Slashdot Mirror
Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future
An anonymous reader writes "Havoc Pennington, lead developer of GNOME, wants to fork GNOME 3.
'So the forces of existing userbase, the easiest-to-reach future userbase, cross-platform applications, and funded development efforts are strongly pulling GNOME 2 toward conservatism. I think GNOME 3 should be a fork for that reason.'" This has been a common practice for not only many open source projects, but proprietary systems such as Solaris for major revisions, so it's not as tumultous a change as the word "fork" may imply.
Darn those pesky users for making us stablize things instead of hacking cool new features! I mean, which would you rather have, a foot menu that works or spatial Nautilus?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The name 'Gnome 3' is reserved for the core Gnome product.
If you're going to fork the core product and possibly make an incompatable branch, please give it another name.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
If they want to fork, let them. If it becomes any good, it'll be used
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Maybe the GNOME guys should follow how the Linux kernel works. Keep even numbered GNOME releases as the stable, it works for everyday use. Update the even number versions with bug fixes, and maybe small targeted improvements. Then on the other hand have the odd number GNOME releases be the wild and crazy, lets see what kind of interesting desktop we can create. Once something stable, usable and decent looking is created, make the odd numbered release the new even releaes.
Why doesn't he just join up with KDE? Theres enough bulk in KDE that it should fit his needs nicely.
There is no fork.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That has got to be one of the coolest first names ever.
oh wait, there is no spoon
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I guess that system of labelling releases is dead and gone... 2.6 is either both stable and beta or neither (probably subjective).
Though I really don't see the importance of version numbers; it doesn't say _anything_ about the product or the changes since the last version.
Havoc is NOT talking about breaking out of GNOME because he doesn't like the current way.
He is talking about forking off development for GNOME 3, because it would be too disruptive to move everyone onto GNOME 3 immediatly.
Basically GNOME 2 would continue as is, with incremental changes, while someone starts hacking on GNOME 3 for a future release. They would diverge quite heavily after a while, but when GNOME 3 has started getting momentum, GNOME 2 can be closed down.
Becuase as it is it seems like GNOME is falling apart. Two years ago GNOME and KDE were neck and neck. Now KDE is getting better all the time and GNOME seems to have just stalled out. Every single time GNOME does something new, they come up with something nobody likes, and instead of listening to any issues their customers bring up they just jam their fingers in their ears and yell "I can't hear you! It isn't poorly designed, it's 'innovative'!"
As a 90% user of Windows (ya I hate it) and 10% user of Linux (I hate it too), I think the biggest problem with linux is its incessant forking. At least Windows develops some sort of standard and things look about the same on all computers. It's like Windows is monogomous.. It's boring, but reliable.
With linux, every distro breeds more distros.. every project breeds more projects.. They're forking like rabbits!
--- We need more Ron Paul!
This is a great strategy on his part. I view this as analogous to the great gcc2->egcs->gcc3 "fork", which was quite successful.
11*43+456^2
"Let's not make any configuration options available to the users at all! No settings, preiod. If they think they are smart enough to reconfigure the product, let them read through the source and figure out what cryptic Gconf keys they need to hack. Yeah!" Seriously though, is forking such a good idea? I can't say I've run into too many gnome bugs (and I use it everywhere.) What gnome really needs, like a number of large-scale open-source products, is to have all the features 'finalized.' It seems that some things are just not quite finished, or some things hint at integration, yet it is not as complete as it should be. Finish the main features, then fork off that. Why not?
Just because Havoc says something doesn't mean it's true. Havoc doesn't own the Gnome project, and doesn't have the authority to make a big, sweeping change like this.
In the past, sometimes his plans for Gnome have been in conflict with other members of the team.
If Havoc wants to fork the project, fine. But don't call it 'Gnome 3' unless it has been designated the 'Gnome 3' project by the board.
Now, if this was a message from the Gnome Board of Directors, I would feel differently.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
He really is. I just wish he wasn't so political about everything. Spoils the soup.
Do I still need to install a compleet new desktop version when i want to have new version of Gedit?e _a_singe_c haracter_on_the_screen
Is it still easier to write your own desktop enviroment then compiling Gnome?
The longest function name under gnome 3.x becomes:
gnome_output_compleetly_new_system_writ
Naah
g'd day....
These Op-Ed blog posts rarely indicate policy...regardless of your position on forking and GNOME.
Perhaps he should name it Troll, and think all the /. PR he'd get.
I hope Novell gets involved and has a Mono core dependancy. RedHat won't like it, but they're not the only game in town now that Novell bought Ximian.
.NET libraries that will be written now and in the future.
Mono has the benefits of being able to run Python, C#, Java, C, C++, VB, and a whole slew of other languages that the JVM is incapable of. Not only do you get the benefit of automagic bindings to various libraries, but you get tons of
You still write core parts in C, but more and more in managed code. You'll need a beefier machine, but time marches on. Was 640K enough for everyone?
As far as the legalities of Mono are concerned, I'll leave that to the FUDsters who are better at cowering under the covers instead of embracing good technology.
is that it's going to require a code fork to be able to ever graphically edit your applications menu.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I know this will sound rude. But I feel like saying it anyway. Gnome has very much been focused on becoming more userfriendly in Gnome2 and it has done this by a less-is-more approach. This has, for me, made it a lot more user-unfriendly. The simple file dialog boxes are a very good example of what I mean: They now by default open up half-opened so users will not be confused by the more advanced options in them. But the problem for me is that the advanced options are things I use every time, meaning an extra click or keyboard press every time I need to use them. There is no good reason for them to appear half-open, it is just done to make it simple. The result of this is only extra time spent using them every time to make it easier to use the first time for complete idiots. Something similar is also done with the features to make it more user-friendly: If a feature is to advanced for a beginner, they are simply removed or placed where they are completely unavailable or require a great deal of effort to use. Gnome2 has come user-friendly to the extend where it is almost impossible to use productive on a day to day basis. I seriously hope Gnome3 will be better. Not that I think I will ever use it as a main desktop again, but as I use a lot of Gnome2/GTK2 programs (like I also use KDE programs in my fluxbox) this annoy me very much.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Call it a new version, darn it!
It seems that the browser-now-known-as-firefox did this. They forked mozilla, created something quite a bit better, then worked out the kinks, and eventually it'll merge back and become mozilla.
I have no problem with gnome forking and creating a cutting edge version that's unstable for a year or two. It might reinvigorate the project so they can make something that gives kde a run for it's money.
Pennington isn't proposing anything. He's merely examining the current discussions on the future of Gnome and exploring possible options. From TFA:
where the comment ends and sig begins
First of all, some xcompmgr support would be nice. Gnome has a few BIG problems with using that program, which is unfortunate because using it on my computer speeds up the sluggish Gnome.
Another thing would be better wireless support. Unlike KDE, there is no app that can do what Kismet can. The network app. lets you connect wirelessly, but no part Gnome lets you scan. In this department many good programs have appeared that would fix this problem. I like- Wifi Radarand this applet
They only need to be incorporated (or packaged with a Gnome distro for the love of diety).
Many people think that Gnome's biggest problem is RAM usage, and they might be right. 256mb feels VERY different than 512mb on the same machine. I personally believe that this problem was made worse in the last release, not made better. I think that 2.12 has intentions on fixing this, so I care more about Gnome 2's interface problems.
Open Source Sushi
I seriously am envious of anyone able to code anything decent. I have developer envy.
In any case, I was wondering some of the same things that you put forth in the blog about fractally "petrifying" the GNOME codebase. It was my first DE i'd used with linux (rh5.2, I think CDE [ugh] was default) and loved it; but it never seemed to add features.
KDE 3.2 grabbed me after a few years of just using black/fluxbox and seems to really have the upper-hand in "creating value" when upgrading from previous versions. Do you feel GNOME has been losing ground for this reason? I'm looking forward to trying Beagle and seeing where Seth's OpenGL hacks lead to for metacity, but outside of that, I can't think of why I'd want to run GNOME anymore. Can you try to give me some insight into why I should be looking forward to future GNOME2 versions, let alone GNOME3?
put the what in the where?
"You must be a GNOME developer. ;-D"
I'm not. I just happen to be able to look beyond my nose, and see the big picture of what they're trying to achieve. I'm sorry you're not yet ready.
And the moral of the lesson is...You can't make everyone happy. Any more than you can have more than one horse win a race. Making xiando happy will make someone else unhappy. And that person will post "Very Rude Comment Redux" on Slashdot. And the cycle continues.
"by Havoc Pennington " Read my blog post - " You must be new here...."
For sanities sake? Let it remain so.
"As far as the legalities of Mono are concerned, I'll leave that to the FUDsters who are better at cowering under the covers instead of embracing good technology."
It's not the FUDsters that are going to be pressing the court cases.
Even though I depend on GNOME libraries for my projects (specifically PyGTK), I think this is a good thing.
The reason why is that having a bleeding-edge version that integrates things like Cairo, xcompmgr, more eye candy, etc will give us who like to have a system with all the eye candy a chance, without having to worry about adding them to GNOME 2.x and possibly disrupting users who want a no-frills desktop. When GNOME 3 becomes stable, it can replace the old version.
But moreover, the Linux desktop is at an inflection point - we're just starting to get the kind of nifty eye candy that other desktops have. GNOME 3 should be a chance to get GNOME ready for the future of the Linux desktop - using Cairo to render the GTK widgets, using Luminosity as the next GNOME window manager, etc.
Sometimes it's healthy to fork off your code and rethink some of the assumptions you made rather than having to deal with the cascading problems that can crop up when you try to muck about and fix those messy hacks we all seem to create.
Forking isn't always bad - sometimes it's necessary to eliminate cruft. If the end result is a better desktop, then that's what should be done.
Seems to me that Havoc wants to create a platform to try out new features that may or may not be accepted by users, and another platform that is more "traditional". When a feature is found to be really useful then they could merge it into their traditional version.
The problem with this, of course, is when the underlying libraries like atk, etc, are altered fundamentally. In that case, things will become a right mess.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
yeah, BING3 is not GNOME 3...
Yes, lets all fragment our efforts to kingdom come, then try to compete with proprietary software.
...and then lets wonder why Linux isn't taking off on the desktop.
Lets have 3000 different distros, and no clear leader. Lets make sure every distro has slightly different configuration tools. While we're at it lets force users to compile their source, (including the kernel otherwise their hardware won't work).
Lets have 3 different kernel firewalls, in about as many years.
Lets have 300 desktop managers, none of which quite work or interoperate.
Lets have 3 different office suites, none of which quite translate MS Office stuff quite right.
I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer. I'm also damn tired of defending it. I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.
Lets decide whether we're doing cool techy geeky play stuff, or whether we want to produce something real and tangible and useable by everyone. Lets make up our minds on any given project what our goals are (or what the goals for our group are). Lets contribute to existing open source instead of starting our own little pet project that does no better than anything that came before it. Lets get a bit of unity back into open source, before it goes the way of the dinosaur!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why not just make a fork of gnome that's useable? new button should be the gnome foot kicking a few butt cheeks.. xfce4 is all I need...
Step out of the box and enjoy life
Back in the "old days," I remember the pgcc/gcc split. The old version of gcc was in dire need of an update, but was relied upon by many projects and users. The pgcc effort came online and made remarkable improvements. The old gcc and pgcc coexisted for years. People wanting the fastest compiled code used pgcc. Them finally pgcc was deemed stable enough and became gcc.
Revolutionary work can be done in a fork and I surely wouldn't discourage it. It will make distributions a little more complicated and may cause compatibility issues, but there is a clear benefit here. If the whizbang new stuff is worthwhile, people will use it, patch the bugs, solve the compatibility problems, and use it.
(Indeed, it's still not that great, or you'd be seeing a lot more i786, -p3 and -p4 RPMs out there. Not many people use an actual i386 these days, except in the space industry.)
PGCC's optimizations were, IIRC, largely rejected as EGCS's working group didn't like Intel's way of doing things. For similar reasons, again IIRC, a lot of the approaches used in Intel's C compiler aren't used in EGCS/GCC either. Well, I can understand that. It's better to use a good design, if you can. On the other hand, if you're writing something for a processor, it would seem to make sense to allow for the faults of that processor.
I seem to remember a similar argument, when SGI issued a whole load of speed-ups for Apache 1.x - the Apache group rejected them because they were not the way the Apache group wanted Apache to work. SGI caved in, eventually, and stopped maintaining the patches. A royal pain, because I quite liked them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Let's add Evolution to the mix for kicks...that makes GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla/Evolution...whose acronym is GNOME!
Obviously this is a sign from the Gods Of Recursive Elegance (GORE? He's in on it too?) that we're on the right track.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
He's talking about Branching the product .... not creating a "new" competing product. However the new Gnome 3 -no doubt- would have a seperate development team.
... Gnome is fast becoming stuck by what users expect of it rather than developing into a better product.
I preffer KDE personally (I have a Graphics/Design background, so bite me!) I still use plenty of GTK apps and have regular contact with resent Gnome builds.
But I find it ironic that GTK was created for GIMP, yet the UI of GIMP sucks (Compaired to Adobe and Macromedia products)
I mean why can't Gnome work fast AND look good AND be usable??
It shouldn't be hard to beat the pants of Redmond!
You should have said, Linux. Not "Open source software is splitering/fragmenting". Besides, if you don't like Linux's "fragmentation, non-standardization or poor leadership" - it's all about money now, just like MS - then switch to OpenBSD or FreeBSD, respectivly.
Not all distros do. Pick an old-school, stable distro. Don't go with some flavor-of-the-month. Try something like Slackware, or shit if you want stable, Debian stable is rock solid. Linux gives you the freedom of choice to pick the right distro for you.
It has: .desktop extensions (like Windows does with .lnk files, but without the arrow telling you it's a shortcut) allowing them to spoof regular documents with icons and everything.
* No menu editor.
* Hard coded un-overridable mime-sniffing that gets lots of things wrong (because it's foolish to even try to anticipate every single file format and code to handle them all) and then forces its will on the user (won't open some of my text files in gedit for "security" reasons).
* A file browser that defeats all that paranoid mime-sniffing "security" by hiding extensions
* Menus that scroll like win95 when very full. A menu editor and/or overflowing into columns would help a lot.
* And a continually decreasing level of configurability.
I suppose aside from that it's very good. It's the desktop environment I'm using now, and the one that I keep coming back too after repeatedly trying to dump it in favor of the alternatives.
recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux.
Oh really? What kernel flags did you change for a printer driver? Hate to tell you this but there is no printer supporting in any version of the Linux kernel at all. And even if you were just mistaken, nobody has had to recompile a mainstream kernel distribution for things like USB or Firewire for years.
ets have 3 different office suites, none of which quite translate MS Office stuff quite right
MS office format is very complicated, its essentially the internal structures of Word, excel... More importanly it makes use of lots of Windows specific technologies like VBA. There will never be a perfect translation for MSOffice documents. That was the point in its design! Vendor lock in. This has nothing to do with Linux, I don't see SCO, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, VMS, ZOS... or any other operating system doing any better in this regard. Hell Microsoft has trouble getting it right, and they can wholesale add Windows components to another OS;there are numberous problems between MS Office for OSX and for Windows.
If you want to run the core Windows app that uses Windows technologies at the deepest levels perfectly than run windows. The Linux kernel isn't going to do a better job supporting Windows apps than windows will.
Lets contribute to existing open source instead of starting our own little pet project that does no better than anything that came before it.
Oh and Havok is probably the single biggest contributor to Gnome, he's also a project lead for RedHat and founder of Freedesktop.org so this isn't a private project.
The sort of thing you would know if there was a "we" in terms of producing open source software.
Now why do you feel the need to impress people you've never met with lies?
Gnome+Firefox+Open office
Even the world is not enough !
in Gnome's nautilus you can specify that the text is to the side of the icons instead of under the icons. walla, i think thats what you wanted.
It's pretty much the only X file manager out there that dares to do something other than clone the Windows file browser, and for that "crime", it's widely castigated by the community.
I don't know if you remember, but this is how windows 95 worked. It was the most anoying thing, and I was extremely relieved when 98 came out and Microsoft changed the file manager. I cannot understand why the Gnome people would clone a decade old Microsoft model, over a new one (not to say that Microsoft invented either.) I use Konqueror both in Gnome and in KDE (which I use much more frequently, partly because Nautilus is so deeply ingrained in the DE.)
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
multi column view lets you scan down a "list" of file names vertically. but only one per-line. whereas "list" view is more like icon view with the text the the side. so you can scan down the list of names but still fit more than one icon on each line. without the sortable columns. (which is also availible)
Eh.... they do. *Exactly* like Linux.
If your version is X.Y.z then X is the major version, and Y is your minor version. Even Ys are releases and odd Ys are development releases. That's why Gnome releases, like Linux releases, are 2.2, 2.4, 2.6...
Personally I like both KDE and GNOME. For new systems I'd have to choose KDE because the extra resources it hogs don't hurt performance that much, and I love programs like Kate and Kile. It also has a lot of smart features that I keep stumbling on (like the day I discovered Konqueror's integrated FTP client). But GNOME is clean, simple, and efficient while having a few intelligent features of its own. This is part of why when I build a junk box out of old parts (generally P2 or equivalent), I really like Ubuntu (for new machines, I'm a SUSE believer).
" It has:
0 8773
* No menu editor."*
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/3
"You should be able to right-click items on GNOME sub-menus. This will bring up a list allowing you to add that launcher to the panel, remove it from the menu, edit its properties, or make changes to the entire menu such as adding new launchers."
*Snide remark#2406: You must be a KDE user.
Careful which ones you sniff. Many mimes are French.
Well, it's kind of offtopic, but there's no way in hell that it's flamebait.
Can you guys not read? Or can you not say "Watch out everybody, every time GNOME comes up in an article, somebody posts the EXACT SAME troll post?"
Damn. Gnome is my favourite. I'm using it most of the time including now. If it only was as smooth gaming platform as KDE I would never use anything else. Does it need forking? just smoothen up the functionality.
Didn't RTFA and it might show...
I've been using a mixture of both GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4 for a while now with Fedora, Ubuntu and SuSE and I've come to the conclusion that GNOME is better. Sure, it may not be as pretty in places but it is functional, fast, efficent and runs all my applications well. The new Mono based programmes like Beagle, F-Spot, Muine and Tomboy are really great. I'm looking forward to GNOME 3 (same time as KDE 4?) and hope that it should be an easy transition.
There are many good things worth keeping in GNOME, and many worth changing. Some are foundational issues, and the best way to handle those foundational issues (such as getting Storage implemented and suchlike) is within a fork. I love GNOME (and use KDE under GNOME, rather than the other way around) and wouldn't like to see the GNOME 2 line disturbed too much in the name of progress, yet I wish to see that progress happen.
On a related topic, I'm not up to speed with the details of programming GNOME: in which order should I learn my way round the libraries?
John_Chalisque
But wow...gnome...where to start.
//whatever-it-is in nautilus but.. yeah.. rofl.. so unusuable. Oh.. my... word.. please dear god. In KDE and Windows, editing the menu is a simple simple task that is both fast to do and newbies can figure it out.
/gulp...
First of all, I LIKE the idea of having a great desktop WM that keeps things simple yet still delivers a full environment. Gnome isn't there yet, but if they can LISTEN to the users then it will be soon.
It's great to be simple. However, being simple also includes being able to do *all* the simple things in a simple way, not just a few. Remember mac OS 8? Remember how easy that was, how things just worked? Gnome needs to strive to be like that. First of all, YOU NEED TO BE ABLE TO EDIT THE MENUS!!! Of course if your distro happens to love you that day, you can go to a special
Nautilus is awful. Please let me be able to have tabs? Please? (If this has changed, let me know!). GNOME NEEDS a powerful hardware device manager dealy like windows device manager (admit it, device mangler works fine in 2k and xp.. it works better than anything else i've seen for a regular user)...I know there is different setups in different linux defaults, but provide the tools and some sane defaults that people can "hook" to when they make their distro..and config stuff for samba, nfs, network settings, display resolution and drivers. At the VERY least, please dear god something like kde's configuration gui.. please?
No, windows explorer isn't the best file manager... it works, and it works a helluva lot better than the gnome default. The best one imho is included in KDE!!! It's gotten to the point where if I could run (yes I know, but lets say natively etc) the KDE environment on windows, i'd set that up for everyone and for myself too on this box. It's just...just about perfect really.
Yes, I am a windows user. This system has XP with the 2k style interface, and most stuff turned off. It runs great, it plays games etc and openoffice which is what I do.. The box in the corner is kubuntu. My old portege3110ct laptop (p2-300, 128mb ram, no cdrom) runs arch linux and kde 3.4. Now, I'm no linux guru not even close, more of a newb, but gnome, if they refuse to implement any gui tools well my god PLEASE can they at least look at the arch linux config files that you hafta edit to make it work? Cry...they are so easy...if you could just have a text config file that simple for say.. editing your menus and stuff...
Yes, I'm a kde user in linux. Think KDE is slow and bloated? Then you haven't used KDE in a while, have you? KDE 3.4 runs great on my 300mhz 128mb ram laptop. Not just "useable" but screams..fast..instant response in the kde apps. Zero complaints. 3.2 and 2.x might have been slow but this is no longer the case. KDE is nice, you see, when you first start it up on your new user, it automatically detects the speed of your hardware and presents you with a sane default setting for eye-candy. You can have your system pretty and slow if you want, or I could turn off even more options for even faster response. But the defaults are sane, and if you have been a windows user and wanna play on my lappy, I can click the windows UI and the users don't get lost at all. The ability to open a new konqueror tab and just type in smb://192.168.0.1/mp3s is fucking amazing. Nautilus, take notes on the tabbed thing please? In closing (sorry about the huge rant), I know gnome isn't "bad" but I cannot for the life of me see why anyone would use it when KDE is better in every single regard, including performance, default settings, ease of configuration, and ease of use.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
while( 1 ) fork( );
Havoc Pennington? Is that a real name? Isn't he a character in Austin Powers? ;-)
I used to think that graphical filemanagers all suck. I didn't like Windows Explorer, pre-spatial Nautilus, gmc or Konqueror. I used only command line for file management. The first time I tried spatial browsing was on MacOS System 7.5 running on Basilisk II Mac 68k emulator (this was a few years back) and after 15 minutes or so I found that it was something I actually enjoyed using. I thought: "This Finder thingy is insanely great. Why can't GNOME or KDE people do something like this?" And then, soon after GNOME 2.6 was released, I bought a new computer and installed Slackware 10 on it. Using spatial Nautilus and the entire GNOME 2.6 environment was absolutely wonderful! It was the best user experience I had ever had (I have used Windows, OpenLook, CDE, GNOME 1.x, KDE, FVWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, OS/2 Warp and Indigo Magic (on SGI O2 workstation running Irix)). Now I use GNOME 2.10 on Ubuntu and FreeBSD. I do most of my personal file management tasks using spatial Nautilus. I actually use command line only for file management related to system administration (bash + vi rule in those tasks). I have to wonder why I like GNOME 2.10 and spatial Nautilus so much?
One reason for this is that spatial nautilus is extremely simple and fast to use. For me using spatial file managers is very intuitive and natural. A good analysis on spatial filemanagers is found here.
Other parts of GNOME 2.10 are also very nice. I really like the way GNOME 2.10 handles filetypes and connecting them to certain applications. It is so intuitive and effortless to use that it puts the abomination known as Windows Filetypes dialog to shame!
GNOME dialogs are also awesome. The new open and save dialogs are finally usable (again: simple, fast, effortless, efficient). They are vastly superior to the pre Gtk 2.4 dialogs. As for other dialogs, they are also extremely nice and logical. Finally we have gotten over annoying "Yes/No or OK/Cancel -dialogs should be enough for anyone". Using verbs in dialogs (when it makes sense, that is) is a huge improvement!
Finally, to sum everything up: Great work GNOME developers! Keep up the good work!
Good idea to let Gnome2 and Gnome3 run in parallel for a while, especially when looking back at the transition from 1.4 to 2.0 which was quite painfull. Lots and lots of features got removed in that transition, either because they simply wern't implemented yet or because somebody considered it a 'good thing' to have unconfigurable applications. It took till around Gnome2.4/2.6 till Gnome2 really was a good replacement to Gnome1.4 and most featured either have found their way back or the default behaviour was something more sane. Quiete often I wished I could just go back to Gnome1.4, but that wasn't easily possible, since the packages dropped out of Debian and a whole selfcompiled Gnome was just to much of a hassle to bother. Might be nice if that horrorstory doesn't repeat with Gnome3 and I can decide when I want to switch and am not forced to upgrade just because a dist-upgrade makes the switch unavoidable.
the reason he's arguing against just doing gnome 3 in a devel branch is that the timeframe for gnome3 development is over a year long. so essentially, he's saying start a new gnome 3 dev branch *in addition* to continuing the 6 month release cycle for gnome 2.x sounds good to me
tasty electronic music vittles
n/t
tsting what is possble