it seems that labels that are native to the interface are explicitly underlined, and labels that are variable simply underline the first letter unless the user assigns a specific letter to them. letters underlined more than once are sequentially selected with each access key keystroke.

Man, i consider myself to be a moderately funny guy, but never in a zillion years could I have come up with something that crazy. I laughed until I cried.

You rock, dude.

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[flacco]

Man, i consider myself to be a moderately funny guy, but never in a zillion years could I have come up with something that crazy. I laughed until I cried.

i know, it's *totally* crazy! i figured it out, like, immediately after encountering this labelling scheme myself! it was *soooo* much harder than windows' 'pick the next available letter' defaults. and *soooo* much more confusing than windows' 'hide the letter until you hold down the shift key' default! crazy!

You rock, dude.

thanks, i'll take praise where i can get it. :-)

Re:Truth: The State of Desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

for the love of god tell us you know what the word 'satire' means

Differences

[desplesda]

How many of the differences that we can see in the screenshots are from the new GNOME, and how many are from Ubuntu? I run Ubuntu, and it customises a fair bit of the GNOME desktop.

Re:Differences

[Stevyn]

I've installed GNOME on gentoo which pretty much uses the stock gnome and I didn't find really anything too remarkably different. The changes must focus on the underlying stuff and not gui enhancements.

Difference

[mboverload]

Honestly, I relaly don't see much of a difference.

Re:Difference

[Bootle]

It looks the same to me as well, and by same I mean ugly.

Honestly, gnome looks like something from 1995. I always used KDE just because it looked good. I also hate having everything in a right-click context menu.

Maybe I've just been spoiled by OS X....

Re:Difference

[Compenguin]

I love the right click context menu. It seems fairly analogous to object oriented programming. You right click on your "object" and perform actions on it. The right click is like the dot.

Re:Difference

[tpgp]

Honestly, I relaly don't see much of a difference.

I am going to presume you meant really, rather then relay.

How about the places menu, the MultiMedia Systems Selector, maybe the Device Manager or the Dictionay.

But honestly, this is an incremental release. What were you expecting? A complete revamp?

Re:Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Context menus can be good. They are just so often abused. It's also a little bit of a chicken and the egg problem: Because you aren't used to them, they seem inefficient to you. Because they seem inefficient to you, Apple and MS don't use them much. Because Apple and MS don't use them much, you never get used to them.

Back when I used OS/2, I loved context menus for their power and simplicity. IBM didn't get them completely right either, of course; but because they tried, I got used to them and felt crippled when I eventually switched to Windows. I think you haven't really been "spoiled" by OS X, but you certainly are so used to it (or something with a similar philosophy re: this topic) that you have a hard time adjusting to something else.

For what it's worth, I disagree with nearly every UI decision GNOME has made since 1.4. So I personally don't think they're doing context menus right either. Just trying to illustrate that your feelings may not be entirely because of GNOME's faults.

Re:Difference

[RedWizzard]

or the Dictionay.

I am going to assume you meant dictionary... (sorry, had to :-)

Re:Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but gnome is all about making the linux desktop easier for the user, not about making the interface operate in strict object oriented programmer mindset.

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

That's fine in principle, but in practice it works like reverse Polish notation. It's something you can learn, yes, but it's backwards.

In English, we "do this to that." That is to say, we apply an action to an object. We don't specify an object and then describe an action. We "open door," we don't "door open."

The nut is that trying to teach people to think object-then-action is a chore. It's a process that has to be learned.

A far, far better paradigm is the gestural paradigm. Click, double-click, click-and-drag. For instance, consider drag and drop. Drag and drop is one of the easiest things to learn. We deal with the same basic paradigm every day. In order to put the banana guacamole in the freezer, I pick it up and put it on the shelf. I don't point to the banana guacamole and then point to the freezer and then give a command. In fact, drag-and-drop is so intuitive that people who have a lot of experience with primitive computer systems often have trouble mastering it. It doesn't seem "natural" to them because they've gone out of their way to learn a different syntax.

Select-then-act has to be learned. Drag-and-drop and other gestural interfaces are far more obvious.

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

Only a computer programmer would take a simple idea like "sound" and call it "multimedia systems selector."

I can't help but notice that the sound control panel -- er, sorry, the "multimedia systems selector audio tab" --doesn't have a volume control on it.

Sigh.

Re:Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

> Honestly, I relaly don't see much of a difference.

> I am going to presume you meant really, rather then relay.
> How about the places menu, the MultiMedia Systems Selector, maybe the Device Manager or the Dictionay.

I presume you meant Dictionary, you spelling bee champ.

Re:Difference

[yobbo]

It took you 10 years, and you still can't see Gnome's theme feature.

Even worse, you're considered informative on slashdot.

Let's do the timewarp again!

Re:Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a retard.

Only a computer programmer would take a simple idea like "sound" and call it "multimedia systems selector."

It isn't a sound control panel (notice the video tab)?

I can't help but notice that the sound control panel -- er, sorry, the "multimedia systems selector audio tab" --doesn't have a volume control on it.

If you weren't so obviously retarded you would have noticed the volume control in the top left corner of the image linked to.

Re:Difference

[cortana]

Did the 'video' tab escape your notice?

The multimedia systems selector allows you to select which multimedia systems, both audio and video, programs will use. What would you have called it?

To change the volume, you click on the little volume icon shown at the top right of the screen.

Re:Difference

[Brandybuck]

I understand what you're saying, but the "gestural paradigm" doesn't work when you have lots of available actions. Some of them are fine. But to do everything with some sort of gesture, you're going to end up with dozens of keys to press while dragging. You can't remember them all. Alt+P+drag equals print, Alt+Y+drop equals compress, Shift+Alt+M equals upgrade the package the icon came from, etc, etc. What if you do Alt+P+drag on a binary executable? Does it print out the splash screen?

That's why there are context menus. The most common items can remain gestures (copy, delete), but you're going to have to put actions in a context menu, especially if they are not universal to the object being manipulated.

Drag-and-drop and other gestural interfaces are far more obvious.

Nonsense. The only reason it seems that way is because so many people have prior experience with other desktops. There are no analogues in real life to holding down a key while dragging. Some people may stick their tongues out while trying to thread a needle, but that's an individual behavioral quirk, and not a universal instinct applicatble to the computer desktop.

Re:Difference

[natrius]

This is what happens when people who don't use the software in question try to badmouth it. The program you're referring to lets you pick the backend that GStreamer outputs audio and video (aka multimedia) to. It doesn't have a volume control on it because that isn't related to the function of the program. You contol the volume through the -- gasp! -- volume control applet in the panel. Just like in Windows and OS X.

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

Did the 'video' tab escape your notice?

No, it's right up there next to the "Audio" tab ...you know, the one that should read "Sound."

The multimedia systems selector allows you to select which multimedia systems, both audio and video, programs will use. What would you have called it?

Sound and video are two different things. They don't belong together. Break one out and call it -- I'm gonna get wacky here --"Sound," and the other "Video."

Of course, if you have no video card attached to your computer, a "Video" control panel is superfluous. No video output, no need for a "Video" control, see? So if there's no video output (composite, 601, 292M, whatever), there should be no video control panel.

To change the volume, you click on the little volume icon shown at the top right of the screen.

Why is it not included in the "Sound" control panel?

Re:Difference

[Doppler00]

and somehow it was modded:
(Score:5, Insightful)

How can you get modded that much for saying a generic uninsightful sentence with bad spelling?

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

The program you're referring to lets you pick the backend that GStreamer outputs audio and video

Dude, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, and I don't have the first fucking idea what that's supposed to mean. I'm just gonna take a wild-ass guess here and say that this is the control panel you use to say whether you want sound to come out of the speakers or the headphone jack. Why wrap it in technobabble?

It doesn't have a volume control on it because that isn't related to the function of the program.

Volume isn't related to sound controls? I think you'll find you're mistaken.

You contol the volume through the -- gasp! -- volume control applet in the panel.

What's a panel, and what's an applet? And if I go to the Sound control panel, I'd damn well expect to find controls related to sound there. Telling me they're somewhere else isn't the right answer. Are we constrained by room on the dashboard or the cost of materials? Put a fucking slider control on there, stick a label on it, and call it a day.

Except that the label would evidently be "audiophonic amplitude attenuation," abbreviated to AAA, and it would range from -e to +pi.

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

Shift+Alt+M equals upgrade the package the icon came from

Beg pardon? I think maybe you're reaching here. That's a pretty silly example, is it not?

Re:Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

and it would be measured in joules per steradian. i read somewhere that it's a law of nature that some people are going to make things as complicated as possible. these people tell you how fast they're driving in furlongs per fortnight. and evidently they also program for linux.

Re:Difference

[cortana]

> No, it's right up there next to the "Audio" tab ...you know, the one that should
> read "Sound."

Then I don't understand how the fact that the multimedia systems selector is *not* a volume control, could have escaped your understanding.

> Sound and video are two different things. They don't belong together. Break
> one out and call it -- I'm gonna get wacky here --"Sound," and the other
> "Video."

The actions of picking which subsystems to use for audio/video (hence the 'multi' in multimedia) capture/output belong together. The actions are known as "selecting which multimedia systems to use". Hence, "multimedia system selector".

> Of course, if you have no video card attached to your computer, a "Video"
> control panel is superfluous. No video output, no need for a "Video" control,
> see? So if there's no video output (composite, 601, 292M, whatever), there
> should be no video control panel.

Quite incorrect. I may wish to select one of the video sinks that records a stream to disk, shunts it accross a network, or calculates MD5sums of the data stream. Not to mention configuring video capture.

> To change the volume, you click on the little volume icon shown at the top
> right of the screen.

Because:
* the multimedia systems selector is not a "sound" control panel; strcmp("multimedia systems selector", "sound") != 0
* if changing the volume was hidden away in a control panel then unskilled users would never find it
* if it were hidden away in a control panel then anyone who did find it would be annoyed that it was hidden away!

Re:Difference

[mboverload]

Windows has had the places menu for years. It has also had the device manager for who knows how long. Wow, a dictionary. Get the news crews.

I dont care about some small release that means nothing. That's not important enough to have on the slashdot front page.

Re:Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

ahahaha nice.

You fucking idiot. NOTE: Before criticizing someone's spelling online, press FUCKING PREVIEW!

Retard!

Re:Difference

[natrius]

I don't have the first fucking idea what that's supposed to mean.

And you shouldn't if you don't use GNOME, because even if you did use it, you're not supposed to need to select a different backend for GStreamer. Some distros don't even include it in the menu because its advanced configuration that most users will never need. It's purpose is to allow you to use a different sound server, like KDE's artsd. If you want to know more about it, google some of the terms you don't know about. I'm not trying to to belittle you, but you're coming out of nowhere trying to put down the design of things you've never even used. It shouldn't be a surprise that you don't know the purpose of some things.

Volume isn't related to sound controls? I think you'll find you're mistaken.

No, that's not what I said. Volume isn't related to the Multimedia Systems Selector. It's named that because that's exactly what it is. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it should have a volume control slapped on it. Like I said before, it's a window that you would never see unless you typed the command in the command line since it's not in the menu.

What's a panel, and what's an applet?

Panels are the bars at the top and bottom of the screen. they hold programs called applets. Look in the screenshot you were referring to. See the little speaker icon at the top right? That's what any user trying to change the volume would go to, not the Multimedia Systems Selector, because, for the third and final time, it's an advanced configuration program not meant for most users to deal with.

Pop in one of the many live CDs that have been posted on Slashdot over the past week or so and try out GNOME. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much easier it is to use than you think. There's still a lot of room for improvement though, and it gets better with every release. I hear 2.10 has a new volume control applet.

Re:Difference

[Brandybuck]

Of course it's a silly example. It's taking the opposing proposition to the extreme to make the point.

Realistically, how many actions can you perform with a document icon? If it's a folder icon, how many actions will it have? How many will device icons like the trash can and DVD drive have? An executable? A zipped file? Etc, etc.

I'm guessing there will be about actions common to all icons (open/run, cut, copy, rename, trash or delete, and view properties). Then there are actions specific to only some icon types, like compress (for a normal file), play (for a CD icon), empty (for the trash), eject (for any removable media icon), etc. Overall I would say a dozen unique actions are available. Since you shouldn't overload the gesture semantics because it makes it harder to learn and remember, these will all require equally unique gestures.

Assuming a one button mouse (to please the Mac people), counting click, doubleclick and drag-drop as separate actions, and with four meta keys to use, we end up with twelve possible gestures. It's sufficient, but just barely. But the PROBLEM is remembering those gestures. There are twelve gestures to remember. People already have problems remembering with button does what with a two button mouse, imagine them trying to remember twelve different things. They will need a cheat sheet, because after all, we've completely removed the context menu because it's user unfriendly.

Re:Difference

[the_2nd_coming]

actually... we do interface with a door as door open.

you decided to interact with the door, then you use the door's open method to access its knob object and use the knob object's turn method which opens the door.

same with every object in life... each object has an interface to it and we access something in that interface to do something to that object.

Re:Difference

[Heidistein]

No not really... IMHO polands door.open(); and we open(door);

Re:Difference

[rainman_bc]

Multimedia Systems Selector was already there, as was dictionary, but both have been tweaked a bit. Really, gnome has bigger problems. Try playing a mp3 off an smb share without mounting the smb share. Not allowed. Try listing the shares on a machine. Wireless suppoert is finally getting better - NetworkManager is rad

Re:Difference

[erlando]

A far, far better paradigm is the gestural paradigm. Click, double-click, click-and-drag. For instance, consider drag and drop. Drag and drop is one of the easiest things to learn.

You have obviously never spent even an hour in either frontline support or as an instructor trying to teach "normal" people to double-click. It might seem natural and easy to you but trust me.. Not all people find it easy.

And drag-and-drop is even worse.

Re:Difference

[mboverload]

I think drag and drop is a very intuitive idea.

You grap (click and hold) an object (icon) and then drag it to another place and let go (release button).

That does not seem like a stretch to me.

Re:Difference

[TuringTest]

Apparently it was important enough for you to read it and even post a comment!

Re:Difference

[Khazunga]

Try playing a mp3 off an smb share without mounting the smb share. Not allowed.

Care to explain why should it be allowed? Access to remote filesystems should be delegated to the kernel. And yes, Linux can only access mounted filesystems. It has never been a problem before...

Re:Difference

[the_2nd_coming]

but then your function crashes your house when you call it like this:

open(chair)

you really decide that you want to open something then you go in search of something to open?

Re:Difference

[Bloater]

yeah, the "Audio" tab should be "Sound", and the "Video" tab should be "TV"

Re:Difference

[Bloater]

FUSE should make this clean an safe so that users can be permitted to mount loopback/network volumes as they wish on directories they own. At the moment this is restricted due to security issues - although mounting of floppies isn't yet.

Re:Difference

[Bloater]

I don't agree, if I want my co-worker to have something I've got, I sometimes first think about the co-worker, sometimes the thing, but rarely the give.

Other times I have a result scheduled for production, so I want to select a pre-named product from my list of tasks, then select the objects to work with, then do the work to produce it.

Other times I just want to play with a new tool, so I want to select the tool and get to see what things I can do with it before selecting an object to use it on.

Re:Difference

[digidave]

"I hear 2.10 has a new volume control applet."

Is it in the Multimedia Systems Selector?

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

If you want to know more about it, google some of the terms you don't know about.

Tell me again why this "Linux" thing is gonna take over the world? Is it the "this control is unnecessarily complex" attitude that's gonna be the key to their success, or the "this is not meant for you to understand" attitude that's gonna win the hearts and minds?

It's named that because that's exactly what it is.

No, it's named that because somebody decided to try to make it sound like more than it was. "Sound output?" Oh, God, no. Far too mundane. "Audio controls?" Still to pedestrian. "I know! Multimedia system selector!" Throw a random plural in there and erroneously capitalize that second "M" and you've got a winner!

Panels are the bars at the top and bottom of the screen.

And they're not called "bars" why? Could it be the "not invented here" phenomenon? Apple called it a "menu bar" in 1984; the term is ubiquitous and universally understood. But we have to be cool, so we'll come up with a different name. We'll call it ...a panel! That's it, a panel. That's a word that nobody relates to human-computer interfaces. It makes the learning curve steeper for absolutely no reason. It's perfect!

they hold programs called applets.

Applets are little doohickeys that used to run inside a Web browser back in 1994 before everybody realized that they were basically stupid. Things that appear on the screen and that can be manipulated are called controls. Oh, but wait, we can't use the term everybody else uses. We have to make up our own. This time, rather than choosing a word nobody understands (like "panel"), we'll choose a word everybody understands and use it in a completely foreign way: applet. Perfect.

See the little speaker icon at the top right? That's what any user trying to change the volume would go to

Not necessarily. A user who didn't know to look for controls in the menu bar --oh, crap, sorry, the "panel" --wouldn't, particularly one who's used to Windows. Windows puts on-screen controls in the bottom right corner, you see. A user who's familiar with Windows would look for the volume control -- dammit, "applet" --in the usual place, not find it, and default to looking at the sound control panel.

it's an advanced configuration program not meant for most users to deal with

Then why is it there at all? Given that Gnome is so obviously unfinished, why is effort being put into features that nobody will use when basic features remain incomplete? I mean, the fonts are obviously not finished. They're just bitmapped placeholders. The "close" buttons all have a black placeholder mark on them. The icons haven't been drawn yet. The list goes on and on. Why are people wasting their time on hideously complex features that nobody is going to use?

Pop in one of the many live CDs that have been posted on Slashdot over the past week or so and try out GNOME. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much easier it is to use than you think.

Hm. Doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me. "You think Gnome, on a scale of one to ten, is a dead-flat zero, but trust me! It's actually a one!"

Pass.

Re:Difference

[drsquare]

The multimedia systems selector allows you to select which multimedia systems, both audio and video, programs will use. What would you have called it?

But how the hell would a newbie know what the hell OSS, Alsa or ESD are? I've played with Linux for a few years, written config files, compiled kernels etc, and I still don't know what the difference between them is, or even what they actually do. Didn't OSS use to stand for open source software? Why do you need three different things which all do the same thing?

It's the same with gtk and qt etc. Say for instance you use gnome, you install the greatest theme ever and get all your fonts and colours right, then you open KWord, and it's all blocky and grey. What the hell's all that about?

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

The actions of picking which subsystems to use for audio/video (hence the 'multi' in multimedia) capture/output belong together.

Trust me, they really don't. "Sound" is one thing, and it has a whole set of controls that belong together. "Video" is a whole 'nother thing, and it has controls that belong together. There are lots of reasons to manipulate sound and video controls that don't involve picking the inputs and outputs. Splitting those controls off and moving them someplace else is just bad human interface design.

Think of the interface as a grocery store. Somebody walks into the store and thinks, "I want paprika." They're not going to go over to some kind of index and look under "P," nor are they going to stop an employee and ask where the paprika is. Instead, they generalize: "Paprika is a spice, and spices are usually on the baking aisle, so I'll walk until I see baking stuff."

When somebody uses your computer and thinks, "I want to adjust the volume," they generalize: "I'm looking for sound controls." When they think, "I want to select the headphones instead of the speakers," they generalize: "I'm looking for sound controls." When they think, "I want to adjust the gain on the microphone," they generalize: "I'm looking for sound controls."

Sending your users all over God's creation to find different controls for related functions is a great way to piss everybody off.

I may wish to select one of the video sinks that records a stream to disk, shunts it accross a network, or calculates MD5sums of the data stream.

Um. Yeah. Stupid examples of nonsense situations that nobody would ever, ever do in the real world do not help your case. You may want to use your computer as a boat anchor, too, but that doesn't mean welding an anchor chain to the top of the case is a wonderful idea.

Re:Difference

[rainman_bc]

It's silly that I can browse my local file system, and I can browse a remote SMB file system, but I can't run a file off a remote SMB share. I like how Windows treats SMB shares, and really, Gnome should automatically mount the share, and run the file, be it an mp3, or a document file or whatever.

Re:Difference

[cortana]

> But how the hell would a newbie know what the hell OSS, Alsa or ESD are? I've
> played with Linux for a few years, written config files, compiled kernels etc,
> and I still don't know what the difference between them is, or even what they
> actually do.

If a newbie wishes, he may press the prominent "Help" button that you may have noticed througout the Gnome desktop environment. This button may help him achieve enlightenment. But this process is optional, since there is no need for a newbie to know what the different options do. This is because newbies will end up whatever settings the distributor has chosen as the defaults.

Because the distributor picks what other software goes into the system, and what settings that other software runs with, the distributor is able to specify defaults that work well together.

For example, the default in Debian 3.1 (Sarge) is to use the Open Sound System. This is beause the default kernels use OSS for their sound, and the optional (2.6) kernels use ALSA, configured to emulate the OSS API. Since Ubuntu ships with (only) 2.6 kernels, the default lselection will be ALSA. And so on.

> Why do you need three different things which all do the same thing?

They don't all do the same thing. Please stop being obtuse.

> It's the same with gtk and qt etc. Say for instance you use gnome, you install
> the greatest theme ever and get all your fonts and colours right, then you
> open KWord, and it's all blocky and grey. What the hell's all that about?

"Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I poke myself in the eye!" "Don't do that, then".

If you care about you apps looking nice together, use Abiword or Openoffice (which is what a newbie will do, since KWord will not appear on the Gnome Applications menu). Or use a gtk theme that hooks into qt and applies the qt theme to your gtk applications.

Re:Difference

[cortana]

I see what you are saying, but read my reply (cousin to this post) to drsquare's post. A newbie will have no reason to ever access the controls in the MSS. The controls that you talk about for adjusting sound settings are all accessed via the litle sound icon at the top left of the screen (analogous to the little speaker icon in the system tray that everyone is familiar with on Windows).

The MSS is (on my system ) in the menu under Applications -> Desktop Preferences -> Advanced -> MSS. A newbie is unlikely to pick this menu option while looking for a way to adjust the volume of the music playing on his computer. In fact, he's most likely to adjust the volume by using the little knob on his speakers!

> Um. Yeah. Stupid examples of nonsense situations that nobody would ever, ever do
> in the real world do not help your case. You may want to use your computer as a
> boat anchor, too, but that doesn't mean welding an anchor chain to the top of
> the case is a wonderful idea.

Please don't presume to let your experience of using a computer dictate what others may wish to do. GStreamer (the multimedia system that the MSS is a front-end to the configuration of) allows you to do all of these things. Have you never wanted to record a stream from the 'net, or 'broadcast' music to a 'net radio station?

If I wanted to use a system that let the ignoance of newbies get in the way of doing more advanced things, then I'd use Windows.

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

A newbie will have no reason to ever access the controls in the MSS.

The fact that you separate your body of users into "us" and "newbies" is a big, big error, in two ways. First, you're dismissing an entire class of users by assuming that they're not going to want to do something; that's not a valid assumption. And second, you're assuming that a class of people -- whatever the opposite of "newbies" is --are okay with a needlessly complex user interface. Also not a valid assumption.

The controls that you talk about for adjusting sound settings are all accessed via the litle sound icon at the top left of the screen

Why just there? Why are all the sound controls not grouped together in a Sound control panel? Why are they spread out all over creation?

In fact, he's most likely to adjust the volume by using the little knob on his speakers!

You're assuming that the user has third-party external powered speakers with a volume knob on them. In my experience, this is hardly ever true.

Please don't presume to let your experience of using a computer dictate what others may wish to do.

Physician, heal thyself.

If I wanted to use a system that let the ignoance of newbies get in the way of doing more advanced things, then I'd use Windows.

Linux is doomed to obscurity and commercial failure as long as the people responsible for its future keep acting like snobs.

Re:Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

amazing that lunix hasnt' taken over the world, isn't it?

Re:Difference

[cortana]

> The fact that you separate your body of users into "us" and "newbies" is a big,
> big error, in two ways. First, you're dismissing an entire class of users by
> assuming that they're not going to want to do something; that's not a valid
> assumption. And second, you're assuming that a class of people -- whatever the
> opposite of "newbies" is --are okay with a needlessly complex user interface.
> Also not a valid assumption.

I'm sorry for using such loaded terminology as "newbie". I should have said "people looking to change the volume" vs "people wishing to select which subsystems multimedia programs they run will use".

I was talking in terms of those two use cases, not generalising all users into the classes of newbie and advanced user.

> Why just there?

Becase it's visible all the time, not hidden away under several layers of menu options. Because the icon for a speaker is familiar to Mac and Windows users (and hopefully to users who aren't familiar with computers at all, but might recognise the icon from, say, a hifi), and its placement is similar to that in those operating systems.

> Why are all the sound controls not grouped together in a Sound control panel?

They are, you get it by clicking on the speaker icon. Selecting multimedia subsystems is not a "sound control", it's a genealised multimedia operation.

> Why are they spread out all over creation?

Some would call it not lumping two orthagonal functions together into the same program. Separating out the the (related) functions of selecting the audio and video subsystems would create an interface whose components are "spread out all over creation".

> You're assuming that the user has third-party external powered speakers with a
> volume knob on them. In my experience, this is hardly ever true.

In my experience it is usually true. In the case that it is not, the user can adjust the volume by going to the speaker icon, which is aways visible and is located in a prominent position that is even familiar to users who have used the Mac OS and Windows.

> Physician, heal thyself.

You are the one who dismissed my examples as "stupid examples of nonsense situations that nobody would ever, ever do in the real world".

> Linux is doomed to obscurity and commercial failure as long as the people
> responsible for its future keep acting like snobs.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. If you have some constructive comments to make, address the Gnome HIG people, instead of trolling Slashdot.

Re:Difference

[drsquare]

If you care about you apps looking nice together, use Abiword or Openoffice (which is what a newbie will do, since KWord will not appear on the Gnome Applications menu).

How does using other apps make the original apps look right? Your solution to half the apps looking different to the other half is only to use one half? That's ridiculous. I can't think of any reason why there can't be a standard like on OSX where everything is congruent by default.

Or use a gtk theme that hooks into qt and applies the qt theme to your gtk applications.

What the hell are you talking about? You don't get this shit on OSX or Windows. Who the hell came up with the idea of having different incompatible toolkits? If OSX can manage to be functional and user-friendly with one, why does Linux need more?

Re:Difference

[cortana]

Why would I want to use KWord when Abiword and Openoffice.org do the job, but also tie in with the look and feel (less so in Openoffice.org's case I admit ;) ) of my Gnome desktop? Especially since KWord is switching to the common OASIS file format that everyone is enthused about.

The reason Linux (and other free Unix-alikes) have several toolkits is because the developers are free to do what they want. They don't give a shit whether this makes you unpahhy or not.

Oh, where's the rest of your reply? Changing the subject, are we? ;) Goodbye.

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

I should have said "people looking to change the volume" vs "people wishing to select which subsystems multimedia programs they run will use".

See, even here, you're couching the discussion in the wrong terms in order to muddy the water. We're not talking about "which subsystems multimedia programs use." We're talking about audio output. See how simple it is? Why make it needlessly complex?

several layers of menu options

Several what? What "several layers." There's one place for all system preferences, right? Then, from there, the user selects one place for all sound preferences, right? That's not "several layers." It's a damn sight better than leaving the settings scattered all over the place.

They are, you get it by clicking on the speaker icon.

But they're also available from the general "preferences" interface, right? For the love of God, at least tell me you got that right.

Some would call it not lumping two orthagonal functions together into the same program.

Well, that's really it, isn't it? That's the problem in a nutshell. On the one hand you've got computer programmers who think that different functions dealing with the same basic subject belong in different places. On the other, you've got users who just want to find the damn sound settings. See why Gnome is such a disaster?

In the case that it is not, the user can adjust the volume by going to the speaker icon, which is aways visible and is located in a prominent position that is even familiar to users who have used the Mac OS and Windows.

Yes and no. On a Mac, sound volume is accessed through System Preferences, so a Mac user won't know to look at the menu bar --er, sorry, the "panel" --to find that and other similar controls. And on Windows, the icon is on the opposite side of the screen ...leading to the conclusion that the brain surgeon who thought up the idea of putting a speaker icon on the menu bar --crap, the "panel" --really just wanted to do what Windows does, but changed it just to be a little bit different.

And that's really what it all boils down to. "We're going to copy other people's interfaces, but change them to be a little different. We're not going to stop to think that maybe it's good to collect all preference controls in the same place so the user only has to deal with one interface. Instead, we're going to scatter shit all over and send the user on a damn snipe hunt when all the want to do is select headphones instead of speakers."

Great attitude.

Re:Difference

[Brandybuck]

There's no problem with drag and drop. But there's a problem when you combine drag and drop with holding down various different key combinations to get to the drag and drop to do what you want.

Re:Difference

[Leo McGarry]

You're not getting it. It's about that semiotic patterns that go into our language. The sentence is "open the door," not "door, open the." We think in verb-object, not object-verb.

Re:Difference

[tpgp]

*sighs*

Yup. Karma in the true sense of the word :-)

That'll teach me. (or not)

Gnome?

[Anonymous Coward]

A changelog be more useful than crappy screenshots...

And why is this news anyway? There's several hundred current distros. Wheres the news posts for all those?

Re:Gnome?

[Coryoth]

A changelog be more useful than crappy screenshots...

Indeed, this story seems to be a waste of time. If you want screenshots that actually show you what you're getting that's different, look here. It's old news (it's been up for some time), but it gives you a far better idea of what you're getting.

Jedidiah.

Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[RootsLINUX]

Visually I can see no leaps and bounds here, so I'm a little baffled at the purpose of the "screenshot slideshow". Then again, graphics certainly aren't everything. I haven't been reading up on GNOME developments lately but what is "Assistive Technology"? It sounds like something dubious and misleading that Microsoft would promote...

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[be-fan]

"Assistive Technology" is technology to help the disabled use computers. Stuff like screen magnifiers, screen-readers, high-contrast colors and icons, etc.

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[mibus]

Assistive technologies are things like screenreaders, magnifying glasses, etc. that are largely intended to assist those with disabilities.

It's a requirement for being usable in some areas (some governments IIRC require it).

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[akulbe]

I'm thankful I'm not the only one that has been thinking this for a LONG time.

In my opinion, Gnome has looked the same since around 2.2 - 2.4. Nothing new, really.

Call me a naysayer if you will, but I'm not impressed.

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[Leo McGarry]

"Assistive Technology" is a silly made-up name for what everybody else on the planet calls "accessibility." It means things like spoken interfaces and screen-readers, magnified displays and shift lock.

"Assistive Technology" is also the most recent in a long, long series of examples of taking a perfectly reasonable idea and making it so bafflingly complicated that even people with lots of computer experience look at it and go, "What the hell?"

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[TuringTest]

You must be a KDE user...

Seriously, if you can't recognize the hundreds of improvements since 2.2, you probably don't need them. It's all made of subtle changes to preferences panels, admin wizards and widgets placement. According to all HCI gurus, those are the kind of changes that make an interface feel 'better' for non programmers.

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[Anonymous Coward]

A year or two ago I met the maintainter (unintentional typo, but nice pun, isn't it?) of the gnome terminal, and he said he was tired of people complaining about it 'being slow', and that no one knew about all the stuff going on, specially regarding accessibility. I'd like it if this stuff could be cut, most people don't use this stuff, but the bloat is noticeable (of course, I'm against *removing* it! I'm damn well aware that computers are a brick to disabled people if the programs don't help).

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[drsquare]

"Assistive Technology" is technology to help the disabled use computers. Stuff like screen magnifiers, screen-readers, high-contrast colors and icons, etc.

Why the hell don't they just call it 'Disabled Access' or something? Assistive technology makes me think of dancing paperclips.

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[Felonious Ham]

How _should_ it change? Perhaps a big green jelly bean for a Start menu? Seriously, Gnome doesn't have to market to anyone, and for the vast majority of its users the simple, understated look is extremely pleasing. And if you don't quite care for your distribution's choice of widgets and whatnot, new theme installation is basically a two click operation.

Re:Wow! It looks, it looks....(exactly the same?)

[be-fan]

Because "assistive" is a positive word, while "disabled" is a negative word. "Assistive Technology" is the standard term in the industry, "Disabled Access" (is it some sort of security thing?) would just confuse those who actually knew what they were talking about.

Volume Control

[espergreen]

Having used gnome 2.92 in Ubuntu Hoary, I have to say the best new feature is the volume control. The old one had way to much information, the new one is amazing. It's hard to describe, but it's much better than the old one. It may not seem like a big deal. But gnome currently only has a mediocre volume control. In the next release it will have the best volume control I have ever used on any platform.

Re:Volume Control

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't show as many by default, but should you feel the need to play with EMU10K1 PCM Send Routing 21, and what self respecting geek doesn't? then you can make it and all the other sliders visible...... Just what the hell does PCM Send Routing 21 do?

Re:Volume Control

[sayap]

Sigh... it is sad that Windows, Mac, KDE, and GNOME all use the same pathetic design for the default volume control. If you use KDE and want the best volume control, try knob. Believe it or not, knob is the main reason I find it hard to go back to Windows after switching to Linux.

Re:Volume Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Having hacked on the emu10k1 OSS driver, I could probably tell you what EMU10K1 PCM Send Routing 21 does, but you just need to trust me here when I tell you this: You really don't want to know.

Re:Volume Control

[TuringTest]

So you really enjoy using a circular control (the knob) that is controlled with a linear device (the mouse)??

Windows, Mac, KDE, GNOME and every other sane interfaces all actively avoid circular knobs in the computer screen because they're a bad idea.

Re:Volume Control

[TractorBarry]

From the screen shots I've seen it now looks remarkably similar to the default mixer applet that sits in the Windows system tray.

The only difference being that the playback and recording etc. controls are displayed using tabs rather than switching via a menu item.

So much better than the previous GNOME volume control but hardly a cause of great excitement :)

Re:Volume Control

[sayap]

Sigh. Please stop trolling. The Knob applet I mentioned is nothing like the one in Quicktime player.

Firstly, you only require a single left click to change volume, not drag-n-drop as in the Quicktime player. Let me know if you can change volume with a single click with those default volume controls in Windows, Mac, KDE, and GNOME. Most probably you have click once or twice, wait for popup, move you pointer to the popup and click again to change volume, then click again to close the popup/focus back to your application.

Secondly, you can mute/unmute with a single middle click, instead of dragging down and up all the way as in the Quicktime player. Again, let me know if you can mute/unmute with a single click using those default volume controls. Most probably you have click once or twice, wait for popup, move you pointer to the popup and click again to mark a checkbox, then click again to close the popup/focus back to your application.

Finally, being an applet, Knob has the extra benefits that it does not steal the focus and your current volume level is always visible to you.

-7 Flamebait

[netrat]

It's not my intention to knock Gnome, but I think it future releases could have a more all-ecncompassing set of system configuration tools, like KDE has. Maybe I'm just not digging well enough, or am using too old of a version, but Gnome has always seemed to pale to K in that regard. KDE is frigging ugly though. We live in a world of trade-offs, I guess.

Re:-7 Flamebait

[KillerDeathRobot]

Gnome and KDE are both pretty darn ugly if you ask me.

Re:-7 Flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not my intention to knock Gnome

Hey, knock away.
Bad experiences with Gnome are what convinced me that Linux will never match Windows (2000, XP) for stability and usability in the GUI category.

Re:-7 Flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not my intention to knock Gnome, but I think it future releases could have a more all-ecncompassing set of system configuration tools, like KDE has.

Gnome System Tools are already included since gnome 2.8. Improvements for next versions are being discussed.

Hey, I just thought, it would be nice if people criticized software they actually used.

Biting comment!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ouch. That comment was meaner than a junkyard dog!

Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad, after reading about GNUStep to see what a sad state the Linux desktop is today.

Those Mac mini's are looking tempting...

bad menu UI

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a big space between the "foot" and "Applications" (same spacing as between other menus), yet they're the same menu?! Either glue the foot to Applications, or call it foot *or* applications. What where they thinking?

Re:bad menu UI

[suckmysav]

" There's a big space between the "foot" and "Applications" (same spacing as between other menus), yet they're the same menu?!"

That is one (minor) thing that has nonetheless always annoyed the hell out me. Another is how difficult it is to add extra items to the "Start Menu" under Gnome. KDE is so much uglier than Gnome, but at least all I need to do is open up the Prefs dialogue and hit "right-click>Add New Item" to add an app.

You have to edit some text file hidden deep in the bowels of the system to do the same thing in Gnome (or at least you did in 2.4 which is the last time I tried Gnome)

Re:bad menu UI

[EngMedic]

as another poster mentioned earlier in this thread: kick open nautilus, and type applications:// in the address bar. bingo. edit ze "start menu" to your heart's content.

Re:bad menu UI

[Anonymous Coward]

... click on "Add new item to this menu" ...

That's greyed out here. What do I need to do to FUCKING ADD SOMETHING TO MY OWN GODDAMN MENU?

P.S:
FUCK you, new GNOME overlords, for ruining GNOME by introducing all these retarded "user friendly" features. Fuck you for removing configuration options. Fuck you for thinking it's easier for users to edit keys if a fucking registry, than to click on widgets in a prefs program.

(I just took the opportunity to vent at the new GNOME intelligentsia, so don't be offended, "dutchdabomb".)

Re:bad menu UI

[Anonymous Coward]

if a fucking registry = in a fucking registry

Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.

Re:bad menu UI

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S:
FUCK you, new GNOME overlords, for ruining GNOME by introducing all these retarded "user friendly" features. Fuck you for removing configuration options. Fuck you for thinking it's easier for users to edit keys if a fucking registry, than to click on widgets in a prefs program.

Users, at least not power users, aren't supposed to touch the gconf editor. BTW, although the interface looks similar (because it uses a tree view, big deal), it's not similar, at all, to the windows registry.

You fail as a troll.

Re:bad menu UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. That's really bad UI design. And I just finished reading a critic of the quicktime player GUI.

Re:bad menu UI

[Phlod]

Wow!
Not to try and flame or anything (really!), but I think *Gnome* is the ugly one... Dark colors, and an unhealty love of the color brown really turn me off every time I boot into it. (I have them both installed, on the chance that someday I'll boot up Gnome and like the way it looks.)
I guess it's a good thing that we have both KDE and Gnome, if for no other reason than aesthetics...

You actually think this looks good?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think these GNOME screenshots look good, or even more important - will be a step forward in usability, you're really out in the cold.

When you grow tired of your amateur GUIs...consider Mac OS X. It looks so much better than the KDE Krokodile and GNOME beta screenshots that i've seen - so much better that it's not even funny ....and, and the interface is actually intuitive - you dont have to know anything about UNIX or X servers or modelines or anything to use it.

I mean, stop kidding yourselves - Windows 3.1 looked better than these screenshots.

Re:You actually think this looks good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Greetings, fellow connoisseur of aesthetic excellence! I wholeheartedly agree.

Sincerely,
11594097

Re:You actually think this looks good?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think OS X rocks, too, (and that Linux desktops have quite a way to go) but jeezus, quit being a "better-than-you" troll...

errrrmm

[netrat]

-8: Dear God at least look at what you typed after typing it.

Hello.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see you again. So yeah, what's it like having been mentioned in the Slashdot Trolling Phenomena Wikipedia entry? It must be nice, but they put you in the "Minor Trolls" category. Fucking bastards. Yours is the most effective. I know all about the troll and it STILL gets me. In fact, I'm thinking about my breathing right now! *breathes*

Difference? Difference!

[nxtr]

Look at the version number!!! It's one more than the other versions! C'mon! Just look!

Re:Difference? Difference!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately that seems to be the extent of the difference. 95% of those screenshots could have easily appeared in the preview for Gnome 2.6. The article in general seems to be a flop.

Re:Difference? Difference!

[TheRaven64]

This one goes to, uh, 2.9.90!

still only one background for workspaces

[DeathAndTaxes]

This is just about the only complaint I have with gnome. You're stuck with the same desktop pic on all your workspaces. It's gone on too long, and it's silly.

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just about the only complaint I have with gnome.

No kidding ? Just one complaint ?! How about it looking as nice as Windows 95, but running as fast as Java app ?

Come back to the reality, dude.

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[ryen]

the source is open, why dont you submit the changes that you want? heres a link to gnome cvs: http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/
stop complaining and get started! =)

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you make such dispariging remarks against Windows 95 and Java.

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm....maybe because there are 100,000 WM's out there that do this already?

If you want me to use your desktop, why is it up to me to fix it anyway?

Sorry but, "Fix it your damn self," is not the correct answer to user complaints. I think it is time the OS world learned that.

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[Crayon Kid]

This is just about the only complaint I have with gnome. You're stuck with the same desktop pic on all your workspaces. It's gone on too long, and it's silly.

It's funny you should request this, but at the same time you also wish (I presume) for a faster, less resource intensive and less bloated Gnome.

Last time I checked there was only one X root window. What you want would mean changing the contents of the root window every time you switch workspace, which would annoy the hell out of me personally, since it wouldn't make Gnome very responsive.

Or, there would be some caching of all the images for all the workspaces in RAM, thus consuming yet more memory. Another winner sure to instill joy in Gnome users.

All this for what is essentially pure eye candy? I don't think so and apparently neither do the developers.

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[bullgod]

Maybe he's not a coder. This is a fatuous thing to say.

This is functionality that was available in Gnome 1.4 days, it's functionality that Sun have complained about its absence, as is was available under there old standard desktop CDE. It's functionality that I've complained about using no longer being present.

The point is that someone saw fit to have this functionality REMOVED. I'm not going to put it back into the GNOME code base, only to have somebody delete it bacause, despite it being in every other desktop worth talking about, they don't see the value.

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it'd be damn handy to have a big, obvious, you're-not-gonna-miss-this visual cue to keep the workspaces semantically separate. I know I'd use it, but then I'd settle for changing background colours rather than images.

Re:still only one background for workspaces

[vdboor]

the source is open, why dont you submit the changes that you want?

having an *open* source doesn't mean it's developers have *open* minds. If they refuse to include your patch, it's a complete waste of your time to write it.

besides, I'm getting a little sick of people saying "why don't you do it yourself?". Before you know it, you're talking to a developer who already has a few projects under his belt.

What, does it go to 11 ?

[anti-NAT]

I didn't think there could be much room left for new invention in volume controls.

Re:What, does it go to 11 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

sure there is, they could read your mind and adjust volume levels perfectly to suit your desire...

Re:What, does it go to 11 ?

[natrius]

sure there is, they could read your mind and adjust volume levels perfectly to suit your desire...

That's slated for 3.0.

Re:What, does it go to 11 ?

[prockcore]

I didn't think there could be much room left for new invention in volume controls.

Sure there is.. someone out there needs to invent a volume control that will mute Flash without muting itunes/rhythmbox etc.

Re:What, does it go to 11 ?

[fossa]

Hm... I hate my volume control situation... First, the soundcard has a master level and different levels for e.g., PCM, analog CD, input gain (which I suppose are all necessary). Second, some applications have volume knobs which modify one of the soundcard's volume knobs (xmms), while others have an entirely seperate volume knob that presumably controls in-application volume attenuation. And finally, I plug my soundcard into powered speakers that have yet another volume knob.

My troubles are: too many volume knobs. Probably the applications that have their own internal volume are correct; otherwise one could not turn, say, IM notifications sounds way down (but not off), and have music at a reasonable level. I suppose the soundcard's knobs for its analog headers (CD) are necessary because there's no other way to adjust that volume... but digital audio extraction is nice. The two master volumes really bugs me though (soundcard's and powered speakers', and if all audio is going through PCM, the PCM knob is essentially a third master). I suppose it would help if computers had an easy to click master knob (or preferrably, a physical knob) for those occasions (phone call*, door knock, unexpected annoying sound) when you need to turn the volume down immediately. Or perhaps the computer should ditch the master knob completely and assume that whatever your plugging into (powered speakers, receiver, etc.) has a master volume knob... I don't know how exactly I'd like it to work, but I think a big part of my troubles is the awkwardness of adjusting volumes with a mouse and sliders in a GUI... it isn't quick like a big knob or real faders on a mixer

What does anyone else think about this?

* P.S. Does there exist phone that draws power from the phone company (i.e. no cordless I've ever seen) that has a gentle ring whose volume may be adjusted? I don't want to hack my phone just to stop it from shreading my nerves...

Re:What, does it go to 11 ?

[hackstraw]

Sure there is.. someone out there needs to invent a volume control that will mute Flash without muting itunes/rhythmbox etc.

You can get iTunes for Linux? Didn't know that.

Also, the best way I've found to mute Flash that works on all platforms is to go into your browser's preferences and check "Disable plugins".

Now there are not those annoying flash ads on webpages or those lovely background sounds that some people think are cute.

Re:What, does it go to 11 ?

[FlyingPostman]

This is where the design of the iMac is really nice. Volume buttons on the keyboard that control the master volume AND all apps recognize this in the *displayed* volume on the screen. Of course this is even nicer with the built in speakers on the iMac (which arn't that great). This nice integration gets thrown out as soon as you connect external powered speakers though. My Linux machine was nothing but trouble with different volumes everywhere. When you try to play a movie with mplayer I had the crank the volume way up. And then when an IM message came in I jumped out of my skin becuase it was so loud.

First Superbowel post!

[Anonymous Coward]

First Superbowel post!

Go Patriots!

A geeks wishlist...

[rmdir -r *]

Smaller GTK widgets (Maybe its just perceived, but GNOME, and GTK apps in general seem to waste waay to much real estate... not everyone has a 21' monitor..)

A decent default theme (Grey is ugly. Get over it.)

KISS: Ubuntu and Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats to the Gnome and Ubuntu teams. You have taken Linux from depths of desktop mediocrity and confusion and transformed it into something that real people can use to get work done.

Re:KISS: Ubuntu and Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, much like "real people" can self-administer a lobotomy with a toothpick. Why not use a jackhammer (Mac OS X) instead? It'll be much more pleasurable.

Re:KISS: Ubuntu and Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

where can i buy that for my AMD based computer...

Re:KISS: Ubuntu and Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats to the Gnome and Ubuntu teams. You have taken Linux from something that real people can use to get work done and transformed it into the depths of desktop mediocrity and confusion.

Backwards?

[hokputooy]

2.10 is actually 2.1 mathematically.

Re:Backwards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. Who cares about math? This is FOSS versioning. It could be -3.12^0-b5u next.

Re:Backwards?

[DaScribbler]

I just wish package managers would adapt to that versioning. Too often they parse 2.9 to be an upgrade from 2.10

Re:Backwards?

[briankoenig]

Yes, they should've made it "2.A"

Re:Backwards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to point this out but 2.1 is not the same as 2.10 mathimatically ;)

Re:Backwards?

[super_carrot]

They probably shoulf make it 2.10.0 or 2.10.1

Question?

[Vectorferret]

As a real question (not trolling), does Gnome have a graphical way to edit the menus yet? My primary reason for staying with KDE is I don't want to have to edit them manually.

Re:Question?

[chazwurth]

Yes, several.

You can right-click in the menus for some options. You can also, for example, open a nautilus browser window and type 'applications://' in the URL bar to edit the applications menus as if they were directories.

Check out the GNOME docs on menu editing. They're not perfect, but they aren't too bad.

Re:Question?

[tomstdenis]

mod parent up ;-)

Some useful info on /. for a change. Thanks now I finally got rid of that lingering xgalaga icon from my games menu!!!

Tom

Re:Question?

[Anonymous Coward]

applications:// is gone in 2.10

Re:Question?

[Eneff]

applications://?!?!?

You have got to be joking me.

How about right-click on footprint, menu editor? Why can't there be something like that? And that takes you to some sort of application?

If the poster -- or more appropriately, average user -- can't figure it out by the first three guesses, it's not obvious and by extention wrong for a gui.

Heck, there's someone who asked for the comment to be modded up because he couldn't figure out how to remove an icon from the menu!

Tell me when gnome catches up with KDE. :)

Re:Question?

[chazwurth]

To be fair, removing an application from the menu consists of right-clicking the icon, and then choosing 'remove this item'. I agree that GNOME menu-editing isn't quite what it should be, but you're making it out to be a lot worse than it is.

Also, the ability to edit menus isn't the be-all and end-all of a GUI. Being able to configure things is great, assuming you don't waste too much time doing it. A pleasing and uncluttered appearance and a nice set of defaults are also great. I'd say both environments have a great deal of progress ahead of them.

Re:Question?

[m50d]

But what about ADDING them? I'm not worried about rearranging my menus, but if I can't put an app I installed into the menuing system, then the WM is worse than useless. Really.

Re:Question?

[bestadvocate]

>>Check out the GNOME docs on menu editing. They're not perfect, but they aren't too bad.

and there is a new help program "Yelp" (im running version 2.9.3, and its quite usefull for such readings

Re:Question?

[mav[LAG]]

If you right click on any item in a menu, then select the Entire Menu submenu at the bottom, there is an Add Item to this Menu option.

Why is that the default gnome theme?

[xenocide2]

Everybody in the world comes up with a better one. For what amounts to promotional screenshots, you'd think they'd try to at least demonstrate how pretty it can be, even if does eat cycles and causes noticable lag / draw in. Is it just that they dont want to play favorites with the other author's choices?

gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[Sark666]

I tried gnome recently and found out about this cmd to graphically quick user switch a la xp/osx. So one user can log in and leave other(s) still logged in.

This has some issues but what would give almost complete functionality right now, would be if the screensaver had an option to run gnomeflexiserver.

The other problem with this though, is if logged in as another user, the other users settings for xscreensaver will kick in after the idle time and bog down the other user(s). I also believe this will take over the 3d functionality of the users card and not allow another user to use it.

Also, I recently set up my .asoundrc file for software mixing with alsa, and used esd for gnome sounds and piped to alsa. I get sound in pretty much everything simultaneously, nothing holding the soundcard, but if another user uses gdmflexiserver to log in, that user will have no sound.

Afaik, this is also a bit of a kludge, tying another Xscreen to a vert terminal similar to some users using ctrl alt f8 for the other X session. I'm not sure if there would be a way to tie multiple users to one Xsession, but I would think it would save resources and potentionally avoid sound/video accel getting taken over by just one login.

I know this is somewhat off topic as I don't believe gdm is being enhanced in the coming future in this regard, but I'd like to know how /. users deal with this with multiple users in the household. Esp wanting to lock out kids from ones login by xscreensaver but not locking them out from theirs.

Xp and MacX have now had this for ages. The DE's for linux really need to catch up in this regard.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[dilema]

why not just run GDM on default F7 and add FDM to F8 as well? this way you can tap F8 and BAM no one is the wiser.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[dilema]

eh s/FDM/GDM. anyway run GDM on two ttys.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[emidln]

I'm not sure about GNOME (I don't use it), but SUSE 9.2 Pro's KDE had this. The version of KDE that I built from ports on FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE didn't have this so I think that SUSE's team may have backported this from KDE CVS or patched it in themselves.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been in SuSe's KDE at least since 9.1, so it's quite 'old' by now. Don't know about the vanilla KDE though.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[anpe]

I'm using 2 X servers on my box, so my wife can use Gnome and I can use ion.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm beta-testing KDE 3.4 at the moment and it seems to be there alright. Lemme test it... Yup, works just fine. Nifty.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive done this cince 1989 with X It's called virtual terminals, if you properly configure X you can have a few X logins.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[labratuk]

Also, I recently set up my .asoundrc file for software mixing with alsa, and used esd for gnome sounds and piped to alsa. I get sound in pretty much everything simultaneously, nothing holding the soundcard, but if another user uses gdmflexiserver to log in, that user will have no sound.

That's because ~/.asoundrc is a user specific file. That's why it's in your home directory. If you wanted these settings to apply to all users, you should have put the same settings in /etc/asound.conf

Did you really think you could make a change to the global configuration as an unpriviliged user?

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[Bob Uhl]

You don't need to do that; you put ion in your .Xclients. gdm will start you in ion and your wife in GNOME. Saves resources, too.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[ookaze]

I never heard of gnomeflexiserver. I am pretty sure you meant gdmflexiserver, and yes, like its name implies, it comes with the gdm package.

This has no issue of itself, and I do not see the added functionality in making the screensaver execute this app. I even see it as a security risk. GDM actually comes *below* xscreensaver, and I see it as a security risk to let xscreensaver run apps below itself.

And if you run as another user, it DOES NOT bog down the other users, provided they know that they can use which Ctrl-Alt-Fx combination to switch back to their session. This DOES NOT take over the 3D functionality of the graphics card either. Some of this was true in 2001, not anymore. I switched to Linux in Jan 2001 with three sessions at once, and had some issue back then. Not anymore. Though I agree I disabled 3D screensavers at the time because the nvidia drivers where locking my machine after one week (and besides, I did not need 3 screensavers at the same time on the machine, as only one was viewable). Then it worked perfectly. Now, I disabled it again, because it does not play well with the new XOrg compositing.

Perhaps your user having no sound is due to the facts that :
- Only authorized users (read : part of the right group) have access to the soundcard (yes, on Linux, everybody can not do anything they like with the underlying hardware, security and all)
- your .asoundrc is private to your account, you need a global conf for ALSA.

This is not even a kludge. The functionality of gdmflexiserver uses the very functionality a lot of people want to see removed from X : network transparency (even if it does not uses the networ in your case). What you are asking for is a kludge. How do you make the difference about users if they have the same session ?
You are asking for cooperative sessions (like in WinXP), instead of simultaneous ones. Of course it saves resources, as it is cooperative, you never have problem with managing resources either. I understand now why you request the screensaver launching the dm : you want Windows insecure and kludgy behaviour.

XP never had the functionality, so how can you say it had it for ages ? I do not know for MacOSX, but I know that Win XP does not.
And you have it backwards : that is Win XP that has to catch up to Linux DEs.

I use such a setup on Linux since 2001 when I finished switching from Windows. I tried the same setup as I have on Windows XP : it just does not work. Let me tell you, with Win XP Pro :
- You can not switch users when you have your accounts on the network. Well, let's say we abandon this HUGE functionality (I lost numerous files and windows crashed itself beyond recoverability due to it crashing with local session, borking its own files, never happened with session on the Linux server, which never crashed btw)
So we are in local session :
- A user have no way to switch to its session without interfering with your session (meaning with accel keys)
- You can not have concurrent desktop app, as you are not really running 2 sessions (or more) at once

If I test a video on my gnome desktop (with sound) and my wife and switch to her desktop (with Ctrl-Alt-F8, sth she learned very fast), and launch a video, you can still hear mine, the sounds are mixed together (it actually happened once). I can not recall all exactly how my experience went in 2001 with Windows XP, but I remember pretty well that it was pretty bad compared to the linux desktop back then, specially when comparing desktop switching. I saw pretty fast that the Windows one was a kludge and was not working.
I seem to remember virtualdub crashing when I switched user while it was working on a video. And RealPlayer too. Oh even WMP !!!

Win XP has a long way to catch up, and Gnome (and KDE) are a lot better than in 2001 now.

Re:gnomeflexiserver tied in with xscreensaver

[Sark666]

You've brought up some interesting points about the cooperative vs the simultaneous and I'll concede on those points. But everytime this discussion is mentioned someone always says they use ctrl alt fx.

A lot of users, including myself really want a gui way of tying this together. Yes I meant gdmflexiserver and it's seem to do just that.

My main problem is: In my session I have my screensaver kick in, kid comes up and wants access to his account, but xscreensaver is just giving him a password prompt as it's locked the screen. This is where gdm's new user login would be beneficial. Even if they use ctrl alt fx, the screensaver would still be running on my session. You say you don't have that problem, well it happens here not sure why.

Regarding the sound issue, I copied my .asoundrc to everyone and even tried putting it globally put the esd daemon is still locking the sound for the first user. Maybe your soundcard has hardware mixing as mine does not, and was glad to find this method with alsa to provide software mixing, only to be stumped again with another problem.

So, for me, I definately still have a sound and screensaver issue. And I can see your worry security wise about the screensaver but regardless this funcitonality is needed.

Bottom line, whoever suggests to use ctrl alt fx doesn't have kids in the house, and is ignoring the functionality a full de should provide. There really needs to be a means of switching users from the gui, and since gdm provides this, it opens up some holes with sound dameons, screensavers, and switching within the gui environment even if a user's screen is locked.

Perhaps I'm missing something...

[hatrisc]

But screenshots of the next version of a piece of software do absolutely nothing if it looks exactly the same!

Re:Perhaps I'm missing something...

[afra242]

More accurate screenshots here.

I like the shadow effect, but maybe that is here now, and I don't know it?

Re:Perhaps I'm missing something...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the shadow effect, but maybe that is here now, and I don't know it?

For that you need the X.Org X server with the XComposite extension enabled.

Wow!

[gustgr]

I can't wait to see the ScreeShots of Gnome 2.10 Beta 2!

Re:Wow!

[Basehart]

"I can't wait to see the ScreeShots of Gnome 2.10 Beta 2!"

I want to see screenshots of peoples faces when they have been trying for three hours to untar this, complile that and generally unzip the other but STILL can't get the damm thing installed.

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean like this

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

how about more like this

I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Quattro Vezina]

Gray is a beautiful colour. Themes that aren't gray tend to irk the hell out of me. That theme isn't gray--it's tan. Who's bright idea was it to use a tan theme for a desktop?

Frankly, the default looks of both GNOME and KDE are rather ugly. I used to think it was just GNOME that was ugly--not only the default theme, but also most user's themes, but I've since realised that most KDE themes (including the default) are just as ugly.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Leo McGarry]

Gray is a beautiful colour.

Um. It seems like you either misspelled "grey" or you misspelled "color." Pick one and stick with it, huh?

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[oliverthered]

There are a number of different dialects of English, and I'm expect there's one where both gray and colour are correct. [hint Scotland]

You're suffering from an almost autistic lack of ability to perceive that somethings may be different for other people than they are for yourself.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Anonymous Coward]

For what it's worth, as a New Zealander, I also find myself using "gray" as well as "colour" :)

Here, at least, "gray" and "grey" are completely interchangeably (much like everywhere in the world uses "farther" and "further" interchangeably).

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[oliverthered]

that's what I like about kiwis, there sensible.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Scarblac]

For what it's worth, as a New Zealander, I also find myself using "gray" as well as "colour" :)

And here in the Netherlands (where English is a foreign language), we're just exposed to this mass of different spellings and we can't tell which belongs to the American set and which to the English. So they'll always get mixed up. It's the future, man!

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[oliverthered]

didn't the ducth write part of the english dictionary. hence the h in ghost.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[oliverthered]

'The development of the printing press has also left its mark. Early printers developed many "rules" in an attempt to make spelling more consistent for the wider audience they were trying to reach. Many of the rules were largely to do with the practicalities of the printing press. For example, it became common to add an "e" to words to fill a line of print. They also used rules from their own languages e.g. the "h" in "ghost" is due to the influence of Flemish printers, whose word was "gheest".'

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Anonymous Coward]

i can't fucking believe this was modded insightful.
"colour" always had a "u" in it, which makes sense according to a more european pronunciation. Americans took it OUT, not the other way around.
dumbass.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Leo McGarry]

"Farther" and "further" are not interchangeable. "Farther" refers to distance in space, while "further" refers to some other type of extent. It's easy to remember this because "far" means "separated by a great distance."

You'd say "I walked farther," but you'd say "I will look into this further."

Sometimes people may get them wrong, but that's an error, not interchangeable usage.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Scarblac]

Heh, I didn't know that. Ironically, in Dutch (and Flemish), that word is 'geest' nowadays...

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Anonymous Coward]

before bitching, you should understand. commonweath english spells it "colour" but they also spell it "grey." the poster wrote "colour" but he wrote "gray," which is the us spelling. so he misspelled one or the other.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah that depends on your perspective. Assuming the poster is writing English, I think you'll find that they spelt "colour" correctly.

But then again if they were supposed to be typing in American their spelling would indeed be incorrect.

Why begs the question of why isn't American called American ? Because it certainly isn't English.

Re:I love gray, but GNOME ain't gray

[Leo McGarry]

Ah that depends on your perspective. Assuming the poster is writing English, I think you'll find that they spelt "colour" correctly.

I'm startled by the number of people who didn't get the joke.

In Commonwealth countries, the word we use as a synonym for hue is spelled "colour," and the word we use for a shade of black is spelled "grey." In the US, it's "color" and "gray."

The guy wrote "colour" and "gray," which means that one of those two words was misspelled. But we can't know which one, see, because we don't know from context which regionalism he's using. So when I said that he misspelled one of them, but didn't specify which, I was being clever.

Get it? It's a joke, ya dumbasses. A statement meant primarily to amuse. And along come all these dipshits who think they know what's going on and feel compelled to correct me. Sheesh.

(By the way, anti-Americanism is so 2003. It's 2005 now, the year of the ink-stained fingertip. Get with the program.)

I didn't RTFA but can it....

[Dark Coder]

Can it edit START menu?

For 5 releases (2.4 to 2.9), I haven't been able to drag and drop a new ICON/application into the START menu bar, yet.

Last time I tried this, it involved a convoluted method of editing three different files just to borne a new application menu item within the START menu.

(sigh).

Re:I didn't RTFA but can it....

[MarkMcLeod]

Er. What's this start bar you speak of?

Re:I didn't RTFA but can it....

[Anonymous Coward]

aka

1. "Applications" pull-down menu bar OR
2. "Feet" icon on task bar, then "Applications"

Re:I didn't RTFA but can it....

[DeathToBill]

*sigh*

You didn't actually try it did you? Come on, 'fess up...

Try any of the following:

1. Right click on the menu. Click "Enture Menu" -> "Add New Item To This Menu"
2. Open nautilus, go to "applications:///". Right click, click "Create Launcher".
3. Right click on the desktop, click "Create Launcher". Drag the resulting launcher to the panel.
4. Open the Applications menu, drag an item to your desktop (it would be nice if this worked the other way around, but it doesn't for me - YMMV).

Admittedly, 1 only works on launcher items in the menu, not items that are actually submenus. Even so, it would be nice if you could *try* the feature you're complaining about before you complain.

Note: The above works for me in GNOME 2.8, Debian/Sid edition. Not sure how much variation there is in other distros.

Re:I didn't RTFA but can it....

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see the menu look like something that Sun did with the Java Desktop
- MUD

Re:I didn't RTFA but can it....

[gothfox]

This won't work in 2.9.90 (or 2.10 beta1) because GNOME switched to FDO XDG menu scheme and old VFS based approach was removed.

Currently there is no way to user-friendly edit the menus, in 2.10 there supposed to be a menu editor.

Better screenshots/descriptions

[kasparov]

Here are some better screenshots of apps in this release with descriptions. Much better than the 640x480 screenshots linked to in the article.

Re:Better screenshots/descriptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than crap can still not be good. These look thoroughly boring too. Sorry.

GET A LIFE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, Now I know there are lots of people who look at slashdot at all hours of the day, but >50 posts before 12:20am EST? come on!! Get a life people! .... uh .... I guess ... I'm going to go get a life now... :P

Re:GET A LIFE!!!

[Jafar00]

It may be a surprise, but there are a lot of people who don't live on the East Coast of the US and I'm not talking about those who live on the West Coast ;)

big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

The shit looks the same as the gnome I have now and the version before it.

Whoopty doo.

If gnome 2.10 has some great technical improvements they sure as hell aren't evident from those screenshots.

Innovation at Slashdot!

[SuperBanana]

GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 is the first pre-release intended for wide public scrutiny before the final release in March. It is packed full of tasty GNOME goodness. This release is a feature frozen snapshot primarily intended for wide public scrutiny before the final GNOME 2.10 release in March.

To those who say the Slashdot staff are resting on their laurels, I present you with what I believe to be the first case of single-story duplicity!

Re:Innovation at Slashdot!

[forkazoo]

It's called either a pre-emptive dupe, or a demidupe.

Re:Innovation at Slashdot!

[gmhowell]

Here's hoping timothy will quit his day job. Like his partner in crime, michael. We just need to figure out a way to get timothy to bitchslap a college friend of Rob's...

Fly for a white guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Michael IS pretty fly for a white guy.

It looks like Microsoft Windows

[callipygian-showsyst]

With the bar on the top!

Standard graphics

[aventius]

I love gnome and its my preferred gui... but why can't the default gnome have a little style? Get rid of the shitty screensavers, beef up the 1994 era icons, and throw in a few good wallpapers that aren't solid colors or a rainbow on crack like this one. I realize that graphics don't matter with regards to functionality... but dammit, a piss poor interface is just a lack of attention to detail.

hellooooooooo?

[Anonymous Coward]

type 'applications://'

He meant GRAPHICAL. If he wanted to type stuff he could do it from the command line.

Re:hellooooooooo?

[Anonymous Coward]

well its all raster info in the end...

Re:hellooooooooo?

[Vectorferret]

Editing the menus like directories is what I meant. I was asking if there was a way to do it without having to edit a config file. Considering that those Gnome menu config files are more complex than manually partitioning with fdisk and messing with /etc/fstab to get everything mounted right, it's something they needed.

Re:hellooooooooo?

[kerrle]

And that's what he said - if you go to Nautilus and open the location "applications:///", that's the root of the applications menu. You can then navigate it just like files and folders. Note, this works fine in 2.8 (and I think all the way back to 2.4), but I have heard that 2.10 handles menus a different way. I haven't tried it, so I'm not sure.

fix the file selection

[wotevah]

I just hope they fix that godawful file selection thing. I have never found a tool so unfriendly to "power users". I mean, what's up with forcing people to browse instead of letting them type the path.

I mean having to browse through to /usr/bin and waiting minutes for it to build a fancy list so I can finally select what I already knew I wanted, that annoyance is worth wanting to switch to KDE or something else that allows me to TYPE stuff. Yaknow, like the old interface.

Re:fix the file selection

[Sark666]

You can press ctrl-L to get a cli for typing the path.

Re:fix the file selection

[Anonymous Coward]

Type completion is available in the file selector by default.

Re:fix the file selection

[Anonymous Coward]

the need to browse through to /usr/bin is not something that is needed, in fact you shouldn't have to go anywhere near it, /usr, /etc /lib etc. etc.

In those unusual situations where you do there is ctrl+l

Re:fix the file selection

[wotevah]

Open a file of unknown type in Mozilla.

Yes I can configure Mozilla to know about it, but there is no reason why this particular dialog should be made more difficult than before.

Re:fix the file selection

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you, i really needed someone else to decide what i need and what not.

Re:fix the file selection

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome is shot through with annoyances like this. Which is why I use KDE. Other examples. PAN, Gnome's default newsreader, no way to add an attachment or insert a files easily in a post. KDE? Use the attach button. I never groked Gnome's file manager system. KDE? Hit 'window' and I can spilt a window and drag or drop with ease. I can even split a split window and have several open to sort out a directory with spead and ease with drag and drop. I just loaded Mandrake 10.1 and played with Gnome a bit and its still lacking a lot of ease of use features KDE has
Nautilus has to have the ugliest icon imaginable, it looks like an orange turd. The rest of Gnome is an eyesore also. I don't what else Gnome is lacking, I didn't have the patience to dig all its faults out. I am back to KDE which has its faults,but the KDE Knode attach function, and KDE's wonderful split windows and drag and drop file
manager functionalty put it in a league of its own compared to Gnome. I can't use Gnome until it
catches up. Now if we could ject get firefox or Opera to ad a KDE like window manager function to
their browsers. I'd be a happy, happy man.

Re:fix the file selection

[Anonymous Coward]

PAN, Gnome's default newsreader,

PAN isn't included in gnome, not officially at least. So it's not "gnome's default".

I never groked Gnome's file manager system. KDE? Hit 'window' and I can spilt a window and drag or drop with ease.

Same with two nautilus windows for the drag & drop thigie. Split? For god's sake, that's just some geeky feature that no other GUI has ever needed for file management.

Nautilus has to have the ugliest icon imaginable, it looks like an orange turd.

The icon changed to a folder at least since 2.6. Looks like you need to do some homework.

The rest of Gnome is an eyesore also. I don't what else Gnome is lacking, I didn't have the patience to dig all its faults out.

You really don't want to get me started on KDE and its "what the hell do all those icons in the toolbar do, and why are they close enough to look like a gfx orgy", or "why are settings repeated all over the monstrosity that is Kcontrol".

I can't use Gnome until it
catches up.

I hope it never "catches up", if catching up means cloning every geeky feature KDE has.

Re:fix the file selection

[Mornelithe]

Yep, no one uses split pane file managers.

Re:fix the file selection

[hackstraw]

Its been a while since I've used a Gnome app, but I thought that for at least 7 or 8 years you could type in a path and even use tab completion to finish the filename for you.

Is this nolonger the case?

Re:fix the file selection

[drsquare]

You can press ctrl-L to get a cli for typing the path.

How obvious. What next, having the taskbar invisible, so you can type 'Ctrl-T' to bring it up? Everyone loves having to go through an extra step just to do what they used to be able to do in less steps. Personally I like the old feature of being able to type in part of the name and use tab-complete.

But like many OSS programs, the best file-dialogue features are spread out over different implementations, so you end up with say half the decent features in KDE, and the other half in Gnome, so whichever you use you're only getting a half-decent program.

Re:fix the file selection

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can press ctrl-L to get a cli for typing
> the path.

That's old. It now automatically pops up when you hit a key. In FC3 if I hit "k", the first entry that starts with "k" is highlighted and I see a small box where I can type additional letters. This is much easier than windows, where I don't see what I type.

Is it still as beefy?

[wjeff]

I keep trying both gnome and kde every year or so, and keep switching back to blackbox, or these days, fluxbox, they just use to much in the way resources for what they give back in functionality. I seem to remember seeing in the forums a few months back the one of the current goals of the project was to trim the fat a little, has anyone who has tried it lately noticed any improvements in this regard? or for that matter any improvements in kde's footprint also?

Just curious

Re:Is it still as beefy?

[WMD_88]

Mod this up. Starting with Gnome 2.8 I like it a lot. But I'm an XFce user at heart, and because of it I don't tolerate bloat very well. I'd love to see Gnome use a bit less memory...I mean, I've seen panel applets use 10MB. WTF?

As for KDE, I doubt God himself could do anything to help reduce bloat from that thing. :p

Re:Is it still as beefy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster above has a point. What exactly are you doing that causes your machine to have no memory or CPU time to spare? I can run Knoppix (with KDE) off a CD and it seems more responsive than Windows. If you're running a web server or some scientific computation or something, why don't you skip X altogether? If not, type top, and look at the amounts of CPU time and memory you are just wasting through daily use.

I haven't tried Gnome, but seriously, KDE has some very useful features. Konqueror for example lets you browse through compressed files and FTP/SFTP the same way you brows through the rest of your file system. You can even open a file on FTP or SFTP, edit it, and when you save in your editor it gets uploaded to the server. It even shows you previews of text, image, PDF or PS files' contents in their icons or on hover, something I haven't seen in XP or OS/X (except for images in some views). It might take a bit of time getting used to, but most things are there for a reason.

GNOME

[Codifex Maximus]

There was once a day when I was in the GNOME camp. I didn't like the non-free Qt stuff. These days, Qt is not much of an issue. I still appreciate the GNOME guys for giving us an alternative but...

Why does GNOME always seem to be in a state of trying to define itself - to always be in the concept stage? Perpetually in ALPHA state.

Is GNOME still the GNU Network Object Model Environment of old?

Now, in favor of GNOME I must add: There are some GNOME apps that just rock. I really like the process list, some of the games and the panel apps. The widgets are crisp, beautiful and intuitive just like they were on the original GIMP.

The GNOME guys have got alot of impressive code. Now to use that code to form a cohesive and easy to use interface that doesn't change drastically with every point release.

Re:GNOME

[jrcamp]

Why does GNOME always seem to be in a state of trying to define itself - to always be in the concept stage? Perpetually in ALPHA state.

Umm, I and countless others use GNOME on a daily basis. What makes you think it's in an alpha state? Well, except, oh, maybe if you run from CVS. So therefore KDE, XFCE, and every other project known to man is also alpha?

GNOME's mission is more defined than KDE. Their goal is provide a consistent, intuitive, and accessible interface for all users for Free (note the capital F).

KDE's mission is to... well, see who can put as many checkboxes as possible on a single page. Or maybe it's who can have the most missing icons from their application. Or is it who can clutter the menu with (again) missing icons and useless applications.

Re:GNOME

[WMD_88]

Why does GNOME always seem to be in a state of trying to define itself - to always be in the concept stage? Perpetually in ALPHA state.
I have to agree, it seemed like this for a while. Hence, I stuck with KDE/XFce for a long time. But after using 2.8 in Ubuntu, I think that period is over. I currently use XFce 4.0 in Slackware, but the next time I get the upgrade bug, I'll probably put on Ubuntu with Gnome whatever version. Unless they change it all around again. ;)

Re:GNOME

[Mornelithe]

Or hey, maybe Gnome's mission is to take away as many options from users as possible, and to hide the ones that are still there in a Windows registry look-alike program.

See? I can be a troll, too. All I have to do is spew out tired stereotypes. But then again, I don't really believe what I just said.

Do you really think that KDE isn't Free (note the capital F)? Is the GPL no longer Free?

Re:GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

See? I can be a troll, too. All I have to do is spew out tired stereotypes. But then again, I don't really believe what I just said.

Phew, and me thinking you actually believed Gnome was redefining itself everytime when most people are like "it's the same as the prior versions, it's not progressing".

Do you really think that KDE isn't Free (note the capital F)? Is the GPL no longer Free?

I don't think he said that. Try to calm down and reread his message.

Re:GNOME

[dmaxwell]

Do you guys call that a GNOME vs KDE flamewar?!? Get with the program already! This should have already spawned a thread 30 messages long and running. Kids these days! Can't even troll properly for their partison platform....

Re:GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't handle the truth huh?

Re:GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't handle the truth huh?

Ehmmm... Just try not to sound like some psychotic zealot, please.

Re:GNOME

[Glytch]

KDE may not be Free, but at least it Works, and Doesn't Take Away Options From Users, and Isn't A Massive Pain In The Ass To Compile From Scratch.

Re:GNOME

[Abcd1234]

The GNOME guys have got alot of impressive code. Now to use that code to form a cohesive and easy to use interface that doesn't change drastically with every point release.

Ironic you should say this, given the number of people bitching in the comments about how, based on the screenshots, there doesn't seem to be any appreciable change in the new release.

Try upgrading to a 486

[Anonymous Coward]

you'll be blown away by the power.

Better overview of new features

[Xofer D]

Davyd Madeley's page (coral cache) shows a cute overview of the new features that you can't see at all in those stupid screenshots.

Re:Better overview of new features

[Lobo_Louie]

Ah, now *there* are good some good screenshots. Don't show me menu listings.

What is the

[Clockwurk]

button on the top left of each window?

Re:What is the

[prockcore]

It's the window properties button. Clicking it will pop a menu that lets you change window properties.

You know, lets you do things like "move this window to another desktop" or "make window always on top".

It still uses default GTK widgets...

[Anti-Trend]

Alright, I love GNOME as much as the the next guy. But the plain old default GTK widgets... they're just plain fugly. In my mind, that's one of the single biggest (and aguably most retarded) things that's holding GNOME back. Why have ugly widgets by default? There are plenty of ugly interfaces out there. Why should GNOME be one of them?

Another wrong guy out there

[opweirdisntit]

"If you look through the screenshots, it is an Ubuntu install, and has a number of the Ubuntu customisations already, so it's not even very representative of what the general GNOME 2.10 user is going to get. All up, the screenshots aren't worth your time, head here [gnome.org] to see what changes GNOME 2.10 has."
WRONG ubuntu linux has changed the menu system in gnome (added computer menu etc) That can't be a ubuntu computer unless they recomipled gnome without ubuntu support and added the worst theme possible + ubuntu's there looks very nice.

It's Filler

[rafael_es_son]

It's filler.

thanks

[wotevah]

Thanks. It's not very intuitive, but I suppose it'll have to do.

Maybe it's just me accustomed to the "old ways", but it seems that Gnome is following the "Windows way", that is, make it easy for the idiots and god help anyone else, what with the pretty icons and the amount of clicks (and only clicks) you need to do things.

Re:thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just me accustomed to the "old ways", but it seems that Gnome is following the "Windows way"

You can't be more wrong. Gnome is going the Apple way, just check the Mac OS X file chooser, that is almost identical to gnome's.

And as we all know, Apple rules on usability.

Re:thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

> Gnome is going the Apple way.

Luckely Apple is not going the GNOME way.

> Apple rules on usability.

Exactly, Apple.

Even better

[bonch]

If you want, you can even have the best of both worlds and dual boot Linux and OS X on your a Mac mini. :) Better yet, you can even run KDE and GNOME through X11, in OS X.

You will feel your geek penis grow...

Re:Even better

[sessamoid]

Better yet, you can even run KDE and GNOME through X11, in OS X.

Better yet, you can run KDE applications in OS X natively . It's still alpha and therefore pretty buggy, but it looks pretty good (KDE app icons in the Dock, for instance), and it's making progress. Konqueror seems to work reasonably well as a native app.

Re:Even better

[mboverload]

Awesome.

I'm dead set on getting a mini now =)

Fonts suck

[bonch]

I'm sorry, but I never agree when people say fonts on Linux look good. For instance, take a look at the "W" characters in those shots. The diagonal lines in that letter are thicker than the others. It also happens in certain digits and special characters. Diagonal lines and curves in general are uneven. People often tell me the fonts in Linux render better than in Windows, and I just look at comparison shots between the two and shake my head at their apparent delusions, especially when comparing to a shot from OS X (probably the best I've seen from any OS...everything is smoothed, and somehow it antialiases very tiny characters without making them appear too thick or too thin).

Re:Fonts suck

[bonch]

And for those curious, it's more pronounced in these shots: http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/.

Hell, look at this--http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow. php?release=234&slide=32. See the word "IDE?" The D characters have uneven line widths on their curves. They thicken right at the diagonal parts.

Re:Fonts suck

[jai0]

Agreed 100%. I've never used OS X but windows. Even then, I can say fonts look so sharp and clear in Windows XP but in Linux (KDE/Gnome..) it looks so blurred and ugly..

Re:Fonts suck

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X screenshot'

Overall the fonts looks blurry. The "C" in C/C++ isn't the same width allover the curve. The "T" in target looks like it's bolded. th "9" looks just weird with all widths at the same time on the lines. The "B" in build looks like ass. Is it the same font?

Overall Linux fonts looks just as good as these. The "D" char you rave about is hardly noticeable and certanly much nicer then the "B" on the OS X shot.

Take of the Apple glasses before posting.

Re:Fonts suck

[Quattro Vezina]

Completely disagree here.

Smooth fonts make me ill. I go to extreme lengths to make sure that nothing on my system is antialiased. I love the way I have my fonts set up on my Linux box--no other OS compares to it. I've had my share of font issues, but I've since dealt with them, and my system looks better than ever.

I also like uneven widths--one of my favourite fonts is Luxi Sans, which has a lot of unevenness to it. It's quirky and distinctive, and I love it.

Re:Fonts suck

[displaced80]

From the title bar (more pronounced pinstripes), that OS X screenshot is from v10.2.x (Jaguar) which was released in August 2002.

ATS (Apple Type Services) has been revised repeatedly in the years since. Font rendering certainly was something of a dog's breakfast in earlier OS X versions, and is no doubt not perfect today. But if you're going to make comparisons with the latest GNOME/FreeType/Whatever, it would be more valid to refer to the latest version of OS X.

Re:Fonts suck

[Anonymous Coward]

...could even be any version between 10.0 and 10.2... back when everything was horribly bulbous.

Re:Fonts suck

[BlackHawk-666]

Linux fonts *can* look better than Windows ones, especially if you use Japanese on occassion like I do. However, it is down to the user to configure it all propertly a lot of the time - and this is a stumbling block. The other problem is getting really good, royalty free fonts in the first place.

Re:Fonts suck

[gothfox]

This is, I suppose, because Bitstream Vera fonts look ugly when rendered without anti-aliasing.

If you want crispy looking fonts you can get windows ones (they have a set of fonts, which doesn't require Windows license) and disable anti-aliasing (for some specific font sizes range) in fontconfig.

Debian clones have bytecode interpreter enabled, so you'll get exactly the same rendering as in Windows (for example, in Fedora, you'll have to rebuild freetype library to get good looking fonts).

Getting Windows fonts is, of course, not a right solution for Linux desktop, but fonts are hard to make and currently there is nothing better than Bitstream Vera.

As I understand Longhorn...

[dalutong]

As I understand it, Longhorn is supposed to have vector-based widgets. If cairo can be integrated well enough so that this stuff is solidly in gtk and gnome in a year then we'll have beaten MS in a very obvious visible way.

I read somewhere that this will be especially useful for graphics artists and researchers because the huge displays they use make the icons almost useless. If everything was vector based then that wouldn't happen.

I'm excited. Can't wait to see this stuff in my default Ubuntu install.

Quoted Article Text

[ringbarer]

Long story short, michael was canned for his abusive and egotistical personality.

Rob's been building a list of complaints by users about michael's abusive patterns but he never acted on it. Well, michael managed to bitchslap one of Rob's old college buddies' accounts along with a couple of paid accounts, word eventually filtered down to Rob, and he had kittens. He convinced michael's OSTG manager to track him down and drag him into a conference call.

Rob laid down the law and started reading off complaints and michael raised his voice, saying that if Rob had a personal problem with him that he didn't need to go over his head and involve his manager in it.

During the shouting match, michael's editor flag was revoked. He was in the admin area at the time and he noticed.

At this point he went totally ballistic and started screaming about how this was why he moved, to get away from "arrogant elitist bullshit". (this is a direct quote.. michael actually did move from New York to Canada to protest George W. Bush's inauguration in 2001. Andover kept him on since it was only an all-remote job anyway.)

michael's manager ducked out of the call to page (read: wake up) Hemos (overseas on business) to three-way him into the call, to try and calm everyone down.

There was some more shouting, and michael's manager told him that things aren't working out well, and that he's going to recommend that his employment be terminated.

michael just hung up, and that was the end of the call as well as michael's employment with OSTG.

And in the style of the erstwhile Mister Sims, I shall now include my own commentary while pretending it's part of the article.

Good Fucking Riddance! Now let's hope he doesn't try to hijack the slashdot domain.

psst...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not trolling if its the truth.

Everything changes but change itself.

[Doc Ruby]

In the old days, a release came with release notes, so we knew whether we cared about a release. Maybe GNOME's release notes release is just very hard to use, but I don't see a meaningful list of changes. And I don't mean a ChangeLog, which is meaningful only to developers, people waiting for a specific bugfix, or others involved in the project enough to be upgrading from daily build snapshots.

Re:Everything changes but change itself.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the old days, a release came with release notes, so we knew whether we cared about a release. Maybe GNOME's release notes release is just very hard to use, but I don't see a meaningful list of changes.

Who the hell in their right mind thinks that the screenshot tour in OSDir was ever meant as official gnome release notes?

Re:Everything changes but change itself.

[shaunm]

This is a beta release, and the slashdot announcement was not made by the release team. The release notes are being worked on right now. We can't help it if people jump the gun with announcements.

Re:Everything changes but change itself.

[Doc Ruby]

It's a beta release. Beta means people not on the development team are trying to use it. And a release ought to come with release notes, to be usable by those of us not on this team. I appreciate the early releases (and all the community work on this great SW that I use every day), and the announcement. But one of the worst failings of OSS is its lack of documentation, especially that which communicates high-level status to people at the fringes of (and outside) the developer community. Which is ultimately the key to success of any software - Windows triumphs solely on the quality of these docs, rather than any quality of the SW itself. If we can do better, we can turn the tables.

Re:Everything changes but change itself.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a beta release. Beta means people not on the development team are trying to use it. And a release ought to come with release notes, to be usable by those of us not on this team.

There:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list /2005-February/msg00000.html

Announced the 4th. Will you stop whining now?

Which is ultimately the key to success of any software - Windows triumphs solely on the quality of these docs, rather than any quality of the SW itself. If we can do better, we can turn the tables.

Windows triumphs because they were early and smart enough in the industry to stablish a monopoly quite hard to break.

If you're gonna tell me that Windows' user docs ("we found no answer, ask tech support") are "quality", please don't. I'll laugh in front of you till I puke.

Re:Everything changes but change itself.

[shaunm]

We can't make full release notes for every single point release. And when I say release notes, I mean these:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/


These take a fair amount of time to prepare. Now if you want a quick overview of what's changed since the last point release, the NEWS entries of all the modules are aggregated together for quick reading:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.9/2.9.90/ NEWS

Re:Everything changes but change itself.

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks for the link to the news. No thanks for the snotty retort. Of course I'm satisfied when my reasonable request is filled, even by an obnoxious person calling it "whining". If you can't understand that the beta release itself should have a link to those NEWS announcements, without having to deal with people like you to find it, then you're probably a Linux developer, Anonymous user-unfriendly Coward.

Re:Everything changes but change itself.

[Doc Ruby]

Thank you. All it takes is making a link to the existing docs, where the release is announced or published for download. Much easier for someone inside the project to do, even at each of the dozen or so point releases, than for everyone outside to scrounge for independently. It helps promote the project to more people without an already vested interest, especially helpful in beta cycles (helps reduce the number of cycles, too). When I work as release manager on betas, I offer that link. I'd like my favorite projects to benefit, too. Thanks for such good development.

Back to the roots?

[Vo0k]

Pull-down menus, status in upper right, drive icons on desktop, clean hypertext black on white help text, simple, clean folder view... haven't you seen that somewhere?
I know I did.
On Amiga.

Re:Back to the roots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for you, want a cookie?

Before you criticize...

[natrius]

A lot of posts so far have been criticisms from people who clearly haven't used GNOME before. How about trying the software out first, then pointing out legitimate problems with it rather than complaining about little things you've picked out of a screenshot?

Re:Before you criticize...

[m50d]

The main complaint I've seen is about menu editing, which is a real problem for people who really use the DE.

Re:Before you criticize...

[Anonymous Coward]

The main complaint I've seen is about menu editing, which is a real problem for people who really use the DE.

You can:
1) right click on items in the menu (not categories)

2) open "applications://" in nautilus (using control+l) and modify anything.

3) manually edit whatever config files are scattered in the system.

So, where's the problem?

Re:Before you criticize...

[m50d]

The problem is none of those are intuitive. Why do you have to click on an item in the category to add an item to the entire category? Why can't you right click on the actual button?

Oh you assholes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rule #1 of Slashdot, don't link to a huge screenshot repository like osdir on the slashdot front page!

(No wonder the commandline is so popular among devs, no need for screens)

Screenshoots? Is this a fashion site or what?

[jotaeleemeese]

What about posting articles talking about features, bug fixes and enhancements. I mean, we are talking about software after all, aren't we?

who cares about screen shots

[gmhowell]

Given the relative ease of skinning with most modern window managers and desktop environments, what can anyone hope to gain by looking at screenshots?

Not quite true

[phorm]

There will be new room left for volume control settings so long as there is room for the evolution of audio.

As surround gets better, I can see more volume controls using a 3d environment for "speaker config" so as to configure sound settings as best suited to how the speakers are placed in a room. While it's hard to imagine more improvements in the realm of audio (other than more and more speakers are different angles) I'm sure that there will be surprising new concepts which will require new ways of being configured.

Re:Not quite true

[displaced80]

Exactly.

And you've hit on something I'd love to see -- full surround speaker configuration.

I've got 6-channel (5.1) audio running from my PC to my amp. The computer's also connected to both a monitor at the desk, and a TV against the other wall. The upshot of which is, when I'm facing the TV, the surround's coming from the correct channels. But when facing the monitor, I've got the right-front and right-rear infront of me, and the left-front and left-rear behind.

I'd love to be able to set up presets to flip the audio to the correct channels depending on where I'm facing!

Has anyone come across the ability to do this? Either in Linux or Windows?

Re:Not quite true

[moonbender]

You could do something like that in Windows using the (free) ac3filter's output matrix. This matrix enables you to assign every channel to any output channel, including spreading a channel over several output channels. You can also save the configuration to a preset.

I'm sure other surround sound applications feature something akin to the output matrix.

Re:Not quite true

[displaced80]

Thanks! So that's my Dolby Digital streams sorted (that's AC3, right?).

Now, I'd love to be able to do the same for games with surround audio.

I guess there's nothing really low-level that could be tweaked which would apply to all audio APIs/filters?

Re:Not quite true

[moonbender]

Yes with respect to Dolby Digital. No with respects to low-level re-routing, not to my knowledge. Of course someone with hardware skills (not me) could just come up with a small box with a switch that rewires the signals...

Fast User Switching

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, I've recently tackled this...

There is a User Selector applet floating around, which evidences a few bugs with that approach -- an OS X style menu is nice, but I think Gnome can approach the Windows behavior much more easily (and avoiding some of the SNAFUs with the current options)...

Basically, what happens now is, you either end up running a new gdm that has an option to 'quit,' or you end up using the 'user selector,' which runs into multiple prompting issues after people are logged in... sometimes you get gdm, sometimes you get an unlocked desktop, sometimes you get both.

I think the easiest thing, *for now,* may be to rely on GDM to lock the screen and act as saver in multiuser setups, and configure Gnome to only unlock the screen on some sort of signal from GDM.

Then there's none of this multilocking BS, the admin gets to select one screensaver for the entire system (to enforce DPMS blanking or similar, and getting over the 'oops accidentally switched to user and got locked xscreensaver and can't switch back' newbie problem), and all problems are dodged except for enforcing the invocation of gdm and the flexiserver business at the right time (but this could just be a simple prioritization issue in where all the gconfd settings crap is pulled from).

No muss, no fuss, no user-selector in the Gnome desktop -- let GDM be the menu for that, that's what it's there for... ...and we all get what we want, I think.

XScreensaver bug then?

[phorm]

Hmm. That in itself might be a problem with XScreensaver.

Wouldn't it be better if XScreensaver started as root (no, don't kill me yet) and, as many daemons do, forked off to run in a user process? The root process wouldn't actually handle the screensavers itself, just the inter-user communication. Better, you wanted, you could even have the root process become an "xscreensaver" user and then allow any "xscreensaver-user" process started by logged-in users to communicate with the master. That way, you've got a master process (non-root) that can start the screensaver, and user processes that can tell it when to start the countdown (when all logged-in GUI users are idle).

OS/2 Rip-off

[professorfalcon]

Looks like Gnome got the OS/2 look-and-feel down pat.

Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel GNOME and KDE are rich in features contributed by very talented developers but to me they are both too slow and big. Enlightenment DR17 is shaping up nicely and combined GTK+2.x, the system is lean and beautiful.

Easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is called marketing.

Screenshots are excellent as a marketing tool, especially when a new release is nicely incremental but adds little in way of actual features. And bug fixes are just plain not sexy.

Screenshots are good. Show those screenshots around. That's how you'll attract more users to the GNOME camp!

Re:Easy.

[Jagasian]

Yeah, but if you dont concentrate of advertising new features and bug fixes, you won't be keeping anybody in the Gnome camp!

It's the fonts, stupid

[ortholattice]

OK, I'm going to go off on a limb here with a rant that's probably an unpopular opinion. But what do I hate about virtually all Linux distros (and the current Mac)? It's this fad of antialiased fonts.

Am I the only one left who prefers clean bit-mapped fonts?

Sure, the screenshots shown in the article look pretty snappy from a distance, because the fonts are large. But to get a lot of work done you want small, even tiny fonts. That's the whole point of high screen resolution, right?

Antialiased small fonts look awful. Compare the crisp, clean bitmaps of NeXTSTEP or even Windows to the small blurry fonts in GNUStep or the Mac. With aliasing letters bleed together , the shapes aren't quite right, etc. It gets so tiring to read after a while.

And if you turn off antialiasing they're barely legible (and sometimes even touch each other - I hate it when letters touch each other!) because no one takes the time to produce correct bitmaps for specific font sizes. (OK, to be honest I haven't seen the Mac with antialiasing turned off.) I don't even care about a zillion different sizes, just give me a couple of fixed sizes, small and smaller, that look right.

As much as I hate Windows, one thing it has going for it is that the fonts are very clean and legible with antialiasing turned off. I tried the latest Ubuntu for a while, playing with all the font settings available (even LCD subpixel) and in end couldn't stand it because of the fonts. Such a beautiful OS gone to waste because it's unreadable with antialiasing turned off, and I can't stand it turned on. Isn't readability like half the point of a computer in the first place? Or do all people care about anymore is just getting a pretty "printed page" effect from a blurry distance?

The irony is that font bitmaps are not even copyrightable! Heck, just steal them from NEXTStep! Or even Windows! (The bitmaps, that is.) Why doesn't anyone do this?

(End rant.)

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[lux55]

I've always found that fonts on Windows look like ass. Especially web page rendering.

On Linux, I find the anti-aliasing a bit aggressive, which seems to be the way with most OSS. As soon as they get a new feature, they ramp it up to full for the first two releases thereafter, until they realize that a moderate amount of said feature would be better.

On Mac OS X, under System Preferences > Appearance, there's an option "Turn off text smoothing for font sizes [n] and smaller." It's set to 8 and under by default, but you can set it up to 12 if you want. This pretty much solves the problem of smaller fonts being less legible with anti-aliasing turned on.

IMO, Apple generally has the best font rendering (although some of it is application-dependent, for example, BBEdit turns anti-aliasing off entirely, and I find Preview.app a little blurry compared to Acrobat).

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[arodland]

Antialiased small fonts look awful.

Perhaps that's why every distro I've ever met is configured, by default, not to antialias fonts under a certain size? I think it's your system, man. I don't have problems with blurry antialiased fonts, and I don't get problems with blocky fonts at small sizes. Everything, amazingly enough, Just Works (tm).

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! I'm glad someone has said this -- I feel exactly the same.

We read by recognising shapes of words, and the more they're blurred the worse it is for the eyes.

Crisp Helvetica any day!

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[JamieF]

>It's this fad of antialiased fonts.

It's been around for 32 years, so I don't think you can call it a fad.

>no one takes the time to produce correct bitmaps for specific font sizes.

Of course they do, and have for *years and years*. Arial (Windows) and Geneva (Mac) are fonts that were specifically designed and thoroughly tested for on-screen legibility at small sizes (9-12pt), and shipped with bitmap versions that were hand-tweaked to look good. When available, bitmapped fonts were/are used instead of an outline version for that point size.

These days I think they've been replaced by outline fonts with sufficient "hinting" embedded in the font file that the exact same bitmap will be reproduced from the outline + hints if antialiasing is turned off. Maybe there are teeny differences now between the original bitmaps and what you get from an outline, but I doubt they are major.

What you need to do is to RTFM. Turn antialiasing off for small point sizes, whatever that means to you. (For me that's 10pt and smaller - no antialiasing at those sizes.)

Download ProFont (free) and enjoy legibility at 8 and 9pt. Stop using shitty fonts - the built in ones that come with Windows and the Mac are actually quite high quality in terms of the "clumping" effect that you're complaining about.

BTW, there's a separate issue, and that is that the fonts that you get with a typical Linux distro *suck ass* and look bad at every size. This is a totally different problem from antialiasing and bitmap fonts. Crappy fonts look bad, news at 11. Go get some decent fonts.

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

no, most of us that have X terminals disable all AA fonts very first thing.

cut's network traffic in 1/2 by simply disabling that.

next? disabling any kind of eye candy and those damned useless "throbbers"

I do not need 600 frames of animation to bring up a menu.

Re: It's the fonts, stupid

[gidds]

Please don't think that everyone dislikes anti-aliased fonts. Personally, I love 'em; I find 'em much easier on my eyes. Non-AA fonts may be 'sharper', but that sharpness is just an artefact of the rasterisation. To me, they look gritty, awkward and uneven; AA fonts are much smoother and easier to read, even at fairly small sizes. (At least, here on OS X.) And they're a more accurate representation of the glyphs.

As others have said, you can usually disable AA on your fonts; but if you're running at a reasonably high resolution, on a reasonable quality monitor, with a reasonable font renderer, then it's worth giving them a second try.

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one left who prefers clean bit-mapped fonts?

Yes.

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[_|()|\|]

Am I the only one left who prefers clean bit-mapped fonts?

It depends on the resolution. Mac displays are usually about 100 dpi, and I like the way they look. On my 19" LCD, which is closer to 85 dpi, I prefer to make text a single pixel wide with fonts like Trebuchet and Andale Mono. In neither case do I use tiny fonts to "get a lot of work done."

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[drsquare]

Sure, the screenshots shown in the article look pretty snappy from a distance, because the fonts are large. But to get a lot of work done you want small, even tiny fonts. That's the whole point of high screen resolution, right?

No, the whole point of high resolutions is to the text is more defined, not smaller. Who wants tiny fonts that fuck your eyes up? There's a reason so many computer users need glasses. The screen is harsh enough on your eyes without making you squint to read the text.

Non-anti-aliased fonts look awful. Just look the the old X-Windows programs like xfig to see how great fonts on Linux can be. Admittedly fonts on Windows look OK non-anti-aliased, but on Linux the fonts are rendered so badly (apparently this is due to patent issues), that it looks like the fonts are made out of lego.

Although the fonts on that OSX screenshot look blurry, on my Linux system they look OK.

The irony is that font bitmaps are not even copyrightable! Heck, just steal them from NEXTStep! Or even Windows! (The bitmaps, that is.) Why doesn't anyone do this?

It's not that they fonts can't be stolen, it's that Linux can't render them very well as the way to render them is patented. That's why anti-aliasing is such a big deal on Linux: without them you get the lego effect.

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[Felonious Ham]

You're not the only one, I feel the same way. I like the crisp look of Windows fonts (I tried and turned off anti-aliasing in XP). The problem is that without AA, Linux fonts look like crap. I'm basically used to the AA now, but for the longest time I just thought the screen was blurry. And flipping back and forth between Windows and Linux partitions, the crispness of the fonts is the one thing I notice every time I log in... it's like a mist has cleared.

Question: Why _is it_ when you turn off AA the fonts look so bad in Linux?

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[Sergej]

The fonts in Windows were optimized for their own font renderer. None of the free fonts have been optimized for aliased rendering using the FreeType renderer.

Re:It's the fonts, stupid

[Sergej]

I'm working on it.

It's too bad

[Digital Dharma]

That the *nix people are still holding on to the belief that they can compete with professional OSs by using unprofessional naming conventions, poorly designed UIs, etc. Let me relate an exchange between myself and my superior recently over the usage of Windows and *nix at work:


Me: "You know Ken, Some of our customers really only need web access to do their jobs. We could change out some of these expensive Dell laptops for really cheap Linux boxes running a bootable Linux distro. Our customers never really move around with the Laptops anyway. I could arrange a demo, if you like."

Ken: "Sounds intriguing. Let's have a look at your proposition at the next Officer's Meeting this Thursday."

[Flash forward to Thursday. I show up with a homegrown box and a copy of Gnoppix. Total cost of my venture, including the media for Gnoppix? $358.23]

Me: "So you see, gentlemen, not only could we save considerably on our own initial expenses, but we can pass a portion of those savings onto our customers which should help us earn more market penetration. It's a win-win."

Ken: "Umm, how do I change the resolution on this thing? We need to get it in sync with the overhead"

[I make necessary changes]

EO#1: "Sounds great, but what does Gnome mean, anyway? I'm confused. I though gnomes were tiny little dwarf-like people, not computer applications. I mean, with Windows, the customers know exactly what they're paying for; a Windowing system to run their computer. You say this is independent of the operating system and more modular than Windows. Can we rename it and brand the splashscreen with our own design? What are the legal implications of that?"

Me: "Sure, we can make any changes we want to. But, the way the software is written and licensed, we have to make freely available all changes to the source code if requested to do so."

EO#2: "I would have to ask our onboard lawyers about that, but it sounds like you're saying that there's no way we can keep any proprietary changes to ourselves. Is that correct?"

Me: "Yes, that is correct."

EO#2: "So what you're saying is that we would be paying our developers to work on this project, and essentially anyone else can just come along, pick up where we left off and that's that? That doesn't really seem fair, if you ask me."

Me: "Well, sir, I-"

EO#1: "Sounds like software communism. But, I can understand why it would be set up that way. I was looking for a magnifier so I could zoom in on this text here and all I can find is this thing that tells me it needs something called a 'Gok' package. What the hell is Gok, anyway? I mean, Windows is pretty straightforward, and I know our customers appreciate its intuitiveness. Windows calls it Accessibility, which makes a lot of sense, but I don't think our customers would appreciate it if we replaced their current systems with Gok, or troll, or Gnome, whatever it's called."

Me: "Sir, as I've already stated, we can make any changes to the UI and look and feel that we want to-"

EO#3: "Assuming we make it freely available to anyone who wants it. We're basically working for free."

Ken: "We only have to give up the code if someone requests it, Jim. There's nowhere in the GPL that states-"

EO#2: "What is the GPL?"

Me: "Gnu Public License, G-N-U"

EO#2: "GNU?"

Me: "It Stands for Gnu's Not Unix"

EO#1: "Okay, gentlemen, thank you for your time, but I've had enough of this. I've heard a lot about the Linux phenomenon, and I have been meaning to get with you so you could clear it up for me, but from what I see, it has a long, long way to go. Windows is already at that point, and it does what we need it to do, so I believe we'll be sticking with that for now. Gnu, Gok, a UI that looks like it was designed 20 years ago, it's all too unprofessional to be springing on our customers, even with the substantial savings you mentioned. Goodbye now, gentlemen"

*sigh* Thanks, Linux Phenomenon. There goes my next promotion.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Moral of this story? Don't go into a meeting with management without knowing what you are talking about. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing isn't it?

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of pointers:

If you want to rebrand the splash screen, text, icons, backgrounds or any other data-related content, you can do so and that remains protected by copyright, not the GPL. You don't have to distribute any changes at all. That's why you can redistribute Red Hat's distro, but must remove their logos and references...

And the GPL states that you only have to give people access to source that you externally distribute the changed binaries to. So if you alter a program and only distribute it within your company, no problem. If you distribute it wider, to customers, or b2b, then you may have to release source.

Any applications that you write yourselves atop Linux are yours to licence as you wish.

The only time you'd ever have to give code access is if you made changes to a GPL program and then sold that at a profit. You've clearly used someone else's work to save you time, so that you don't have to implement it all yourself, and you want to make money from that short-cut. If you want to sell someone else's work without paying them for it, you have to give something back (that's the essence of the GPL, and that something is the code changes).

EO#2: "So what you're saying is that we would be paying our developers to work on this project, and essentially anyone else can just come along, pick up where we left off and that's that? That doesn't really seem fair, if you ask me."

Reponse: So we can essentially just come along, pick up where someone else left off and sell it? Making profit without putting any effort in or rewarding anyone for the use of a product?

Would a manager say that was fair? I think that all the ones I've ever worked for, and your one, would probably see their eyes light up at the prospect of free sellable products like that.

The GPL isn't onerous; all it does is maintain fairness and prevent abuse. Your task isn't abusive, and you can very happily co-exist with the GPL and it can be beneficial to all.

As for the GUI looking old, take a look at my desktop... It's SuSE 9.2, with KDE 3.3, Plastik and Nuvola icons. It's not the default, but it took me 10 minutes to do, and if you wanted to remaster a distro with those changes, you could certainly be done within a few hours.

http://gemini.cs.cf.ac.uk/~dawnrider/snapshot1.jpg

As for naming, your manager seems very hung up on those, and there's not much to be done about that. For what it is worth, every other manager I know would shrug and say "If that's what it's called, that's what the customer will get. They'll get used to it in a day or two." And that is generally the case.

But if you can, I think you really should re-open the discussion in your workplace, perhaps by taking the time to carefully read the GPL yourself and asking your manager for a written list of questions about it (scenarios, what-ifs, descriptions of what changes you might need in the OS/desktop environment etc). Then you can ask GPL developers about the list (maybe the KDE or Gnome mailing lists?) and see what their responses are. I think that your manager would be very happy and impressed that he's getting response from the people who do this for a living, who directly program the software he's thinking of using, and it might also enable him to see whether they intend to make changes he needs in the near future anyway, saving work for his employees. It will also help alleviate management anxiety as to the ability to find intelligent support.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

If your superiors are idiots ("software communism!?") it's not the fault of free software.

IBM is pretty happy with linux. Perhaps you should have mentioned that instead of explaining the basics in an uninteresting way to IT staff and then come here crying.

Of course, there's the possibility that you just made that conversation up to merrily troll around.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah. windows. THATS a good name for an operating system. I'd say I build one, with the name Doors. Hmmm. Maybe "Shoes" sounds better, doesn't it?

*sigh*

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus fuck, are you thick skulled.

Windows was called "windows" because the surrounding area around the content looked like a window.

What is a window? A section of something that lets you see information on the otherside of a barrier. Windows did that in terms of showing computer data within "windows".

A "door" wouldn't even make sense, since you have to open a door to see through it, but not a window.

Re:It's too bad

[Digital Dharma]

Hmm... I though IBM was pretty quiet about their Linux initiative these days...

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... I though IBM was pretty quiet about their Linux initiative these days...

You mean like they didn't release the Red Book of Windows to Linux desktop migration? Yeah, that non-release was a pretty disappointment.

Re:Shitty Theme?

[knipknap]

They probably had a look at slashdot and figured slashdotters seem to like stuff like that.

ugly arse desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

and its still fucking ugly. when are people going to realise that linux on the desktop is a BAD IDEA! just buy a mac already!

YHBT

[dylain]

You do realize that you have, indeed, been trolled, correct? And that furthermore, trolls know what they're saying is inflammatory bullshit and don't really believe what they say, which makes them trolls, right?

Re:Vectorized graphics (not always the solution!)

[lukewarmtapioca]

Vectorized graphics are NOT always a good thing. See a great post by Jakub, the artist behind the Gnome industrial iconsets: http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/blog/Artwork/Sc alableIcons/

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Chunky == blech!

[mfearby]

Gnome is never going to encourage people like me that aren't interested in eye-candy and bloat as long as there is only one view style, and that is, everything is bloody huge! Windows Explorer has the best details view of any operating system, and until Nautilus and Konqueror can offer a decent - and fast - details view (where the entire column doesn't go blue when you highlight a file), then I'll just stick to the evil OS from Redmond where I don't have to contend with these shockers!

Re:Chunky == blech!

[redtux1]

Your joking right?

Nautilus lets you customise your details view (right click -> visible columns)

Re:Chunky == blech!

[Ucklak]

Try Command-I

This no longer works with gnome-2.10

[Anonymous Coward]

The methods you describe don't work with the new gnome release as gnome has switched to the freedesktop.org menu standard and the old way of putting things in vfolders is no longer supported.

As of now there is no way to edit your gnome menu other than by hand, that is putting .desktop files in ~/.config.

But I sure hope that there will be a solution to this situation before 2.10 comes out. If anybody had any info about a menu-editor being planned for this release I'd greatly appreciate it.

Re:This no longer works with gnome-2.10

[cortana]

Well eventually Gnome will create their own editor for the standard fdo menus. Until then you can use one from another DE--xfmenu4 is (I'm told) quite nice. Obviously it's not ideal because it won't confirm exactly to the Gnome HIG, but it's better than nothing.

Offtopic: about your sig.

[orcrist]

Sorry, couldn't resist but.... remaining silent, by definition, doesn't change the signal to noise ratio at all, since it's neither signal nor noise ;-)

-chris

Re:Offtopic: about your sig.

[Xofer D]

Strictly speaking of course, you're correct - if you do not know beforehand whether you will emit signal or noise. However, the idea is that "there are two ways" is supposed to suggest to the reader that the first one is to emit only signal (which is what most people assume they will be doing), and the other way is to emit no noise. I think Slashdot would be much better if more people considered that what they were about to emit is not signal.

I will now consider rephrasing my sig to make this clear. You're the first person to ever bring this up.

In other news, I should follow my own advice, as this post is clearly noise.

WTF

[Ecio]

Text on site says "OSDir Screenshot Tour of GNOME 2.10 Beta 1" First Screenshot reports "Version 2.9.90" WTF?

file chooser still broken

[coaxial]

So after much out cry over the file chooser in 2.6, they decided to change it again. The problem with the 2.6 dialog was that there wasn't a way to type in filenames. GNOME is the only framework that doesn't allow users to type in filenames. Almost 30 years of GUI research and development had this, but GNOME decided that was dumb. Now, GNOME did allow users to type in a directory names if they hit CTRL-L. The problem with that is that it's hidden from the user.

Now, GNOME has added typeahead find to the dialog. Well, that got rid of the CTRL-L nonsense, but it's still hidden functionality, and doesn't allow users to paste in filenames.

This is just incompetence.

Re:file chooser still broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, GNOME has added typeahead find to the dialog. Well, that got rid of the CTRL-L nonsense, but it's still hidden functionality, and doesn't allow users to paste in filenames.

This is just incompetence.

It's a good thing gnome just joined the club of incompetents where APPLE is.

Damn ignorant trolls.

Re:file chooser still broken

[arodland]

Indeed. The GTK+ 1 file chooser is pretty much optimal. Bring it up to date visually, add a couple quick-navigation icons if you really must, and it will be the best possible. The thing even tab-completes in an absolutely intuitive way. Why did they feel the need to make it so much less functional for new releases?

Re:file chooser still broken

[Anonymous Coward]

So why did Apple do it right then ? Incompetent to follow Apple correctly or just big noise for marketing ?

Re:file chooser still broken

[Felonious Ham]

Hardly insightful. I'm not some Linux hardman like the "Enlightened" poster few posts above, but I can say loud and proud, "I love the file selector". I haven't ever pasted into a file dialog, but I can say that the type-ahead find and ctrl+l bash-style completing textbox, plus the handy favorites/mounts buttons are great. It took a while to warm to the file path buttons (being a Windows user by day), but I even find them to be more useful than the textbox+.. (since it remembers down the tree).

They probably should expose the ctrl+l somewhere, but your complaints sound pretty specific, why not submit two bugs (and maybe tone down the rhetoric... two minor complaints for a rather function-full component is hardly grounds declaring incompetence)?

Re:file chooser still broken

[coaxial]

They probably should expose the ctrl+l somewhere, but your complaints sound pretty specific, why not submit two bugs

Bug 136541 Opened March 2004. They tend to worry about accessability and exposing functionality through APIs rather than actual usability.

(and maybe tone down the rhetoric... two minor complaints for a rather function-full component is hardly grounds declaring incompetence)?

Either everyone in the GUI world is wrong except for GNOME, or just GNOME is wrong. You take your pick.

Re:file chooser still broken

[Anonymous Coward]

So why did Apple do it right then ?

YES. If you feel they didn't, just discuss it with the developers in the company with most GUI experience in the world. Hey, perhaps you'll show them wrong (giggle).

Incompetent to follow Apple correctly or just big noise for marketing ?

I didn't hear the gnome folks saying "hey, look, we copied apple!". Still, it's nice when you know they did and use that fact to shut trolls' mouths.

Re:file chooser still broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Either everyone in the GUI world is wrong except for GNOME, or just GNOME is wrong. You take your pick.

Everyone in the GUI world is wrong except for GNOME and Apple. That's my pick.

Consider that most file choosers except apple's (and gnome's) just mimick windows', so you think a text entry is absolutely necessary to open a file when it isn't (you just look for situations where you're not at ease, or even make them up and then label them as if they were serious flaws).

Now, it would be funny if Apple developers faced the same opposition than the gnome ones. But unlike them, Apple developers are revered as Gods and you people prefer to pick on the "lesser" man.

apple sucks and so does gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

apple sucks because if you scratch just underneath the surface, they are nothing but microsoft wannabes...if they could rule your wallet, they would do it in a heartbeat. overpriced accessories for machines that need a lot of stuff to make them usable. mini mac ? please...32 mb. of video ram ? $75 for a minor ram upgrade ? and most people will need to go buy usb mouse and key to use it...now it's more expensive than a high end PC after all...plus they will nickle and dime you on software updates endlessly.

on to gnome...this is really easy...when are you dumbasses going to fix the menu editing that has been broken for years now ? how can an ISV deal with just adding a simple menu addition with all that broken shit ?

at least with KDE you can edit the damn menu. gnome...when are you dumbasses going to fix the menu editing that has been broken for years now ? how can an ISV deal with just adding a simple menu addition with all that broken shit ?

apple sucks because if you scratch just underneath the surface, they are nothing but microsoft wannabes...if they could rule your wallet, they would do it in a heartbeat. overpriced accessories for machines that need a lot of stuff to make them usable. mini mac ? please...32 mb. of video ram ? $75 for a minor ram upgrade ? and most people will need to go buy usb mouse and key to use it...now it's more expensive than a high end PC after all...plus they will nickle and dime you on software updates endlessly.

Toolbars

[archonon]

And still no customizable toolbars, what a shame. So much precious screenspace wasted and no way to configure them. Imagine, W*ndows had that feature since -95.

Re:Toolbars

[Roguelazer]

Have you ever actually tried using Gnome? Because you really should -try- something before you make blanket assumptions about it...

pointless

[cg0def]

these screenshots are pointless/ First of all they do not represent Gnome but Ubuntu and Ubunty adds all their crappy and compleatelly pointless customizations to the menues. Also ther is not a single screen shot that has anything new in it except for the really ugly background the missing MIME database and the new applets icons.
Thanks a lot for wasting my time. I am compleatelly convinced that Ubuntu is never going to get even to the level of Debian. Apparently not all changes are improvements (this one is for the Ubuntu people since the rest of us already know that).

Animations in GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an avid GNOME user. It is my preferred desktop platform. However, compared to OS X and Windows XP(especially), GNOME's user interface animations leaves me wanting for more.

Rashly speaking, why does GNOME's user interface animation suck so much? Is it GTK+ that is the culprit, or is Metacity to blame? And when can we expect animations on par, or better, than OS X or Windows XP in GNOME.

Outside the aforementioned issues, it my opinion that GNOME rocks! Yes, Johnny, I'm a sucker for eye-candy!

I'm a hardcore programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and I don't see the need for the extra input field. It just confuses beginners and if I really want to type in a filename, I can always hit Ctrl-L (or even /) and Ctrl-V and that's it.

It doesn't even need extra keystorkes, for you also have to focus the input field if it isn't hidden.

Re:I'm a hardcore programmer...

[coaxial]

... and I don't see the need for the extra input field. It just confuses beginners and if I really want to type in a filename,

You mean confused like when they use windows, or macos, or solaris, or kde, or nextstep, or beos, or ...

I can always hit Ctrl-L (or even /) and Ctrl-V and that's it.

And where did you learn about ctrl-L? Google? Because it sure as hell wasn't the dialog.

I must not be configuring something properly, but

[twilight30]

... esd drives me nuts. I have to kill it before I can use any sound app aside from Gnome events.

Also, sound seems to be an exclusive thing -- only one sound app at a time; I can't have multiple streams. Anyone have ideas as to why?

Gnome 2.10 has not yet been released..

[Anonymous Coward]

So there can be no changelog, yet.

And because GNOME is more a collection of libraries an programs, you won't get a single changelog.

But you are free to browse the CVS and check out all the entries. There may be a few thousand of them.

Or you can simply wait for someone to write a review.

Or you could install GNOME 2.10 (As soon as it is released) and write the review by yourself.

Have fun!

Gnome Sucks

[Icephreak1]

I never did like Gnome. It reminds me of those big utility crayons you give to first-graders to teach them dexterity.

Enlightenment. Now that's a man's GUI.

- IP

Re:Gnome Sucks

[TractorBarry]

But isn't that the target audience ;)

Re:Gnome Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

But isn't that the target audience ;)

Are you implying a rampant sexism tendence towards women exists in enlightenment? :/

If you're using ASLA,

[anti-NAT]

you can save the values of the various controls to file using the alsactl utility. You could then build a graphical widget that executed this utility that saved / loaded the different configurations you want. Somethink like Tk/Tcl could be used for the GUI part.

Another alternative might be to use the amixer utility. You could use a script to swap the volume values of the appropriate channels. eg, the script follows these steps (1) store the volume level of control 1, (2) store the volume level of control 2, (3) load the stored control 1 volume into control 2, (4) load the stored control 2 volume into control 1. Again, you could put a GUI wrapper around it to make it a mouse click.

Re:If you're using ASLA,

[displaced80]

Thanks -- I'll have to take a look at that once I've finished compiling my gentoo system (no jokes please! :-D)

Will this allow me to actually swap which audio channels are output to which physical connectors?

I'd basically want to rotate the speaker config 90 degrees, so that the proper audio channels come from the correct speaker.

I'll definitely take a look once everything's emerged. This is my first 'from-scratch' linux system in a few years, so I guess I'm heading down a voyage of discovery... I've not even used a 2.6.x kernel yet!

Re:If you're using ASLA,

[anti-NAT]

Will this allow me to actually swap which audio channels are output to which physical connectors?

Not sure. I might have misunderstood what you wanted to do, or rather didn't think enough about it. Just swapping volume around won't change the contents of the channels. However, those utilities might allow you to do something like that, and you could always ask about it on one of the ASLA user mailing lists. It may even be a feature that could be added, as I'd think your scenario would be starting to be common enough.

Re:If you're using ASLA,

[displaced80]

Just swapping volume around won't change the contents of the channels.

Ah - yes, that's what I want to do -- swap channels.

However, those utilities might allow you to do something like that, and you could always ask about it on one of the ASLA user mailing lists. It may even be a feature that could be added, as I'd think your scenario would be starting to be common enough.

I'll be sure to take a look! Before I start asking on lists, I'll have to get myself up to speed on Linux audio systems/daemons/etc. The last time I had a good crack at building a desktop media-capable Linux system, I think OSS was the only option. Clearly, I need to some learning!

I didn't think my situation was all that obscure, but it's good to hear it from someone else.

possible solution

[fons]

I had this problem too (changing line-width), so i stopped using lines. Only shapes.

For example: if you want to draw a red square with red outlines, you draw a red square WITHOUT outlines, then you draw a slightly bigger black square, and you arrange it behind de red square.

Works for me.

Re:possible solution

[oliverthered]

What is the problem with line-widths?
do they scale double or something? are they always drawn centred instead of on the outside? how are they different from you 'solution' when they should be the same?

I love GNOME as much as the the next guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

The Next Guy here!

I just have to tell you that I fucking hate GNOME so stop telling everyone I love it as much as you do.

Thanks

T N Guy

Re:I must not be configuring something properly, b

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because you're using an inferior operating system.

Tasty goodness?

[nsushkin]

It is packed full of tasty GNOME goodness.

I thought it was frozen! ;)

Places menu. But how about...

[WWWWolf]

There's some stuff that tells about the great new Places menu that would duplicate the bookmark feature Nautilus 1.x had - only better.

Here's my only complaint of Nautilus: I really like the spatial view, but there's no bookmarks menu for it. I don't use Nautilus to draw desktop, so I can't exactly plop shortcuts to desktop, either. I start up Nautilus at computer:///, and it's an annoying special folder where I can't put any of my own bookmarks. I so hope bookmarks finally get there in 2.10.

Of course, with my luck, the Places will only appear on the damn desktop menubar, which I don't use either... but I hope Nautilus' Places menu will have same entries.

Re:I must not be configuring something properly, b

[zeenixus]

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

Usability problems from the screenshots

[master_p]

There is something wrong with the Gnome menu: the 'Internet' command has a submenu. The concept 'Internet' is tied to the browser in the average Joe's mind. So it should have been that 'Internet' should open Firefox/Mozilla. When one is on the Internet, 99.99% is on some browser.

There are many other things like this, like:

-'Image Viewer' is not the name of an application. Which Image Viewer?
-terminal server/bittorrent is not 'internet' (in average Joe's mind).
-the office submenu is litterred with 'openoffice.org' in front of every command.
-what is 'Evolution' in the office menu?
-why a terminal is in 'system tools' and not in 'accessories'?
-the 'search for files' is in the menu called 'places'; it's totally irrelevant to each other.
-screen resolution is under 'administration', which is usually something average Joes wouldn't touch. It should have been under 'preferences'.
-some programs have names, some don't. For example, 'Ubuntu update manager'. Why 'Ubuntu'? what's different than a simple update manager?
-why isn't the system object-oriented? for example, the desktop context menu does not have a 'change resolution' command.
-what panel menu will be deleted when I select 'delete'? (slide 14)
-the 'help' button in dialogs should not be in the same line with 'close' or 'ok' or 'cancel', because these buttons are for dismissing the dialog.

There are probably many more usability problems, but it's not my purpose to report them. And I am not an expert on human interfaces, I am a programmer; I just apply plain common sense and know what I want.

Re:Usability problems from the screenshots

[MrHanky]

There is something wrong with the Gnome menu: the 'Internet' command has a submenu. The concept 'Internet' is tied to the browser in the average Joe's mind. So it should have been that 'Internet' should open Firefox/Mozilla. When one is on the Internet, 99.99% is on some browser.

Oh, come on. To many users, the monitor (or the keyboard) is the computer, and the computer chassis is the hard drive. There's no reason to adopt the language of the incompetent -- if you do, how will they ever learn? How will they know how to get help when "the internet" stops working? Your suggestion is stupid on so many levels that it's scary.

Names are important to be able to discriminate between different things. Therefore, Firefox is called Firefox to avoid confusion with MSIE and Opera, and it's not called Internet to avoid confusion with the network cable or modem. Just imagine doing phone support if you not only stop naming things, but give them wrong names that are already clearly defined to be something else.

Re:Usability problems from the screenshots

[master_p]

My suggestion is stupid in the context of advanced users, I admit that. But it is not stupid for 'average Joe' users. Do we want Linux to get to the masses or we don't?

agreed

[Ender Ryan]

I've used Mac OS X a fair bit, and I am yet to be impressed by anything it has to offer. Commercial support issues aside anyway... The desktop is pretty, fonts look pretty nice, but I find font rendering in GTK and QT apps to be much more readable at equivalent screen sizes.

On OS X, fonts often appear much thicker and often very blurry, and while looking pretty are harder to read. On 'doze, well... Frankly, font rendering in Windows still looks like shit.

Mac OS X does have some major advantages with regard to fonts though, as pointed out in a few other posts.

I disagree with you about the Bitstream Vera fonts. They are very nice and readable fonts.

New Gnome rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

The new Gnome version absolutely rocks. Except smart file name completion(might be due to my previous install) everything works excellent as far as I can tell. Excellent job! I am totally impressed and inspired and feel like writing some gnome apps.

But does it now have a usable interface ?

[TractorBarry]

But can you now select more than one file at once when, for instance, choosing desktop wallpapers ? or must you still go through the entire rigmarole of using about 5 clicks to move through the dialogs to select each file in turn... one after the other... then the next one.... and the next...

And when in Nautilus can you now use a key on the keyboard to move your current selection between all files that start with that letter e.g. pressing the "a" key will in turn select "About.html", "Alberts Pants.jpg", "another load of arse" etc. etc. (and in this case no *NIX case sensitivity please)

In other words have they caught up with some of the most basic bits of the Windows 95 interface that made it good. Or are you still expected to click & drool at everything with the mouse ?

So go ahead and mod me troll for these comments but they're the major reasons why GNOME isn't my desktop of choice. I actually do like the idea of GNOME but I simply can't stand the amount of mouse work/repetition involved. Similarly if I can add multiple items to a list I expect to be able to simultaneously add multiple items at the same time. That's good user interface design.

And I won't even mention spatial Nautilus as that's a joke too far. It's just a wretched, wretched design. It shouldn't be on by default and you should be able to turn it off directly from Nautilus. It's a view mode and it should be configurable directly from the interface.

Kudos to Rhythmbox though as that's ace !

Re:But does it now have a usable interface ?

[BenjyD]

The first complaint is moot, as you can select multiple files in the open dialog in the standard way by holding down shift.

Your second point seems to have been corrupted by slashdot filters or something. Let me try to rephrase that for you:

Bug Submission #1
Severity: Enhancement
Title: Allow quicker navigation through nautilus file windows through keyboard navigation
Description: Finding files in a Nautilus directory view could be made much quicker if simple type-ahead find was implemented. Several other GUIs (such as Windows 95) on a keypress in a directory view move the focus to the first file beginning with that letter in the view. This makes keyboard navigation much quicker and reduces the need for the user to move their hand to the mouse.

Personally I like spatial Nautilus, and so do many people. Turn it off if you don't like it.

no significative change

[nazsco]

until gnome and it's programs has a nice keyboard shortcut system. i will stick with windows. Linux sucks when it came with global shortcuts ...probably because IT DON'T HAVE ANY! i like to see my IM alerts flashing in the status bar and then press some key combination when i'm confortable to read them. But with gnome + gaim, i have two options. Let the message pops on the screen when it arrives, no matter if it will cause me trouble depending on who is near my workstation, or i have to use the mouse to click the damn thing. GLOBAL KEYBOARDS SHORTCUT NOW!

Re:no significative change

[water-and-sewer]

KDE has had this for ages. You can implement keyboard shortcuts that launch programs, shortcuts for all the windowing operations you can think of, and shortcuts for all the functionality within programs.

I agree with you that keyboard shortcuts are important. I'm a keyboard person, not a mouse person, and for the moment it's one of the reasons I stick with KDE. From the desktop, I can do the following to send an email message, just using keyboard shortcuts:

Cntl-M to launch KDE.
Cntl-N to open a new message
Cntl-enter to send it (Cntl-Alt-enter) to queue it for sending later.

Those are all keystrokes I chose myself. Is that what you were looking for?

smb / ftp browsing?

[radarsat1]

i REALLY hope they've improved the use of nautilus for smb browsing. It's "okay" for ftp browsing, though sometimes I have a bit of trouble getting it to accept my password, but it's HORRIBLE for samba. I use my laptop on my (Windows-)network at work, and I use samba to interact with other computers. I don't have it properly hooked up to the Windows domain server, so I manually have to enter the domain name whenever I use "smbclient". This works fine from the command line, but I've never ever gotten Nautilus to accept my domain name and password for browsing on the network. And only 30% of the time does it even ask me for my password before giving me an error.

Other than this, I absolute love Gnome (converted from KDE when I first booted up the Ubuntu live CD), and since I also enjoy working from the command line it doesn't bother me too much, but there are times I'd really like to use Nautilus for this.

Why to they keep bothering

[Anonymous Coward]

If I wanted a light weight window manger I'd use FVWM. Gnome doesn't offer any more now that it's been so striped of capabilities. It's still got the massive dependancies (as bad as KDE), yet is weaker than running XP. The GTK tool kit is pretty nice, but come on, Gnome's almost worthless. The developers keep striping features that they don't feel are important and force use models that just plane stink. Everytime I try a new version of Gnome, I get disapointed that they developers don't have a clue. Oh well, it's either FVWM or KDE.

Does the desktop work yet?

[Jagasian]

In Fedora Core 3, the Gnome desktop still doesn't properly work. You have to manually refresh to get new or changed files to be properly displayed on the desktop or in the file browser. I think there is something wrong with Gnome's file alteration moniter, but it has been broken for a long time now. It is getting VERY annoying. Yes, I have many other people have formally reported the bug.

Another big gripe of mine is how you can get the Gnome file browser to crash by checking the properties of a large file, say a 7GB DVD ISO image. Sure fire crash each time. Not sure if it has been reported, but then again, reporting doesn't seem to get the bugs fixed.

Maybe I will switch to KDE, but that would require me to switch to a KDE friendly distro. Any suggestions?

Re:Does the desktop work yet?

[BenjyD]

The file alteration monitor in FC3 is gamin, a lighter replacement for FAM (which was terrible). Replacing the installed version with the latest dev version (RPMs from the developer's website) helps a bit, but gamin is still pretty unreliable. It's early in its development still.

FC3 is terribly unreliable and buggy, but it seems to be about "as good as it gets" for GNOME 2.8 desktops. Gnome-volume-manager, alteration monitoring, gnome-pilot and nautilus have very annoying bugs. Ubuntu had a mostly overlapping set of GNOME bugs, too. It's getting to the point where I might drop work on my own (PalmOS) project for a while to go fix gpilotd, just so I can actually sync my Palm with GNOME. I've also reported bugs against things like gtktextview that really ought to be spotted by unit testing in such an organised project.

That said, I have read GNOME developers saying that 2.6 and 2.8 were bad from a bug point of view and 2.10 is meant to be a major bugfix release, and some KDE releases are just as bad (KDE 3.3.0 was the last release I used).

Re:Does the desktop work yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros, Slack ... take your pick! KDE installs and works much easily than GNOME on any distro ... except of course Ubuntu ... ouch, could'nt help that one :-)

Re:Does the desktop work yet?

[Jagasian]

Hmmm, I want a KDE friendly distro that supports apt for RPM or is Debian based. BTW, how KDE friendly is Debian itself?

Re:Does the desktop work yet?

[Jagasian]

Well, from what I have seen, KDE's file manager is far more viable than Gnome's, hands down. A graphical file manager is a core aspect of a good desktop environment. The other thing that I am interested in on KDE would be good Gecko (i.e. Mozilla/Firefox's rendering engine) integration. Do they have that yet?

KDE has been there, done that

[Jagasian]

KDE has had this feature for years now! Somebody needs to write up a complete critical comparison of the two desktops. I think allot of people would be surprised.

So much work and it still looks ancient

[Dralt]

compared to the Apple desktop.

Mod parent up !

[TractorBarry]

Hear hear.

Sorry but every time I use a GNOME file save/open dialogue I realise how bloody good the Microsoft Common Dialogue control is (with the exception of Microsoft Office which has it's own version of the control which is absolute crap)

When using GNOME then not being able to type in a directory path and have the control switch context to the directory I've just typed slows me down immensely. Given *nixes tab complete feature this would be a tremendous productivity boost.

Also not having the ability to type in partial filenames (with "wildcards") and then hit enter to update the display to show only those files that match the search pattern is a complete pain.

And sorry but GNOMES patalogical refusal to make use of the filesystems hierarchical tree analogy is just plain wrong.

I'll say it again. I like GNOME but there's so much of it's interface that is so counter productive and seems to have been introduced in a "we know best" manner.

Finally I'll say it again, if an application allows me to add multiple file system objects to a list it should let me add multiple objects at the same time.

Maybe one day ?

Fuck beginners.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus fucking Christ. "Think of the newbies"... "Think of the Children".

Fuck beginners. They can bloody well learn how to use the interface like everyone else. It's this principle of designing everything for 2 year old children that's made Windows XP and GNOME fucking shite.

Fuck beginners, fuck wizards and fuck you. If you can't use something leave it the fuck alone and go and whittle something.

You fucking imbecile.

Re:Fuck beginners.

[Sergej]

Get lost, please.

Re:I must not be configuring something properly, b

[twilight30]

Thank you, that's great.

What's New?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or is it apparent that KDE has long had all the above features and more? And no, this is not a flame-bait. I just want everyone to open their eyes and see that there's nothing really new in GNOME 2.10 unless you've never ventured out of the GNOME pastures :-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

http://www.alsa-project.org

[anti-NAT]

is the place to go.

Ubuntu really is the new Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

When Gentoo started getting all the Mandrake converts, they started spewing random shit without knowing what they were talking about.

Now that Ubuntu is the cool fad, we can see the same trend in user mentality: run your mouth without knowing jack.

[Ubuntu fanatic> MY DISTRO LOOKS SO GREAT COMPARED TO THOSE CRAP SCREENSHOTS!!

[Normal Person> That IS your distro, you twat.