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Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" Released
An anonymous reader writes "Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" has been released! Direct links for the US install iso or the US install torrent file." Update: 10/13 18:08 GMT by Z : Linux.com has a look at the release, in-depth.
The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.
/opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can't move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.
Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.
Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn't touched for a really long time. There wasn't even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.
But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it's quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.
Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like "specifications" as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it's a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature - and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.
For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say
Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it's path inside GNOME but still it doesn't feel like it's truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.
Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on 'dead ideas' they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get's lost with playground stuff.
We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.
It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don't care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.
GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.
Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can't be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.
It's also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whol
http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/
Not to start a apt vs. rpm flamewar here, but I just wanted to stick in a note in defense of Mandriva, as someone who had tried the last Ubuntu release, and went back. First of all, I haven't put up with rpm dependency hell since learning how to use urpmi. Although I wish Mandriva (and the other rpm-based distros) would just switch to apt as a basis for package management, I do like the Mandriva GUI for urpmi much better than Synaptic. Also, I like the distributions which have central configuration utilities. The Mandriva Control Centre is far more complete and easy to use than either of the KDE or Gnome utilities. Also, WTF is up with Ubuntu not setting up a root password on installation?!? I know that I can do it once I'm up and running with 'sudo passwd' or something like this, but this really screwed with me for a bit. I like the whole 'service servicename start|stop|status' that Mandriva (and I'm sure others) have, which Ubuntu lacks. It does have '/etc/init.d/servicename start|stop', but it's not as consistent, for instance my adsl connection is still turned on and off with 'pon|poff something', if memory serves. Both are Java-friendly, which I like. I can't find the package list, and I can't remember if Ubuntu comes with Eclipse, but the new Mandriva betas come with an extensive list of open-source Java applications (Eclipse, Tomcat, Xerces, Ant, etc.). I could go on, but those are the main points.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank