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Godwin's Law Invoked in Linus/Gnome Spat
lisah writes "The flame wars between Linus Torvalds and the GNOME community continue to burn. Responding to Torvalds' recent claim that GNOME 'seems to be developed by interface Nazis' and that its developers believe their 'users are idiots,' a member of the Linux Foundation's Desktop Architects mailing list suggested that Torvalds use GNOME for a month before making such pronouncements. Torvalds, never one to back down from a challenge, simply turned around and submitted patches to GNOME and then told the list, '...let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code.' After lobbing that over the fence, Torvalds concluded his comments by saying, 'Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Anyone have direct links to the patches?
I really think that Linus is a cool guy no doubt about that, sending in those patches to the Gnome community sure was the way to prove who is the over-geek here and how to get something done instead of wasting valuable time arguing over something as unimportant as Gnome (pun intented), if Linus is right.
;)
But Linus does really seem to have a bit of an attitude problem at times. Which is many times good if you are a boss for employees, but the problem just is that is not what Linus is, he is the boss of volenteers, they can quit if they don't like their boss.
I can't help but get a little worried, had it been anyone else but Linus I wouldn't mind, let people have their strange ways as long as they do not bother me or anyone else to much.
I am just worried for Linus, I sure hope he does take care of himself and stay mentally fit, that flamewars like the one he appearently had with the Gnome people here does not bring him out of balance somehow.
If Linus somehow gets sick and overloaded then it will lead to a whole lot of mess with the development of the Linux Kernel which really would not be nice.
So please Gnome people start behaving, be humble, accept the patches and do not upset Linus, we really need him, even if he isn't always the nicest person around
Must be that time of month again for Linus...
Responding to Torvalds' recent claim that GNOME 'seems to be developed by interface Nazis' and that its developers believe their 'users are idiots,'
What exactly is an "interface Nazi"? Is that someone that develops a GUI that encourages concentration?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
And there is a good reason why distros like Ubuntu default to GNOME and not KDE, in my experience it's a lot easier to break something in KDE, and it's harder for an end user to figure out how to get it to do things like, I don't know, not opening file downloads in a text editor. The other problem is that KDE is slow, REAL slow, I know that GNOME isn't exactly a speed demon, but KDE is suffering from code bloat and so many features being tacked on, and in the end performance takes a hit. I understand that Torvalds is frustrated with GNOME, and he can use KDE all he wants, but why does he have to criticize GNOME so much? The whole reason there are multiple window managers is because none of them do everything right, and so you put many of them out there and let people CHOOSE, he could have jsut as easily criticized KDE for bloat, and Fluxbox for missing features.
I'm not a Linus fan boy. But, I have to say that if the work he is submitting is worth bringing in, there will be hell to pay for ignoring it. It's not like some l33t t33n trying to horn in. He has a history and following. We're not talking about some novice.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
They all come off as squabbling children. This is FOSS' finest?
Here are the highlights for those who didn't RTFA:
Lopez: "Linus, you don't know how to read Spanish, so are you an idiot too?"
[snip]
Schaller: "Could maybe be a good way to start a constructive dialog instead of this useless mudslinging?"
[snip]
Torvalds: "What I find unconstructive is how the GNOME people always make *excuses*. It took me a few hours to actually do the patches. It wasn't that hard. So why didn't I do it years ago?
I'll tell you why: because GNOME apologists don't say "please send us patches". No. They basically make it clear that they aren't even *interested* in fixing things, because their dear old Mum isn't interested in the feature.
[snip]
But why, oh, why, have GNOME people not just said "please fix it then"?
Instead, I _still_ (now after I sent out the patch) hear more of your kvetching about how you actually do everything right, and it's somehow *my* fault that I find things limiting.
Here's a damn big clue: the reason I find GNOME limiting is BECAUSE IT IS."
Sorry kneejerkers, but its going to require a much more detailed description of those patches than simply "cleaner and more capable" before we can make a good evaluation of whether Linus's patches should be accepted.
After all, if someone submitted patches to the linux kernel to grab the local weather report and print it out on boot, that would be adding capability that Linus would never accept in a million years because it is outside of the scope of the kernel. If Linus's patches are similarly outside the scope of the official design goals of Gnome, then any expectation that they would be accepted is just a red herring.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
People don't want configurability, they want something that works out of the box. That's why despite being free, people will pay 200$ for a copy of Windows. They don't want to compile things, they want it to work out of the box. They don't want to edit config files, they want it to self discover out of the box.
I think Linus is right. The GNOME developers have dumbed down the interface to the point of annoyance. There is a difference between hiding more advanced tweaking in a separate window or panel and making you (for example) go to gconf to fix the setting, as I have to do every time I want to re-enable emacs-style key bindings after every upgrade of my distro.
:-)
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's F/LOSS, I should just submit patches. But I'd rather rant and let other people submit them for me
Linus, that is.
The whole point of the open source movement is to allow alternative approaches to flourish and be chosen (or not) on their merits. It's what OSS does to raise quality. The biggest problem KDE and Gnome always had was that they continually trod on each others' toes. So, let them go their separate ways - let KDE be configurable and Gnome be "designed for idiots". See who wins. Either which way the variety is good for OSS itself.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
They just try to replace Save As... with SEIG FILE! whenever they see it in source strings.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I hope this doesn't put people off using gnome. It's still more stable than KDE from my experience, and has many good applications on GTK (which I rate more stable than the kde counterparts - regardless of configurability or not, reliability is quite important to me). If you want more configurability, , and your skills have developed from entry level to enthusiast, move out of KDE & Gnome.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
If they don't need some feature to be configurable (rather than consistent), then why would they do that change? It's open source, and the guy did the change as he wanted to. He can branch the code any time. What the hell is his problem? Megalomania? He should really try toning down his ego.
GNOME is very good because it has some of the best practises on by default. For most users, that is. The rest can modify the code as they please. What part of open source is Mr. Torvalds not getting?
Interesting fight. Linus wants configurability and flexibility to reign, which is a hallmark of linux. However, the dominance of Windows (and the success of Mac OS, OS X etc.), as well as the preponderance of "idiot's guides", should clearly lead us to believe that the majority of PC users are, in fact, idiots. Certainly there are many geeks and power users, and not all linux users are geeks, but the typical PC owner doesn't care about minor tweaks; most people just want their system to run and be usable.
Personally, I dualboot XP and Kubuntu, and I've used many other distros, but some people need the universal acceptance of XP apps and file formats, the ease/reliability of a Mac, or at least the simplicity of Gnome. I take pride in being able to take care of my daily business without employing MS software or other monopolistic products, but most pepole just want to do what they need to do without any hassle, and Gnome is a step in that direction, with a linux base. It works, and though I wouldn't try to make it a basic linux standard, I am glad it exists, as it surely leads to wider linux adoption.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
This argument has nothing to do with the background or what gnome looks like morons, it has to do with the way it responds to actions, the way it presents options to the user.
The fact that linus had to take time to submit patches means the gnome developers are doing something incredibly stupid, this isn't a turf war, it means linus is concerned that the kernel he spends shitloads of time on is being trivialized by idiot programmers refusing to accept what the rest of the world wants in the systems they use.
KDE does the same shit, its annoying. I use linux daily but i have to say this is classic linux bullshit, KDE has too much, gnome has too little and no one wants to talk to each other or solve shit because everyone is in their own little camp.
Prefixes are gay as well, kstfu, ggbye
First off, nice touchy feely people get nothing done. All good OSS projects depend on focussed, and often heavy handed, leadership. Linus might piss and moan about Gnome, but then a lot of people do about Linus too. Linus is effective because he's not democratic. Try send patches that Linus does not like upstream in the kernel. They will get squashed. Sure, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but they should be aware of the cultures they are playing with.
I run an OSS project too, one that is pretty successful. I don't willy-nilly accept patches that I don't like either. I will often take patches and recode them to be the way that I want them to be.
Linus is good. Linus contributes a lot, but untimately that does not give him the right to be a fuckwit in someone elses project, any more than it gives anyone else the right to be a fuckwit in his project.
Roll over and be nice to Linus is a poor way to handle things.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How does it happen that when we anonymous coders (or cowards) send patches and complaint about some open source program on a mailing list, it goes relatively unnoticed, and on the opposite side when some guy named Linus Torvalds does the same, he gets lots of attention.
I do not want to sound like jealousy or so but we humans are all equal in rights. But we are not equally famous. So because someone is famous, what he says should have more value?
I believe the Linux kernel is a good piece of software, but that's millions of line of code, Linus wrote only a small part of them. If another coder who wrote a good piece of stable drivers in the Linux kernel said the same thing Linus said, the question is, would this have had any headlines anywhere?
The answer is certainly no.
So that's why I think we should put an end to this Linus stuff. Linus does this, Linus says that... Who cares? Okay he did good things by the past, he does good things today but hey, there are many good developers out there, probably even better ones, and even Linux would survive pretty well without Linus.
To all those Gnome fans:
There are tons of things that can be configured/fixed in Windows just like Gnome.
With some configuration tool that's only suitable for an elite bunch to use.
So, I don't see Gnome as an improvement over Windows in terms of usability.
I don't know why Linus has to care, there are plenty of prominent alternatives.
I like Ubuntu and it got me leaning more toward Gnome. I never liked KDE that much, but I don't take any extra measures to spread that message far and wide - I just don't use it.
Maybe someone can relieve me of my ignorance here (about Linus caring so much, that is).
I read description of the patches, and I don't want a window system with configurable right, middle OR double clicks on a title bar. If Linux ever becomes popular, it would be conceivable for a user to use someone else's machine, or expect instructions in an introductory book to work. He will then end up closing an important spreadsheet while trying to maximize it. Besides, window title bar is not the most critical or complex part of UI. I would rather gnome and kde teams focus on developing killer controls and good UI design tools. I DON'T want my window system's control panel to look like Linus'es make xconfig.
Most people who engage in internet flame wars about issues they are particularly passionate about are not autistic. I have seen absolutely no evidence over the years that Linus would fit in such a category.
As much as I agree with Linus on this particular issue (and as much as I want to see the gnometards' `you're a six year-old' UI get its due) I think the point to be made here is that free software isn't zero-sum, isn't inherently competitive, and the appropriate thing to do if you dislike a particular thing is not to tear it down, but to build something else up.
It's impossible to justify the argument that Linus is being destructive, since he's actually contributing what is likely quality code in good faith to a project which sorely needs it - but I wonder if he wouldn't have been better off trying to improve something with whose fundamentals he didn't quite so completely disagree.
L
"there will be hell to pay for ignoring it"
I can't believe Linus, who has probably dropped more patches than anyone else alive, would think that sending in unwanted patches along with a *fuck you too* for good measure would think that somehow the GNOME people would suddenly change their minds.
Furthermore, projects should avoid contributors that are unable to get along even if they would make a valuable contribution. Having the additional useful developer doesn't balance out loosing the contribution of others who are offended and the loss of community around your project. I'm not making this up, just ask any HR department whether they would hire an all around offensive individual regardless of how good he is.
Honestly, I have a lot of respect for Linus, and respect someone who cares so much about the right solution. However in this case he has gone way over the line from being passionate about technology and perhaps a little quirky, into being embarrassingly out of touch with the norms of human interaction in a public forum.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
I just what to now what is in the patches. Where is the change-log?
Because I want full configurability.
Because I don't want the bloat involved with Gnome and KDE backgroud utilities running
Because I don't want my machine to act or behave like M$ Windows or OS X
Because I want pure freakin' speed!!!
Because eye-candy isn't that damned important. I get by fine with 3Ddesktop and translucent aterms.
If I really want eye-candy I'll run Enlightenment
As I've been telling people thinking about Vista, do you want a fast computer so your OS can look pretty or so you can get more done? Application performance comes first and foremost so I want the lightest, fastest desktop available short of running Rat or screen.
I quit using Guhnome because it's not configurable and features were being deleted at a rapid rate. It's unusable to me now. The same rot is creeping to KDE. I'm currently using KDE and am tired of the hidden and undocumented configuration settings but even with that it's better than guhnome.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
MS Paint: The most widely used image editing program in the world. Users can understand how to use it within seconds of seeing it for the first time, but expert users don't like it much.
Adobe Photoshop: The most powerful image editing program in the world. Entire books can be written on how to use it but all of the experts prefer it.
Differently skilled users will prefer different applications.
I like Gnome - I dislike KDE's messiness, too many lines on the screen for no reason, it is not Zen. I wait for the Nexenta project to reach maturity, then we will have a real fifth toe!
The point of having a rather diverse choice of desktop environments in Linux is that if you don't like one of them, you can use another.
Different people use different desktop environments for their own reason. I like GNOME that comes with Ubuntu because I don't get bombarded with choices, yet still have a good level of integration that isn't always present with other windowmanagers. If I need to put Linux on a low resource computer, I wouldn't even consider GNOME.
Now, if Linus doesn't like GNOME, and prefers KDE, he is more than welcome to ignore GNOME. To have GNOME roll over and obey Linus is to blindly ignore existing GNOME users just to please a [benevolent] dictator.
I have no problems with choice. I find myself gravitate towards software that works quickly, without much fussing around. I like GNOME over KDE, and apparently when I had to set up a webserver for light use, I preferred lighttpd over apache (apache can be too configurable, and overwhelming). That's the reason why we have these parallel projects. If we all a hive mind, then simply these different projects won't exists.
Linus can better serve the open source community by just ignoring GNOME, if he doesn't like where they're heading. If he is right, then GNOME would simply wither away.
I can guarantee that most of the linux based studios in the CGI industry run Gnome. It's simpler, faster and more stable than KDE. I am sure you know that the people there push really hard the video subsystems of the computer hardware. In these conditions it's really easy to figure out which one is the better GUI shell. :) ) - in fact this is a solid part of the "fun". It's great also for people who are not totally dependent all the time by their GUI shell - sysadmins, web/apps coders, terminal users, web surfers, etc.
KDE is great for home users who like eyecandy and are ready to spend time tweaking the window manager to work exactly the way they want ( or dont
For those of us, who really need stable and just working GUI - Gnome is the way to go. But of course, it needs some time and the right conditions to understand that. Once you start feeling the heat of the upcoming deadline and at the same time experience instabilities and wackines of the GUI shell and this is screwing up the graphic apps you need to work stable to get the job done on time, you will start appretiating Gnome little more.
I dont know what is the Gnome problem of mr.Torvalds. Maybe he is thinking at the code level, but for me and most of the people i know and work with, Gnome is just the better solution than KDE. It's not about configurability and pretiness - it's about stability. Most people at work dont really care much how the GUI looks and feels like, as far as it does the expected job. And of course i am talking specificaly about the needs of CGI production. Maybe the situatoin is quite different at other places, industries, project types and workflow requirements.
The words above are based on my observations.
Here is my personal opinion - i like Gnome + Motiff theme - it is simple, it works. It allows me to do my pretty pictures better, faster and with less stress - i suppose it's good then ( at least for me ).
Gnome isn't that good, IMHO. At least the fixed the file dialog.
I'm no software guru, but it doesnt make much sense to me to limit the software in such a sense. I think its up to the distros to configure their default desktop, be it gnome or kde or what have you to look and feel and react whatever way they want by default. Rather than just have gnome that acts a certain way and theres piss you can do about it. Why not have the ability to change and configure. The distros can decide what features they want used and ignored... and the users themselves if they're power users can decide that for themselves to an even further extent. Its always easier to have the ability and turn it on or off rather than not have the ability at all. If you look at it form the point of average joe... If the distro meets his needs he won't need m/any other features. It'll work out of the box and all will be well with the world... But in the case that 'average joe' needs one or two extra features.. does it really hurt to have the *ability* to enable that feature? Or if *average joe* isnt *average* at all but *super joe* he's not stuck using a desktop he doesnt like as much simply because it HAS the ability rather than just having the ability turned off by default on the desktop of his choice?
And I find no reason to say anything different here. Linus arrived fashionably late to the Gnome vs. KDE flamewar. 5 years late. And 3 years too late to make a real difference.
I've looked at the titles of the patches and I'm sure that Gnome will reject some of them on style guidelines -- regardless of what Linus thinks. But I think it helps to understand the two mindsets.
Linus thinks like this: "I want to configure the middle mouse button to do something special the way I'm used to it." Gnome devs thinks like this: "Lucy doesn't want her children to screw up the computer such that double-clicking anything fails to work." Look, Linus has my utmost respect as one of the top coders on the planet. But even I have to point out that no one is dictating that he must run it on his desktop. Linus is free to choose what ever he wants, and if he wants to fork it, he can.
So in that respect I would say that we would need to take his comments with a grain of salt as well.
At worst he can always fork it and call it Linus/Gnome.
There is a reason why i rip everything gnome & kde related out of a linux distro after an install... the UI is too much like windows.
I still use fvwm1 (with all of its quirks/bugs) because it gets rid of some of the *basic* usability issues that gnome and kde fail to resolve.
To list a couple:
I think my point is that the gnome and kde projects are not so much about innovating as keeping up with microsoft... We need to create a community devoted to the idea of seeing what Redmond does and saying 'hey, thats interesting, but I can do that better'
This is what the kernel community does constantly... Linus is the gatekeeper, and he is right to critisize... When was the last time you totally changed the internal architecter of a subsystem of your project because you were wrong? For Linus it was the 2.4 MM (mid release cycle) /p?
In your first list, for items 1-5 I bet a lot of people could make the case that's why the kernel has been so succesful on the enterprise level. For item 6 on that list, Linus submitted patches to the Gnome devs which does add functionality (and the fact I may never use it in no way hurts that UI precept). For the second list, I agree completely.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
In the end, that's what it all boils down to. Personally, I'm glad to see that we have a desktop manager like Gnome available that's simple, limited, and easy to use. And to balance it out, on the other end we have KDE, which is flexible and very customizable. And then there's XFCE, for the older computers. And there are all the numerous other window managers and desktop environments that give everyone numerous choices as to what they can use.
Personally, I really like KDE's flexibility, and that's my desktop manager of choice. Meanwhile, I've set up my mom's computer to use Gnome, which she has had very little trouble jumping in and using, despite never having touched Linux before. After all, Windows doesn't exactly have the most flexible desktop environment, yet people live with it.
However, I think I can see where Linus is coming from here. Gnome has a pretty significant hold as the primary Linux DE in use, while KDE isn't quite as popular with many distributions. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I see it.) I'm not sure why this is the case, but the most notable example is Ubuntu, where Gnome is the center of attention and Kubuntu (with KDE) is struggling to keep up. Instead of attacking the folks working on Gnome, though, what about a little more support for KDE, which is certainly as worthy as Gnome.
Lopez did seem like a squabbling child. However, the Schaller and Torvalds quotes you mention seem decent.
Yes, Linus is pissed, but he's not wrong, and there's actually very good signal-to-noise ratio there. If the GNOME team can hold their blood pressure steady as they read it, there could actually be some useful dialog there, carefully disguised as a flamewar.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My speculation is that Aspergers is way overblown in the computer community. People may see themselves in a list of symptoms, but those can be explained by other things too, and those lists aren't necessarily very accurate or rather provide much context. The DSM IV is detailed and yet incomplete enough that maybe it would discourage people from diagnosing themselves. See a psychiatrist! (My impression in part is from discussions with a biased sample. YMMV.)
Lastly, what makes someone a good programmer, or rather good at anything, is dedication. Mozart could compose at four, but supposedly he wasn't really recognized until fourteen. There is a hypothesis that it really takes ten years to become an expert at anything. See Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years", for example. An Aspergers individual may have the dedication down, but that isn't some Godly power unavailable to us mere mortals.
I've cursed and cursed that the friggin right click doesn't lower the window.
I've literally been complaining about this crap for over 5 years.
http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40743
BTW. I could have sworn that that a month after last time when we had this flame war one of the gnome guys created a patch to make it configurable. At the time, I wasn't using Gnome regularly so I didn't save it and now I can't find it anymore.
Here's what I want.
1) The top of the window should be next to an edge so I can click on it easily.
2) Right click should lower it. Currently middle click works but I really think the right click is less awkward.
I've got maybe 50-70 windows open at a time and I need to be able to cycle through them as fast as possible. I need to have Fitz law working for me.
3) The gnome terminal needs to stop sucking. I've got a frigging 3Ghz computer with 1G of RAM and a top of the line graphics card. Why does gnome terminal slow my whole box down when it's just scrolling ascii? Also why does it take a second for me to highlight text in gnome terminal? When I don't disable the feature where you can double click to select a word that takes up to five seconds...
Sorry I guess the terminal thing wasn't really related. I got on a rant and couldn't stop. But seriously, fix the blasted right click to lower stuff at least. Even if it takes a command line utility to customize it that's fine.
they're only egomaniacs sitting alone in cheap condo in a mid-income neighborhood, "chatting" with others on a Saturday night, likely inside an online game. as you take them to a social setting with women, you see clearly they are just shut-in losers and dorks, and not worth time, conversation, or even recognition of them being alive. let's kill them all. kill them all by throwing the duck sauce packets filling up your fridge from the leftover chineese takeout. throw those packets hard, my friends. they'll break and cover those losers with sweet yellow duck sauce. then the ducks will come to eat that sweet duck sauce. they will try to fly away, but their feet will be stuck in the sauce. they'll lift up the dorks and take them to that island with all the fat ugly people. once we have enough, it'll sink into the ocean and that'll be that. rock the vote!!!
In what world are these mutually exclusive?
Windows is free?
Come on, with a post that short, you can afford to read it aloud to yourself and see if it makes sense.
Funny, that seems like what Linus is doing here. He wants to be able to change his right-click without recompiling! In what way is that wrong?
Oh, by the way, Windows allows programs change options in your right-click menu without rebooting, much less recompiling.
Which is why good Linux UIs make this configurable through a nice GUI. Point and click your way to what you want -- just like on Windows.
You know, your post reads like you think this has something to do with Linux not detecting hardware (except it does; it's not 1999 anymore), but that's not the issue at all. It's about UI preferences, and for fuck's sake, how is my computer supposed to know what kind of UI I want?
Oh, right, there's Clippy, which tries to guess what I'm doing ("It looks like you're writing a letter..."), and Vista's UAC, which asks me before it does anything ("Are you sure you want to use the Internet? That could be dangerous!")... I suppose that's my computer "discovering" what I want out of the box. But you know what, every single person I've talked to -- not just on Slashdot; Microsoft zealots included -- hates Clippy and UAC with a passion, because the defaults are fine for most people, and for the people who care, they'd rather hunt for the settings they care about than be bombarded about absolutely everything.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Back in the early days of GNOME 2, they stated that 1 good default is better than 5 bad options. It's a false dilemma that has been perpetuated far too long. It's better to have one good default so that it can be used without fiddling, and if your needs are different, it can be easily and LOGICALLY changed to an alternative. For example, recently X-Chat, a development infected by this broken logic, stopped having appear around nicks, stating colors make them obsolete. Perhaps for normal chatting that's fine. Unfortunately, if you need to COPY SOMETHING, you have to edit the raw event templates to put them back in, which aren't at all intuitive.
You don't make features usable by taking them away. The point of usability is to bring features to the fingertips of the user. People who hold OSX as a paragon of usability should remember to take note that it's also a _fully-featured OS_.
Heh, besides, even that isn't addressing the fundamental issue with linux as a usable OS. It's not using a preconfigured system to open your mail. It's installing and configuring your own, especially when it comes to _non-packaged_ software.
Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is a mainstay of Internet culture, an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
Strange
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
... is to not have to choose at all. I just want it to let me get on with my work. The good thing about Gnome on Ubuntu is I could install it and do just that: it's well laid out, has very little bullshit, is consistent with what I'm already familiar with, and I'm able to find or figure out everything important easily without running for documentation. It's better than Vista even, in that I didn't have to go round turning annoying features off. I hear about Linus adding crap like allowing different mouse buttons do different things to title bars. If this option goes into the window manager, I want it to be hard to find, so that only advanced users who know what they're getting themselves in for change it. Most people just want something that works and is consistent, and that's something gnome seems to do pretty well. I would love to see more people use Linux: more people means more mainstream support for the things I want to use it for, better driver support, better application support, even better game support. We can only get that if it Just Works for more people. KDE may be flexible but Gnome Just Works. That's not to say gnome's perfect. For example, when you copy a large file from a samba share, the gnome-vfs will sit there chomping 30%+ CPU on my celeron 2.4Ghz. If I mount the file system myself using smbmount and copy the files that way I see less than 4% - what's with that?!
... 99.9% of all users are morons - in that they are perfectly intelligent people who only use a computer once a week / month.
Windows 98 was great for them. If it did not work, they switched off the PC and then on again. If that did not work they called people like us.
The GNOME designers have understood this. To break into the mass market we need a Linux that just works in the same way as my toaster - push toast in = on, one dial for how brown and auto - off with a loud indicative clunk noise.
Simplicity brings restriction. If you don't like it as other posters have noted - use some other windows manager. I say hurrah for diversity.
Here's the link: (it was posted a bit earlier)o p_architects/2007-February/thread.html
.... But I do think that Linus needs to chill and let the GNOME core developers run the way they want to and accept or postpone (if there's a freeze) or reject his patches as they deem appropriate. If Linus want to contribute to GNOME (I hope he does), he has to do it by GNOME's rules or fork, or pass it on to someone who *is* willing to play by GNOME's rules (I'd be surprised if there weren't are more than a few developers and distros who would be willing to work as intermediary between Linus and GNOME). That's the way open source works.
http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/deskt
Basically, Linus wants to have fine grained control over what the mouse buttons do.
Sounds like a simple request, but he doesn't reveal it until *after* he submits a patch and in that same email goes on to rant about how no-one listens to him and how GNOME developers make excuses instead of just doing whatever he wants. In a later email he comments that he sent the patches to a developer's only email address (that he admits may or may not have been able to see his patches) because he doesn't like bugzilla and says that the patches must be accepted or GNOME developers are a bunch of hypocrites even though an API freeze is in effect for about a month ( http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen ).
Personally, I find it a bit interesting that Linus has repeatedly flamed (or sidelined) people on the Linux kernel mailing list for acting like he is now, not following the kernel submission procedure, assuming that freezes don't count, and assuming that if the core architects of the Linux kernel think that a feature (done in a certain way) is a bad idea then they must be a bunch of hypocrites.
I personally don't know if the patches are any good or in keeping with GNOME's design or need changes or
It's not unreasonable to expect this. GNOME core developers don't go on the Linux kernel thread and whine and submit attitude patches to Linus, 'tho if they did, they would (and should) be flamed. Linus has said repeatedly on the kernel mailing lists that submitters must either follow the kernel rules, or fork (e.g. if you don't like the license), or pass on your patches to someone who is willing to do things that kernel developer's way (none of Reiser's patches would have gone if it weren't for this later option).
Are there problems with the GNOME way of doing things? Sure. Linus brought up a good point about the ease of submitting patches. But all projects have issues. There was a time, not too long ago, when the submission process for the Linux kernel was "send Linus your patches and if he doesn't respond then keep resending them because the patches might have gotten lost". But the issues won't get better if you complain to the wrong people.
Just my 2 cents worth.
When they adopted Metacity i wasn't very happy, but it lasted here no more than 10 minutes, Sawfish has some little bugs, but still rocks. It's the Emacs of the window managers, the last could be read as a compliment or an insult, it depends on the reader... (=
Alternatives are good, code duplication is bad.
And yes, OSS does do that. Usually it's done by forking small projects and testing development versions, then merging those changes back. Sometimes it's done by keeping alternatives of very small systems available -- like Cron, for instance -- often based on forks of the same code, too, so you can merge stuff back.
KDE and GNOME are simply too big for me to accept them as reasonable alternatives. If it was just metacity vs kwin, that'd be alright -- after all, I can replace both of them with Beryl, at both ends. But if you replace one, you end up replacing a whole set of things -- they each have different theming systems, configuration interfaces, file browsing interfaces, virtual filesystem interfaces...
It's hard to measure it, but I think you should do a reasonably objective comparison: Open the two of them side by side. Ask yourself: Is KDE's taskbar significantly different than GNOME's panel, in terms of functionality? What about the virtual desktop pager -- they really look identical. Why do we need both of them?
Too often, the best answer anyone can give is that the underlying tech is too different. In other words: The Gnome Panel will use GTK+, probably Bonobo, maybe gconf, etc. Not sure what KDE uses instead of gconf, but the KDE panel would use QT and Kparts. And there's dozens of other libraries that they each have, which essentially duplicate the same functionality, but the whole systems are so big that they really have to have different libraries for a lot of it.
I mean, what are you going to do, implement a new toolbar in pure X? Because neither project wants to depend on the other. You won't get GNOME to depend on QT, and you won't get KDE to depend on GTK+. And this kind of thing is pretty pervasive. It's a fairly massive project -- probably being done anyway, but still pretty massive -- to try to absorb the common, maturing features of each into common mechanisms like gstreamer and dbus.
And there will ALWAYS be feature overlap here.
What we really need is to refactor things a bit -- which is what they're doing. Find functionality common to both which can be isolated into a tiny library that depends on neither. Rinse and repeat until the things that make KDE different than GNOME are handled in something smaller than Fluxbox.
Unless that happens, I'm going to consider it a truly massive waste, both in terms of manpower and my computer resources -- every day I have to run something depending on each project, meaning I need both QT and GTK+, even though they both do exactly the same thing.
At least, I think both KDE and GNOME are GPL'd... right? I hope? Because licensing issues can make a bad situation worse... Cedega forked wine back when it was under a more generous license, and promised to contribute back to the WineHQ project -- but it doesn't look like they've given back any code, so Wine is now under LPGL, meaning Cedega could contribute code to Wine (by relicensing it), but they can no longer take code from Wine -- effectively a permanent fork. Compiz and Beryl have similar problems -- I believe Compiz is under an MIT-like license, while Beryl is GPL'd, which means Compiz improvements can go into Beryl, but not the other way around.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ironic, we're advocating choice and alternatives in the big picture by supporting an option (Gnome) that does neither.
Are you trying to slashdot wikipedia?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
A good way to combine the strengths of both GNOME and KDE at the same time is to use a file manager Krusader running in GNOME.
You see the same thing on any real newspaper story about a company with which the newspaper itself has a conflict of interest. It's called responsibly providing all the facts up front in an honest way. Technically it would be more annoying if this was followed more thoroughly, i.e. any story on Slashdot that had to do with closed-source software also disclosing at the end that Slashdot is owned by an open-source organisation and therefore has a possible conflict of interest. Then again it's just a tech website, not CNN or The Guardian or something like that.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
I started with Gnome, went to KDE, went back to Gnome, and am now using Gnome on my laptop with Fluxbox on my desk computer, sometimes I use XFCE.
I think Gnome and KDE both have a nich, as do Fluxbox and XFCE. I really don't under stand the bickering thats going on here though.
It's like watching two 5 year olds arguing over who is better, GI-Joe or Ninja Turtles, while in your own head you are thinking
"Fzuk that, Voltron would stomp the both of them."
Money is the root of all evil?
While they integrate well with KDE or GNOME, I have Beryl working well without any kind of desktop environment running.
Not much slower than Fluxbox to start, and the only place performance suffers is games -- and then only in windowed mode (once you disable redirection for fullscreen windows). In a few years even that won't matter much -- my UT2004 framerate dropped by half or so when running windowed, so in a few years, that'll be down to maybe a 5-10% hit, if that. CPU usage is less than 10% -- more like 5% -- when dragging around a wobbling, translucent, animating terminal (running top). This is running at 1600x1200.
It's actually faster in at least a few places. For instance, as counter-intuitive as this seems, dragging around a large-ish Cedega window -- with full wobbly-windows in play -- was MUCH faster and smoother in Beryl than in Fluxbox, probably because Fluxbox can't really do any acceleration on that kind of movement.
I haven't found anything I could configure in Fluxbox that I can't configure or replace in Beryl. But then, I used Fluxbox pretty minimally. The tabbed window feature just isn't very useful when you can't see multiple tabs of a window at once, so I've learned to like multiple desktops more. I didn't use a menu to launch apps, I used a run command, and in fact, I've bound Fluxbox's run to a key in Beryl.
And by the way, speaking of configurability, YOU CAN TURN OFF AERO IN VISTA! DUH!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Looking at the patches Linus has provided they mostly relate to the window manager metacity.
I am 100% with Linus on this one. A few years back Gnome was using the sawfish window manager. Not only could this be configured to your hearts content, you could even write your own extensions for it. With sawfish windows could do some real magic.
Gnome saw sawfish and its configurability and decided it was bad -- and to some extent it was, there were a plethora of options. The right solution to this is to find a good set of default options and provide a configuration tool that presents just the options that people are most likely to configure + an advanced configuration dialogue for those that want to play with the more interesting options.
Gnome threw the baby out with the bath water when they went to metacity.
For a while I stopped using Gnome and used ratpoison as my window manager. Ratpoison shows the power of being able to do all your window manipulation from the keyboard (this is quite important for me, I have a neuromuscular disorder and so avoiding the mouse can make me much more productive -- metacity does not give me that option).
More recently I kept hearing about 3-D window managers and decided to give beryl a try. Now beryl comes with a plethora of options and has reasonably good support for keyboard navigation. Fingers crossed some gnome based linux distributions will go for beryl as their window manager.
Going from ratpoison to beryl is maybe going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but what the two have in common is configurability.
Linus is right, one size fits all sucks.
I thought Godwin's law was when someone accused a member of the `other side` in whatever they're squabbling over of being as bad as the Nazis. Nowadays, though, it seems that it's simply the result of:
bGodwinsLaw = instr(ucase(sText),"NAZI")
(if you'll excuse the VB)
I LOVE IT!
And your gnome is the sucks and my e17 is the best thing since sliced bread. It spawns kittens and the idle process is a sexy red head that loves to give blow jobs.
Only bad thing is that if it follow the ubuntu tradition (kubuntu = KDE, edubuntu = Education, xubuntu = XFCE) then you would end up with eubuntu. Mmm, maybe the european union should sponsor it.
Offcourse since ubuntu is a word with meaning and so is "enlightenment" you could just call the distro by the long name and come up with something incredibly deep and meaningfull. Take that lover of a distro named after some nasty tiny little critter known for making the lives of humans a misery.
But in all seriousness, I do think both KDE and Gnome are "wrong" at least for my purposes. Gnome is far too strict for my tastes. KDE is far too fisher price. (So is OS-X by the way, I do not need HUGE ICONS).
But most important for me is this. My desktop machines are rather old, dual P3's from that era in time when motherboards were made only to support a limited amount of memory. At least the mobo's I can afford.
e17 is the ONLY one I ran from a livecd that did NOT want to swap. Installed and running for several days doing all kinds of stuff it only has used 140k swap space on a 768mb machine. That I love because offcourse my HD's are also slow as P3 era HD's were.
Yes e17, especially with the eyecandy switched to make vista look like dos, does suck up the CPU cycles like it was coded by MS, but since I run on a dual who cares. One cpu is enough for what I do on a desktop.
e17 for me delivers what I need. Does gnome deliver what you need?
Linus probably has different requirements. But fundementally I think there is a HUGE difference in philosophy.
Gnome seems to believe that making things simple is the way to adoption. To accept that the new users is going to be new and is going to want things simple so as not to face a vertical wall that is the learning curve.
It sounds sensible, and to a degree it is. It is the beginning of learning. Start simple. Gnome's mistake and everyone else that wants to keep things simple is that the NEXT step in learning is to make things more difficult.
1+1 = 2. Good, 2+3 = 5. You are catching on. 4+5 = 9. Excellent. Lets move on 5+5 = ?, think hard. 10, very good! etc etc etc.
The Gnome philosopjhy would have you doing single digit sums with single digits answers until the day you die because that is EASY. Yeah, it is, but most people want more.
Would you still ride a bicycle with trainer wheels or your parent running behind it? Offcourse not, you ride 1000cc road monster. Not as easy, but you have moved beyond the training wheels and now want MORE.
Gnome is the kiddy desktop. The one were the training wheels are welded to the frame. Does this make it a bad product? No, if that is what you want/need then that is what you need. BUT the nature of human beings is to try to convince that what is right for them is right for others.
That is were flamewars start. Gnome is for the crowd that does not need or want or can handle more control. It is a valid group BUT you will have clashes if you then try to market it to other users.
Offcourse the same goes in reverse, users who need/want or can handle more control trying to convince those who can't to switch to a product that gives them more control.
It is human nature. Gnome is right and it can't understand why KDE just can't see that. KDE thinks it is right and just can't see why gnome won't accept that. Meanwhile e17 spanks them both.
Oh and, vi for the win! Did you know there are distro's (I am looking at you gentoo) where that editor is not only not the default but not even INSTALLED as the base of the OS (on the root partition). Shocking.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'll tell you who are Interface Nazis. The developers for software that ends with an 'imp' and starts with a 'G'.
And GNOME was developed on the UI toolkit originally developed for which famous piece of software?
I gave up on evolution when I found a bug before I'd even managed to configure it to read my mail.
You are making the classic mistake of petty little armchair dictators everywhere. What is right for you is right for everyone.
You don't want to configure things, so NOBODY wants to configure things so things that can be configured are bad.
I hope that you are a homosexual or your partner is going to extremely frustated. What works for you, will not work for her. (yeah yeah, slashdot and partner, har har)
If what you claimed is true then Harley Davidson would be bankrupt since for a long period of their history their bikes most certainly did NOT work out of the box. Are they bankrupt? Oh, no, they are actually doing fairly well and the bikes from that era were you first needed to put in some major work on your new purchase are actually highly sought after. Covered in rust and in pieces and mixed up with another model? All the better!
You can't switch on discovery channel and not see a program were people that a product that works out of the box and then cut it apart into little bits to configure it to their liking.
So are these persons not people?
No, you think because you don't like something, nobody likes it.
Well, sorry kid, but that is the way fundementalists think. I am X so everyone is X and if they are not they are wrong.
Humanity is far more complex, we want/need different things and we are going to argue about it forever. This is a GOOD thing. It is why things happen. It was the crap western bikes that gave the japanese their chance and is why in a world were you have HD doing extremely well, some people buy honda's because they want a bike that really just fucking drives out of the box and they don't ever have to mess with.
On the other hand, people also still buy bucatti bikes. A brand that never ever managed to create a single piece of equipment with two wheels that just works. (I do not know anything about the reliability of their four wheeled car, except that I want one. Road car that can outrace a F1 car. Fap fap fap.)
Humans eh.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Unlike you, the Gnome developers don't actually decide things based on their opinions alone, they apply widely used principles of UI design and they test their interfaces on "real people".
Gnome is doing a good job at what they're doing. If people like Linus and you want to help, learn something about UI design first. Then, you can either contribute suggestions for specific improvements justified based on accepted UI design criteria, or you can participate in user testing. Your and Linus's opinions, on the other hand, are pretty much worthless.
If the Gnome people keep rejecting user directed extensibility, it would seem that a fork is in order. Perhaps the fork could be called extensible gnome. The fork should be lead by someone who has experience with gnome development.
Any takers?
The solution is simple. A default gnome desktop install package that just works, and an additional power-users tweak package. Like Windows has with TweakUI (only more powerful). The extra step involved in installing the extra package would prevent accidental stuff-ups by grandma and grandpa, while being easy enough for l337 h4x0rz to install and configure.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
I hope you are a girl, because I am going to kiss you.
There is however one sentence that should be added.
MS Paint is therefore excellent for beginners, but once those beginners are no longer beginners, you might want to switch to Adobe Photoshop.
Once you learn to ride a bike, the training wheels can come off and soon you might graduate to an "adult" bike.
Once you reached first base you might want to eventually try for second. Maybe even try to steal home plate. Or you might try sex instead of playing ball.
Differently skilled users will prefer different applications. From this follows that as you change in skill, you will want to change applications.
Shocking. Next thing you might find that as you go to school each year you move up a level and teachers gradually increase the difficulty of sums until you forget how to do basic aritmethic (or forget how to spell it) without a calculator.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The root cause of the injustices in Nazi Germany was not hatred of any specific minority, it was vicious persecution of minorities by a state and a majority. Anti-semitism was one consequence of that, but that's just because of demographics. If Europe had been 97% Jewish and 3% Christian, it's the Christians that would have ended up in concentration camps.
It's important to have organizations that remind the world of the horrors of the Nazi regime. But I also think it is counterproductive when such organizations put on their banner that they are dedicated to the protection of a specific minority group. The ADL should decide whether it wants to be a Jewish advocacy group or whether it wants to be an anti-holocaust group; mixing the two is not a good idea.
I see it as a not paticularly good idea implemented badly - as an exercise for the reader consider how you would go about exporting the gpanel menu setting from one user to another on the same machine. Consider it in detail and look at source code instead of just stating "it's XML - how hard can it be?" - it will suprise and offend you - and you'll see why some very capable gnome developers have not yet finished the Sabayon application that is designed to do such things.
There's a lot that is good about gnome but don't assume that pointing out flaws is due to attitude problems.
I'm GNOME user, have been for years. But Linus is completely correct. Had I had the ability to do what he's done, I would have. Most of the configurability that's lacking in GNOME is the window manager, so I just run XFCE instead of the gad-awful Metacity or whatever they slap on these days.
I guess it was Linus himself who started the popular "have fun" quote and yet again thanks to Linus, we're having a global flame war :)
However I fully agree with Linus's point of view. Since I use Linux for 8 years now and gave all available desktop environments a fair chance.
Gnome IMHO, simply does not look right and it does not feel right.
Of cause I respect all coders that contribute to Gnome, but IMHO you girls and guys are waisting your talents on something useless. So please my friends, stop waisting your time and invest your grate talents in something useful (like KDE or the like).
To the so called end users: if you don't have the skills to work with a respectable Operating System and desktop environment, simply leave it. Nobody is forcing you!
Just return to your good old Micro$haft Windowze. It's up to only you ;)
Anyway, have fun!
Marti van Lin
Maastricht (NL)
----- BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK ------ GO d-- s: a+ C+++ ULU+++ P+ L+++ E--- W++ N++ o? K-- w--- O+ M V- PS++ PE- Y++ PGP+
Then I tried Ubuntu once and I was surprized at how much I liked it now. The same GNOME that I hated, now worked great. I stopped worrying about all those infinetly large space of KDE configurations and was able to just use my desktop. At times I would get frustrated with it, just like Linus did, but then I would get used to it. I have become convinced that 'less is more'.
Apple, who has invested more than any other company in UI research, has proven this to be true. Geeks like me laughed at the stupid Apple with their one-button mouse. But somehow Apple ended up being touted as the king of usability, there is a good reason for that.
I like Linus, and I understand his frustration. But he also needs to understand the mindset of a regular (=idiot) user. He lives in the kernel world and GNOME needs to live in the Desktop world. Linus' users are geeks who know what ioctl() is and GNOME users want to write a monthly report paper. They will never agree. They just need to understand each other and work together.
What we had was an MS windows fanboy that wanted his own version of MS windows on linux without understanding the platform he was writing for (not cross platform in any way - other people had to sort that out for him later). He's now gone on to do mono but has left gconf behind. It is stupidly difficult to change things and one poor user with can completely lock themselves out of their laptop as one user by changing the resolution settings which ends up hidden somewhere inaccessable in gconf and is best solved by copying their stuff - deleting the account to destroy the broken gconf config files - then setting it up again. It has it's hooks in far deeper than it deserves to be allowed.
The mutant thing above really has me thinking it's time for people to reach for a dictionary, a few good novels and a few years worth of newspapers - I see it as a really bad comparison I cannot grasp the point of. Real people can do a lot of things and cover a wide range of abilities without getting pidgeonholed in with people in extreme states. Start paying attention instead of cataloging.
Sorry, here's a hi-fi version of the post with paragraphs and stuff.
I see your point, but, to continue in the way you put it, not everybody cares whether the environment is 95% or 99% perfect for them. Achieving 100% perfect, even if it were possible, would be way too costly in terms of time and effort to be worth it.
Even 99% perfect is that for a lot of people. I understand that if you sit 8+ hours a day in front of an editor writing code and often repeating pretty much the same mantra (in terms of tools they use for processing the code, not in the code itself), you may want to have it behave exactly the way you want. Geeks (who actually understand that the way things work aren't set in stone and usually could, at least in theory, be changed) in general are probably more sensitive in this way than most others, so editors and code are quite appropriate as an example even if there are also other people who spend most of their time using a single application or interface.
The last few percent tend to be the most expensive, regardless of the matter in question. I'm generally a control freak and used to want to be able to tweak everything they way I wanted it to work. Then I got tired of spending extra time just to get the last few percent done. I settled with the 95% that Gnome gives me.
Like my friend once put it: "Computer scientists always have to optimize everything to save five seconds, even if the optimization process itself takes your entire life." That's not to say that it's entirely a bad thing but it reveals the point that sometimes going all the way to the end doesn't give enough benefit to justify the cost.
"People don't want configurability, they want something that works out of the box."
... and deeply personal ... way. The Windows you speak of is very configurable, and the popularity of stuff like TweakUI proves that a lot of people want it even more so. The Mac is not so configurable and ... golly gee whiz ... it's not as popular.
First, there is no monolithic "people" who single mindedly want something. If there were, everyone would be satisfied with the pathetic lot that the majority have voted into power in Washington.
More importantly, you are making a false dichotomy. Configurability is not the enemy of ease of use. The two properties are completely unrelated. Want to please both the dabblers and the deep tinkerers? Just give each software module intelligent defaults (pretty much like Gnome does now with some exceptions where it could be greatly improved), and add comprehensive configuration dialogs to change things. Now prominently add a single button, "restore all defaults". Presto. Now idiots (forgive me) can always instantly set everything to the One True Way which is easy to learn and easy to explain, while intelligent people can still set things up in an intelligent
You lose your money.
If anything, from my personal experience, your percentage guess should be inverted. Out of the core linux kernel devs I've met and conversed with in person, not one raised any flags for me about even mild asperger's tendencies.
Of course, I'd suspect the ones that DO fit that diagnosis probably shun real-life kernel developer gatherings due to social phobias and associated symptoms of their disorders. A "sample" taken from something like the OLS's pub-night may well be biased away from the autistic part of the dev crowd. Nonetheless, "90% would test positive" shows you have NO clue what the fuck you're talking about. Aspergers may be overrepresented among "computer geeks" compared to the general population, but nowhere remotely close to that level.
In any case, Linus himself _certainly_ doesn't fit the bill. He's just smart, vocal, and opinionated - nothing autistic about that. When you're proven right as often and for as long as Linus has been, a certain level of arrogance becomes almost inevitable.
Most people who engage in internet flame wars about issues they are particularly passionate about are not autistic.
Plus that wasn't even a flame war. It was damn civilized as far as bitch sessions go.
rd
It's time for the obligatory Princess Bride quote. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Could it be that you intended the word "schizophrenia"? It is difficult to tell.
Someone who is autistic typically:
* Is unable to start or sustain a social conversation
* Develops language slowly or not at all
* Repeats words or memorized passages, like commercials
* Doesn't refer to self correctly (for example, says "you want water" when the child means "I want water")
* Uses nonsense rhyming
* Communicates with gestures instead of words
Those characteristics clearly do not describe Mr. Torvalds, who is an articulate speaker and writer. What's more, when you go on to elaborate "autistics tend to care about things that most non-autistics don't...like engaging in holy wars about which is the *one true* graphical environment, which is the *one true* text editor, or which is the *one true* license", such behavior again does not come close to describing Mr.Torvalds.
"Lusers" (as in: "people who uses windows") may find gnome more user friendly.
Now, linux geeks (including you, me and Linus) are NOT idiots. We know how to use computers. That's why many of us use kde. We're in 2007 and still gnome can't make thumnails of videos in the open dialog. It doesn't even has a thumbnail view in the open dialog, so you can see miniatures of all your jpg/avi/whatever files, instead of having to select every file to get a preview.
Lusers and geeks who like the overall usability improvements of gnome maybe can stand that. I can't.
Besides, KDE is, from a software design POV, way more clean than the C mess that gnome has become through the years. Real geeks like well designed software. Even if it costs them blood.
The other problem is that KDE is slow, REAL slow
Actually, KDE and GNOME eat the same amount of memory, according to some memory benchmarks pulished somewhat recently - and that's after more than a year of memory consumption improvement work by the gnome people (before that gnome ate some extra MB more than KDE)
What is actually being said is the Linus is a gnome supporter, as there are other interfaces to chose from.
And that really is the point!
I use autocad at work and the new version has "workspaces" where I can set the interface up as I like for a given type of tasks. And I can set up another workspace for a different type of task. and so forth and so on. And switch between them on the fly. Regardless of the fact that I find autocad 2007 frustrating because they failed to include the standard interface workspace in autocad mechanical 2007 that is in autocad 2007, the basic idea is wonderful. But they don't seem to have an easy way to share workspaces (or make some available on their site)
Now in MS windows you can set up accounts for different users and they can customize to some degree their interface. Not so versatile but again the idea is there of allowing users to have the interface they want without concern for interface selection of another user that would be using the same machine.
This is how it should be on GNU/Linux, and is to some extent.
Maybe its time to show the rest of the industry that the open source movement does innovate.
And I suppose this would be a Linus thing to enable in at the kernel level...
Innovate the ability of the user to easily change interfaces and even be able to load their prefered interface off a USB thumb drive.
Any complaints that this wouldn't be so easy is..... well not innovative.
Ultimately its up to Linus to support the possibility at the kernel level....
And this is why linux will never be a contender for the consumer desktop. 1) It has no native UI. 2) The Linux community is always fighting amongst themselves. 3) Linux gurus don't understand that not every power user wants to do stuff via the command line or obscure config files. 4) It's segmented. I don't want to have to research and try ten million different distros before I figure out which one would be best for me. I really would like something better than windows, I just haven't found it yet.
I personally use KDE as my daily desktop, and I like it. My kids and wife also use it on a daily basis on their machines.
This split of KDE/Gnome has hurt Linux on the desktop more than anything else. The reason is historical, if you remember Troll Tech and their Qt library being not free (Libre), and then some folks going off and writing gtk, and Gnome on top of it. This issue is now moot because Qt is now free (Libre). However, it was too late to heal the rift.
Another observation is that Gnome is popular in the USA, but KDE is popular almost everywhere else. There have been some reports on developers leaving KDE because of so-called Anti-Americanism, but that is just an interesting side anecdote.
Although my preference is KDE, and I wish Gnome to fade away for the sake of a single Desktop platform that everyone can write to, I can't see why Linus has to be so confrontational about it. Regardless of whether he really has some valid criticism, or to move people away from Gnome for the sake of unifying the desktop, he is going about the wrong way doing so.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
That was some epic shit. I want whatever you're drinking.
If he doesn't like Gnome, he should just stop using it and be done with it. But I have a sinking feeling he WANTS to like Gnome.
:p
Now if only enlightenment would come out of beta, I would start using that and trash this silly argument completely.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The best example of gnome over-simplification can be summed up in one word: "Close".
Remember the familiar "Okay/Cancel" buttons on anything which presents you with things you might get wrong?
In the Gnome world, these do not exist. Gnome (by which I mean, [insert-your-gtk-derived-application-of-choice]) is of the opinion that nobody anywhere ever makes mistakes or wants the ability to to go back to a previous state.
But you remember exactly how everything looked before you started anyway, right?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
A highly accomplished person with a prominent position is a lightning rod for commentary, much of it rude and stupid. Even an easy-going person will become testy after receiving too much garbage, and Linus is no exception.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I know Mike Godwin from school (UTexas) and last year, after drunken reunion party of sorts, talked turned to Iraq. Discussion grew heated, and someone at the table called me Nazi (from which you may infer my opinion and/or drunkenness). Mike Godwin, sitting next to me, said "Hello?!? I'm right here! You can't violate my law in my presence!" and declared me the winner. But I don't think he meant it - he thought I was a Nazi too, but couldn't bring himself call me one. I think he settled for "warmonger". But he's a very nice guy.
What's with this "Your with my patch or your against it!" BS ... I use gnome at home exactly because it is limiting (not to mention just pretty) ... my wife and friends have no problems using gnome without any intimidation from the UI at all ... and I have no fear of anything getting buggered up.
I really don't see a problem with developing software based on the principle of "does my gandma need it and understand it" ... that type of thinking really captures a segment of the population most coders don't care about.
Anyways I am sure linux and his patch submitted aka "Mission Acomplished" will generate a few news stories ... but I really think he's a little off his rocker this time. The merits of work based on "principle" and "technical" aspects are not always to be compaired.
My two eldest daughters (9 and 13) used GNOME for a long time.
When I showed them KDE just for fun, they switched and have
never gone back.
I use XFCE, and can be reasonably productive in KDE, but GNOME
just kills my productivity with its stupid design and intrusiveness.
After 5+ years, Evolutions STILL won't let you compose mail in an
external editor... feh!
Isn't it possible to have a nice, easy to find button, "Reset all interface (mouse, keyboard shortcuts) controls to default?" in a place where someone can't help but find it if they screw up the controls?
s/everything Metacity depended on/everything Brightside depended on/
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
People who advocate the killing of other human beings should be banned off this board, plain and simple.
Look nothing like each other, and use entirely different controls and styles?
I completely agree with the parent post. Self-diagnosis is fraught with problems, and will generally lead to false positive diagnoses.
It turns out that this is also a common problem with first and second year medical students, as I found out from two separate friends who went through it.
Medical students spend most of their long waking hours reading about new (to them) diseases, syndromes, collections of symptoms. Naturally, their brains, being good at pattern-matching, find patterns in the quirks of their own experience, leading them to conclude that they have lived with some previously undiagnosed disease. Of course, this is not the case, but that doesn't stop it from happening to every new class of med students.
I even fell prey to the same thing when all the articles on Asperger's started flying around about 5 years ago, thinking: "OMG, I have this, and this, and this, and I score very highly on this survey, blah, blah, blah". Then, I think and observe some more, remember my med school friends, and read accounts like the parent, and realize that I'm just confused. Nevermind.
Mike Godwin was (is?) a grammar and spelling Nazi.
Really. Back in the days of 1200 baud modems, when BBS systems had little or no message editing features, Mike would complain incessantly about spelling and grammar errors.
He'd even make up errors, like "you should not start a paragraph with 'but.'" Never mind the medium was more extemporaneous than literary, some schoolmarm had taught him it was wrong.
Which is why every conversation Mike was involved with used the word "Nazi." It describes Mike's enthusiasm for the pedantic.
*Exactly* like the famous Soup Nazi. "Mike, quit being a capitalization Nazi. Mike, quit being a spelling Nazi. Mike, quit being a grammar Nazi."
If Mike Godwin was around, the word "Nazi" was going to get used.
It's time we rescued "Nazi" from Mike's personal problems. "Nazi" is a perfectly good word to describe people who like to enforce silly little rules. Such informal use does not diminish the evil of the NSDAP; campaigning against such informal use provides camouflage for real Nazis by belittling the efforts of those who work to expose real Nazis.
I'll start by suggesting that those who pedantically invoke Godwin's silly little rule, are Godwin Nazis.
Why is someone of Linus' prodigious ability playing around with cutesy noob desktops anyway?
Caveat Utilitor
Godwin said it in 91. I said it in 89. Lesson learned: never let a lawyer take your best lines.
4 314f075182eeb
http://groups.google.com/group/news.groups/msg/b5
Need Mercedes parts ?
I think that people who have no background in cognitive engineering, HCI, or design engineering should just shut the hell up, because they're making life miserable for those of us who would really like to have user-friendly systems.
At the very least, read one of the seminal books in the field first:
The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, ISBN 0-465-06710-7
If Torvalds hasn't read this book, he should shut up.
If there's anyone working on GNOME (or KDE) who hasn't read this book, they should immediately resign and work on some other project. Only people who have some talent or training in thinking about usability should get involved in these things.
One of the biggest problems is that so many of these people are mildly aspergic and therefore have limited ability to empathize with how other people (who don't know as much as they do about the system they're designing) will be able to use it.
Oh, BTW, I'm working on my Ph.D., and one of my minors is HCI.
- Vertical challenged person
- Desktop challenged person
P.S. I use neither KDE or GNOME.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Readable code is a good thing. But Torvalds is fixated on it in a way that suggests he cares more about that than usability. He should not even mention it. If he wants to criticize GNOME, he should focus on what matters: usability.
I'd say all the different desktop environments and window managers are pretty good. They each have their own niche and appeal to some while repulsing others. I happen to like gnome very much and it works very well for me. The bottom line is that one is not necessarily better than the other but boils down to personal preferences. We can all agree that, unlike Microsoft, open source operating system users have a choice in the presentation of their desktops and we celebrate this freedom. In a nutshell, ask yourself these questions: What are your needs? What are you looking for? I don't honestly see the reason to flame. But, I think Linus might make a point that a community-driven, open-source project should be interested in it's developer base and user feedback. That said, Linus' complaint was delivered in a less-than-professional manner. Name calling and labeling ends up alienating the people you are trying to reach.
It is not correct to say that Sawfish got replaced by Metacity due to it being deciding its configurability was bad, far from it. Sure there
where people who felt Sawfish went a bit overboard in that regard, but that was not the reason it got
ditched as the default GNOME window manager. The reason for that was simply that after Eazel went backrupt and Sawfish maintainer John Harper
had to find a new job, he ended up at Apple. And thus he couldn't maintain Sawfish anymore. The really special thing about Sawfish was that it
was written in its own Lisp dialect so as part of Sawfish you got both an extra lisp interpreter and GTK+ bindings for it.
All of these three went unmaintained as John went away and nobody where interested in taking over. Thus the GNOME developers had to look elsewhere
for a maintained window manager, it was decided that one should aim for one written in C like the rest of the desktop libraries to lessen the chance
of future maintenance prolems. To answer this call Havoc Pennington stepped up with Metacity and it was quickly adopted by a lot of GNOME developers and
users and subsequently chosen as the standard. Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to a policy that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem.
This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME, in the sense that there is a consensus to not allow 'random' patches
add config options to the GUI without a very good reason. For instance one shouldn't add config options as a way to work around bugs or
missing features in lower parts of the stack, instead one should try to fix them. In the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore
fashion that for most other modules, but due to Havoc's high profile I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceived
the project as a whole.
nuff said :)
We're talking about things like duplexing printers being able to print even-numbered pages on the back of the odd-numbered pages, or toner/ink-saving draft modes.
The way to handle the tension between the "KISS for Aunt Tillie" and "Let me tweak my ass off" crowds is to put the most basic options on one tab of the dialog, and have more advanced options on the other tabs, or accessible via an [Advanced] button of some sort.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Personally, I think it's great to see some dramatic interaction, go kids go, i always say.
Thanks to all you folks, and your excellent efforts, my systems rock!
Words to men, as air to birds.
The real problem isn't really the lack of desktops or window managers. The real problem is the lack of a decent file manager that's independent and that allows you to see content (e.g., see jpegs, see pdfs).
ROX is not the answer. XFCE is not the answer.
I wonder: could something like this benefit from Java? That would be a good idea, wouldn't it? You could have something light like Fluxbox, that have a power file manager, since you already hava Java installed. That would also be multiplatform.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I think Linus's point was that certain GNOME developers refuse features not because they're too hard to do but because UI is some cathedral that requires perfection. Take the first question in the FAQ from the metacity README : "Will you add my feature?"
The guy basically says "Only if everyone would like it to be there." And lets take the article linked to after that explanation: http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html The contradiction of "Not enough UI designers" and "Too many cooks" might not be obvious, especially if you feel that designers aren't programmers. But open source software doesn't make that distinction. I actually find it nice in this regard: it avoids situations in which some volunteers tell other volunteers what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. There's a fairly recent parable of the mice and the bell. It can easy to propose and vote that something should be done, but sometimes doing it is another thing. Open source projects focused on patch sets eliminate this.
GNOME is not a platform for programmers. GNOME developers should not be surprised then, when programmers notice this and either avoid it or complain in some fashion.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
It's about choice, personal preference.
I have GNOME and KDE installed on my machines for the apps and utilities, but I use neither as a GUI. WindowMaker all the way.
Stick Men
For all the Beryl hype, I can't see how it increases usability. Actually, it seems the originating project was about providing a framework to test new solutions for the desktop, and it was quickly hijacked and morphed into a eye-candy project.
Usability means having a Documents folder with 50000 items, and being able to find something. The little Folder metaphor, as we know, is a huge time-waster. By the way, GNOME's file manager can't really handle large volume of documents on an average computer, without choking for a minute or two. Ridiculous. GNOME is slow (and I blame that, amongst other things, on coding OOP with C, and compiling that with gcc).
So, when I see people on Slashdot discussing KDE vs GNOME, I wonder if KDE or GNOME hackers have submitted the desktops to heavy stress. AFAIK, no such test are conducted on both solutions.
Here are my suggestions:
1) Test browsers and other applications for memory leaks; test them by running for days on end;
2) Stress-test file managers by providing *large* volume of documents of *different* types;
3) Stress-test search engines in the desktops on *large* volumes of *different* types;
4) Test search engines on extracting meta-data from files - does it meet any benchmark based on statistics?
The only thing, so far, for me, that has come close to providing better desktop usability is Apple's Searchlight (although I haven't used GNOME's Beagle), but it also gets lost in a sea of meta-data.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I have been deploying a semi-embedded system for military use. I already have to maintain special versions of 40 packages from the SUSE 10.0 Distribution to meet various security requirements. Gnome's lack of configuration options for GDM, specifically ways of turning off many fallbacks and modal dialogs that are not appropriate for a kiosk like system are a pain. I finally just modified gdm and rebuilt it to ignore certain conditions like not being able to write the .dmrc config file because the home directory is read only. Also, don't even get me started about getting a GTK application to come up correctly with override redirect WM hints.
There are some parts of gnome that are nice but some of the fallbacks in gdm and the modal dialogs are security risks because they allow the user to get a different interface than the one designed into the product and there is no way to turn them off in the config files.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
First thing, Linus did nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong with him speaking things out straight. It's simply because that people don't like to hear those critisms. Some say Linus shouldn't mess around with others' projects. Man, this is how Open Source evolves! As long as his arguments sound, we should listen to him. And what Linus' patches fixed DID improve usability. Why don't Gnome people stop worrying about usability issues in their own way but let the users judge what they really want.
Second of all, it seemed like this discussion had turned into a report of self mental illness in the first dozens of replies. lol
If you don't want to use KDE or Gnome, kick them both to the curb. I got tired of all the baggage that both of them bought an unwrapped a forgotten tool from days gone bye. Fvwm2 is still alive and kicking.
You want to get off that donkey ride to hell called kde grab fvwm2 and roll your own desk top.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
this is the real reason why Windows has not been taken over by Linux yet. If a majority of the Linux developers decided to work together to make Linux easy enough to use for even Windows and Mac Users so Linux would be used more than Windows or Mac systems.
That and making sure that third parties develop Linux device drivers for the hardware that they make.
Will this most recent fight cause a fork in the source code of GNOME?
While we Linux users suffer from this sort of thing, Bill Gates laughs over it and starts to take a swim in his money vaults like Scrooge MacDuck, knowing that the competition won't be taking over Windows marketshare any time soon.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I don't get the whining about gimp. To me, it looks like someone took the parts of photoshop that don't get "windowed" and "de-windowed" them. I mean what is the difference in gimp's and photoshop's gui? The wrapper/window.
Guess what? Slide that background in photoshop off the the side, and gee, you don't have access to file, edit, etc. but it looks like gimp.
Well, if I slide photoshop's "background" window off to the side, I find it isn't so much a background as a container, and my open documents move with it. If I minimize it, all my open documents are minimized, along with all the toolbars, etc. If I click to bring it to the front, all of its associated windows come with it. This is much more useful than having to manage all those windows independently.
But, frankly, that's the least of my concerns with Gimp. I find the fact that everything is organised into just two menus ("File" and "Xtras") inconvenient. A shallower, broader menu system makes it easier to find any individual item. Photoshop has 9 top level menus, each of which is substantially smaller than either of gimp's 2. Many of Gimp's menus have names that are incomprehensible to anyone but an expert. The handling of selections (particularly what it calls 'floating selections') is frankly bizarre, and difficult in practice to use even for somebody with months of experience using the software (albeit compared to years of using photoshop). Moving layers can be tricky, because layer selections change automatically when you click with the move tool (this is an option in photoshop, but not on by default).
I see here many people attack Linus, or at least comment on his behavior. I also don't know the man and whether he has attitude problems (and who doesn't?). But I personally believe he is right!
When 10 years ago desktop environments for Linux started to be developed, I personally chose KDE over GNOME, because even then I realized GNOME was too restrictive. Both, from a user and from a developer perspective. Since then I use and develop for KDE. As a developer, I find KDE more flexible for my day-to-day job. It is true that GNOME is being developed mostly for end users with all those restrictions and limitations embedded.
KDE vs GNOME reminds me of Linux vs Windows dillema - the latter one may look fancy and cool in times, but limits what you can do with it all the time. And fanciness and coolness is just a matter of time - it all comes really quick to a theater (desktop and/or OS) near you.
Let's use the GNOME application Evince as an example. Evince is a PDF (and other) file reader. The GNOME usability gurus, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that hiding preferences in an option or preferences dialog is bad UI design. They'd rather have all your viewing options up front in the menus.
Not bad, except for one thing -- there's no way that I can find to set a default for the settings you want to use to view a PDF. Everytime I open a PDF in Evince, I have to spend a few seconds turning off "continuous" display of pages (which mucks with paging through a document), setting the zoom level to "best fit," closing the thumbnails view, and resizing the window. Evince will remember these changes for about 30 or so files (I think) for the next time you open them. If you open a lot of different files, or you're viewing a new file, this memory is utterly useless and you have to change your settings over again. It gets to be a real drag.
There's no menu option for "use current settings as default," and the only reference I can find to preferences is a message on their bug tracker where a developer basically shoots down a request for globally persistent preferences stating that it's not what they want to do.
The attitude of the the Evince developers is that their "smart" sizing choices should always be the default, and they ask users to attempt to justify why they should be allowed to set personal preferences with the attitude that they must explain why they're rejecting the defaults that the developers prefer. That sort of looking down your nose at users is just intolerable in my opinion.
The only reason I haven't dumped Evince entirely is because it reads CBZ & CBR files.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
- complain about things they should fix themselves
stupid people can't use linuxlinux requires the oposite
> I personally don't know if the patches are any good or in keeping with GNOME's design or need changes or .... But I do think that Linus
> needs to chill and let the GNOME core developers run the way they want to and accept or postpone (if there's a freeze) or reject his
> patches as they deem appropriate.
More likely he will do what I did, don't even try to send patches. Just from their public reputation I didn't even bother trying to figure where/how to send in a fix I made to gdm, figuring I'd almost certainly just get abused.
btw, my patch added an extra tap to call a PrePreSession script because PreSession, despite the name is called AFTER the session is opened. I'm doing some odd things in a public lab that automount isn't enough for.... or I couldn't figure out how to do with automount at any rate.
Democrat delenda est
Seems somebody takes the "talk is cheap, show me the code" really serious!
I can't help but get a little worried, had it been anyone else but Linus I wouldn't mind, let people have their strange ways as long as they do not bother me or anyone else to much.
We've got to accept Linus Torvalds as a fellow human and back down from the demigod status. He's got some mad skilz, but he gets to have cranky days too. Come to think of it Yaweh smote his errant subjects on cranky days too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Bite me
There's more than just a little difference in the time scales involved.
I agree 100% with Linus on this one, the "gnome way" they seem to be going is a pain in the ass for anyone remotely competent, hence I ditched it some time ago.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You're right, it would be stupid to do the sort of things that linus is doing when submitting patches to the kernel, but the kernel overall is a pretty successful project, whereas gnome, and particularly metacity, has major problems that generally prompt people to remove the "default gnome" desktop after some use, and replace it with something better. Generally, linus has done a good job of making sure the kernel address the core problems it faces, but gnome has not.
Generally, I think that Linus' initial comment was correct, people should just switch to a different desktop. The criticisms against gnome are out there, and the developers can either address them or lose their users. I have no particular obligation to use gnome, and no obligation to help fix it if they won't accept patches. Mostly what stops people from switching is that when you stray from the mainstream gnome/metacity combo, there's so many alternative window managers, most of which don't work that well, that people are confused and have a hard time picking out the good ones. KDE used to be the well known alternative, but it has some of the same problems as gnome. Thankfully, recently xfce has moved far to the head of the pack, as doing everything that gnome and kde do, but better and with fewer bugs.
For those who aren't familiar with the criticisms addressed against gnome, in summary they are that it the window manager, metatcity, is missing a lot of important features that other desktops have, that it is as buggy as all get out, and that it is kind of bloated. They are working on fixing the bugs... presumably, and people can learn to live with a little bloat these days, but the lack of critical features has driven away countless users, and fractured what would otherwise be the one true linux desktop. Some of the missing features aren't so heinous, I actually thought the one that Linus mentioned was pretty minor, but there are major broken areas of metacity like *xinerama support* (used if you ever want to plug a monitor into your laptop for instance) that the developers refuse to address for reasons that don't make sense.
How' this a flamebait? It's true. We're talking GUI, so let's slam the one-corner resizing in Mac OS. Completely off-topic but well worth slamming.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
n/t
Advanced users are users too!
Let me put it another way.
If you are creating a user interface largely for people who have something better to do than learn about how their operating system works (i.e. 95% of computer users), then your primary UI design goal had better be:
THE DEFAULT SHALL BE GOOD.
or better:
THE DEFAULT SHALL BE SIMPLE AND GOOD.
So if you MUST indulge your configuration addiction, you must NOT make the configurability features get in the way of simplicity of use in the default case. e.g. Adding a whole bunch of configuration adjustment menu items or choices in primary use-case dialogs would be fatal to usability for your target audience.
Configurability features must be deeply, deeply hidden; only findable by someone who has RTFM.
And even well hidden configurability reduces the chance that person A will be able to use person B's (or web cafe B's) computer.
So there better be a damn good reason for configurable options, because they have seriously destructive properties in general, when we're talking about a user interface for human beings in general, as opposed to a user interface for kernel hackers.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
c) Linus turns around and does what he's told to - he submits patches to fix what he thinks is broken
Yeah, and the Gnome project apparently didn't like the patches. So what? Linus rejects patches and add-ons to the Linux kernel all the time: that's what open source project leaders have to do.
So why is it wrong when Gnome does that to him?
Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.
This is from the guy who steadfastly refuses to let the Linux kernel even compile with C++ compilers, let alone move it over to C++. Apparently, power, configurability, and choice are values he cherishes only for other people's projects.
Linus' patch for Gnome is bad. I'm sorry he doesn't understand why complete configurability for the mouse is undesirable, but that's his problem. Furthermore, he actually has a trivial option for getting what he wants: he can use one of half a dozen other window managers, many of them fully configurable.
You'd have to look fairly hard to find someone with any idea what the social meaning of crucification was, and then they're no more likely than average to be Christian.
Linus is right, not enogh Gnome configuration is exposed by default and too many defaults are not best of breed.
Bug:metacity:
Middle clicking the maximise button does not maximise height only and there is no trivial way to bind mouse clicks to actions.
Bug:epiphany,galeon:
Tabs on top, not left where they ought to be; galeon is one gconf edit away but the default is wrong - height is more valuable than width, put the tabs down the sides.
>>>>truth; beauty; unix.<<<<
Umm, XFce anyone? :0)
"People who advocate the killing of other human beings should be banned off this board, plain and simple."
Ban who you want from YOUR board. I think the Slashdot folks will just ignore those we disagree with. I fully embrace anyone's ability to express their opinion. I just as fully embrace everyone's right to ignore others' opinions.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
And what desktop perchance did you install with Linux that made it so easy to use?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
It's called a straw man because it's a fallacious argument set up to be easily knocked down. I doubt you have any idea what the social meaning of crucification was, either, because it had nothing to do with Christianity.
Aspies tend toward the stereotypic INTP/INTJ personality, although this is not universal.
This does not mean that INTP/INTJ equates to being a low-grade aspie.
Yes, I subscribe to the neurodiversity point of view, but still see aspies as being sufficiently different, both qualitatively and quantitatively, as to be "a breed apart", whether you frame that in a positive or negative light.
Also, there are a huge number of comorbidities that are typically seen, and the lifetime prevalence of death by suicide is high.
For one, I am not biased to any desktop interface. In fact, I use them interchangeable throughout the day when I switch from my home Ubuntu Gnome desktop, to my Windows Mobile 2003 on PDA 1 and Windows CE3 on PDA 2, and from then on to Windows XP at home, alternating KDE, Xfce and Gnome on my laptop and dabble around under Mac OS X on the old iMac. Using them all in this way doesn't give me any better insight in which desktop is really the best. When you reach a certain level of experience it doesn't take a long time time to acquaint yourself with the basic functions and all the stuf you need on a day to day basis. Interoperabilty is way more important for me.
I also like tinkering with my desktops, changing at least the wall paper on a very regular basis, but having no qualms about changing the complete theme of the desktop, making it look completely different. I used to run Flyakite in order to make Windows XP look like Mac OS X. I used a theme package from KDElooks to change my KDE interface into an XP interface. Usually this kind of exercise renders my desktop unusable after a while or making it too dynamic. At that point I revert back to more austere, simple, uncluttered desktops.
With any desktop I know there are tons of options under the hood. One thing I have learned from most computer users is that they don't give a damn thing about all those options. Not even after using the computer for years their level of expertise ever reaches that point. They are users and content at that. Those are not the types to start thinkering in the Windows registry or start delving in all the desktop options, Gnome, KDE or otherwise. Hence, there is a lot to say for the decisions made by the Gnome developers. Ever since the human interface guidelines were accepted the Gnome desktop has developed into a simple, uncluttered desktop. The KDE desktop has developed along different lines, with a different philosophy in mind. Is one better than the other? Who cares?
Linus tried to prove his point by submitting a patch or two. Great. I don't have his coding skills (nor any skills in that area I would even want to mention), but what does it prove? Nothing, just that he has coding skills. As far as I understand it he wrote some code that would add KDE like configurations in the Gnome desktop. Well, no doubt the Gnome afficionados would be able to write a patch to simplify the KDE desktop as well. The problem is that this isn't the point. Linus likes to tinker more with his desktop than maybe the whole new batch of Linux users that appreciate the simplicity and accesibility of Ubuntu Linux. Linus also doesn't like GPL 3 and doesn't mind DRM. Isn't is great to have opinions?
As a geek that's used Linux/Gnome as his primary desktop for several years, and has helped many newbies use it also, I can totally see where Linus is coming from. All desktops are pretty limited and annoying and nobody seems to really want to redefine the desktop environment. We have a way things are done and just because it works poorly isn't a good enough reason to do things better. Having tried to make bug reports and feature requests to the Gnome developers I also agree that they really act like they don't care about suggestions. It's great that they want to keep Gnome easy to use and free of bloat but as with Linus' suggestion you could actually make it easier to use and make the code cleaner by implementing some changes.
It doesn't really matter though. With the lack of vision by the developers of KDE and Gnome I don't see the Linux desktop ever becoming a staple of computing for non-geeks except in very special projects managed by geeks without any non-geek overlords selecting the platform. Sure using KDE or Gnome is easy enough but there is no benefit to using them compared to Windows or Mac OS. Nothing that non-geeks will understand and desire at least. I'm not talking eye candy - I mean real features that make Linux on the desktop easier to use and more powerful in a way that normal people find useful. To pull people away from Windows and Mac OS we need to be obviously better and not just reaching par.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
They are absolutely right. Configurability is bad. No one needs it. It is confusing, wastes resources. Tomorrow I will give to GNOME people my configuration so that they can make it the one and only GNOME default. If I cannot configure stuff, no problem. It has just to be done the way I like and want it.
I know two boys, one autistic and one with Asperger, and there is no comparison. Judging by those two, the step from "nerd" to Asperger is insignificant compared to the step from Asperger to classic autism.
The whining in this thread seems to be just a case of the US favorite sport of victim-status territorial fights. [ When I lived in US a couple of years, I learned to my surprise that being Scandinavian didn't make me belong to a minority despite there being very few of us around, but that women were a minority, despite also being majority. Weird system. It is probably my autism that prevents me from understanding it. ]
Linus is just trying to use his position to unduly influence an existing, mature project. Can't say I agree with everything GNOME does (the ok/cancel order really got to me, when I had to change many requesters over) - but they have a style guide. They have a vision and a goal and people working towards that goal. For someone like Linus to come along and try to affect that vision in such a manner isn't going to go anywhere and will just create division in their community. If it was anyone else - and surely there are many many as equally competent and strong-minded individuals out there - he'd just have been ignored silently like many others have been for years.
It reminds me of the way Miguel would force us to do the same sort of things - because of his personal preference - but he got his way because he was the boss and also an influential figure. But it didn't really make anyone happy or agree with him, except his cronies, who got some power and joy from such meddling. At the cost of some morale and productivity from the rest of us I might add.
I just ended up leaving GNOME (and Novell) partly because of this stuff myself (although not a big part) - but given the choice I still use it (actually i'm using xfce at home at the moment, but only because it runs much better on my laptop with 'only' 512mb of ram, and it feels the same as GNOME does). I'm tired of 'tweaking' my 'desktop' - it doesn't do anything productive, it just wastes time.
Not having to code pages of stupid configure windows would save a lot of time and tedium from any coders job too, so I wouldn't blame them for not doing that either.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
> Studies have consistently shown that higher intelligence leads to healthier (physically and mentally) and happier people. This "semi-autistic genius geek" thing is a BS myth. Don't say most, say "me." Because that is what you mean, and it ends there.
i sm#Intelligence_and_autism :
The issue is nowhere near as clear-cut as you make it, and while you describe an old consensus, more recent research suggests otherwise.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_in_aut
"Characteristics observed by some studies as being associated with gifted children at least appear to be analogous to those of autistic children:
Some studies suggest that gifted children are more than twice as introverted as their peers.[1]
Gifted children have been characterized as having obsessive interests, preferring to play alone, and enjoying solitude. They are also said to have prodigious memories and show intense reactions to noise, pain and frustration.[2]
According to some reports, gifted children have a higher-than-average propensity to allergies[3]."
Sounds like the introverted geek stereotype, doesn't it?
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
who is the poor soul who modded this flamebait?
It is the single most insightful comment here.
> the problem is that if you make a damn smart program for flux, ...
/dev/random.
> after a couple of months different implementations of the same smart program will appear for:
> - KDE/Qt
> - GNOME (sponsored by Novell and with nice artwork, running on Mono)
>
-1: ignorant catting
A program running on fluxbox would run unchanged under everything else,
since fluxbox is not a desktop, therefore does not require bloated
desktop-specific libraries, and there is no fluxbox-only software.
If you now feel you were comparing apples with oranges, you're on the right track.
... Bill is strutting about the ring and smashing Linus with an Xbox... this is ugly folks. But Linus is not out.. I don't believe it, he has a patch that makes metacity work properly with KDE apps.. Bill is horrified, he cannot respond... Steve tags and is in, he's smashing Linus with a new Ipod which is licensed to download the Beetles catalog... this is horrible... Linus shrieks in pain, RMS leaps in and poleaxes Steve with - I don't believe this folks, but it's a new GNU license which makes it illegal to make money out of software... will Steve survive ? Children should not be allowed to watch this... but Bill is back with - oh my God, he's brought out the superweapon - Vista Service Pack 1. Will he use it ? The horror, the horror..
lol sorry my sig got anyone upset. I put it up only after seeing someone who had one that said basically "be a patriot, shoot a republican". Want me to remove it?
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
If the interface is the only thing you don't like about Gimp, have you tried Gimpshop?
The most important thing to understand about beginners is that they don't exist.
The notion that there are all these people in the world who don't know how to use a computer is a notion that has dominated CS and IT long after it was no longer true.
There are two groups of people, those who grew up around computers and those who did not. Those who did do not need their hand held. Those who did not grow up around computers more than likely still know how to use them because they have a job. Anynoe who isn't employed doing manual labor (skilled or unskilled) is going to be a using a computer at some point during the day, often times almost exclusively.
I'm 34 years old, I grew up around computers. Not everyone in my age group had a computer growing up, but a sizable percentage did. Those who did not, had them at school and at work. People 10 to 20 years younger than I am DEFINITELY grew up around computers. Designing a user interface to try and cater to idiots who don't use computers (and never will) is a waste of everyone's time.
Today a beginner when it comes to computer is a 4 year old, not a 44 year old. If the latter doesn't know how to use a computer it is because they have avoided learning. The Gnome guys are really wasting their time trying to create a dumbed-down, open source version of Microsoft Bob for these turkeys. Writing books for people who cannot read just makes the author look like a dumbass.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Yes, I know the bit above the folder on GTK shows me the file path, however I would argue [...]
Well, you're at least attempting an argument. One could now make a counterargument and debate this.
The point is, Linus didn't do any of that. He just categorically asserted that more configurability is usually better, as if he were the authority on user interfaces. Not only did he fail to engage in an argument (as the Gnome folks had invited him to), that argument actually has been settled long ago among experts, and the answer is that Linus doesn't know what he is talking about. In fact, in that regard, the OS X and Gnome designers are in full agreement.
What's wrong with that; isn't he ALLOWED to try to use GNOME just because you have him pigeonholed as "somebody who uses KDE"?
(And next time you don't understand something, please first consider that the problem may be not with whatever it is you don't understand[*], but with your limited powers of understanding. HTH!)
[*]: In this case, Linus trying to improve GNOME.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
If the interface is the only thing you don't like about Gimp, have you tried Gimpshop?
Not yet. Does it get rid of GTK?
"Well apparently he was TRYING TO use GNOME in stead -- how the fuck else would he even have noticed the problem?"
He already said he thought KDE was better. I don't understand why he is trying to use GNOME.
"What's wrong with that; isn't he ALLOWED to try to use GNOME just because you have him pigeonholed as "somebody who uses KDE"?"
He is allowed to do anything he wants. On the other hand the GNOME developers are allowed to do anything they want and I am allowed to call linus an asshole for pissing on the GNOME developers when he doesn't even use the damned thing.
"And next time you don't understand something, please first consider that the problem may be not with whatever it is you don't understand[*], but with your limited powers of understanding. HTH!"
Oh yes it's my fault that linus is acting like a supreme asshole.
evil is as evil does