GNOME 2.20 Released

Gimli writes "GNOME 2.20 has been officially released. There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them. The timing is impeccable, too: 'This release coincides with the tenth anniversary of GNOME's existence. The project has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation and has become a global phenomenon. Used as the default environment in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME is widely used by Linux desktop users and is supported by a growing community of companies and independent developers. GNOME 2.20 will be included in the next major releases of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10, which is scheduled for release next month. Users who wish to try it now can use the latest Ubuntu 7.10 live CD images, or the latest build of Foresight Linux. You can also check out the release notes."

Comments

Woo

[Jeffrey Baker]

frist ps0t?? natalie pr0tman with hot gnomes etc etc etc? No really, I love GNOME, and Ubuntu, and I'm really going to love GNOME 2.20 in next month's Ubuntu!

SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[Anonymous Coward]

8====D

You may now return to your regularly scheduled goatse.

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[Anonymous Coward]

8====D

Why the long face? Or am I missing something? :--D

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the Celine Dion emoticon.

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just say it's definitely horse related.

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you, blind? It's a cock! It's not a face, you sick fuck! It's a cock! Look. It's a cock and balls! A dick! Chorizo and the huevos! It's a big stiffy! It's a penis! Penis maximus! A willie! A weenie! Mr. Jiggle Daddy! The one-eyed wonder weasel! Don't you see that? It's Jimmy and the twins. Rumple Foreskin. He made this. It's made from dil-dough.

Minor Changes

[paullb]

Doesn't even seem worth an upgrade from 2.18.

Re:Minor Changes

[Tribbin]

"Doesn't even seem worth an upgrade from 2.18" ... for me.

Sorry you forgot that part; no hard feelings.

Re:Minor Changes

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use gnome, but the upgraded gtk+ that comes with it seems a bit nicer, and it looks like someone actually did some work on performance this time around. Good for them.

I have to ask...

[Chlorus]

Since this is a new GNOME release, what configuration option did they cut out now?

Re:I have to ask...

[drgonzo59]

The one that is confusing the users and that you can never remember how to find after you messed it up. Yeah...I'm pretty sure, that's the feature...

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

"For GNOME 2.20, the control panels have been reorganized slightly to reduce the number of control panels, making it easier to find what you need."

From the release notes page for 2.20. On can only assume this means they've gutted the whole thing and you now have the option to choose between 2 lovely colorschemes, everything else has been set at the factory.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like a good file selector?
No it wasnt cut out, they never did it.

Re:I have to ask...

[Constantine XVI]

From the version currently in Gutsy, they basically threw all the appearance-related apps into one mega-app. I haven't noticed any missing functionality (in fact, the fonts and toolbar applets are unchanged), though I would appreciate if Ubuntu came up with a more useful "simple" Compiz app (it's currently "off", "on", "insane")

Re:I have to ask...

[slyn]

There's a blueprint just for what your asking. I agree that you should be able to customize it more than you can now, but I guess that's in conflict with the Gnome philosophy. Personally I think it would be better to have an "off", "on", and "custom". If you set it to custom a bunch of checkboxes appear in the window for you to choose what you do or do not want enabled. Off would obviously be off, and On would be things like the expose emulator, genie minimize effect, graphically showing virtual desktop switches, and other similar simple effects.

Re:I have to ask...

[moosesocks]

To be perfectly honest, I sort of like it when configuration options are sort of organically integrated into the application instead of displayed in a long list in some preference panel.

And then again, there are many cases in which it's perfectly acceptable to leave them out altogether.

Simplicity is a beautiful thing. One of the core fundamentals of Unix is that an application does a single job, does it well, and provides output such that it can easily be piped into another application. Gnome and KDE have routinely shat upon this paradigm, and it's only been recently that we're finally starting to return to it.

I've used Xfce quite a bit as well, and despite the lack of advanced configuration options, I must say that everything more or less works the way I expect it to, and it's all rather intuitive. The fact that it's ridiculously snappy is a very nice bonus (remember how "snappy" Windows 95 or Mac OS Classic were? Xfce is sort of like that, but with a real operating system underneath, and a full complement of modern features). The configuration options were sparse, and in one or two cases there were things I'd change, but as far as the whole package goes, I'm a big big fan.

If I want to do something tricky, I'll go to the command line. GUIs simply aren't elegant for every function imaginable, and it's sort of assumed that you know at least a few basic unix commands if you're going to be using something as obscure as Xfce. Besides... how many normal users have to pipe their routing table into grep on a daily basis?

KDE's a prime example of feature bloat. From a technical standpoint, it's probably the better of the top two desktops, but from a usability standpoint, I find it horribly unintuitive. Lots of toolbars full of tiny similar-looking blue icons don't help either. If Microsoft did Unix, it'd look something like KDE.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to mess with your desktop when your WM is so flexible as a straightjacket.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

By "simple effects" I guess you mean the genuinely useful effects.

Re:I have to ask...

[Waffle Iron]

remember how "snappy" Windows 95 or Mac OS Classic were?

I think that you're looking back with Pentium-III colored glasses. On a shiny new Pentium I machine of the day, Win95 performance was acceptable but not great. On a typical installed-base 16MB 486/33 machine, Windows 95 was a pig.

The situation was probably comparable to KDE and Vista's performance today on common machines. Unfortunately for these new desktop environments, however, the widening lag of memory and disk bandwidth behind CPU speed means that they probably won't feel "snappy" in the foreseeable future just from hardware improvements.

Re:I have to ask...

[imr]

off topic: On my via epia xfce is actually slower than KDE.

The problem with xfce or gnome is not the choice they made per se, but the fact that you can't actually get out of them. If you happen to be a person that don't fit what they see as a regular user and what is good for you, you just can't have a good experience with their desktop.
So yes, the KDE control center is crammed with features, but I only know and use those that I need and I have turned the desktop into a wonderfull, simple and sane experience for me. A thing that I can't do with GNOME, XFCE or any Windows.
And before you actually dismisses me as a KDE fanboy: I was a GNOME user prior to their stance on "forced down your throat" usability. I had also all "regular users" I knows of try the GNOME desktop so that I don't force my choice on them and they all prefer KDE. So this is not a representative panel, it's just a familym but they are supposedly the target of this usability choice, but either because its defaults are windows like (wife used windows at work before they switched to Linux), either because they can turn it into a strange unbearable carnival of colors (youngsters), either because they can drag and drop all their heart between applications (grand parents) or because I can heavily customise it to suit my day to day work, everybody chose to use KDE.
I'm sorry, but when I use the console it doesnt force me to use that command to another because it's "THE right way to do it", I can choose whichever I see fit for the job and pipe them into an unthought of combination.
That's the part I like about the unix philosophy.
To me the GNOME usability choice were not made to suit the users, but to suit the helpdesks. Users are versatile, I dislike and I'm even worried by this computer behavior which asks the user to fits the system and not the other way around.

Re:I have to ask...

[garbletext]

As with many things gnome-related, the configuration utility is not installed by default so as not to confuse users. Advanced users who care to adjust the eye-candy will presumably know how to get the software, i.e. apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager . In this case, I think it's a wise move, since this utility is as insanely fine-grained as the old beryl configutation manager, except it has about 10 new plugins. OCD people could spend hours tweaking the window spring model alone.

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

Strangely they've added a few. The new "Appearance" applet is quite nice.

But "fortunately" screensavers remain unconfigurable. After all, Billy Jon McCann (the sole developer and rule of the Guuh-Nome screensaver universe) says that screensavers that you can adjust settings on are "inherently broken".

GNOME screensavers. Crippled for your protection since 2005.


"Please, just tell people to use KDE"

-Linus Torvalds, December 2005.

Re:I have to ask...

[slyn]

"Genuinely useful" is a bit relative, but yes, I guess that is what I was getting at.

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

remember how "snappy" Windows 95 or Mac OS Classic were?

Actually, no. I don't.

I used both back in in the day. System 7 crashed regularly and Windows 95 on a screaming "Pentium Classic" with 32MB of RAM running Internet Explorer 3 ran slower than molasses in January (just before the BSOD that is).

Re:I have to ask...

[AaronLawrence]

What is this obsession with piping between applications? Does that have any meaning at all in graphical user interfaces? Piping allows you to build a bunch of text-processing apps into something more useful, but they are fundamentally not interactive tasks; whereas GUI apps are primarily about interaction.

Re:I have to ask...

[mike_sucks]

"So yes, the KDE control center is crammed with features, but I only know and use those that I need and I have turned the desktop into a wonderful, simple and sane experience for me. A thing that I can't do with GNOME, XFCE or any Windows."

And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default. They do this not by removing random features just to spite people, but by conducting usability studies to find out what actually works and doesn't work for people then doing the former by default and fixing the latter.

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place. Now, this could be because you prefer to have double-clicking on a window's title bar start a ytalk session using a regex over the window's text, or because you prefer to rebind the enter key to double-backspace-n, which is fine - go for your life. But if that's the case you're an outlier (no offence - rejoice in your point of difference!) and you probably shouldn't be making broad judgements about the usability of desktop environments for anyone other than yourself.

-mike

Re:I have to ask...

[josephdrivein]

I fixed it for you both:

He said: usability reduces the available choices.
You said: it's called usability.

News at 11.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you're not the default, Gnome doesn't want you." Good. We're all agreed then.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

No... there are less windows yes, but they have been organised into tabs with similar settings grouped into the same window.

Re:I have to ask...

[mike_sucks]

Yes, that is _precisely_ what I said.

Seeya!

Re:I have to ask...

[the_womble]

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.

No, the default is easy to use: most Windows users can log into the guest account on my PC and use it straight away.

However, I also have the flexibility to customise it to be productive for me.

KDE is also more functional than Gnome. Genuinely useful panel applets, preview, tabbing and split window functionality in Konqueror, etc. are actually very useful.

I like the elegance of Gnome, so I have tried it several times. I find it less functional, and a lot of functionality works less well (compare opening a directory over sftp in Konqueror and Nautilus, for example).

Re:I have to ask...

[mike_sucks]

It's amazing how much genuinely useful work I get done with GNOME.

Never ceases to surprise me, given how genuinely useless it all is.

-mike

Re:I have to ask...

[chrisvk]

Hooray! Bugzilla!

"Table './bugs/longdescs' is marked as crashed and should be repaired"

Re:I have to ask...

[Rudd-O]

Piping is useful because it lets you do useful shit. If you knew what you could accomplish with piping, you wouldn't be asking.

Re:I have to ask...

[nem75]

And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default.

The parent may miss your point, but this doesn't invalidate his own. Which is that for him Gnome and Xfce fail in this attempt (I'm leaving out OSX because parent didn't comment on it). And they do for many other users as well - if this were not so, KDE would be dead.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

The big fun thing in all OS's is that things like CANCEL or STOP sometimes respond with an delay... and that's the WORST behaviour you can get to speed a system.

E.g. the scenario:

- A program crashes, but doesn't terminate itself.
- You try to quit it.
- The menu to quit the program doesn't start (i.e. task manager [windows], or activity monitor [mac]) because 'a program' is getting 100% cpu.

DUH! So some programs, like task manager should stand above everything if you ask me, because only then I can quit crashing software. (also the Dock on the mac for example thus!).

---

2nd example:

Both on windows and os-x i noticed that if you search for a file in the filesystem (be it 'search', 'spotlight' etc.), if you cancel your request it takes some time for the system to stop searching... WHY? No need to spoil that CPU/harddisk activity, i don't care about what the results are if I cancel something.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place. Now, this could be because you prefer to have double-clicking on a window's title bar start a ytalk session using a regex over the window's text, or because you prefer to rebind the enter key to double-backspace-n, which is fine - go for your life. But if that's the case you're an outlier (no offence - rejoice in your point of difference!) and you probably shouldn't be making broad judgements about the usability of desktop environments for anyone other than yourself. And you are missing the point about not all users like same things. I dont like to have simple and few most used buttons showing on my filemanager if those aren't buttons what i need to use. On Gnome and Windows (or MacOSX) i dont have those buttons what i want, but on KDE i can get them there and just remove others. I have power and control to choose what I need and what I preferr. Fact is that world is not full of one person with many copies. Every user sees desktop different ways and for very basic task, it is easy to do simple GUI but for difficult task, it's not because there are left handed, color-blinded, mathematic persons and not so mathematic persons. Users who learns fast and users who dont. Users who like to control what how they do something and users show like to be slaves to normal behavior. One single corporation cant do one best GUI... Building GUI is like marrage. Women and Man are needed to find compromise to live together. Other cant say what other can do or what cant. Same way, Microsoft cant say that you dont need 'Enter' because MS Word takes care of that or Apple cant say that you dont need Keyboard because their voice commands are pretty good for every basic task. Thats why i preferr KDE because i can tweak it fast to preferr my ways so GUI isn't on my way anyway like MacOSX or Windows Vista/XP does. I can do my task on those but it isn't 'home'. It's like someone else would come to my houme and rearrage my stuff to new order and say that it's much better when bed is top of table and freezer is upsidedown and it's door against wall..... So those who says that big corporations or usability designers knows everything better what they do, are simple wrong... every person is unique and every person has free will and own behaviors. We just need to live together...

Re:I have to ask...

[mike_sucks]

Yes, and I'm glad that he can configure KDE to work for him.

However, he seemed to also be applying this to all users, i.e. that because GNOME doesn't work for him, that it won't for all users - which is what I was taking him to task about.

-mike

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why you never add salt to a meal? Because you think that one taste fits all?

I can't speak for the grandparent, but for me, KDE provides an experience better suited to my needs than Gnome out of the box. However, I always like to have some extra buttons in the window decorations for 'stick to all desktops' and 'keep above others' and preventing windows from jumping to top when I click on a window.

Those tweaks aren't necessary for my mother and I think the default is about right for people who don't know how to setup those things. They do improve my experience considerably. I know that research shows that it takes newbies longer to find their way through the software the first time if there are many choices. The fact is that the time difference is only slight. We shouldn't let our user interfaces be artificially hampered to save new users a few seconds.

Re:I have to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha, that's truly fucking pathetic. If I gave much of a shit I'd switch to Kubuntu, but I don't.

Re:I have to ask...

[MrNemesis]

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.

By that rationelle, in my case neither KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows, OSX, BeOS, OS/2, Fluxbox or indeed any other windowing system I have ever seen has "got it right" out of the box. Every "power user" has their own little bunch of tweaks that help them work better - for instance, I find windows unusable without X-mouse from TweakUI. This doesn't mean that windows is shit - I'm perfectly happy to accept I'm not a default user.

The OP's point was that, with DE's like KDE, actually give you the OPTION to change the default behaviour in a reasonably simple manner. Yes, there's alot of buttons to press, and 99% of users will never need to bother setting up a special rule that opens all Konsole windows on virtual desktop 4, xinerama screen 2 - but for the users who DO desire that functionality it's an absolute godsend. Last time I set up a GNOME desktop for myself I couldn't find a way of doing this, but when you know what you want KDE makes it pretty simple.

What *would* be good is if both KDE and GNOME adopted "beginner/advanced" toggle buttons in their configuration dialogues. To a novice user, KDE has too many options, to a power user GNOME has too few.

Re:I have to ask...

[gowen]

But "fortunately" screensavers remain unconfigurable.

Umm. No. From the FAQ:

Why doesn't the screensaver preferences tool allow me to change the settings for the theme?

We are trying to take a different approach. A gnome-screensaver theme is not directly equivalent to the xscreensaver concept of a "hack". Each gnome-screensaver theme is a combination of a "hack" (or theme engine) and a set of options. This is quite a different design. So, perhaps, a better question is how does one create a new theme for a pre-existing theme engine? For that please see the related section in this FAQ.

So if you want fast flying toaster, you can have fast flying toasters -- just configure a screensaver to run that hack with those options.

So you can configure screensavers however you like, but you can't reconfigure screensavers on the fly -- are you really holding that up as a serious usability issue?

Re:I have to ask...

[oliderid]

And it looks to me that you are missing his point too. Currently Gnome is mainly used by Geeks (ie advanced users). They like to keep control of their installation, that is what Linux is all about until today.

But the Gnome "market department" wants to go mainstream (excellent long term target). And thus they need to "make things simple".There is a clash between their current clients and the target they've got in mind. They can't satisfy both with an unique interface IMHO. Read Geeks posting on slashdot. A lot have stated that they have migrated from Gnome to KDE. It became even "trendy" since the Linus comment.

I guess they should deal with two profiles: simple and advanced. You hide/simplify features in the UI for simple users and keep them for the advanced profiles.

Re:I have to ask...

[ultranova]

However, he seemed to also be applying this to all users, i.e. that because GNOME doesn't work for him, that it won't for all users - which is what I was taking him to task about.

He is quite correct, actually. Gnome won't work for all users, because there is at least one known user - him - for whom it does not work.

Now, if he had said that it won't work for any users, then you'd had a case, since that statement would be incorrect if there was at least one user for whom it would work. But he didn't so you don't.

Any and all - the english language equivalents to "||" and "&&". Confusing them will cause bugs in your logic ;).

Re:I have to ask...

[ultranova]

What is this obsession with piping between applications? Does that have any meaning at all in graphical user interfaces?

Yes. "Piping" is a form of interprocess communication. While the specific method of redirecting input/output/error streams may not be very useful in graphical environments, the basic idea of letting one program get input from another certainly is. Cut/Past, for example, can be considered a crude form of piping. Scripting usually works by letting the script control the target program. Etc.

Re:I have to ask...

[mike_sucks]

+1, Pedant. :P

Re:I have to ask...

[dlZ]

I switched from KDE to Gnome for the exact opposite reason. I liked the fact that KDE was so configurable, but I don't have the time to futz around with it that much anymore. I change a few minor things in Gnome right away on the other hand and I like it. A few years ago I wouldn't have touched Gnome over KDE, though.

Re:I have to ask...

[Goaway]

You're entirely right about simplicity, and the fact that most Linux users and developers don't understand this is most likely why it's not yet the Year of Linux on the Desktop.

The fact is, in a vast majority of cases, there is usually a best way to do things, which does the job for pretty much everyone. However, most programmers are too lazy to try and figure this out, and instead pick several inferior ways to do something, and force the user to pick one of them in the settings. This is not how good and usable programs are designed.

Re:I have to ask...

[mike_sucks]

"By that rationelle, in my case neither KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows, OSX, BeOS, OS/2, Fluxbox or indeed any other windowing system I have ever seen has "got it right" out of the box."

Correct. Some of them just try harder than others.

While some kinds of preferences make total sense, some do not and too many are generally a bad thing. To paraphrase a wise hacker, those extra preferences are just way for lazy developers to avoid making hard decisions.

Re:I have to ask...

[zlamma]

" The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.
How is [hard coding functionalities/stripping configuration] helping to achieve sane defaults? KDE has also been working on usability with OpenUsability. However there are always different ways of doing stuff that no study will prove any of them better, and this is where configuration is cruicial.

But if that's the case you're an outlier (no offence - rejoice in your point of difference!) and you probably shouldn't be making broad judgements about the usability of desktop environments for anyone other than yourself. Interface Nazi ;P

Re:I have to ask...

[cloakable]

A serious one? I wouldn't think so.

As an example of GNOME asshattery? Yes.
Why the hell should you have to create something that is in effect an entirely new (oh, and unconfigurable and unportable - can you use that screensaver in KDE/XFCE/etc? No. Can you change the settings of THIS screensaver? Also no.) screensaver, when, you know, you can CHANGE THE FREAKING SETTINGS on every other screensaver configuration tool I've seen? GNOME is taking the piss by calling it a configuration tool. They should rename it to a 'Screensaver selector', that way you'd know that you'll find no configuration in the tool - just some stuff to point at.

Re:I have to ask...

[Rutulian]

Huh, did you actually read through the whole thread that you linked? Here is a relevant post:

  Comment #48 from William Jon McCann (gnome-screensaver developer, points: 22)
2006-09-26 17:08 UTC [reply]

Matthew and others:

There is really no reason to be rude or to encourage forking. In the FAQ,
regarding creating or modifying themes, is says:
"There is work to be done to make this simpler. Ask how you can help."

Not a single person has ever asked how they can help.

In the FAQ entry mentioned in comment #10 I added some information about
technical issues that need to be addressed (ie. code written) before this can
even be possible.

There are also cross-desktop compatability issues to be considered.

Here are a couple of the issues:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355488
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354811

There have been various misreadings of what I have said about this issue. This
probably has something to do with the brevity of some of my replies, due to
lack of time, and I'm sorry for that. I'll try to summarize and explain a
little better:

* My view is still that any screensaver theme that *requires* configuration is
inherently broken. The key word here is requires. It means that the defaults
should work in a reasonable way that no one should *have* to change them.

* I am not denying that some people may want to change the defaults and
settings. I am saying that simply adding configurability like xscreensaver has
is not a good solution and I've listed some reasons in the FAQ. Please notice
that the original reporter asked for the "ability to configure individual
screensavers like Xscreensaver". That simply won't work. We need a new way
and that is going to take some actual work.

* I am saying that this isn't my highest priority and that if it is very
important to someone they should help out.

Jeez, these comments are pretty disheartening to someone spending years of his
own time on...

Thank you.

Re:I have to ask...

[eno2001]

I know you're trolling but before incorrect assumptions abound, let's just say the file selector in GNOME blows away any other file selector I've ever dealt with except the file selector in Mac OS X apps. I love the GNOME file selector in GNOME apps. It's so flexible and restrictive. It allow you to do absolutely anything you want within sane parameters. Instead of loading up with tons of useless junk and options it only gives you what you need. The ultimate in options: only what you need, not what you want.

Re:I have to ask...

[eno2001]

What ARE you talking about? "Insanely complex"? I was forced to move from Beryl to Compiz-fusion because of the merge and I'm REALLY missing everything about Beryl a lot. There was so much flexibility. The compiz-settings-manager is so limited. And there's so many Compiz features missing. I loved being able to rotate the desktop cube by just middle click-dragging instead of the Ctrl-Alt-Left Mouse Drag that you have to do in Compiz. I also loved the tranparent cube caps so I could rotate to the top of the cube and watch all four sides at once (it enhances productivity when you have a way to see multiple windows at a glance without needing a larger screen). I miss the 3D window plugin that popped the windows off of the cube to give everything a more polished 3D feel. There's nothing like being able to have a window wrap around the corner of the cube but be pushed out from the cube. That way you can watch events in one window while just waiting for another window to complete it's task with your peripheral vision. The transparent feature when rotating the cube was beautiful as well. Yet another way to see all your open apps at once and be stylish while doing it. Hopefully Compiz-fusion will reach the level of maturity that Beryl was at sooner than later. Otherwise, I think 3D GUIs on Linux took a huge step backwards.

Re:I have to ask...

[MrNemesis]

Correct. Some of them just try harder than others.

Like KDE, you mean? ;)

I think your entire argument seems to boil down to GNOME being better because it's default out-of-the-box is closest to what you see as the most "efficient" configuration. This is different strokes for different folks, because I could disagree with you until the cows come home about who has the best opinion on the matter.

But to say that KDE is less usable because it has more twiddly options and hance takes longer for Mr. Discerning User to set up (which seemed to me to the crux of your argument) is a false dichotomy. One doesn't neccesarily exclude the other.

Re:I have to ask...

[ch0ad]

I guess they should deal with two profiles: simple and advanced. You hide/simplify features in the UI for simple users and keep them for the advanced profiles. i think this is actually a very astute observation. you can quite easily classify computer users in to 2 broad groups: those that want to use their computer as a tool for reading web/mail or wordprocessing; and those that want to get the most out of their computer, making it behave exactly as they'd wish.

for the former users, too many options are a bad thing. for the latter, there is no such thing as too many options. it would be a tremendous step in the right direction (and trivially easy to implement) if there was simply an option to turn on/off "advanced mode" in gnome/kde/any other wm/de.

getting rid of multiple virtual desktops by default in "simple mode" would be a good start. they confuse the hell out of my mum (she barely gets the window metaphor, let alone the window list and alt tab, let alone multiple workspaces)

Re:I have to ask...

[Scaba]

Never underestimate the power and speed of molasses in January.

Re:I have to ask...

[segedunum]

Umm. No.

Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm, yes. The Gnome mental disease of denial over these things is just plain ridiculous.

So if you want fast flying toaster, you can have fast flying toasters -- just configure a screensaver to run that hack with those options.

So Gnome, as-is, won't allow me to configure screensavers? I believe that was the actual point.

So you can configure screensavers however you like, but you can't reconfigure screensavers on the fly

Are you fucking kidding me sweetheart? "Gnome screensavers are not configurable for totally unspecified usability reasons, but they are actually configurable if you do it yourself!"

Re:I have to ask...

[segedunum]

And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default.

To attempt to be usable, you have to identify who you are being usable for and identify those users and the people who actually use your desktop, and then identify what they need and how to go about doing it.

Saying that you are doing things and not adding features for the sake of usability, does not make you usable. Evidently, from Gnome's Bugzilla, there are plenty of people who find it less than usable.

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.

I went through KDE's first-run wizard once, and then never configured anything fundamental again. If I want to make my life easier every now and again, the power to do certain things is there.

But if that's the case you're an outlier (no offence - rejoice in your point of difference!)

And here we see a perfect example of Gnome's new found disease. Get this. Gnome is a Unix/Linux desktop, and it is used by an awful lot more people who lean towards wanting it to do traditional Unix desktop kinds of things (they expect their middle mouse button to actually do something). The basic, kiddy users that the Gnome developers seem to think exist and actually use their desktop (I've never seen these users defined anywhere) are simply few and far between.

Where's the sense in using a Unix desktop when it doesn't do the traditional kinds of things that Unix desktops have always done, and where it is even less functional and has less options than Windows or OS X and where it is an inferior OS X knock-off? I don't see that being useful, or usable.

Re:I have to ask...

[segedunum]

While some kinds of preferences make total sense, some do not and too many are generally a bad thing. To paraphrase a wise hacker, those extra preferences are just way for lazy developers to avoid making hard decisions.

Cutting preferences is also an excuse for lazy developers who don't have a development platform underneath them to stop putting features in that every other desktop environment has, in the name of usability ;-).

Every desktop environment I have seen can configure screensavers. Every desktop I have seen gives you a simple option to run an application as another user without having to configure anything. I see no reason at all why those things should be cut, and judging from Gnome's Bugzilla, neither do many users.

Re:I have to ask...

[Ant P.]

That's funny, all of those minus the 3D windows are in my version of compiz-fusion.

Re:I have to ask...

[mike_sucks]

Like KDE, you mean? ;) Heh. Nah, that other Free desktop environment. Oh, and MacOSX. :P

I think your entire argument seems to boil down to GNOME being better because it's default out-of-the-box is closest to what you see as the most "efficient" configuration. No, not at all. I'm saying it's better because the developers have put more effort into working out what really is the best behaviour, done that by default and provided prefs for only stuff that is really important.

I'm not saying that they have done a perfect job, but I will suggest that they have done a better job of it in GNOME v2.x than the KDE developers did in KDE v3.x. It will be interesting to see what KDE 4 is like, from what I have heard it's a step in the same direction as GNOME.

-mike

Re:I have to ask...

[pherthyl]

No one is saying Gnome is useless, but an amazing number of people also get a lot of work done with Windows, and DOS before that. That says nothing about how hard it is to accomplish certain tasks. Any action is possible in any operating system, but the amount of work required for it can vary.

Re:I have to ask...

[pherthyl]

They do this not by removing random features just to spite people, but by conducting usability studies to find out what actually works and doesn't work for people then doing the former by default and fixing the latter.

Well, that's partially true. A lot of UI decisions in Gnome are made on hunches and the developers "common sense", not usability tests. That's fine, it's certainly not feasible to test every little thing, but it also means that the interface is driven a lot on anecdotal experience. "My mom was confused by this", "no-one I know has ever needed this feature" etc.

Gnome is going the route of OS X. To make it simple so that most people can understand it from the get go. That's fine, for most people, but there will always be a certain percentage that feel limited by an environment like that. A UI that is easy to learn is not always the most efficient way to work once you've learned it. Every time I try Gnome again, I love the feel of it. It feels solid, and clean. But as soon as I get over the warm fuzzies and try do to work, I miss all the features of KDE that make me more productive. Some of those features required learning, some of them required fiddling with settings, but in the end they help me out. I realize that most people will never bother to look around enough to see those features, so using KDE gives them no advantage.

Re:I have to ask...

[fast penguin]

You might want to know that Konqueror was replaced by Dolphin, which feels basically like a Nautilus port. And KDE developers stated they wanted to cut on complexity (sounds like Gnome-speak).

Re:I have to ask...

[pherthyl]

No, not at all. I'm saying it's better because the developers have put more effort into working out what really is the best behaviour, done that by default and provided prefs for only stuff that is really important.

Ah, but there's the rub. What is "really important"? You might not think that a feature to make any window always on top is important, or to change the button order on the titlebar, but I certainly do (and for very good usability reasons I might add). The problem is that the people determining what is "really important" are the developers, and most of their decisions are based on their own experience, and not on any hard and fast usability rule (which, aside from maybe Fitt's Law, don't exist by the way).

Yes, Gnome defaults are easier to understand for just about everyone, and that is something that KDE has been notoriously bad at, but the point here is that a desktop environment needs to allow room for users to grow and become more efficient. That is something I don't see in Gnome. Doing something the developers hadn't thought of is very difficult, because the options are not there.

Re:I have to ask...

[pherthyl]

For every feature you can find a set of people that are confused by it, and another set that love/depend on it. Removing said feature because of the first group is the wrong way to go, because if you look at all the features of a modern desktop, it is quite likely that most of your users are in the first group of some feature or other.

Of course, adding features willy nilly is not ideal either, but determining which ones to add is very difficult. But you have to listen to your users and see how large that second group is.

Re:I have to ask...

[tjwhaynes]

for the former users, too many options are a bad thing. for the latter, there is no such thing as too many options. it would be a tremendous step in the right direction (and trivially easy to implement) if there was simply an option to turn on/off "advanced mode" in gnome/kde/any other wm/de.

There is an equivalent to advanced mode for GNOME. It's called GConf and it allows access to all sorts of bells and whistles that aren't visible in the main Control Center. All sorts of tricks are hidden in there, from lists of screensavers for GNOME screensaver to run to custom keybindings running scripts. The only extra I use for advanced window management is Devil's Pie which matches windows and performs window modifications based on a LISP configuration file. If that isn't hard core enough for you, you'll have to rewrite GConf in ML.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:I have to ask...

[the_womble]

You might want to know that Konqueror was replaced by Dolphin

Konqueror remains available, and can be used as the file manager if you prefer it. I intend to try Dolphin once I move to KDE4, and see which I prefer. I will probably stick with Konq because being able to see previews in a Konq tab reduces the number of windows I need to open.

which feels basically like a Nautilus port. And KDE developers stated they wanted to cut on complexity (sounds like Gnome-speak).

I love the simplicity of Gnome. If KDE is going to copy that, while keeping the functionality I want (everything from KIO slaves to Klipper to Katapult to the moon phase applet - yes, the latter does matter), that is exactly what I want.

Re:I have to ask...

[gbalaji]

I feel installing some KDE apps on a GNOME desktop gives me the best of both worlds. Probably its just me but I find KDE too buggy, messy and simply unusable! But I like many of the apps. In other words, I'm not ready to live in the garage simply b'cos I often come there to get some stuff done! I prefer the nice living room provided by GNOME and use the KDE garage whenever necessary!

Re:I have to ask...

[mickwd]

"Simplicity is a beautiful thing. One of the core fundamentals of Unix is that an application does a single job, does it well, and provides output such that it can easily be piped into another application."

Sure, but many commands like "ls", "grep", "ps", etc have a huge number of options which control how and what they do, and make them more flexible and useful.

Re:I have to ask...

[EsbenMoseHansen]

let's just say the file selector in GNOME blows away any other file selector I've ever dealt with except the file selector in Mac OS X apps. I love the GNOME file selector in GNOME apps. It's so flexible and restrictive.

My bolding. Just reinforces my point. If you want power, configurability, several ways to do stuff, that sort of thing go for KDE. If you like minimalism, get-the-hell-out-of-my-way, do-your-job-and-nothing else sort thing, go for GNOME. I never understood the bad blood between KDE and GNOME. They both do what they do nicely, and noone forces you to use the other camps desktop. Yes, that means you probably have to load both kdelibs and gtk*, but hey, we are quickly moving to 4Gb RAM. Those libs are not *that* big.

So let's not fight. Instead, continue the great work done on integration. E.g, I hear that a way to get the proper file selector for either desktop will soon be available, which means that I get to skip that fileselector from GNOME. Which is, to my way of working, the second worst file selector I have seen, only topped by the MAC OS one :p

Re:I have to ask...

[Warped_Dragon]

What *would* be good is if both KDE and GNOME adopted "beginner/advanced" toggle buttons in their configuration dialogues. To a novice user, KDE has too many options, to a power user GNOME has too few. Hardly. GNOME can be greatly customized, it simply requires that one dig into configuration files that, in general, are not accessible from any graphical-based configuration window. And isn't -that- the true definition of "power-user"?

Re:I have to ask...

[imr]

Yes, but it's not exactly true:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/02/konqueror-not-vanishing-news-at-11.html
It's not replacing it, it's replacing it as the default

As I said I have nothing against the defaults that were chosen by GNOME.
It's just that many users don't like them and those users need to have a way to be able to find another look and feel to their desktop or will need to change their desktop.
So what's true for GNOME would be true to KDE if KDE made the same mistake or preventing the users to change their look and feel.

Re:I have to ask...

[imr]

What *would* be good is if both KDE and GNOME adopted "beginner/advanced" toggle buttons in their configuration dialogues. To a novice user, KDE has too many options, to a power user GNOME has too few.
Exactly my opinion on this too.
What KDE failed was to give revision and improvment to his KDE Control Center.

And distributions failed in that aspect too, because it is possible to tweak and improve every aspect of KDE. (It would even possible to have KDE look and feel like GNOME and prevent to have it further tweaked through kiosk, if one would want to do that.) My personnal aspect of konqueror is in fact much more simpler and leaner than firefox or epiphany default. I tweaked it years ago and havent touched it back since.
SO distro could have improved the control center that way.

But it would take any distro some actual courage to do that since they would probably get flamed to death for doing it. Red Hat tried some years ago. (granted, the main grip was about the about box and author courtesy but still...)
So maybe we also failed as users, we got in the way of such changes instead of helping them to happen.

Re:I have to ask...

[garbletext]

I'm not sure what you mean. Each and every one of the plugins from beryl are in compiz-fusion, since it's the direct descendant of beryl merged with compiz. Looking through the options (I'm using compiz-fusion-plugins-extra 0.5.2+git20070917-0ubuntu1), I found and enabled one for each and every one of the issues you mentioned. Most of the options were in the exact same place I remember them being in beryl. Perhaps you don't have all the proper packages installed? Anyway, saying that "3d GUIs on linux took a huge step backwards" is unwarranted; you can always just use the version of beryl that you like. Regardless, compiz-fusion is a superset of the old beryl, I have only found enhancements so far, from what I can tell they didn't remove anything.

Re:I have to ask...

[imr]

HGNOME can be greatly customized, it simply requires that one dig into configuration files that, in general, are not accessible from any graphical-based configuration window. And isn't -that- the true definition of "power-user"?
No, when you inflict that to others while you could provide a simpler way (an interface) to do it, that is the definition of sadism.
And when you base your decision on the love of simplicity, you add insult to injury.

Re:I have to ask...

[imr]

And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default. They do this not by removing random features just to spite people, but by conducting usability studies to find out what actually works and doesn't work for people then doing the former by default and fixing the latter.
And that's where you missed the point.
KDE did exactly that by copying the windows default as its default. It is an envirronment which has seen many usability studies and it is working for the most people. Wether we like it or not, wether we think it is the best default or not.

Second, you may correct me on this, but I seem to recall the usabilty tests you're talking about were founded and conducted by sun for its desktop offering and were made with helpdesk and corporate users in mind. Not the front end home user.
Now, I could save me the time to think and write about it and decide that there is only one sort of users, and that his habits and ways don't change according to the envirronment he is using his computer in.
Unfortunatly, that is not true.

My point was not to attack the GNOME defaults and you seem to have oriented your answer in that direction, but that the default that were chosen are not the best in all situation, that it's not possible to find a perfect default no matter how many usability studies you make bacause there ar emany users with different mindset and many envirronment which add to the complexity of the situation, and that there is a point where providing a way to change those defaults is obligatory. (I can use the example of the YES NO CANCEL button for that).

So yes, the KDE control center is not a success because that is what made me chase around some options, but the fact that they can be changed is a success. In fact it can even be changed to the point that if you decide that GNOME's default is the best, you can do it, and if you decide that users must not be able to change them, you can do it too through kiosk which is the way to lock a corporate desktop if you need or feel to.

You see, what you don't get is that it's front end users who pass their time switching and tweaking their desktops, not power users. This simple fact that you elude this fact shows that either you are the one that shouldnt be making broad judgements about the usability of desktop environments for anyone other than himself, or that many we are not talking about the same front end users, which I think it's the case since you were always referring to the productivity you have with your desktop.
I completly understand GNOME choices in a corporate envirronment from a helpdesk point of view. But I was talking from a user perspective, at home.

Re:I have to ask...

[tehcyder]

you now have the option to choose between 2 lovely colorschemes

No brown then?

Re:I have to ask...

[gowen]

So Gnome, as-is, won't allow me to configure screensavers?

Can you have your screensaver running with whatever options you like? Yes.

What definition of "configure" are you using?

Re:I have to ask...

[eno2001]

Ahhh... I'm missing the extras package. No wonder it seems so spare. I'll have to build it over the weekend (Gentoo here).

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

It's back now. :)

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

There is a lot I still like about GNOME. But there is even more that I like about KDE.

I use both.

So then...

That raises a question....

Am I using Kubuntu with GNOME or Ubuntu with KDE?

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

....are you really holding that up as a serious usability issue?

.

Yes.

GNOME supposedly bends over backwards to make itself simple enough that Grandma should be able to use it.

Hacking configuration files is by no means simple.

Before Billy Jon came along, screen savers in GNOME worked. Period.

Why "fix" something that wsan't broken? Billy's "fix" in fact broke it.

If GNOME wants to be [new] user-friendly, then they need to be consistant with that approach.

Windows and MacOS have had configurable screen savers for years (if not from day one).

Xfce has them. KDE has them (and has since day one). Why? Because it's what people are accustomed to. They are cool. They are fun.

Are they "serious"? Of course not.

Is the breakage a usabiliy issue? Well, it certainly is with the new users GNOME stives to aquire (as well as a lot of us old timers as well).

Hacking a screensaver to get it to work like it should is for geeks. GNOME doesn't "market" itself to geeks (anymore).

P.S. Read through the comments in the prviously mentioned bug. It is indeed a "usability" issue.

Re:I have to ask...

[gowen]

So you're suggesting that your "Grandma" gives a flying fug as to what speed her screensaver toasters move at?

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

What definition of "configure" are you using?

I'm using the one that applies to (among others):

MacOS System 7
MacOS System 8
Mac OS 9
Mac OS X
Windows 3.1
Windows NT 3.5
Windows 95
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 98
Windows 98SE
Windows Me
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
KDE
Xfce
& Guhh-nome [pre 2.15].

You know...

Go into a control panel/center/applet, make a few mouse clicks, move some sliders around and boom! It's done.

No "hacking" required.

Compared to the rest of what GNOME is doing, this screen saver thing is a giant step backwards.

Billy Jon needs to be replaced. Now if we could just find his boss....

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

Probably not.

How about this scenario.:

John Q. Gnuboy's new girlfriend who's been a Mac lover for years.

Johnny is trying to woo her into the world of "Free Software" and away from from "evil proprietary operating systems"

And since the FLOSS masses seem to think that GNOME is the most "Mac-like" FLOSS desktop out there, he suggests she try Ubuntu (even more "user friendly" - compared to say Gentoo for instance).

She gives it a shot and does find it easy to use (save for that annoying DVD thing, but GNOME/Ubuntu have no control over that).

So then she decides to look at the screen savers. She's always found them fun and runs them in OS X regularly.

She finds one in GNOME that she likes but (like most ordinary mortals) wants to change some of it's settings (you know, just like she did in Mac OS X).

She takes a look at the screen saver applet and can't seem to find the button to click to configure the screen saver she otherwise likes...

This is "usability"?

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

Huh, did you actually read through the whole thread that you linked?

Did I read through it?

Yes, did you? ;)

Did you see how many comments "angrykeyboarder" made throughout it.

I'd have made more, but they didn't like what I said. It got been banned from GNOME Bugzilla (well, as far as that email address was concerned anyway ;>).

Now, in regard to your quote:

So what?

Billy Jon's defense does not change the fact that for ordinary users (the very ones GNOME wants to attract), screen savers are now broken.

I've used GNOME for years. I don't care what he says. They were not broken and worked just fine till he "fixed" them.

And by the looks of the comments in that thread (and in this one) I'm hardly alone in this opinion...

Re:I have to ask...

[Rutulian]

Well, my point was that he isn't ignoring the problems with gnome-screensaver as everybody seems to be claiming. He acknowledges that there are things that need to be fixed, but since there are a lot of complainers and not a lot of helpers, progress is slow.

As far as screensavers not being broken...Gnome never had a screensaver utility of its own. Xscreensaver was shipped with X11. It was never bundled with Gnome, but a lot of distributions installed it by default. You can still download and install it if you want to use it, until you feel the official gnome-screensaver is "usable" enough for you.

Re:I have to ask...

[angrykeyboarder]

Billy Jon is selectively ignoring problems. The problem in the bug we're talking about here will be ignored unless somebody else fixes what he, in essence, broke.

The fact that somebody should feel the need to do that is absurd. Why should sombody else clean up his "mess".

And and as far as nobdy helping, you may find this shocking, but the vast majority of us "users" are just that... USERS.

Heck, I've been a Linux user (on and off) since 1999 and it wasn't till 2004 that I learned "./configure && make && make install".

But I'm compling code that somebody else wrote. Writing code is beyond the scope of my knowledge. And the fact is most people have no interest in comping from code let alone writing it. So why should they be expected to do so?

I assumed for a long time that XScreensaver was not part of X (the GUI anyway) as it's a GTK2 app and the natiive X apps (i.e. the ones that come with X.org itself) are not.

And as I mentioned in my linked blog post, I did indeed remove gnome-screensaver and install xscreensaver. The problem is, I'm tech-savvy enough to do that. The "average" user GNOME strives for is not.

Perhaps you've misunderstood my main point here. The problem isn't so much for me as it is for GNOME in general. I know a workaround. But the point is, there should not have to be a workaround, period.

Up next: GNOME finds context menus to be "broken" and eliminates them. But if you want them, you can get them via "hacks".

Dons the asbestos suit....

[Rick Zeman]

Is it as good as KDE yet?

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[bobdickgus]

In my opinion no, but i am more used to kde so really it's all just personal preference.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I was "used to" Gnome for years, until one day I tried KDE, so I would say it just comes down to which one is better ;)

But knowing the Gnome philosophy, I find it hard to believe it would be much different from the previous version, at least not in the "good way" KDE users want.

And for the record, I've never found the many options of KDE distracting or hard to configure. But then again, I _want_ the options.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Zonk (troll)]

IMHO, it surpassed it with 2.14. At least that's when I switched from KDE (after using it since '99 and was very anti-Gnome). At this point I don't want to go back to KDE. Gnome makes so much more sense as everything is organized more logically, the button/control overload is gone, the dialogs are great (ie, the file dialog, I love having my network and usb drives listed by name on the side instead of having to click on media or browse down to /media). That and Clearlooks is beautiful and looks so much nicer than any theme I've been able to find for KDE (don't say Klearlook, those buttons are freakishly large, select boxes are tiny, and everything else is way out of proportion, polyester (with tweaking) is the only one that doesn't make my eyes hurt).

Now if only Gnome had a browser that's not Mozilla-based (Epiphany counts as Mozilla based) and actually follows the desktop settings and looks and feels native...

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[FoolsGold]

Is it as good as KDE yet?

What, in terms of how often KDE crashes? Nope, GNOME hasn't reached that level yet, which is why I use GNOME for stability and KDE for looks. :)

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Tribbin]

See for yourself.

The question should more be like; have I turned into a Gnome user?

I always try to love KDE when I hear something about it from Linus; but it's just not for me.

For the user perspective Gnome *could* be a godsent compared to KDE so from that view I have to say it surpassed KDE in some points for some users.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Rick Zeman]

See for yourself.

And get rid of the Aqua on my Mac? Heathen!

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[FoolsGold]

Wow. I get moded troll for an opinion that's commonly displayed in the Ubuntu forums. It's well known KDE crashes far more than GNOME, people have expressed this as such. What fucked up community are you a part of who can't take a little criticism?

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[mgkimsal2]

Serious question here, since you love the file dialog so much...

How can you get a gnome file dialog to show the file created date *and* time?

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Slashcrap]

Wow. I get moded troll for an opinion that's commonly displayed in the Ubuntu forums. It's well known KDE crashes far more than GNOME, people have expressed this as such. What fucked up community are you a part of who can't take a little criticism?

I may be biased since I've been using KDE for years and have never known it to crash, but I have to ask - what proportion of Ubuntu users would you trust to correctly differentiate between a KDE crash, an X Server crash or a kernel panic/Oops? Also, if you're putting forward Ubuntu as the gold standard of stable packaging and quality control then your opinions may not be treated with the respect you may think they deserve.

If you can find similar opinions amongst users of Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Suse or any of the BSDs, do come back and let us know.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Randle_Revar]

Please don't point to GTK-Webkit on SF, that is an abandoned fork/port. GTK support (and QT support) are now part of the main Webkit project.

I am not a dev, but I would think that there will at least be an option to use Webkit with Epiphany by Gnome 2.22. Failing that, I think it would be in by 2.24.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Anonymous Coward]

What, in terms of how often KDE crashes? Nope, GNOME hasn't reached that level yet, which is why I use GNOME for stability and KDE for looks. :) Hmm. How long have you been blind?

If you're not, please show me one theme that doesn't look like ass.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hackish, but it was already possible.

http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Hucko]

I keep hearing vague innuendos about KDE but the closest anyone has been able to point the 'faults' of it are the ok and cancel buttons are the 'wrong' way around.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Anonymous Coward]

The file dialog is the biggest reason I hate gnome, with the second biggest being Nautilus, which is little more than a Windows Explorer clone. If the gnome team can discover any new way to hide power and flexibility from users, they implement it.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Randle_Revar]

You are right of course, and I actually knew about that, but didn't mention it since you have to build it yourself. I was talking about just choosing Epiphany-Webkit in the package manager, or even having it be the default.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[aichpvee]

Those are definitely a good pair for second and third. But I think the top spot has got to go to miguel de icaza. I can't think of ANY better reason to hate gnome.

If you're reading this miguel, have you heard that microsoft is porting windows to c#? Get going on that kernel fork, junior!

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[westyvw]

I just cant see it, I use Gnome on the Laptop, and KDE on my desktop, and Gnome is... well... weak. It takes longer to load, doesnt do hardly a damn thing compared to the interactiveness of KDE apps, or the right click context menus, or fish, and so on, that it drives me nuts. It is a bit more organized, possibly more stable (I run unstable repo's so I cant really compare, but I would say that Gnome does seem to work). Appears nice looking, but in the details its sorely lacking and doesnt tell me a damn thing about files, dates, metadata, and so on. In the end Gnome is like OLPC and thats why its on the laptop. When I have work to do, KDE has the tools (and tricks) to get the job done.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[mike_sucks]

You can't (AFAIK).

What you can do is locate the file in nautilus (with creation times down to, gasp, seconds) and drag it into the file chooser. Or drag it into the application directly, avoiding the file chooser altogether. Or find it in a terminal and do "gnome-open filename" and avoid all of it.

Serious question here: How often does it actually matter? How often can't you use reasonable cues like the file name, or by noticing that when sorting it by date the ordering implicitly tells you?

-mike

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[TheDugong]

"I get moded troll for an opinion that's commonly displayed in the Ubuntu forums." Yes you do. Nowadays Ubuntu forums seems to be full of clueless noobs (no offense meant, I was one once as well) who are unable to search on the same 10 questions which seem to be asked 1000 times a day. I wouldn't be surprised if their opinion of KDE was a result of trying to install beryl, using autofuckits^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^Cautomatix to install nvidia drivers, some random .deb from some random persons blog while blaming linux for their noobness!!! That feels better.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Rudd-O]

X Server crash: back to logon screen, or sometimes the mouse refuses to work.
Desktop environment application crash: crippled desktop, other stuff still works.
Linux Kernel crash: dead mouse pointer, dead numlock key, sometimes keyboard lights blink.

I've had them all. Fortunately not with my new machine.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess... Are you affected by one or more of the following things?

• You are not using GNOME 2.20 yet, but an older version such as 2.18 or 2.16.
• You are using openSuse or Novell Linux (and their bloated, non-standard version of GNOME). Or maybe Mandriva, although they are trying to get better.
• You are not using the default Clearlooks theme, but you picked a non-standard and buggy theme engine (such as the one that tries to mimic Qt).

If one of the above statements is true, please consider fixing that problem before judging how GNOME 2.20 performs.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Luke Dawson]

I've used each of those Linux distros (obviously not counting the BSDs) on various hardware configurations, and I've experienced KDE crashes at least once every single one - be it compiled by hand, or pre-packaged. With that said, GNOME wasn't exactly better in that department, either. That's not to say that KDE frequently crashes, but if you've used KDE for years and not once experienced a crash, then I'd say you're either mistaken, or bending the truth somewhat. Just playing devil's advocate here :)

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Whiteox]

Ummm... You need time stamps especially when you need to know which file is newest: eg ftping pages to a website that you've already loaded a few minutes ago cause you made a small edit on 3 pages and have to reload them etc etc etc.
Timestamps - Good!
No timestamps - BAD.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[mike_sucks]

Sorry, let me clarify what I meant when I said "when sorting it by date the ordering implicitly tells you".

What I meant was: when you sort the files by last modified date, the order in which they then appear in the file list actually tells you which files have been modified most recently, relative to each other, regardless of the fact that the date is printed as "Today" (or whenever).

For example, lets say you have two files, "bb" - modified 1 minute ago and "aa" - modified two minutes ago. In the file chooser, the last modified column tells you they were last modified "Today" (this is much more usable than printing the date and time because it tells you instantly when it was actually modified - you avoid the higher cognitive load and potential for error in having to parse the date, remember what day it is today and then doing the comparison). If you want to find out which was modified more recently than the other, click the "Last modified" column header to sort based on the last modified date/time of the files rather than sorting them based on the file name - "bb" will appear at the top instead of "aa". Now, to tell which files were modified most recently, just choose the ones at the top. Amazing!

This assumes of course you're using an program that doesn't automatically do this for you (you're kidding, right?) or that you're not using Nautilus (which, as I already mentioned in the GP post) /does/ show full timestamps.

-mike

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Whiteox]

Thank you for your very lucid explanation, for which you deserve a reply.

Although I run an Ubuntu box, I haven't as yet found a good enough wysiwyg page editor that can encapsulate the variety of websites I maintain. Consequently as almost all of them are inherited (I didn't write them, I just alter them), it becomes a pain to edit a site created by Dreamweaver in Front Page - vice versa - or whatever.
So I am almost forced in using the app to modify a page (or set thereof), save it, open up an ftp app, logon. Now the fun begins. I've got to check the timestamps (for logs) on the server, check the page timestamps, check to see if my page upload really uploaded by checking the timestamps, (as some ftp apps don't automatically refresh the local file list, it won't update the remote server as it thinks that the file date/timestamp is the same for both local and remote files) and then test the site. Any minor edit goes through the same process (often only minutes apart from the last upload) and as I'm working in 2 windows, one representing the files on my HD and the other representing the files on a remote server, ranking by newest to oldest would stir up the file list on one or the other and so I'll have to search file 'names' for comparison rather than leave the rank on file names alone and checking the date/time on the last uploaded version. Phew!

Now the ftp app will show timestamps anyway. But if I have to work with a GUI that doesn't do this (for convenience?), then it's just another minuscule hurdle. I can always get up a property sheet in Ubuntu for the file, but not listing a timestamp in a dir would be a pain.

So I suppose that what I'm waiting for is a good, quick page editor and a desktop that can handle timestamps.
Mind you, I've not noticed that the Gnome desktop on my Ubuntu doesn't provide me with timestamps as all of the apps that I have run on it show it internally anyway.

Power Management?

[JohnstonDJ]

Gnome 2.20 has better power management? I never thought that was the job of the desktop environment. I thought it was just to supply some form of UI for the user. I understand that GNOME would have to give some details, to either the kernel, or some module about user activity, and the like but wouldn't think the the desktop environment just dealt with power management itself. Can someone clue me into how this works?

Re:Power Management?

[Jeffrey Baker]

All previous GNOME releases had a problem where the volume control would wake up every 100ms to poll the mixer settings, which prevented the CPU from entering and maintaining deep sleep states. The new volume control does not do that, which may be good for a few watts at the outlet. Other applications have undergone a similar treatment.

Re:Power Management?

[drgonzo59]

As you said, the job of the desktop environment is to

Supply some form of UI for the user. I understand that GNOME would have to give some details, to either the kernel, or some module about user activity,

and that's exactly what it does. It lets the user control the power management features better. There is a nice power history graph too...

Re:Power Management?

[aerthling]

I know. GNOME is power hungry. It wants to be in charge (at least, it does on Ubuntu). Network settings, power settings, and now it wants your graphics hardware settings too. This is good in that it's grandma-friendly, but it's also kinda frustrating having to wrest control of my hardware away from the GUI.

Re:Power Management?

[orra]

As I understand it, GNOME Power Manger runs a DBUS service. This can be used by clients to inhibit sleep. This is very useful; it means when you're watching a movie in Totem the screensaver won't cut it in, and nor will your monitor turn off, merely because you haven't touched the mouse during the last 5 minutes of intensive movie watching. So I'd say there are good reasons for your desktop environment controlling power management.

Re:Power Management?

[JohnstonDJ]

But that's should just be Gnome telling the kernel to temporarily turn off power management well a certain application is doing a certain task wouldn't it. Reading through the comments, that's how I've picked up it works, (and how I assumed), is GNOME talks to the kernel, to tell it when to use and when not to use power management. But it isn't controlled by GNOME, GNOME just gives the kernel some parameters to use power management by.

Re:Power Management?

[Ajehals]

So Gnome lets the user manage how the power related features work? Sounds like power management to me.

I know what you mean and I know the statement could be said to mean either, but if we are talking about a DE I would always assume that we are talking about a power management *interface* rather than anything that is taking direct control of the hardware.

I didn't RTFA, nor do I use Gnome so I could be wrong...

Re:power management?

[nategoose]

I'd guess that it has probably been made smart about not doing unnecessary things while in a power saving mode. Things like animations or notifications when trying to save power. Things that would require the cpu to wake up.

Re:power management?

[cortana]

Provide policy as determined by the user's preferences (e.g., sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity).

Re:power management?

[Constantine XVI]

Gnome makes sure the apps aren't squandering resources and making the computer work more than it has to, sucking less power.

Re:Power Management?

[Tribbin]

If you have parts of the DE ask resources from time to time - "Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes?" - then it has to do with that.

The sound volume management is part of the DE, right?

Re:power management?

[Tribbin]

You try to sleep and then ...

Gnome mixer asks: "Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes?"

It would distrub me; as it would disturb your laptop.

Like somebody sleeping next to you repetitively asking: "Are you already asleep?".

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=302979&cid=20675217

Re:Power Management?

[larry bagina]

I wish my girlfriend had an option to wake up and poll my dick every 100 seconds :-)

Re:Power Management?

[Nimey]

You just need to program your robotic girlfriend, then.

Re:power management?

[simonv]

But according to Data, 680 milliseconds is an eternity.

Re:power management?

[aichpvee]

Gnome makes sure the apps aren't squandering resources and making the computer work more than it has to, sucking less power.

If it actually does that it is very likely the only instance where one can realistically use "gnome" and "sucking less" in the same sentence.

Re:Power Management?

[wirelessbuzzers]

On my laptop, the GNOME screen dimmer (widget+hotkey) stuff is pretty fucked up. It was almost unusable a month ago, but it's been improving steadily. Hopefully will be much better in 2.20 final.

And yes, the front end of screen dimming is the DE's problem.

Re:Power Management?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind sir,

We finally managed to make it to the end of your comment, and (forgive me for saying this) we can hear the English language weeping. Your spelling and grammar choices would keep an entire team of linguistics expert perplexed for months, if not years. Eventually they would determine that either English is not your first language, and forgive you, or English *is* your first language, and have you executed for the good of mankind. We hope it's the former.

Love,
The people whom you made cry with your post

Re:Power Management?

[weighn]

I wish my girlfriend had an option to wake up and poll my dick every 100 seconds :-) 100ms = 100 milliseconds. You know "milli"? It's the prefix for the unit of measure your girlfriend uses when describing your dick to her friends.

Re:Power Management?

[Anonymous Coward]

an entire team of linguistics expert

'nuff said

Re:Power Management?

[CortoMaltese]

So I'd say there are good reasons for your desktop environment controlling power management. Definitely. I'll bet GNOME developers have read this comic.

Re:Power Management?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL! That's such a stupid fucking bug! It took them this long to fix that? HAHAHAHHAHAHA and OSS is supposed to be awesome.... stupid stupid stupid.

Re:power management?

[SCHecklerX]

Well, then the summary is mis-worded. That's not gnome doing power management, it's just re-writing the apps to cooperate with power management.

Re:Power Management?

[ArAgost]

milliparsecs?

Re:Power Management?

[Anonymous Coward]

One millikilometer? ;)

Arr!

[ackthpt]

frist ps0t?? natalie pr0tman with hot gnomes etc etc etc? No really, I love GNOME, and Ubuntu, and I'm really going to love GNOME 2.20 in next month's Ubuntu!

It be an enhanced GNOME. Didn't ye get the email?

Enahnce your GNOME, stay up longer, get better performance from your GNOME, have great timing and more control over your power! contact XXXXX@yahoo.co.uk.

scupper me, all we were t'were pirates!

Re:Arr!

[Anonymous Coward]

The mods see to have lost their sense of humour, has anyone seen it?

Funny by the way.

Re:Arr!

[tom17]

I think the rockers stole it.

power management?

[SCHecklerX]

other than an interface for configuration, what does gnome have to do with linux power management?

In related news

[Anonymous Coward]

A worldwide shortage of underpants has begun.
While Miguel de Icaza wasn't very specific about the improvements in the new version, Novell stockholders are anticipating record profits.

Oh, great

[MT628496]

I just finished compiling 2.18

Re:Oh, great

[Ajehals]

Gentoo or LFS user?

Re:Oh, great

[cortana]

It took you six months? :)

Re:Oh, great

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's time to compile all the other 500 upgraded components waiting for you in portage by now anyway, so you probably won't notice the extra time the new Gnome adds to that.

Re:Oh, great

[Tribbin]

Aren't you glad you can use 2.18 while compiling this version for the next six months?

Re:Oh, great

[MT628496]

Gentoo. Considering it seems to take about 6 months before things move from ~x86 into x86, I'm only exaggerating by a few months.

Re:Oh, great

[Ajehals]

I'm on Debian stable. No compiling and my world is... stable. If a little behind the cutting edge...

Re:Oh, great

[Anonymous Coward]

i compiled it on my PDA and the battery went dead coupla times.

tomboy

[KiloByte]

improvements [...] note-taking application Tomboy. I hope these improvements mean Tomboy has been taken out. Right, please?

Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand. It's the only part of Gnome proper which uses mono -- so why do they bother shipping it?

Of course, asking whether major annoyances like new windows opening on whatever workspace you're currently on instead of the one they were started have been fixed is kind of pointless...

Re:tomboy

[Jeffrey Baker]

I think you answered your own question. They insist on shipping Tomboy so they can have a reason to ship mono. Without Tomboy, and without Beagle, the search tool thousands of times more idiotic than Tracker, there would be no reason for anybody to install mono.

Re:tomboy

[OmegaBlac]

I hope these improvements mean Tomboy has been taken out. Right, please?

You could always remove it yourself. It is just an applet that can be removed/added easily to the toolbar.

Re:tomboy

[Tribbin]

I wanted to have a smart-ass reply on your message about you not being obligated to have it in your panel and that other software also depends on mono.

Then I though; you are partly right; why use mono for a note-taking application?

It's for many users much like notepad on java.

In your case I would look for an alternative note-taking-thingy for GTK if you need one.

The same for me; I don't use beagle because I don't like it archiving my personal files (and popping them up for arbitrary searches by others) on seemingly arbitrary moments of the day.

Re:tomboy

[Whitemice]

> Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the
> rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand

Either your installation is completely hosed or you don't understand UNIX memory semantics. Because I've got Tomboy running all the time, and I've never seen Resident - Shared exceed 10Mb. For a modern X application that isn't much.

Re:tomboy

[jhol13]

IMNHSO the moments are not arbitrary: archiving seem to happen exactly when I am short of memory and unzipping a huge zip or opening a big document.

Seeing the system crawl to an halt while something is "archiving" .iso's and tar.gz's ... I'd rather watch the paint dry.

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand

That's bullshit. Every gnome applet or application on my machine has an RSS between 5 Mbytes and 15 Mbytes, and there are dozens of them. Tomboy has an RSS size of 26 Mbytes, which is more, but not a lot more.

But unlike all those other applets and tools, you would only need a single Mono VM to run all applets and most applications safely together. If it were fully based on Mono, you could probably run the entire gnome desktop in a small fraction of the memory it's using now, and you'd laugh at the silly suggestion of writing anything in C because it's just too inefficient.

It's the only part of Gnome proper which uses mono -- so why do they bother shipping it?

Because they realize that Gnome can't survive as a desktop that's being hacked in C/C++.

I really don't know whether the Mono VM is the future for the Gnome desktop. But I do know this much: C, C++, and Python are not the future of desktops.

Re:tomboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Miguel? Is that you?

Re:tomboy

[Anonymous Coward]

...Beagle, the search tool thousands of times more idiotic than Tracker...

In what way, exactly? Do you just hate Mono so much that anything using it is "thousands of times more idiotic", or is there a practical advantage it has?

I'm really curious. I want my app's native filetypes to be searchable, and I want my app to use a desktop search tool to sort and search its own documents quickly. I looked at Tracker, but they seem to have no documentation to speak of, and no way to define custom filters. As a developer wanting to support search in my app, that makes it basically useless.

In contrast, Beagle has a well-documented API, and a well-defined way to write new filters. It's in C#, which I don't much care for, but at least it's possible.

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

No, it's not. But Miguel is right on this one, and he is hardly alone in this view.

The current state of GUI and application development tools on all major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux) is pathetic. Mono is a significant step forward, although even Mono is far from ideal.

Re:tomboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Without Tomboy, and without Beagle, .... there would be no reason for anybody to install mono.

I think Muine is pretty awesome. http://muine-player.org/wiki/Main_Page

Re:tomboy

[Jeffrey Baker]

On my machine Beagle doesn't *ever* finish. It runs, for about a month, over my millions of files, until it finds one that makes it crash, and then it crashes in a loop. I thought the whole point of mono was that it can't crash and it's safe from overflows and other C problems. But in practice the implementation is appalling.

In constract Tracker can index my huge home directory in less than a day without crashing.

Re:tomboy

[kripkenstein]

Because they realize that Gnome can't survive as a desktop that's being hacked in C/C++.

I really don't know whether the Mono VM is the future for the Gnome desktop. But I do know this much: C, C++, and Python are not the future of desktops.

I was with you until the bold part (my emphasis). Yes, modern desktops (and all complex modern software) should probably be written in modern high-level languages. But why not Python? Python is exactly a good example of a modern language, I would think...

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

I like Python and use it a lot. It's a really nice language. I think people will continue using it for quite some time to come.

However, Python will likely remain "the scripting language that you write add-ons in", not a mainstream language for core desktop component development. There are a bunch of reasons for that, related to packaging, error checking, development environments, object model, and raw performance. I don't see those getting fixed in P3K either.

Or, in different words, Python is one of the best scripting languages, but we should move beyond "scripting".

Re:tomboy

[kripkenstein]

However, Python will likely remain "the scripting language that you write add-ons in", not a mainstream language for core desktop component development. There are a bunch of reasons for that, related to packaging, error checking, development environments, object model, and raw performance. I don't see those getting fixed in P3K either. Hmm, Python+PyGtk seems a great platform to develop applications on; I use it myself:

Regarding packaging, distutils and Eggs are very useful. But even without them the process seems reasonable to me (no less than for C/C++). Regarding error checking, you do lack compile-time checking, as a dynamic language - but the runtime checking is extremely convenient. Bug reports that include the crash output can lead to quite solutions in my experience, far more than for C/C++ (and you don't have any of the memory management errors). Regarding development environment, I use Gedit, so I guess you are referring to more 'complete' IDEs ;) (personally I don't like an IDE that does too much for me). Regarding performance, Python is very suitable for desktop applications - startup performance is reasonable (unlike Java), and execution speed is fast enough. Sure, I wouldn't run a ray-tracing app in Python, but for many (most?) desktop tools it seems good enough to me.

Re:tomboy

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't run a ray-tracing app in Python, but for many (most?) desktop tools it seems good enough to me.

Actually, if someone wrote a ray-tracing C module for Python, you might enjoy doing ray-tracing in Python. As long as you have C code doing the heavy lifting, you might as well enjoy the pleasant Python language for setting up the desired ray-tracing.

Python is in wide use now for math stuff like matrix operations because there are good C modules for scientific math.

Returning to the topic, the OLPC project is writing a desktop environment in Python, and their machine has limited memory. I was wondering if Python bytecodes are reasonably compact, and if the Python is actually helping them conserve RAM.

Re:tomboy

[FooBarWidget]

So? If you don't like Tomboy then don't enable it. Until recently I didn't even know Tomboy uses Mono. The fact that I didn't increase any significant increases in memory usage just proves that it's good enough.]

Furthermore, "takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together" is bollocks. In the System Monitor, Tomboy uses 24.5 MB resident memory, of which 14.7 MB is shared memory and only 9.8 MB is writable (private) memory.

Re:tomboy

[Andrei D]

I use basket for note taking. It has more features than tomboy, it's snappier, but it's a KDE app and it doesn't fit that nicely in a Gnome session..

Re:tomboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Some time ago there was some talk about reimplementing tomboy in c++. But I don't know what happened to that project (nor the code) http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/52994.html#comments

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

As long as you have C code doing the heavy lifting, you might as well enjoy the pleasant Python language for setting up the desired ray-tracing.

Yes, and that's the problem: you can't use Python for everything, you can only use it for the glue. C needs to go, and unfortunately, when you use Python, you still need C.

Python is in wide use now for math stuff like matrix operations because there are good C modules for scientific math.

NumPy is great, but, come on, stop thinking within a little box: dynamic languages like Python can be compiled into fast code, if they are properly designed. The fact that you have to us C extensions with Python is a fundamental design fault in Python, and an unnecessary one. Python is at the stage where Lisp 1.5 was 40 years ago, it's depressing.

Returning to the topic, the OLPC project is writing a desktop environment in Python, and their machine has limited memory. I was wondering if Python bytecodes are reasonably compact, and if the Python is actually helping them conserve RAM.

Python probably helps them conserve RAM. OTOH, Python's lack of an efficient compiler means that they are running much more slowly than they otherwise would. And Python's lack of a decent IDE means that programming on the OLPC is much, much harder than it needs to be.

As I was saying, Python is one of the nicest scripting languages around. But there's something wrong with the concept of a scripting language itself: we need to stop programming by typing long files into text editor and running back to C whenever we need speed.

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

Look, I like Python, too. But the fact remains that in Python, like in the other languages, you write code in a text editor, save it in files, run it, have it fail sometimes, put it into packages, install it, etc. That is so 1960's.

As for speed and type checking, they are sufficient for some applications, they are not sufficient for others; you have to drop into C.

We need programming languages that don't limit programming to a bunch of hackers, that don't make programming a chore, and that don't tie us to C for speed. Even Python, nice as it is, does.

Re:tomboy

[g4b]

well my desktop should be fast and responsive.

can't think of any downsides for C/C++ in that part...

using modern high level languages as add-ons for various applets, like funky calendars swimming around or stuff like that...: fine. but in my opinion the core layer of a desktop environment should definitely not use ANY interpreted language or virtual machine.

which brings us back to good old C/C++.

wake me if those funky high level languages compile into fast and real executable code without need for an interpreter. no. wake me before that. sleeping too long makes you sleepy.

Re:tomboy

[reclusivemonkey]

and without Beagle, the search tool thousands of times more idiotic than Tracker

AFAIK, Gutsy is now shipping with Tracker as the default indexing/search tool, so there is some hope for Ubuntuites.

Re:tomboy

[Nevyn]

Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand.

So I can understand the desire to have them stick with a smaller number of languages (and to generally get the memory usage down), but I think you are measuring the "memory usage" badly. Yes, tomboy takes up about 400MB of virtual memory making it about the 10th "largest" application on my system ... but it only has about 35MB resident dropping it to 20th or so.

With the largest resident pages being: X (830MB), gnome-terminal (470MB), firefox (400MB), xemacs (340MB), galeon (220MB), evolution (175MB), revelation-applet (62MB), named (60MB), gdesklets (45MB) ... with lots more to go before we hit tomboy. You probably want to use "ps ax -o rss,vsaz,pid,cmd" (possibly with H too).

Personally I'm much more annoyed by all the python code which seems to grow out of control (a few of which are turned off above, but revelation and gdesklets are on).

It's the only part of Gnome proper which uses mono -- so why do they bother shipping it?

Well there's muine too, which is nice.

Re:tomboy

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you have to us C extensions with Python is a fundamental design fault in Python, and an unnecessary one.

Dude, chill out. It's not that bad.

Yes, CPython is sub-optimal for efficiency in important ways. (It's still good enough to be useful and I'd still rather use it than its competitors in the same space.) But there is ongoing research into making Python faster (check out the PyPy project).

The fact that you are able to use C extensions is an important ingredient in Python's success. Guido van Rossum knew he couldn't make Python super-ultra-fast right away (or even "anytime at all soon") so he figured an "escape hatch" would be a good idea. And it damn well was. All those people using NumPy or whatever would not be using Python now if Python didn't have C extensions.

Sure, it would be better if Python were super-ultra-fast while still being the flexible and powerful language I love. But that's the real trick, isn't it? I guess LISP can be compiled to C-like levels of efficiency but I don't like LISP and I like Python.

If Guido is so much less smart than you, or at least you really know how to do it better than Guido, then by all means please produce a new Python-like language that is super-ultra-fast and doesn't have C modules. If your new language really is better, maybe Google will switch from Python to your new language.

Guido has done the best job he knows how to make a good language. Lots of people have helped him. All of them have produced the Python we have today. Maybe, if they had done things differently, it might have been better; but we live in the real world and this is the Python we have. I don't think it's "depressing". For the things I have been doing with it, Python is plenty fast enough already, and I am glad I have it.

Re:tomboy

[KiloByte]

Except, you cannot discount all the libraries used by tomboy, because a majority of them is used by tomboy and tomboy alone.

I do agree about python, it's also quote out of control, but nowhere even in the vicinity of mono.

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

well my desktop should be fast and responsive. can't think of any downsides for C/C++ in that part...

In fact, C and C++ have plenty of downsides: they are hard to optimize, programmers retain lots of memory unnecessarily, their lack of runtime safety means lots of stuff has to run as separate processes, and pointers inhibit compiler optimizations.

And that's why Gnome, KDE, Windows, and Macintosh are such resource pigs: the trivial little desktop functionality they provide should not take hundreds of megabytes and dozens of processes to implement. You couldn't design a less efficient language and desktop if you tried. It is sill that you think that this bloated crap is "fast and responsive".

but in my opinion the core layer of a desktop environment should definitely not use ANY interpreted language or virtual machine. [...] wake me if those funky high level languages compile into fast and real executable code without need for an interpreter

Yeah, being asleep is about what describes the mental state of people like you; there have been dozens of systems programming languages that are more efficient than C and C++, and they have been around for decades.

Now, as for Mono and the CLR, describing it as "interpreted" or "virtual machine" is misleading. Mono gets compiled into native code, it simply happens to use a portable binary format and perform runtime optimizations.

I do give you this much: Mono is bloated, but the reason for that is not the CLR, it's the libraries. But its libraries are no more bloated than the Gnome or standard C++ libraries.

Re:tomboy

[g4b]

In fact, C and C++ have plenty of downsides: they are hard to optimize, programmers retain lots of memory unnecessarily, their lack of runtime safety means lots of stuff has to run as separate processes, and pointers inhibit compiler optimizations.

using a lot of memory however for me doesn't mean fast and responsive. in todays memory sizes a bigger memory footprint providing a lot of features would more or less mean that programs can reuse a lot of code. however a JIT takes some time. the compiler has to run too, doesn't it? and afaik JIT code can't be optimized in the same manner, because it has to be fast?

Yeah, being asleep is about what describes the mental state of people like you; there have been dozens of systems programming languages that are more efficient than C and C++, and they have been around for decades.

I *really* love to learn new things, but offensive statements followed up by general assumptions never succeed to wake me up. chrrrr.

I do give you this much: Mono is bloated, but the reason for that is not the CLR, it's the libraries. But its libraries are no more bloated than the Gnome or standard C++ libraries.

well I think, in the end that's the problem of every framework. smaller frameworks lead to more independent solutions, which leads to even bigger memory footprints in a longterm running state, even if the base is fast.

Windows, MacOSX, XFCE and KDE are desktops I use quite often. the responsiveness of Linux has also to do with X.org as far as I can see. MacOSX is quite responsive normally. Windows starts up programs like hell, but it has its downsides, also it lacks features. XFCE is quite fast. downside is, it lacks features.

So in the end, a fast and responsive Desktop may rely on more than one factor and this discussion is not leading anywhere, and also the choice depends on the wishes of the user. I still disagree building a desktop in mono, or java or whatsoever. And AFAIK, but I can be wrong, mono lacks a jit, but I have only read that somewhere. could be totally wrong.

Re:tomboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, I like Python, too. But the fact remains that in Python, like in the other languages, you write code in a text editor, save it in files, run it, have it fail sometimes, put it into packages, install it, etc. That is so 1960's.

As for speed and type checking, they are sufficient for some applications, they are not sufficient for others; you have to drop into C.

We need programming languages that don't limit programming to a bunch of hackers, that don't make programming a chore, and that don't tie us to C for speed. Even Python, nice as it is, does. That's how all languages, mono and assorted crap included, work. And that's how they will continue to work for a very long time. Just because you glue few nuts and bolts to a text editor and proclaim it's an IDE does not change a thing.

And python is much more accessible to non-hackers than mono could ever hope to be.

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

using a lot of memory however for me doesn't mean fast and responsive.

Using a lot of memory isn't just a question of size, it's also a question of speed.

however a JIT takes some time. the compiler has to run too, doesn't it?

JIT compilation is amortized over execution of the code, meaning that even if it did exactly what a batch compiler does, it wouldn't be noticeably slower. But, in fact, for equivalent executables, at JIT-based system is often faster simply because the binaries are a lot smaller than native code, which translates into faster load times and less memory usage, both of which improve speed greatly. The time saved in those areas alone makes up for the small overhead of running the JIT. And, in addition, the JIT can actually optimize far more than a C/C++ batch compiler.

well I think, in the end that's the problem of every framework.

Correction: it's a problem of every framework you know.

the responsiveness of Linux has also to do with X.org as far as I can see. MacOSX is quite responsive normally. Windows starts up programs like hell, but it has its downsides, also it lacks features. XFCE is quite fast. downside is, it lacks features.

Again, all these judgments are relative to what you know. In fact, given the power of today's desktop machines, these frameworks objectively run like molasses: there is no reason why response to every desktop operation shouldn't be instantaneous. You simply have gotten around to waiting for things to start up, and for the spinning beach ball on MacOS, etc.

So in the end, a fast and responsive Desktop may rely on more than one factor

Well, it's good that you realize that, because that realization is the beginning of accepting the fact that C/C++ are neither necessary nor sufficient for writing a "fast and responsive desktop".

and also the choice depends on the wishes of the user.

Ah, and what possible "wish" could the user have about using a desktop in C/C++? Could he wish for programs that crash? That have security holes? Could he want software that takes years to develop instead of weeks?

And AFAIK, but I can be wrong, mono lacks a jit, but I have only read that somewhere. could be totally wrong.

Yes, you are totally wrong. Why don't you try to learn something about technology before you dismiss it?

and afaik JIT code can't be optimized in the same manner, because it has to be fast?

Quite to the contrary: JIT code can be optimized far more and far more easily than batch compiled code because the JIT has a lot more information available. For example, a JIT can inline many virtual function calls, and with a JIT, template metaprogramming becomes unnecessary because regular OO code can be optimized the same way.

Again, why don't you try to inform yourself first before condemning a platform?

I *really* love to learn new things, but offensive statements followed up by general assumptions never succeed to wake me up. chrrrr.

Based on almost no technical knowledge about the platform or approach, and plenty of wrong assumptions, you condemn an entire approach to developing software and promote another platform with huge problems.

Please, if you don't know much about a subject (and you have pretty much said that you know next to nothing about JITs, Mono, or optimization), don't make grand pronouncements about the supposed disadvantages of those platforms or why people should use something else. I've used C (and later C++) for a quarter of a century and do most of my programming in it, I know what its problems are. It was fine in the 1970s on PDP-11's with 64kbytes of address space (which is what it was designed for) when used by programmers who knew how to fit software into those kinds of machines; it has no place at all in modern software development.

Choices and ignorance like your are what keeping C and C++ alive, and they have condemned us to two decades of buffer overflows, slow and bloated software, and glacial development time. And that is quite offensive to me, because we really shouldn't be mucking around with this kind of primitive technology anymore.

Re:tomboy

[squiggleslash]

Because they realize that Gnome can't survive as a desktop that's being hacked in C/C++.

Given:

1. Sun has freed Java. Java being a mature, complete, platform that isn't catching up with someone else's spec all the time
2. Mono is still at an early enough stage (in terms of amount of use within GNOME) that we can safely drown it in the bathtub without anyone ever finding out.

...why not switch to Java, and be rid of the Mono trap without losing the advantages of a modern managed code environment?

Re:tomboy

[m2943]

That's how all languages, mono and assorted crap included, work.

Bullshit: there are CLR implementations that are as fast as C/C++, and Mono is getting there. And if you don't like Mono, there are plenty of other languages, some very C/C++ like, that don't have the problems that C/C++ have.

Just because you glue few nuts and bolts to a text editor and proclaim it's an IDE does not change a thing.

While things like Monodevelop are not great, they are still better than anything that exists for Python.

And python is much more accessible to non-hackers than mono could ever hope to be.

It is. Unfortunately, Python is not a systems programming language; you cannot write a full desktop on Python. You can write a full desktop in Mono.

SNIFF IN HELL, FOOT FAGS

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously who wants to use an operating system that uses a smelly foot for its logo?

Plus GTK sucks.

Re:SNIFF IN HELL, FOOT FAGS

[Anonymous Coward]

The same people that want to run "free" code the requires MS patent protection.

Re:SNIFF IN HELL, FOOT FAGS

[Tribbin]

"... operating system that uses a smelly foot ..."

At minus 40 celcius you don't smell the feet of a penguin.

Re:SNIFF IN HELL, FOOT FAGS

[Anonymous Coward]

Foot?
Isn't it a penis?

I always thougth so.
GNOME, we've got balls.

Re:SNIFF IN HELL, FOOT FAGS

[Fri13]

"At minus 40 celcius you don't smell the feet of a penguin."
br> At -40C you smell very well.... have you ever be on -40 Celsius?

Totem

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone actually use totem? I have an vanilla ubuntu box and totem won't play any good video formats. It baffling that they would not include mplayer or vlc, the gold standards of video playing.

Re:Totem

[Tribbin]

First: Ask your distro's maintainers.
Second: I agree; VLC and mplayer rock.

Re:Totem

[miscz]

Install Xine backend for Totem, it becomes quite usable media player. It still lacks external subtitles support though.

Re:Totem

[Constantine XVI]

When you try to play a video Totem can't handle, it should try to install the codec. Of course, you would know this if you read the linked release notes, but I know that's too much to ask of an AC that won't even bother to log in.

Re:Totem

[kdekorte]

mplayer may have legal problems... that said you my want to try "gnome-mplayer" it can be found at getdeb. It is a gnomish wrapper for mplayer (just the basics). Also, you may want to try gecko-mediaplayer. It is a plugin for firefox that controls gnome-mplayer via dbus to playback embedded videos at most websites.

Find out more at http://dekorte.homeip.net/download

Yeah these are my apps...

Re:Totem

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly use Totem. It's is quite bare bones but hey, it usually works. And anybody can install a few codecs.

Totem's K.I.S.S. works well just like rest of GNOME.

Will Linus like it

[boguslinks]

Is this finally the version that will catch Linus's fancy?

Re:Will Linus like it

[Tribbin]

Let Linus worry about stacking your memory and suppressing your nice threads.

Worry as much about his favourite DE as much as you worry about his favourite wine.

Feisty

[Creamsickle]

Packages are already in ubuntu feisty.

just do an apt-get update and then an apt-get dist-upgrade :-)

Re:Feisty

[Jeffrey Baker]

I'm sure you mean Gutsy. I just updated my Feisty machine and there's nothing new, and I wouldn't expect a new major GNOME release in an existing Ubuntu distribution.

Re:Feisty

[arkhan_jg]

You missed the apt-dist-upgrade comment which would upgrade you from feisty to gutsy then ;)

Re:Feisty

[rsidd]

You missed the apt-dist-upgrade comment which would upgrade you from feisty to gutsy then ;)

No it won't do that, unless you edit your sources.list.

Re:Feisty

[nem75]

*buntu only releases security updates. Even bug fixes are hard to get backported to released versions of the distribution. Don't even dream about feature updates.

Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they stop trying to use the bastardized C pseudo OO language they invented yet?

Personally, trying to shove a square peg into a round role isn't something I am keen to do.

Read about the abomination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GObject

Re:Lameness

[19thNervousBreakdown]

I'm a hardcore Gnome user (it's prettier, more "solid", and I like how simple they make configuration, even though I've been a programmer, sysadmin, have used Linux exclusively for about 5 years and am by all accounts a "power-user") but man it bugs me that they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore. If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!

I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia. Of course, most of the C++ that comes out of the OSS community makes me want to take up trepanning, so maybe that's not such a bad thing...

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit

Sounded for a minute like you were talking about the million fucking java frameworks that are out there now.

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm a hardcore Gnome user"

Oh, so you're not a programmer.

"...they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore."

It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).

"If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!"

Glade isn't necessary anymore; GtkBuilder replaces Glade from a programmer's POV, Glade the UI designer tool just outputs an XML file that you can read in your App and generate a perfectly functional UI, which to me is just plain elegance. No more having to programatically design and update UIs. Pango is not a code generator either, it's a Font Layout system that supports complex font layouts. Orbit is a deprecated piece of hold-over bullshit the GNOME people haven't gotten around to officially deprecate yet, and shouldn't be used with new code (use D-Bus instead).

"I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia. Of course, most of the C++ that comes out of the OSS community makes me want to take up trepanning, so maybe that's not such a bad thing..."

Which is exactly why the OSS community is C++-phobic. Not only is most community-generated C++ terrible, it's very hard to make build across all of the dozens of "standard library" implementations. GLib was invented and written in C to give the OSS community a truly standard library that they could control across platforms, and because GLib is written in C, most follow suit and write their applications in C. Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.

Re:Lameness

[19thNervousBreakdown]

See, that's why I put the parenthetical in there, I am a programmer, but I'd prefer 2 features that both work right to 1,000 that half work. To me, the latter is morally equivalent to lying. Although Gnome absolutely has its share of problems, it's well ahead of KDE as far as actually working. I keep an updated KDE installed on my desktop and check it out at least every 6 months--mostly because Gnome isn't good enough either, but it's the best I can find. The thing is, I jump into KDE, and within a half hour I've found four things that don't work, cause crashes, silently fail, or just suck (by just suck I mean unresponsiveness, the crappy menu transparency and shadows that are off by a couple pixels that's completely different from the crappy window transparency, which isn't even consistent in itself!).

As for the list of junk I rattled off for Gnome, yeah, you got me, that's just what I remember from when I was going to help out with the project a few years ago. After realizing that I'd have to learn 40 different, sometimes incompatible, often redundant frameworks, I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere. And yeah, I do have something that will be coming out Real Soon Now (had to take a break from programming due to tendinitis in the wrist that's still bothering me to this day) but the point is, Gnome looks like it does not because all that crap actually helps out, but because 50 different people had a Great Idea.

No, wait, there is no point. Oh! Here's one: A project as big as a desktop environment that needs to be extremely consistent throughout, needs a Linus. It needs one guy to be the benevolent dictator, because right now it looks like anyone can get any old thing in there. Tomboy a C# app? wtf? It's not complicated, it's an applet, a couple borderless windows, and a simple WebDAV client, all of which I'd bet lots of money Gnome already has libraries for. It could be just as easily implemented in C, and a halfway experienced Gnome developer could implement it, with all of its current features, in probably a week or less. I'm halfway tempted to take a week of vacation and do it myself just to prove a point.

Re:Lameness

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Don't even get me started on Java.

Re:Lameness

[Billly Gates]

Miguel has shown interest in mono for 3.x versions of gnome to overcome this issue. Then other .net supported languages can be used.

Not to say I think its a good idea to use a patented technology from a convicted monopolist is a good idea but he seems to think so.

Re:Lameness

[Randle_Revar]

I don't object to GObject, but I can understand why some would.

However, it seems like some of the thing you mention are out of context.
Pango is the the text layout engine.
Orbit is part of Gnome's Corba implementation - I don't care for Corba, but it doesn't seem all that related to GObject.
Glade is an interface builder. KDE has something similar... XMLui or something.

Re:Lameness

[Randle_Revar]

Darn it, you are faster than me and more thorough and correct.

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

but man it bugs me that they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore. If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!

That's right, they could take a cue from QT and use a power-packed language like C++. Then they wouldn't need all these kludge code gener... oh, wait...

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia.

Besides the fact that C++ is "the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's an object system"?

Gnome has always encouraged high-level bindings for just about everything they do. C, and in particular GObject, is really easy to make great bindings for. Gtk+ may be a bit verbose from C, but PyGTK is a dream for Python programmers.

To put this in Ballmer terms, Gnome is pretty darn good about "developers, developers, developers". They have orthogonal libraries (cairo, pango, gtk, gconf, etc.) that you can take or leave as you like. They're good for using from whatever language you like. They're LGPL, so companies writing proprietary apps (like Real) are willing to use them. The documentation isn't great, but it's pretty good. "Pretty good" on every axis, in my book, is quite rare.

In contrast, once you're in C++, you're kind of stuck in C++. I've had to develop large apps in PyGTK, and large apps in PyQt, and PyQt can be quite painful. Unlike PyGTK, I never felt like I was developing a Python application. It never lets you forget you're using a C++ library underneath. I really don't want to have to think about C++ memory management when I'm writing a Python app, and abstracting it away is apparently non-trivial.

I don't know what you mean by "500 different code generators" or "hardly recognizable as C". Looks like plain ol' C to me. If you want to see scary code, look at OOo sometime (which is in C++, coincidentally). Gnome is among the cleanest code I've seen, for a project of its size.

Re:Lameness

[pherthyl]

Not only is most community-generated C++ terrible, it's very hard to make build across all of the dozens of "standard library" implementations.

That must be why KDE, an environment built with C++, on a toolkit written in C++, now runs on all the Unixes, Windows, and Linux, while Gnome only runs on the unixes, and even there it isn't at all easy to make it compile (witness Slackware dropping it for exactly that reason).

Re:Lameness

[pherthyl]

The thing is, I jump into KDE, and within a half hour I've found four things that don't work

Dunno what distro you're using, but you should complain, their KDE packages must suck. You do realize that your experience is atypical, don't you?

unresponsiveness
In what way?

the crappy menu transparency

So you dug into the options, enabled a feature that is not enabled by default, and that Gnome doesn't have at all, and then you complain that it's not as good as it should be? Nice.

crappy window transparency, which isn't even consistent in itself

Window transparency works fine here. How can a transparent window be "crappy"? Transparency is transparency. Also another feature that is off by default and Gnome lacks. Why do you go around enabling features that you don't like?

Re:Lameness

[pherthyl]

Gnome is pretty darn good about "developers, developers, developers".

Like how? Look at how much code reuse goes on in KDE vs Gnome. Every KDE app has the same spellchecking engine, every KDE app has the same text editor component, the same menu structure, the same shortcut configuration, the same widgets, dcop, etc, etc. Kontact, the KDE equivalent to Evolution, is just a small shell around all the individual components. KDE4 extends this even further, by making more powerful components available to developers. In a Gnome changelog, on the other hand, you see changes like "gedit gets editable toolbars" or "somegnomeapp gets gnomevfs support". You will never find something like that in a KDE changelog, because all the apps get all those features for free with the framework. I find it absolutely mindboggling that Gedit would have to manually add support for editable toolbars on gnomevfs, and then even find it worth mentioning in the release notes. It really shows that the libraries are not nearly as simple to use, or there is some kind of impediment to using them.

This kind of thing is evident when you look at resource usage between the desktops too. Why is it that KDE and Gnome use similar ammounts of memory when Gnome has so many less features (I'm not saying more features are better, but you can't deny that KDE has more features than Gnome). I'd be happy with a simple desktop like Gnome (it is much prettier after all) if it also was lighter on resources, but it isn't.

Re:Lameness

[dbIII]

Most of what people are complaining about is the window manager - which is nowhere near as good as the enlightenment 0.16 that has had nothing but bugfixes since 1999. You can use all those gnome and KDE apps with just about every other window manager out there.

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the original poster, posting AC because I'm modding.

So you dug into the options, enabled a feature that is not enabled by default, and that Gnome doesn't have at all, and then you complain that it's not as good as it should be? Nice.

Agreed.

Window transparency works fine here. How can a transparent window be "crappy"? Transparency is transparency.

Sometimes (often, actually) when I switch over to a desktop with only one visible window in it, that window will take on the "inactive window" attributes, which in my case makes the window 50% transparent. This is easily remedied by popping up any other window. However, not only is it irritating as hell, rendering that (especially when I don't notice right away and start scrolling around or typing) is very hard on my GPU. Just saying. But you're right, if it really bothered me that much I'd just turn it off.

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

On the tendonitis thing... I'd recommend workrave... it's stopped me killing my wrists before

Re:Lameness

[kripkenstein]

A project as big as a desktop environment that needs to be extremely consistent throughout, needs a Linus. It needs one guy to be the benevolent dictator, because right now it looks like anyone can get any old thing in there. Tomboy a C# app? wtf? It's not complicated, it's an applet, a couple borderless windows, and a simple WebDAV client, all of which I'd bet lots of money Gnome already has libraries for. It could be just as easily implemented in C, and a halfway experienced Gnome developer could implement it, with all of its current features, in probably a week or less. I'm halfway tempted to take a week of vacation and do it myself just to prove a point.

I disagree. Why should all GNOME (or all KDE) apps be written in the same language? Sure, perhaps Tomboy could be written in C in a few weeks (say a few months to get all the bugs out), but it has already been written in C#, and works fine. I see no issue with this. Different languages have different advantages, and different programmers like different languages, which is perhaps even more important in a volunteer project like GNOME. Make GNOME C-only and you might lose out on a lot of developer mindshare.

What we need is to allow multiple languages to work together; we don't want a situation where special 'bindings' need to be written on a per-language basis. As long as that is taken care of (by running on a VM like Mono, or automated bindings generation, etc.), then I see no issue.

(Resource-wise there is some penalty to this, yes, and that does annoy me.)

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ, Mono is great for Linux and here's why:

I write tools for my job in an all windows shop for data processing. 2 years ago we switched to .NET from Fortran (yes some tools are that old), and I'm in the process of converting some of these tools and improving them.

Now, if Mono works as good as advertised I see a future where we can actually install an Open Source OS (Linux maybe) and move away from Windows all together (at least in the data processing department, given that our tools would run).

I played with Mono-develop (I think that's the IDE's name) a few years ago but it was buggy and crashed at that point in time. But then again I ran it on my FreeBSD box where I had almost everything compiled with -O2, so I can't really judge it based on that.

I intend to give it another shot sometime in the near future and we'll see how that works.

While I'm on the data processing subject, anyone know of an open source equivalent to SPSS? Nothing too fancy, mainly case and variable matching, frequencies, cross tabs and the such (thanks in advance).

Re:Lameness

[mike_sucks]

Check out Vala. It's what C++ should have been.

-Mike

Re:Lameness

[Rudd-O]

Well, I must say... I sometimes have this weird issue when I click on a link in Konqueror and rapidly move my mouse after releasing the button, that sometimes causes the X server to just swallow the pointer and never let go again. This sucks big time and it only happens with KDE.

And the other complaint is that konqueror's icon view is really flickery when loading large folders (I tested dolphin from KDE4 and the problem is GONE), and you must wait till the entire folder is loaded to use typeahead find for finding and selecting a file. Not a huge deal, but very annoying when you type 90 words a minute and you want to get to the target folder fast. Oh and the very big beef about Konqueror not working properly with WordPRess NOT RENDERING Web pages until every single bit and image has been loaded -- very annoying that incremental rendering in Konqueror is so fucked up; and even if you hit Escape, a blank screen is left staring at you. For me as a blogger it really posts a HUGE disadvantage when I want to blog something quickly -- it's faster to actually open Firefox and load my blog post page than to wait for the blog post page to render in Konq.

Other than that, the feature set of KDE is invaluable (fuck, keybindings rule, their amazing configurability as well, konq's split views accessible with hotkeys make managing files BRUTALLY fast, network transparency is a must in my line of work, and Amarok knocks me off my shoes every time I use it), and that's why I abandoned GNOME. I still use Evolution because it basically manages my 2 GB of e-mail just fine and because it syncs up with my palm TX like a charm, versus the entire Kontact suite which is still quirky and whose interface looks EXTREMELY busy. But at some point when these issues are fixed I plan to take the plunge and move to Kontact.

It's the simple fact that, even with the showstoppers outlined above, with KDE I can do more, and do it faster. It's as plain as that.

Re:Lameness

[Rudd-O]

MOC is a kludge whose pain you don't feel. Trust me, all build systems work with it just fine. It was a good invention that enabled C++ to not mongle so much cock (despite being the best tech available when KDE appeared).

Re:Lameness

[Vanders]

it's very hard to make [C++] build across all of the dozens of "standard library" implementations.

In the Open Source world there is exactly one C++ standard library to worry about, and that's the one that ships with GCC. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that as Sun use GCC with Solaris, even that ships with libstc++ from GCC.

Re:Lameness

[cortana]

About the mouse pointer issue: it is possible to tell the X server to release a grabbed pointer, or even kill the client that has the pointer grabbed, by pressing Ctrl+Alt+* (or Ctrl+Alt+/). Unfortunately, you must first enable the AllowDeactivateGrabs and AllowClosedownGrabs options in xorg.conf and restart the X server first.

Re:Lameness

[bjourne]

It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).

it's debatable if this is recognizable as C. To me it looks more like some form of bastardized Scheme and Java. Ofcourse you can write applications without Glib, you don't need any library to write anything. But if you want to integrate your software to GNOME you have to use GObject and your code will become just as messy as the one in the link. Truth is that compared to what OO languages offer, GObject is pure garbage. It requires you to follow some very braindead conventions and go through major pain to accomplish what a few lines would do in other languages.

Just the boilerplate to declare and implement an empty GObject is 6 defines, 2 structs and one public constructor function. Plus one more struct if you want to be able to encapsulate your data. Then you also have to implement one instance init function, one finalization function, one class init function, one property setter function (otherwise your GObjects wont be subclassable) and one constructor function. All that to write the equivalent of "class Foo { };"

Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.

That is not one of the reasons. Mixing C++ and C is easy. The reasons instead are 1. Ditching Glib and GObject would make lots of programmers who spent years working on it angry. 2. Adopting C++ would be like admitting they were wrong all the time and the KDE fanboys were right, can't have that. 3. Plain old "C has always worked for me, we don't need any of your newfangled toys!" Most of GNOME is still stuck in C89 btw, and even C99 code will be treated with extreme suspicion.

Re:Lameness

[Wyzard]

Sure, Tomboy could be reimplemented in C, but people are trying to move away from C, and toward higher-level languages, for application development. That's why GNOME provides bindings for a variety of higher-level languages, including the Mono platform.

As for being able to "get any old thing in there", take a look at the GNOME mailing lists sometime. Anyone can write an application using the GNOME libraries, of course, but it takes consensus to get it into the official GNOME release.

Re:Lameness

[pherthyl]

And the other complaint is that konqueror's icon view is really flickery when loading large folders

Yeah I agree with you there. Konqueror's file manager performance is not that great for bigger folders. ANd the flickering drivers me up the wall. It's not noticeable with a fast video card and proper driver, but on my laptop with the ati drivers, it's incredibly annoying. I think Gnome has fixed this, and KDE4 has as well, so hopefully it will be a thing of the past soon.

Re:Lameness

[pherthyl]

Sometimes (often, actually) when I switch over to a desktop with only one visible window in it, that window will take on the "inactive window" attributes, which in my case makes the window 50% transparent.

Ok, that makes more sense. I haven't seen it myself, but it sounds very similar to this bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118062 Unfortunately you're out of luck on it, as it basically won't get fixed. KDE4 tossed that whole component, and transparency is done as one of the effects in the compositing KWin4 (more like Compiz). So hopefully it will work properly in KDE 4.0.

Re:Lameness

[immcintosh]

Other than the fact that he said he's a programmer? I'm also a programmer and personally can't STAND KDE. Tried it a couple times and each time just really didn't like it, or had its configuration get screwed up beyond my capacity to easily recover.

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

Like how?

If you read the rest of the paragraph, I spelled it out for you: orthogonal libraries, language support, flexible free license, proprietary support, and good documentation.

Why is it that KDE and Gnome use similar ammounts of memory when Gnome has so many less features (I'm not saying more features are better, but you can't deny that KDE has more features than Gnome)

If by "more features" you mean "checkboxes and radiobuttons", true. But I consider usability a feature. I tried to use k3b once, and I couldn't figure it out. There were menus full of dialog boxes full of tabs full of options. It was exactly as complex as cdrecord(1), except it wasn't easily searchable (as "man cdrecord" is). If it's no easier than using the shell, why am I paying any memory penalty at all?

The question is not why Gnome takes more memory than KDE. The question is why KDE take more memory than the shell if it doesn't make things easier to use.

Re:Lameness

[pherthyl]

If by "more features" you mean "checkboxes and radiobuttons", true.

That is configurability, not features. There is more configurability in KDE, and that allows features, but there are also more real features.

But I consider usability a feature.

Of course that can be considered a feature from a marketing point of view, but not from a code point of view. Usability does not cost resources (usually).

I tried to use k3b once, and I couldn't figure it out.

Wow. Sorry I don't want to come across as a jackass, but K3B is really simple to use. Open it, click the giant New Data CD button, then drag the files you want from the top to the bottom. Click the burn button. Comparing that to cdrecord is ludicrous.
There might be simpler burning GUI's available, but none of them give you the power that K3B does (when you want to do more than just burn a couple files.

The question is not why Gnome takes more memory than KDE. The question is why KDE take more memory than the shell if it doesn't make things easier to use.

Troll ;)

Re:Lameness

[Rudd-O]

Thanks a lot! :-)

Unix Gnome

[fm6]

Naturally the poster focuses on Linux, but in fact GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors. The fact that it has done this says a lot about Open Source as a superior way to develop non-proprietary software. When GNOME became common in the Unix world, it mostly displaced CDE, a non-proprietary desktop that was developed the old-fashioned way: a bunch of companies got together and formed a committee that wrote a spec, that various people went out and implemented.

GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.

Re:Unix Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

"that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically,"

Har har har. I saw this and I _had_ to reply...

Gnome is the result of pure politics and "fighting the good fight" (on the beaches, in the streets, in the raised floor computer lab, and while mom yells downcellah "stop looking at that porn!")

The gnomeistas should thank the KDE team for spurring them on to writing a less functional desktop than Windows.

--
Anon E. Mouse

Re:Unix Gnome

[Brandybuck]

...but in fact GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors.

Sun. That's one. I'm unable to think of others to fill out the "many Unix vendors" you are referring to. Apple doesn't. The BSDs don't. SGI doesn't (didn't). I don't recall that HP does. Who am I missing?

Re:Unix Gnome

[uchian]

Gnome was also a child of politics, if not bureaucracy, it grew out of the politics that initially surrounded the KDE project, when Qt was licensed in a way that was deemed to not be "Free Software". Gnomewas one of several ways in which the GNU foundation attempted to rectify the problem (the other was an attempt to write a GPL'd library compatable with the Qt api so that KDE did not need to depend on it. When Qt went GPL, the issue went away and the project became redundant and died)

Re:Unix Gnome

[Tribbin]

That unixes switched to Gnome made me think that CDE can't be all that bad. (if this sounds flamy; read again)

But I can't find CDE in the Debian repositories.

Is CDE worth a try on light linux systems nowadays?

Re:Unix Gnome

[vorpal22]

CDE (Common Desktop Environment) has never been open source. It is available for Linux from Xi Graphics, but you'll pay for it and in the end, it's more hassle than it's worth due to the fact that you need to use their "Accelerated X Server" to run it instead of your standard X.org installation.

There is a petition to open source CDE that looks like it may be successful. I, for one, sincerely hope so; I know that CDE is well outdated, but I got used to using it on our school's Sun boxes during my grad studies, and I wouldn't mind at least having the option to run it at home.

Re:Unix Gnome

[vorpal22]

I take it back; it looks like Xi Graphics has stopped selling CDE, so as things stand, it is not available for Linux in any capacity.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

I'm talking about how GNOME was created, you're talking about why. It may well be that the decision to start the GNOME project was political, but that doesn't mean the design process was political, as it usually is when a product is designed by a committee. Perhaps my choice of phrase ("child of politics") was poorly chosen, but I think it's pretty clear what I was talking about.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

No matter how many times I read that first sentence, it still sounds flamy. You trash GNOME, you don't say why you don't like it. Pretty typical first shot in a flame war.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

There are actually only three major Unix vendors left: Sun, IBM, and HP. All provide GNOME as the default desktop.

SGI is still around, but they no longer sell systems that run Unix. Their flavor of Unix was IRIX, which only ever ran on MIPS, and that CPU is no longer cost-competitive for big iron. So SGI sells Itanium and x64 systems running Linux. FWIW, their default desktop is GNOME.

Dell is also a Unix vendor of sorts, since they sell a fair number of servers running Solaris. Guess what the default desktop for Solaris is?

It's silly to call Apple a "Unix vendor". Yes, MacOS is built on top of Unix. But they're not part of the Unix marketplace. Almost nobody buys them to run Unix software, by which I mean software that's coded against traditional Unix APIs. Almost all Mac software is coded against Apple's proprietary APIs, and isn't available on "other" Unixes. The fact that Apple found it convenient to code those APIs on top of Unix APIs is an implementation detail that matters not at all to 99% of Apple's customers.

BSD has no vendors. Just a few enthusiasts.

That leaves SCO. Do we really want to talk about SCO?

Re:Unix Gnome

[PsychicX]

>>The fact that it has done this says a lot about Open Source as a superior way to develop non-proprietary software. When GNOME became common in the Unix world, it mostly displaced CDE, a non-proprietary desktop that was developed the old-fashioned way: a bunch of companies got together and formed a committee that wrote a spec, that various people went out and implemented.

Yes, Open Source truly defeated the greatest UI developers to have ever lived -- the people who work on UNIX-based and UNIX-alike operating systems. Incredible accomplishment there. Making a better UI than the UNIX guys...I mean really, who would have even thought it possible?

Re:Unix Gnome

[Randle_Revar]

Others discussed the state of CDE, so I'll just say that instead you might want to try XFCE (midway between KDE/Gnome and the lighter pure window managers), or just a plain WM. IceWM, Window Maker,fvwm, Enlightenment, BlackBox and Fluxbox all have a certain popularity. For something really different, you could try a tiling WM like Ion, wmii, Ratpoison, etc.

Re:Unix Gnome

[Nimey]

BSD has no vendors. Just a few enthusiasts.

And Netcraft.

Re:Unix Gnome

[imr]

The drawback to this "scratch what itches" organic way of development is that you can end up your project with big issues because no developpers cared for something that itches particularly front end users like, say, for example, a terrible file selector that isn't improved for years.
Ideology aside, a little bit of carefull planning doesnt hurt either.

Re:Unix Gnome

[daft_one]

No, they don't. I received official confirmation earlier today, BSD is dead to Netcraft.

Re:Unix Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

XFCE looks a bit like CDE.
http://www.xfce.org/images/about/screenshots/4.2-3.jpg
http://www.xfce.org/about/screenshots

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

I think you're describing "free" software projects, rather than open source projects. The former is driven by the whims of the individual contributors, because their unpaid labor is the only resource a project has. The latter has to impose some measure of planning and focus in order to satisfy the corporate sponsors that are paying the bills.

Re:Unix Gnome

[sbryant]

There are actually only three major Unix vendors left: Sun, IBM, and HP. All provide GNOME as the default desktop.

You sure about that? I'm in an HP office right now; the HP-UX boxes here come with CDE and I've never seen GNOME on any of them - it doesn't appear to be installed either.

I know Sun like GNOME. Can't comment on IBM though.

-- Steve

Re:Unix Gnome

[8-bitDesigner]

Yeah, you're right, nobody ships BSD these days.

At least they've got those hobbyists though, right?

Re:Unix Gnome

[Daimanta]

I, for one, sincerely hope so; And if that is the case then,

I for one would welcome our new FOSS CDE overlords.

Re:Unix Gnome

[cortana]

a terrible file selector that isn't improved for years Please stop trolling. The file selector has improved with each release of GTK+.

Re:Unix Gnome

[Tribbin]

I love gnome, I use nothing but gnome.

If unixes switch to gnome than CDE could not have been that bad at all since they later chose for gnome.

I never had the oppertunity to try CDE but I didn't like the looks of it (screenshots). But now I'm interested in how it works.

Re:Unix Gnome

[vorpal22]

There's a reason for this - the original intention of the XFce project was to provide a free alternative to CDE: XFce 4.2.0 release notes (search for CDE in the text)

However, at some point in development, XFce decided to largely take its own direction. Whether or not this was an attempt to update CDE or to simply become a modern desktop environment in and of its own right, I'm not sure.

I still like XFce, but being a glutton for old school punishment, I liked it better in its infancy when it was more CDEish.

Re:Unix Gnome

[BokLM]

Mac OS X is NOT BSD. It uses some parts of it, but Windows do too.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

I did some Googling and found a lot of stuff on GNOME for HP-UX on an HP web site. I came to the conclusion that HP had gone over to GNOME. Perhaps I was mistaken. Though it's possible the systems you're looking at belong to people who are used to CDE and don't feel like changing.

Sun systems actually come with three desktops: GNOME, CDE, and OpenWindows, the Sun proprietary desktop that was used before Sun joined the CDE consortium. But GNOME is the default.

I was actually working for Sun in 1998 when they were making the OpenWindows/CDE changeover. IT really wanted everybody off of OpenWindows, which was really antiquated. (The mail client directly accessed the mailbox file.) But hundreds of employees resisted the change tooth and nail. Didn't want to give up the tools they were used to.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

It may seem a quaint idea to you, but it's considered a very positive practice to actually read the post you're replying to. That sort of courtesy is what separates a conversation from a shouting match.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

f unixes switch to gnome than CDE could not have been that bad at all since they later chose for gnome.

That's like saying Nazism can't have been all that bad, since that's what Germany had before they switched to democracy.

Re:Unix Gnome

[dbIII]

Wow - a demonstration of what your sig is about! And Nazi's too! How about a little bit of racism and sexism to go with it?

Re:Unix Gnome

[segedunum]

Naturally the poster focuses on Linux, but in fact GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors.

It counts for very, very little. Those Linux and Unix vendors haven't made too much headway on the desktop, people still complain about Gnome's lack of functionality and people still seem to be talking about KDE 4. Things are the same as they ever were.

GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.

Arguably, the former is exactly what Gnome has become. Too many corporate companies pushing different agendas, from Mono to some internet based desktop, and with a usability focus on 'ordinary users' where these users are not defined, nor are they representative of the people actually using Unix/Linux desktops.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

I guess you're not so busy now, since you have nothing better to do than to fire off lame responses to every post I make.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

It counts for very, very little. Those Linux and Unix vendors haven't made too much headway on the desktop, people still complain about Gnome's lack of functionality and people still seem to be talking about KDE 4. Things are the same as they ever were.

You're absolutely correct. In point of fact all those Unix vendors I was talking about mostly sell servers and HPC systems these days, so their desktop choices don't have much impact. Come to that, I'm not that big a fan of GNOME. But it is superior to CDE and the other Unix desktops it replaced, and that's mostly due to its development model.

GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.

Arguably, the former is exactly what Gnome has become. Too many corporate companies pushing different agendas, from Mono to some internet based desktop...

You could be right. If you are, it's because GNOME has ceded so much control to its corporate sponsors that it's back to the old committee model of development. That must be an issue with all successful (or maybe I should say "widely adopted") OS projects. It's part of the project leaders' job to resist that kind of pressure. I think most are successful.

Still, I think the main problem with GNOME (and KDE) is the failure to convert a critical mass of desktops away from Windows. That limits the incentive for companies to donate resources (especially programmer time) to move the project forward. That would make the problems you cite effects rather than causes — the result of GNOME's leaders struggling to keep their project alive.

Re:Unix Gnome

[8-bitDesigner]

Really? That's funny, when I boot my MacBook in single-user mode, I get the nice little UC Berkley Regents copyright notice. You know, the one that attributes most of the work behind the OSX Kernel to the BSD project like the BSD foundation requires.

I mean, that whole Kernel thing isn't that big of a deal is it? I'm sure NT4 is practically uses FreeBSD under the hood. And, after all, look at the volumes of documentation on the differences between OSX and BSD.

Re:Unix Gnome

[Brandybuck]

here are actually only three major Unix vendors left: Sun, IBM, and HP. All provide GNOME as the default desktop.

Only Sun provides it as the *default*. Both AIX and HP-UX still have CDE as their default, with GNOME as an option.

BSD has no vendors. Just a few enthusiasts.

Wow. Just wow. It's amazing what people can believe if they just put their minds to it.

Re:Unix Gnome

[BokLM]

Mac OS X kernel is based on Mach, which has nothing to do with NetBSD, FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

I didn't say Mac OS X doesn't use any tools from BSD, yes they have many userland programs and libraries coming from BSD, but that does not make it a BSD system. I'm sure you can find Linux distributions shipping code with UC Berkley Regents copyrights, but nobody talks about theses as "BSD".

Re:Unix Gnome

[8-bitDesigner]

The kernel's based on Mach, but with a good number of components pulled in from FreeBSD as per my understanding, making it a unique hybrid. However, OSX as a whole is Unix-based, and while it's not entirely BSD, it pulls heavily from BSD code from the kernel down the the toolchain and has some NextStep/Apple proprietary tools loaded on top.

Perhaps "BSD Derivative" would be a better term, as it relies far more heavily on BSD code than the Linux distros I know of, or Windows.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

I stand corrected on the IBM and HP fronts. But who out there is selling a significant number of boxes with BSD on them? Apple doesn't count, for reasons I've already explained.

Re:Unix Gnome

[Brandybuck]

[http://www.freebsdsystems.com/] That's one. It took me all of five seconds to find. You're not putting much effort into this, are you?

But back to your original point, there is no evidence to your assertion that "GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors".

Re:Unix Gnome

[Tribbin]

Oi,

You appear to be a friend of a friend on slashdot so I would not want to bash you.

But your analogy is a logical fallacy, no way of comparison and completely misses my point; and my point is what this was originally all about.

I'm not going to try to explain what I said again since you might just bring up a totally different subject there again.

Love,

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

I said somebody selling a significant number of BSD-based systems. This is just another build-to-order mom-and-pop white box company. And yes, they'll provision your order with FreeBSD. Or, if you prefer, Windows or Linux. Not exactly a resounding endorsement of the importance of BSD, is it?

One other detail: they only sell servers. I wonder which desktop they'd use if they sold workstations? Probably not CDE.

Yes, I was wrong about GNOME at HP and IBM. Still, GNOME is doing a good job of grabbing mindshare, even where it's not the default desktop.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

Actually, you're on my fan list, so I must have said something that appealed to you at one time.

Since you don't like the analogy, let's try plain logic. If I switch from A to B because I like B, does that imply that I like A too? It does not. There are any number of reasons for making a choice and not all of them have to do with the chooser's tastes or preferences. I might have chosen A because somebody forced me to (just like the Ger... sorry, promised not to use that analogy) or because it was the only choice available, or because it was all I could afford.

Re:Unix Gnome

[Tribbin]

OK, here goes:

Indeed, if you switch from A to B because you like B, that does indeed not imply that you like A.

But; hypothetically:

I don't like beer brand A though I have never tasted it.
I do like beer brand B very much.

I see somebody unknown to me drinking brand B.
That person tells me that he has been drinking brand A for most of his life but likes brand B better now.

This WILL make me more interested in brand A and I will surely want to know if I've missed anything.

Then I find out that brand A is not available in my country anymore.

That is somewhat how I look at the situation.

A = CDE
B = Gnome
my country = linux

So, when I wrote how I'm interested in CDE now, because Unixes switched to Gnome, you couldn't see how I did not intend that as a flame even though I specifically wrote that it could be read as a flame, but was not intended like that, you replied with:

"No matter how many times I read that first sentence, it still sounds flamy. You trash GNOME, you don't say why you don't like it. Pretty typical first shot in a flame war."

As a response I told you that I love gnome and use nothing else, and hoped to clear up my view for you.

After that you come with a totally unrelated analogy that IS logically flawed, because a switch from A to B does not EXCLUDE that I like A. Those things logically stand apart but in a world that does not only involve logic, because of the switch event, there was a bigger likelyhood that I would have liked CDE.

And if you want to know; I made you my friend on slashdot this afternoon because when I got the feeling you were provoking me I wanted to see if it is worth the discussion; and it is worth the discussion because I like your other posts a lot and therefore would like to make myself clear to you.

Re:Unix Gnome

[imr]

No, I'm talking aboout GNOME which is a free software project.
I don't get what you are talking about, both free software and open source can be done by individuals or corporate, and both can be done in an organic or carefully planed way.

Re:Unix Gnome

[imr]

It's not the point.
The point is that it came out in a terrible state, that nobody cared about it for years. And when it finally got some attention, it was too late for many users who had switched desktop, and, in my case, had stopped to even try to talk about it anymore with GNOME developpers.
So the point is that organic development has its good points, and its issues.
And calling me a troll for having this opinion, is actually the other point about people being ideological about it and dismissing everything that could be slightly critical of their dogma.

Re:Unix Gnome

[cortana]

If that was your point then why didn't you make it in the first place, instead of making the (false) claim that the file chooser had not improved for years?

Re:Unix Gnome

[imr]

Because they arent false claims. It hadnt improved for years as it took years before someone took care of it and it took some more years ot have it become usable.
I was a gnome 1.2 and 1.4 users, believe me, I'm not making this up nor am I taking any pleasure into it or reminding it. I still have stomach ache every time I open a picture in gimp.
The worst about it was when one year after having definitively stopped to talk about it with some GNOME developper I know (and respect), because I was fed up to be given the same preformatted answers about how usability tests had been made, I saw in a forum a new user to gnome trying to warn a new developper about the exact same issues and he was given the same exact answers I had received. At the end of the discussion, the developper admitted he had in fact not checked what he was answering and I felt this was actually an improvment from what I had experienced!

got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS germs

[Locutus]

All I had to do was look at the Tomboy site and see that it is based on MS C# and their DotNyet stuff. Therefore, it is not safe to touch Gnome 2.20 due to Microsoft infection and MS MIB knocking on your door. Let Novell announce this is all free of Microsoft's IP before touching it. KDE is the better choice in this regard. IMO.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/

LoB

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[ADRA]

I guess you should also steer away from every mainstream Linux OS since they're all including mono these days. In fact, you should start wearing your tinfoil hat as well too, because the aliens have patents on Mono technology as well!

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like Tomboy is some vital application you could never live without. It's a note taking application; it's basically Apple's "Stickies" in GNOME format. Don't install it and tell your OS vendor not to ship it (and to ship Tracker by default instead of Beagle).

And the Qt/KDE guys are working on Mono bindings as well: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-18.html So there goes that notion.

New Clearlooks

[duprasi]

What I am interested in is the new Clearlooks by Andrea Cimitan. It looks like he took the old Clearlooks, and combined it with a Tango feel (the modern standard for GNOME graphic design) and the Murrine glass-like appearance (his own personal pet project). It's... interesting. I like it, but it'll take some time for me to get accustomed to. At least with things like Tango icons, though, it's helping to forge an official, clean, recognizable GNOME appearance, whether you are one of those who like the design or not.

Re:New Clearlooks

[Tyr_7BE]

That's Cimitan Andrea :)

http://cimi.netsons.org/pages/home.php

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[callinyouin]

If you're so afraid of some kind of "Microsoft infection" why don't you try reading the source?
http://download.gnome.org/sources/tomboy/0.8/tomboy-0.8.0.tar.gz

I hope I'm not being a Troll

[thomasdz]

I hope I'm not being a Troll when I say that this Gnome release will Dwarf all other releases. It is a Hobbit of mine to Drag-on puns like this until I have to run off to the bathroom to take a Wiz-ard.

Re:I hope I'm not being a Troll

[aerthling]

Please, stop tolkien rubbish.

Re:I hope I'm not being a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, if you don't stop it, you're gonna be sauruman.

Re:I hope I'm not being a Troll

[azenpunk]

it's running rings around all that came before.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[cortana]

If you have evidence that any of Microsoft's copyrights or trademarks are being used without permission, please present it!

If you're worried about patents then you should fix your country's patent system, as it is likely that any software more trivial than "hello world" infringes on dozens of patents.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that but the legal goo. Microsoft and Novell (is there a difference?) both would like to see all true GNU/Linux distros die.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Anonymous Coward]

And KDE was supposed to be the one based on evil technology. Seems like it's the other way round nowadays.

ok, it's out

[fadilnet]

I, for one, am glad to see new stuff. I've not yet downloaded the new packages (still beta, if I've read correctly). Gnome + Metisse -> wow!

Gnome has shortcomings. It's a fact. There's no need to bash it. Use alternate utils to overcome those shortcomings. Say you're irked @ Nautilus, try PC-man for example. It's just a window manager. Just tweak it.

I'm not being a troll or anything but I believe in the rise of KDE4 and compiz fusion, gnome seems quite the window manager for P3/K6 (for e.g). Of course, there's openbox, fluxbox, blackbox, window maker, and the entire plethora of small sized footprint window managers. Gnome is entering that category for machines having say 500Mhz+ processors and 256 MB RAM. (of course, it can run on lower specs but the 'fluidity' (responsiveness) will be lower).

Anyway, kudos to Gnome team. Keep releasing new versions :)

Re:ok, it's out

[Randle_Revar]

Metacity is getting some of the fancy Compiz-fusion type effects, you know. And you can use Compiz-fusion instead of Metacity.

I think Gnome/KDE is less about the power of your computer or even your preference for shiny effects, and more about your preferences in an overall sense.
Personally, I like KDE and Gnome equally, but I like Fluxbox and wmii even more.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you should also steer away from every mainstream Linux OS since they're all including mono these days.

Most Linux distributions do not install Mono by default.

Mono isn't part of GNOME

[DreadSpoon]

Most of the core GNOME developers were (and many still are) against Mono. So I call bullshit on your assertion. Also, just to clarify a bit, Tomboy is not a required component of GNOME, nor does GNOME in any depend upon Mono. It's an officially sanctioned add-on application, which essentially means nothing more than "we host the source and Tomboy follows our release schedule."

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[gwait]

Seriously? That is good news - I had assumed the two were integrated like.. IE in Windows XP..

I really did not want to get tangled up in Mono, so I have been avoiding Gnome (chosing KUbuntu over Ubuntu) to specifically avoid Mono.

Why no Mono? I don't need no stinkin middleware, I just want a clean gui on top of linux.
I also don't want to rely on anything that Microsoft can decide to destroy with IP lawsuits one day..(yes, they would. Mono is a trap).

Why not stay with KDE? Gnome looks cleaner to me, and seems to have more critical mass, thus I assume better support than KDE etc.

So as long as I can install Gnome and uncheck the Mono box, I'd be happy. Is this going to change in the future? Do the mono proponents have enough clout to
cause Mono to become an integral part of Gnome in the future?

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu has more user/support than kubuntu, but KDE has tons of development and users (though maybe behind in default install distros). Both projects have more than enough momentum to continue. Read the Gentoo forums if you want any sort of help with KDE (for lower level OS stuff you're likely better off with ubuntu forums (despite the many, many,many clueless questions and suggestions to be found )).

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[Randle_Revar]

Dude, it's a note taking app, and Gnome isn't MS. There is no way Tomboy would ever be integrated like IE in Windows.

You can even run a completely mixed environment. For example you could theoretically run GDM (the Gnome session/logon manager) with Nautilus (Gnome) to handle the Desktop, use the Fluxbox window manager (not Gnome or KDE), have Kicker running (KDE Panel/Menu bar) and use Konqueror (KDE) for the file manager. Or just about any other weird combo you could think of.

Gnome may have more users than KDE (or maybe not), but in any case KDE has millions of users and a very large and active Dev community.

Mono has official bindings for Gnome, and is fully supported for writing Gnome apps. Aside from Tomboy; Beagle (search), F-Spot (photo management) and Banshee (Music player) are all Mono. However it is extremely unlikely that anyone will rewrite Nautilus, G-conf, Gnome Panel or any other core part of Gnome in Mono.

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[drspliff]

He's not talking about Tomboy being integrated like IE in Windows: It's the issue of Novell pushing the Mono project into tighter integration with GNOME and then the serious repercussions _when_ (not if) Microsoft decides enough is enough and makes it very hard for Mono to stay alive.

Keeping them separate and having Mono fully support GNOME is a really good idea, but at the end of the day everybody still loaths Mono (and the .NET platform) runtime as much as Java for the extra overheads it introduces; some people might conclude that faster development times compared to C or C++ justify it, others don't - you choose what you want to run.

Personally I use Ion 3 to manage my terminals, gvim instances and Opera, instead of "desktop environments" focusing more on pretty boxes instead of helping productivity.

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[Randle_Revar]

From "I had assumed the two were integrated like.. IE in Windows XP.." I thought "it" was Tomboy.

I agree with everything you said, except Ion. I'm more of wmii type ;-)

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[dhasenan]

The faster development time with C# is orthogonal to its running in a virtual machine. There are languages around that offer the best of both worlds -- I currently use the D programming language for this.

Granted, the gtk and wx bindings are simple interfaces to the C version of the library, but higher-level abstractions can be written on top of those.

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[Randle_Revar]

Whoops, I should have said, "I agree with everything you said, except Ion, GVim and Opera. I'm more of wmii, Vim and SeaMonkey type ;-)"

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[gwait]

Sorry, I did mean Mono in general integrated into Gnome.

Sounds like from the responses that I'm relatively safe from Mono.

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[joeljkp]

At least in Ubuntu, there's F-Spot too. It rules.

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[j_aroche]

thats what really don't like about GNOME, why the heck have Mono for everything... that like running another layer of code, where you get nothing more that a waste of cpu time. *grin*

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[sowth]

... I just want a clean gui on top of linux. ...

I must be tired. I read this as "I just want a clean girl on top of linux" and thought: ooh kinky!

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[sowth]

I tried ion. (and wmii) As I recall they had problems with certain applications, such as GIMP. Is there a way to make the GIMP work with those window managers?

Re:Mono isn't part of GNOME

[Seq]

I agree.

I could probably live without Tomboy. I use Rhythmbox instead of Banshee, despite the latter having some cooler features. I "use" tracker instead of beagle (maybe should say "have" as I have not gotten in the habit of using it much yet). But F-Spot is an absolutely amazing program, regardless of what language it is in.

gnome online desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the release notes.
Evolution: no thanks, I use thunderbird.
Epiphany: please, I use Firefox
Tomboy: and mono, no thanks.

Did they do anything to improve the liveCD, gnome online desktop?

Re:gnome online desktop?

[fadilnet]

You make as if you can't install Thunderbird and the other apps you use, while having Gnome installed!

Come on! Gnome is merely the Window Manager. Install the apps you like and enjoy your distro.

The LiveCD is merely to show people the beauty of Gnome. Once, you're done with it, get your distro deployed and select your window manager.

Re:gnome online desktop?

[Daengbo]

If you use Gnome, you'd do well to try Epiphany. Firefox doesn't follow any of the Gnome conventions: it looks completely out of place in a Gnome desktop. The GUI for Epiphany is much more responsive and I get to tag my bookmarks. There's also the little gem of writing your own quick searches as easily as adding a bookmark. You like Firefox. Go ahead. Gnome users who try to stick with Gnome apps for a consistent look and feel should be on Epiphany, though.

Re:gnome online desktop?

[sfraggle]

Gnome is not a Window Manager. Metacity is.

Re:gnome online desktop?

[segedunum]

If you use Gnome, you'd do well to try Epiphany. Firefox doesn't follow any of the Gnome conventions: it looks completely out of place in a Gnome desktop.

I wonder why that is, because Firefox looks OK on my Windows machine.

Re:gnome online desktop?

[Spudds]

Or you could try galeon.
Configurable smart bookmark searches integrated into the toolbar, slim, sleek interface (their motto is "the web and only the web"), better configurability than epiphany and it integrates seamlessly into GNOME.

Cheggidout.

Great names.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the randomly named applications that have no relation to what the programs actually do. I'll Totem that Tomboy anyday. And if that doesn't Evince you, I'll Gnome you from behind till you beg for mercy.

Re:Great names.

[ir]

actually they do label them with human-understandable names in the gnome menus.

Re:Great names.

[Anonymous Coward]

(Ironically enough, I'm posting AC because I'm modding.)

I don't waste mod points on ACs, but shut the fuck up already. Your shit's tired.

Damn

[Billly Gates]

... and I wipped out Ubuntu for Windows due to school wifi's reliance on Cisco's security software. Proprietary software sucks.

WIndowsXP is so limited to gnome but I do like MS Office at least on my now boring machine.

Re:Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Our office uses vpn over wifi .. and has created cisco profiles for us to use. If that's what your school has, then there's a simple solution in Ubuntu (In fact, better than what Windows has). Open your cisco profile, copy the encrypted key and decrypt it using many of the websites that let you do this (Just google it). Then create a vpn profile in network-manager in Ubuntu .. and bingo. You can connect to / disconnect from vpn just by clicking on network manager.

Re:Damn

[Nyeerrmm]

If by Cisco's security software you mean their VPN, there is a linux client, although its a pain to use. But, theres now an open-source client that has worked out beautifully for me called VPNC (sudo apt-get install vpnc, and find specifics on the forums for the four or five line config file).

Re:Damn

[Wyzard]

If you're referring to Cisco Clean Access, I've heard there's a way to work around that from a Linux machine, but I don't know the details. Might be worth looking into.

Re:Damn

[SpiritGod21]

AND, if you're instead referring to the Cisco Secure Services Client, Linux should be able to connect depending on what protocol they're using. What uni are you at, and what protocol is it (LEAP, PEAP, etc.)?

Feel free to contact me outside the limits of this message board. I work at a university in computer services and am one of two (staff) who run Linux on campus, so I know what it's like trying to get things to work in a Windows-centric environment.

GNU/shut GNU/the GNU/fuck GNU/up

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/RMS GNU/is GNU/a GNU/pedo

Congrats!

[ChangeOnInstall]

I've been using Gnome since 0.3 or 0.30 (or something like that), and just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work! It's the best desktop environment I've ever used (I use Windows and OSX regularly, but find Gnome to be the most efficient/least cumbersome). I've had no trouble with customization, but then again I find gconf-editor to be remarkably easy and intuitive to use for all the advanced options I want to configure (such as a ridiculous quantity of keyboard shortcuts). The latter half of the 2.x releases have completely eliminated my chief complaints, i.e., performance, menu editing, and file manager issues. Can't wait to try the next release when Ubuntu 7.10 comes out.

Re:Congrats!

[Anonymous Coward]

No trouble with configuration, eh?

Maybe you are the one that can tell me how to set all my *.asm and *.s files to have a specific icon. Heck, even Windows95 could do that!

Or how to get nautilus to reliably view backup files (*.*~) but not hidden ones (.*.*). It always gets screwed up switching between views. BTW, what about *.bak, *.bk, and *.bk? Aren't they backup files, too?

Bah, Gnome developers have gone overboard on cutting out user options.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Tribbin]

You must be joking right?

If you don't trust our car; check the engine and see for yourself!

Trouble with tribbins

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Worry as much about his favourite DE as much as you worry about his favourite wine."

Everyone knows Linus' favourite wine is no wine at all! Linus has incredible taste. He also has a pretty big clue stick, and will hit you with it if you let him. If you had said it is safe to ignore his taste in art, then I could agree, but you ignore Linus' advice on all matters technical at great peril. I know this is true, because he almost invariably comes to the same conclusions I have come to independantly :-)

Re:Trouble with tribbins

[mike_sucks]

Of course, while a desktop environment has a technical side (how do I display widgets, handle user input) it has an equally important ergonomic side (how do I let the user do what they want to do).

While I would trust Linus to be right about the technical side nearly all the time, I seriously doubt him when it comes to ergonomics - recall that he stared flaming GNOME because he wanted to remap a click on the window's menu button to do something other than what you would reasonable expect (i.e. show the window menu).

If that is something he wants to do then fine, he should use something else that lets him do this. A different WM, a different DE, or whatever. It is certainly not a reason to start flaming GNOME, though.

-mike

performance?

[bcrowell]

Is any work being done on Gnome's performance? When I first tried it, ca. 2000, it was just painfully, ridiculously slow on my hardware. I would click on an icon and literally get up for a cup of coffee while it was responding. My sister told me about fluxbox, and I've been using it ever since. Today, I have a nice modern system (AMD x64, dual core), and Gnome is still not anywhere near fast enough that I would choose to use it every day. It takes 32 seconds to start up, and when I click on a menu there's a noticeable delay before the little icons show up. If I was forced to use it, I would, but its unresponsiveness is just embarrassing when I'm trying to convince other people to try Linux.

Re:performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, if you use Fluxbox EVERYTHING else is slow. Event TVM almost seems slow.

Re:performance?

[ricegf]

I was using KDE in 2000, so I don't have a basis for comparison - but on my AMD x65, single core machine, the menus with icons draw faster than I can blink (even my games menu, which drops off the screen :-), tooltips on the application icons fly by as fast as I swipe my mouse, and switching applications and workspaces is near instantaneous. So yeah, I guess it's fixed.

I can't remember how long it takes to load Gnome - I haven't rebooted in 5 months, so who cares???

Return to Gnome, switch to KDE, or stay with Fluxbox - again, who cares???

Re:performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can fix that by adding the line

gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0

to your .gtkrc-2.0 file in your home directory (make the file if it isn't there). Gnome put it in the delay because they thought it would be more usable. I like it better without the delay.

Re:performance?

[raddan]

I must meet your sister.

Re:performance?

[Billly Gates]

Gnome 2.x is alot faster than gnome 1.x. Also a new memory allocating routine has been added in gnome 2.17 that drastically improves load time when starting programs. Give it a try? Its free.

Re:performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what you mean. I've use gnome on several high end machines as well as on some old beaters, and it's always very agile, or at least, more responsive than windows.

Re:performance?

[bcrowell]

Gnome 2.x is alot faster than gnome 1.x. Also a new memory allocating routine has been added in gnome 2.17 that drastically improves load time when starting programs. Give it a try? Its free.
The performance I was describing (32 seconds to start up, delays in drawing menus, on a new high-end machine) was with Gnome 2.18.1.

Re:performance?

[Chapium]

I had similar experiences in 2002. In general menus and window animations are now fluid and clean. Many programs have load quicker as well.

Re:performance?

[Rutulian]

32 seconds? That certainly isn't the case for me, and I'm still using an old Athlon XP. Sounds like you are using a bad distribution, or else you've done something else to your system to make it so slow.

Re:performance?

[plasmoidia]

I have only a single core Athlon 64 (2.2 GHz) and Gnome (2.18 on Fedora 7 x86_64) is plenty fast enough for me (I'm also running AIGLX compositing with Compiz). I have not timed it, but after login it takes maybe about 10 seconds to completely calm down, and is plenty usable after 3-5 seconds. Menus do take some time to show icons the first time around (not a big deal to me, it takes longer to read the menu), but after that, it is very fast (instant). Anyway, I think performance is one area where work is being done, to answer your question.

Re:performance?

[lazybeam]

You said around 2000 you had the slowness problems; Gnome 2.0 was released late 2001.

I use a fairly standard install of ubuntu feisty (Gnome 2.18.1) on an XP1600+ and I never notice performance problems. It usually feels snappier than my Windows XP at work (P4 3GHz).

Re:performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn XML-based menus, that's what it is..

it helps:
http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php/Desktop_Optimization

Re:performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you type my password to log in to your account, then you have to wait for a long time, before the GNOME desktop appears. That makes Ubuntu look bad when you show it to other people.

Re:performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time menu delay does not have anything to do with XML, it happens because icons are not preloaded and cached.

Re:performance?

[bcrowell]

You said around 2000 you had the slowness problems; Gnome 2.0 was released late 2001.
I said I had performance problems then, with an old version, and am still having performance problems now, with a new version.

I removed Gnome about a month ago, went with IceWM

[walterbyrd]

My system feels a little more snappy now. I guess gnome was okay, but for me it felt bloated.

My system: 1.6ghz, 512mb, nvidia card with 128mb. Running Debian 4.0 SID.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[ClosedSource]

Yes, the patent issue with respect to mono is nonsense. MS (or any other legally-wise company) is going to make their patents as broad as possible and not tie them to a specific implementation. Thus non-mono code is just as likely to trip over MS patents.

An absurd alternate-universe example: if email were patented by MS and implemented only in .NET, than using that feature in your mono program might get you in trouble. On the other hand, if you decided to create a non-mono version of email for Linux, you'd still be in trouble because the patent is based on the email "invention" not on the specific implementation.

note-taking, stickies, postits

[namekuseijin]

are much easier to write down with a pen and glue to my coworkers' monitors.

never seen the utility for it in software...

I hope *nix continue to be about C and scripting and forget about the huge bloated redundant VMs temptation...

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[callinyouin]

Why would I be joking? Apart from any legal aspects, if the code is clean what do you have to worry about?

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Almahtar]

If you're so afraid of some kind of "Microsoft infection" why don't you try reading the source?

http://download.gnome.org/sources/tomboy/0.8/tomboy-0.8.0.tar.gz Because the infection isn't in the source, it's in the standard. Now I wouldn't go near as far as the GP and claim that because a project is using Mono it'll get a visit from Microsoft lawyers, but I can't believe that there are people that actually think including a product based on a Microsoft standard is a good idea. Microsoft has never proven themselves to be trustworthy to the competition.

Strategically Mono seems shortsighted and foolish to me.

IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[NullProg]

It was lightweight on memory and speedy. Every release since then has been slower. 12 meg of RAM for GDM? Give me a break. Its a freaking login box.

There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them.

Sure, and meanwhile, Program Manager (Windows 9x) and Presentation Manager (OS/2) did more with less memory (Two Meg), back in 1995.
Whats really sad is that Presentation Manager was OOP/Class aware which is what both KDE and Gnome are still striving for.

Congrats to the Gnome team. Hardware companies everywhere salute you.

If I bitch about system requirements for Windows, then I can bitch about system requirements for Gnome/KDE.
I won't be downloading Gnome. XFce4 is everything Gnome was suppose to be. How many Gnome programmers use XUbuntu for development?

And where in the hell is the new Enlightenment Ebuntu distribution?

Enjoy,

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[bheekling]

Every release since then has been slower.
Actually, I found 2.18 to be _much_ faster than 2.16. To quote a friend of mine, "gnome-terminals are popping up like popcorn :D"

12 meg of RAM for GDM? Give me a break. Its a freaking login box.
/me fires up htop
Hmmm, its using 2mb on my computer...

Sure, and meanwhile, Program Manager (Windows 9x) and Presentation Manager (OS/2) did more with less memory (Two Meg), back in 1995. 2mbs in 1995! Computers back then had 16mb of RAM remember?
Right now, on my computer, Firefox is at the top of the memory list with 125mbs, followed by thunderbird at 25. Neither of them are gnome apps. The core gnome component using the most amount of memory right now is nautilus (which does half the work in gnome) and its taking up 12mb. [ Now, what were you saying about memory in gnome?

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[NullProg]

Whatever....

2mbs in 1995! Computers back then had 16mb of RAM remember?
No they had on average 2-16 because RAM was expensive. Want to see my still working P100?

me fires up htop
Hmmm, its using 2mb on my computer...

Yeah, right.... You do know what ps -aux columns mean?

root 7875 0.0 0.8 12572 2264 ? S 21:39 0:00 /usr/sbin/gdm --config=/etc/gdm/gdm-cdd.conf

In case you don't, thats 12.5 Meg RSS (Non-Shared) and 2.2 Meg resident usage for a login program that is no longer needed after a single user has signed on.

Right now, on my computer, Firefox is at the top of the memory list with 125mbs, followed by thunderbird at 25.
Try the SeaMonkey/Mozilla suite. Mine never tops 80Meg.

Enjoy,

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[Daengbo]

Interesting. I've been looged in to 2.20 all day, and my top processes right now are:

• Epiphany (8 tabs) 80MB
• Deskbar 24MB
• Nautilus 16MB
• Rhythmbox (playing) 15MB
• Tomboy (50+ notes) 14MB
• Ekiga 10MB

My panels are stuffed to the gills, I've been running all day, and I'm still only using 309MB of memory. I'd call that really good for requirements on modern hardware. We can talk later about what happens when I open OO.o, but that's not a Gnome app. ;)

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot, and on top of that you can't read. Look again at the ps line you've shown: VSZ is 12572, but that means squat, as it is the Virtual SiZe; RSS (Resident Set Size), on the other hand, is 2264, and that is the real physical memory consuption. So, there you go, gdm uses all of a whopping 2Mb of memory.

Congratulations, you're an ignorant douchebag.

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[chemaja]

Wow, htop is pretty cool!

How'd you find out about it? I wonder if there's a gnomefiles.org-style website for ncurses apps...

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[Rudd-O]

RSS does not mean non-shared you ignorant prick. It means Resident Set Size which is the amount of RAM that is actually resident on PHYSICAL RAM instead of in need to be paged in.

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[tao]

[...] for a login program that is no longer needed after a single user has signed on.

Actually, that's incorrect. GDM isn't a login program, it's a display manager. I suggest you read up on the concept a bit, and you'll realise that GDM needs to keep running even after login...

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[juhaz]

Yeah, right.... You do know what ps -aux columns mean? Do _YOU_? Well, stupid question, obviously not.

As Rudd said, 12.5M is VSZ. 2.2M is RSS, and yes, it _does_ include shared memory (which ps doesn't show, see top for example).

When a greeter is not running, total amount of non-shared memory taken by GDM is few hundred kilobytes. Here, it's 1148kB RSS, 748 SHR. That's 400 kilobytes. Memory hungry my ass.

The greeter is pretty hungry, but it is not in use when someone is signed on.

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[segedunum]

You pulled all that off Top, right? ;-)

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[Daengbo]

Actually, off the Gnome system monitor, but basically the same thing. I'm not going to do a full memory profile for something this simple. The memory usage may actually be lower when counting shares libs, but that only supports my original point.

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[NullProg]

Actually, that's incorrect. GDM isn't a login program, it's a display manager. I suggest you read up on the concept a bit, and you'll realise that GDM needs to keep running even after login...

I could be wrong, but doesn't GDM/KDM just wrap login and call X? Its a GUI logon/startx replacement. Thats why X ppid = GDM.

Enjoy,

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[NullProg]

RSS does not mean non-shared you ignorant prick.
Actually I'm a stupid prick for posting rants after midnight while drunk.

It means Resident Set Size which is the amount of RAM that is actually resident on PHYSICAL RAM instead of in need to be paged in.
I know and I'm sorry. No excuse. Please deduct 50 tux points from my account and donate them to the needy.

Enjoy,

Gentoo Gnome 2.20 review

[buchner.johannes]

There are some interesting points about the 2.20 release at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-584813-start-0-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-.html

Re:Gentoo Gnome 2.20 review

[Anonymous Coward]

The article that you linked to should be rated as flamebait at best. At least one of the bugs reported there is real (rename file, then delete) but most of them are either specific to the custom build that he is using or are specific to his environment. He complains that some parts of the theme do not work right (menus, fonts) and asks for a "shiny theme with style" but then mentions that he is using "gtk-engines-qtcurve" instead of the standard Clearlooks (and boy, do I hate qtcurve for its bugs and silly appearance!).

On my systems (a mix of Debian, Ubuntu and openSuse machines), I never see most of the problems reported there: gnome-power-manager works fine, I do not get unexpected changes of fonts in some dialogs, gksu works fine, etc. So instead of reporting all these problems as GNOME 2.20 bugs, they should be reported as bugs on his personal machine, or maybe as Gentoo bugs.

If you want to try GNOME, please do yourself a favor and pick a distribution that doesn't break it by default. So pick Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat or some others. I cannot really recommend openSuse because its version of GNOME is customized and seems to be much more bloated than others (and it has bugs that I haven't found in Debian or Ubuntu, for example). But maybe it is still better than the Gentoo port. I am not sure about that.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[larry bagina]

uh oh

static bool CheckTrayIconShowing ()
{
// Check to make sure the tray icon is showing. If it's not,
// it's likely that the Notification Area isn't available. So
// instead, launch the Search All Notes window so the user can
// can still use Tomboy.
// NOTE: this infringes on Microsoft IP.

Getting better ...

[garphik]

I can see some originality in the UI now, the theme is quite good. But I still think it needs a lot of work (things look very sparsely placed sometimes) Bluecurve was brilliant in that respect.

Only, I think the taskbar on top is something copied.

Re:Getting better ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Only, I think the taskbar on top is something copied."

Just drag&drop it to any side you want it to be.

Re:Feisty - needs more resources than opensuse

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed and used Ubuntu 7.04 for a couple of days on one of my older PCs. Bad experience. It was just too slow, presumably all due to GNOME. OpenSUSE with KDE runs on the same machine and is satisfactorily fast.

Mono

[KwKSilver]

Seems like someone pointed out recently that the only "safe" (as in safe from patent lawsuits?) way to get mono (or was it Sliverblight?) was through Novell... and that someone was Miguel de Icaza. Of course, de Icaza assures us that MS will not sue. However, Steve Ballmer and other MS luminaries say that MS owes it to its shareholders to collect on its patents. So who do I believe, Miguel de Icaza, a Novell developer, or Steve Ballmer, the CEO of MS? Perhaps when Ballmer unleashes the law-dogs on linux and the BSDs, I can count on Miguel to pick up the phone and order Ballmer to cut it out, and Ballmer will obey? Go ahead and act on that belief, if you want. Count me out.

The drift of the "S.S. Gnome" towards the "Mono Rocks" is why I jumped the "HMS Ubuntu" for Sidux (KDE and Fluxbox). Actually, I understand that mono can be uninstalled from Ubuntu, although when I tried I got a warning that my desktop would be removed. Rather than go to the trouble of rebuilding it, I decided to try Sidux & Sabayon. Sabayon turned out to be laced with mono, too and although I successfully removed it (and Beagle) from Sabayon, looking at the trends and sentiments on their forums convinced me to stick with Sidux. Too bad, I'd actually gotten to like Gnome while using Ubuntu.

WTF? If I wanted to use MS-patented technology, I would be using Windows & Internet Explorer. Good luck to the Gnome guys and gals, I wish you well. You may wish to consider starting a legal-defence fund.

Re: Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

"ubuntu-desktop" which would have been removed if you uninstalled Mono doesn't actually contain anything and can be safely removed. It's just a meta-package that depends on everything in a standard Ubuntu Gnome install, so you can do a "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" and get the standard Ubuntu desktop. There is also a kubuntu-desktop so that you can install that standard Ubuntu KDE desktop, rather than having manually install all the various KDE apps.

Re: Mono

[12357bd]

You may also try Mandriva, it's the second distro most voted in a recent lenovo sponsored poll after Ubuntu. I've been using it for years and it's a great distro, the 2007.1 repositories for 64 bits are really a big bonus.

Mods on crack or meth?

[KwKSilver]

The guy provided a link to the Tomboy page at the GNOME site where you can check it yourself. He also said "IMO" = "in my opinion". How is having a freaking opinion trolling?

Purest BS!

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome-1.2 IS the fastest gnome.

Try it yourself. Measure the time it takes to get the "start menu" on the screen from the time you click on the "foot" icon.

I guarantee you an old K6 running redhat 6.2 (with gnome 1.2) will run circles around the fastest Opteron today. gnome-1.2 was instantaneous and gnome-2.x thrashes the disk before it can even find the icons to display, let alone draw. It takes seconds.

Re:Purest BS!

[cortana]

Try remounting your filesystem with the 'noatime' option. It made a slight difference to me, I think.

Always been buggy

[HermMunster]

Gnome, though it is my favorite desktop for linux, has always been very buggy. This release is no different. What the developers don't realize is that once they commit to fixing bugs we the end user will see those bug fixes as new features. Someone there needs to be bonked on the head so they can understand that fixing bugs can be seen as new features by users.

Users don't want buggy software even if it appears that new features have been added.

There are some real show stoppers in gnome. Interesting that for release after release they haven't fixed them. One of them clearly can be demonstrated by copying large numbers of files on a network. You'll be regularly prompted for generic errors about the copy process. You can retry and the file MAY be copied. Moving files over a network is not a safe endeavor. Yeah yeah, small groups of files are ok, but large groups can result in you thinking the process has completed when it really didn't complete the process.

So, some serious show stoppers yet we get a .12 update and we cheer.

FIX THE BUGS!!

Sorry, just couldn't resist.

Re:Always been buggy

[kripkenstein]

I'm not great at this, so perhaps because of that I couldn't find the bug for the issue you mentioned. Can you post a link to it, so we can see what progress (if any) is being made on this matter?

Re:Always been buggy

[zlogic]

My favorite GNOME bug is this: dragging a window onto a different desktop using the pager.
If the window is an ordinary one, that's OK. But if it's a splash screen (or a window that closes itself after some time), if the window closes while is is being dragged, the whole GNOME desktop segfaults.

Re:Always been buggy

[kmaraas]

I don't see splash screens in the pager at all. At least not the OO.o one. How do I reproduce this bug? And did you ever file a bugreport in bugzilla about this?

Re:Always been buggy

[zlogic]

It works with Eclipse as well as Abiword.
1) Start dragging a splash screen in the pager onto a different desktop
2) Don't drop it, just make sure it's about to be dropped on another desktop when you release the mouse button
3) Wait until it's gone (loading compete)
4) Release the mouse button

GNOME crashes, but then restarts itself.

Re:Always been buggy

[juhaz]

It's reproducible, doesn't have anything to with splash screens, but dragging windows that do not exist any more (as you say, it won't work if you drop it while it's there). But gnome does not crash, just the panel, or in distros that compile that applet as a module, just the applet.

Certainly a bug, but you didn't answer his question so I take it you have not reported it. Seriously, bugs don't get fixed by magic, and developers can't fix things they don't know about. Something like that is not what most people will ever do so will ever be hit, if you don't tell someone, IT CAN NOT BE FIXED.

I'll file it, if kmaraas didn't already, but for crying out loud, if something troubles you, let the developers know.

Re:Always been buggy

[cortana]

I am unable to reproduce this with gnome-panel 2.18.3.

  1. Launch xterm
  2. enter the command: sleep 5; exit
  3. Locate xterm's window in the workspace switcher applet
  4. Drag the window to another workspace; do not drop it
  5. Wait for the xterm window to disappear
  6. Drop the window

Please provide more information including the version of gnome-panel you are using.

Re:Always been buggy

[zlogic]

I'm using the default Gnome (2.18.1) in Ubuntu 7.04.
I made a clean test: booted from the ubuntu live CD and performed the steps you described. Gnome didn't crash completely, but the screen flickered and gnome-power-manager disappeared from the tray and moved itself into a small window. Then I tried to do the same, but with gnome-terminal it was a bit worse: restoring took more time and the panels flickered a bit more. I also tried this on another PC and it seems the crash is more visible when there's not much free RAM and CPU. For example on a Celeron 1.4Ghz with 512 megs of RAM (and Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird and 4 gnome-terminals running) recovery takes about 15 seconds.

Re:Always been buggy

[erikvcl]

I completely agree. Every single version of Gnome I've ever used (various 1.x, 2.x versions) have been as rickety as a 3-legged chair. With every version, I was expecting an increase in stability and performance. Instead what I got was increased dependencies, crap performance, and instability.

I finally switched to KDE and I haven't looked back. I haven't experienced a crash with KDE yet. Unlike Gnome, the KDE Control Center will actually give you advice on how to enable features and make your system work properly. I can't believe I waited so long to make the switch -- I could have saved myself countless hours of frustration.

GTK+/Gnome and this OO C stuff is all a big steaming pile of crap written by developers whose egos are bigger than their brains. Write the stuff in C++ and be done with it. I can't understand why the engineers are doing a bad-job of re-writing C++ when they can just bite the bullet, learn C++ and have a decent API with some decent code. Look at the performance of GTK+ 2.X apps compared to the performance of KDE apps! KDE apps are MUCH MUCH faster. You can tell just by pulling down menus and opening dialog boxes. The C code is slower than the C++ code. Imagine that.

Re:Always been buggy

[zlogic]

The problem is that it's easier simply not to drag windows that are about to disappear than
- create a Bugzilla account
- spend a lot of time searching which category the bug belongs to
- fill out a lot of fields, like priority etc.

I find writing an email easier, and besides this way I can do bet-i'll-crash-your-gnome-not-even-using-the-keyboard tricks :-)

Re:Always been buggy

[kmaraas]

Could be related to this: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420713 The detailed changelog is: Fix a crash when dragging a window to somewhere like another workspace/viewport. The original drag source widget might have been destroyed. We're now more solid against this, and use another drag source widget which lives longer. Fix bug #420713. Anyway, if it's not fixed run the applet or the panel (whichever it is that is crashing) under gdb. For an applet you do this the following way: gdb /usr/libexec/wnck-applet (gdb) r Then add the pager to the panel via right click -> add to panel Reproduce the bug and type bt in gdb to get the backtrace. Chances are that we can find out whether it's really fixed or just harder to reproduce now.

Re:Always been buggy

[juhaz]

True enough, it takes a certain amount of effort, but then again, so does complaining about it on slashdot.

FWIW, someone had taken the effort, looks like http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415675, it's already fixed and even backported to 2.18.x branch (happens in Feisty with 2.18.0 but not in F7 with 2.18.3), so better start looking for new tricks ;)

Re:Always been buggy

[juhaz]

From the stacktrace I get in ubuntu (bit harder to do since they build wncklet into the panel, not as separate executable) it looks like 415675.

Obviously new to these things- politics started it

[dbIII]

because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically

Gnome was a child of licence politics and initially did little more than break the gimp toolkit and rant about KDE and qt. Others joined in including some that had a clue how unix worked instead of just reinventing the wheel badly on top, some of the early people left and it became useful and even cross platform. We're still left with some of the fashions of the day poorly implemented in dark corners of gnome (and gconf) but with time this is undone and replaced with something useful.

Attitudes have changed a lot for the better. The brief time when enlightenment was part of gnome and had to sacrifice cross-platform support was enlightening - now politics are far less important then function which is how it should be.

Depends - gnome used to crash a lot more

[dbIII]

I've got a few users running on KDE due to frequent gnome crashes - gnome has improved but they are stuck on RHEL3 for stupid commercial support reasons for a paticular application. At the point KDE was rock solid and gnome was in an unstable stage. Even now (previous release) certain events like remote apps launching another window into the foreground while users are in a file dialog lock the gnome window manager up solidly to the point where you have to kill X.

I am however not certain that the KDE users are happy because it doesn't crash at all or because it crashes less than it did. It's all relative now - users of both keep application windows open on their desktop for a couple of months on occasion.

GNOME,KDE have been replaced by XFCE

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in the camp that likes features, but not the kitchen sink solutions.

Over the years, my desktop has been something like:

mwm,fvwm,fvmw2,kde,gnome(yuck),kde,XFCE.

perhaps I could say my browsers have followed a similar path.

mosaic,netscape,mozilla(yuck),old-netscape,phoenix,firebird,firefox,whould-consider-gtk-webcore

and perhaps my mail readers are similar.

pine?,netscape,mozilla(yuck),old-netscape,menatour(yuck),kmail(yuck),balsa(yuck),kmail(yuck),thunderbird,
would-consider-claws-mail

So for now, the sweet spot for small and useful is XFCE,firefox,thunderbird.

Re:Obviously new to these things- politics started

[fm6]

Dude, before you fire off a response to a posts take a monist to see if somebody hasn't already written the same response.

Vala

[emblemparade]

Vala. This new project, from the Gtk folk, is ingenious. It's a C#-like language that is translated internally into C source code. Object orientation is handled automagically through GObject, which is really the main mover of Vala and its inspiration. GObject is a complete OO solution in pure C, essentially an OO ABI. Bindings exist between GObject and practically any language you have heard of. Thus, a GObject-based C library is immediately usable, for example, by Python, in binary form. Read that again: you can expose an object from your code, and use it, just like that, in Python, without having to write any "wrapper." No other platform in existence allows that. The closest you get to anything like that is exporting COM objects from .NET, but COM is far, far more complex than GObject. GObject is a self-contained, standard C library. You can run it anywhere. Thing is, using GObject is a pain in C, which is not itself an OO language. Enter Vala: it changes all that by adding a higher compilation level. The end result is that you get all the advantages of all the high-level languages, with the added advantage of instant interoperability with a host of powerful platforms. I really think this is the killer solution. Vala code could run anywhere there is a C compiler, and be more interoperable than any of the above solutions. I'm definitely going to be following this development very closely!

Another reason to follow the progress of the Vala project is that it would seriously jeopardize the future of Mono, by making its main drive irrelevant.

If you remember the history, Mono was introduced quickly and with some controversy. Miguel de Icaza and Ximian originally envisioned Mono as allowing an easy way to develop applications for the GNOME desktop, De Icaza's more famous project. The problem with Java at the time was that its license was not easily compatible with the GPL. While there were a few open source Java VMs out there, the projects themselves were problematic and mired in all kinds of problems, including legal uncertainty. Meanwhile, experimenting with C#, De Icaza managed to develop a quick-and-dirty C# compiler. The open source community didn't really care if it was C# or Java, as long as they had a virtual machine of their own. De Icaza had already proved himself capable, so he got the support he needed, and things moved very quickly.

In essence, though, the reason Mono exists is legal: Java's license. Mono definitely was not adopted as a way to make Windows .NET applications run on Linux. That was a "side" benefit.

Things have changed a lot since then. Sun's Java implementation is now moving quickly to GPL, making it a much more mature alternative to Mono for open source. This same opening up, at the same time, has made it possible to include Sun's original Java classes into GCJ, making GCJ much stronger than it was before. There are already trunk versions of GCJ using those classes. (Much of GCJ's weakness was the slow-moving progress of the CLASSPATH project, and open-source equivalent to Sun's Java classes.)

Meanwhile, at GNOME, there's been much controversy over using a virtual machine on the desktop in the first place. A few GNOME projects have been written in Mono, as feasibility studies, and while they worked, users found them sluggish and overblown. Users simply don't like virtual machines on their desktop, and there's no reason why they should.

The Vala project goes back cleanly and directly to the original impetus for developing Mono: allowing the productivity of Java and C# for the open source GNOME desktop. It does this, in fact, far, far better than Mono. GObject, the core of Vala, is also the core of GNOME. All those GNOME projects written in Mono could easily be ported to Vala, immediately making them first-class binary applications, fully interoperable with everything else in GNOME. Just like C# is

Zim can do the same thing, but better

[Colin Smith]

http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/projects/zim/

WTF?

[Colin Smith]

But I do know this much: C, C++, and Python are not the future of desktops. The language is irrelevant.

Re:WTF?

[m2943]

The language is irrelevant.

Language is quite relevant: it can make a huge difference in productivity, training times, performance, and frequency of errors.

People can start doing things in Python, VisualBasic, shell much faster than in C or C++.

C and C++ are a b*tch to refactor, while for Java, Smalltalk, and C#, there are tools that do it automatically.

Almost all the buffer overrun problems in the world, and the security problems and crashes related to them, are in C and C++ programs.

And the same people who claim that "language is irrelevant" often turn around and say that they must use C or C++ "for speed".

Anybody who claims that "language is irrelevant" just doesn't know what they are talking about.

Re:Obviously new to these things- politics started

[dbIII]

It should also be obvious that responses are not instant - you'll get a few written at the same time by people that cannot read each others posts. You used to see something like the twentieth message titled "first post". Don't worry - if it's redundant it will just get modded down by someone coming later that can see both.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Victor_Os]

Please mod this as "Troll" as there is no such note in the source.

Re:Gnome go home

[nbritton]

"It's silly to call Apple a "Unix vendor". Yes, MacOS is built on top of Unix. But blah blah blah."

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is now an Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product, conforming to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for the C API, Shell Utilities, and Threads. Come October Mac OS X is UNIX®, and it will have a larger market share then Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX combined.

http://www.apple.com/science/
http://www.macenterprise.org/
http://www.apple.com/itpro/

C, C++, ABI compatibility, Vala

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they still use GObject. And that's a good thing.

You may not like GObject, but it is a very powerfull library. It may not look very nice, but it does its job and it does it rather good.

You see; I'm a programmer. And I really don't know what to do with C++. It looks ugly and brings some OO concepts to c, at a terrible price. No standard ABI, problems with the linker all the time, difficult to bind to other languages. I /could/ imagine using C++ if it had some kind of memory management, but since C++ doesn't free me from that burden, I really don't see any need in using it.

C on the other hand? Well, it is not very beautifull. And if you add the curde syntax of GObject, it's plain ugly. But at least you have a stable ABI and don't have to recompile everything and its mother if you change the compiler. And GObject makes it very easy to create bindings to scripting languages. Python, jay! Ruby, jay! And now with Vala, creating GObject based libraries gets even easier.

C++ is not a language for the future. Something like D is; nice syntax, memory management, compatible to c libraries.. Heck; with GObject, I'm sure its quite easy to create D bindings. ;)

C just stays the common denominator of most programming languages today. And because of that C is the perfect choice to build libraries upon. And with GObject, though it may be pig-ugly and crude, even OO is not excluded.

Re:C, C++, ABI compatibility, Vala

[Vanders]

No standard ABI

C++ has had http://www.codesourcery.com/cxx-abi/">a standard ABI for nearly six years now. GCC 3.0 was the first version of g++ to ship with support for the new ABI on IA-64, which was released in June 2001. The first version of GCC to support the cross vendor C++ ABI on other platforms, including IA-32, was GCC 3.2, which was released in April 2003.

Re:C, C++, ABI compatibility, Vala

[Anonymous Coward]

You see; I'm a programmer. And I really don't know what to do with C++.

that because your not a programmer, your a hacking code-monkey

Not for free

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, no.

Even KDE apps don't get stuff like VFS integration "for free". They have to use the libraries, otherwise there is no integration either. If I write a KDE application and decide to use tPOSIX I/O routines, I don't get magical VFS access just by including some KDE header file; I have to use the library.

Its just the same with GTK+/GNOME. If you decide not to use the libraries (and some "purebred" GTK+ programmer chose to to just that for their programs (say "Thunar") then they are not integrated.

But that's not a problem of KDE vs. Gnome, that's a problem stemming from the fact that a lot of programmers only use a part of Gnome (GTK+) instead of using the whole environment.

Re:Not for free

[pherthyl]

They have to use the libraries, otherwise there is no integration either.

Well sure, you have to use some libraries either way, but in kde, when you open the standard "Open file" dialog, you get kioslave (network transparent file access) "for free". The file dialog supports it, and there is no extra work involved on the part of the application developer. Same with the toolbar, no KDE application developer would ever have to conciously think about whether they want to add support for editable toolbars, because the toolbar classes support it.

But that's not a problem of KDE vs. Gnome, that's a problem stemming from the fact that a lot of programmers only use a part of Gnome (GTK+) instead of using the whole environment.

Exactly. So the question is, why not? My theory is that the libraries are too fractured. GTK provides too little, so for basic features you need to pull in a bunch of external libraries. I can understand why some app developers just don't bother, because it's extra work, and they want to minimize the external dependencies. With KDE apps, you just need to link to kdelibs and you get pretty much everything. Of course that means that one standalone app will be heavier than it could be, but once you run the whole desktop, you end up using the same amount of resources, and each app gets all the features, so from a user experience point of view, it's more consistent.

Hopefully this will be addressed in GTK 3. I heard they are planning on merging a bunch of previously external libraries.

Re:Not for free

[Spudds]

a lot of programmers only use a part of Gnome (GTK+) instead of using the whole environment Yep. I did that. Being able to use only what you need is a strength, not a hindrance. I wrote an app for asterisk that my company needed. They needed it to run in windows, so I built it in GTK+ and only GTK+ so that I could port it to win32 without going crazy trying to deal with porting gnome stuff as well.

If (and I'm assuming it is not the case and if you wanted to you could use only QT) you must use the entire KDE framework to build an app, well that locks you in to using all of KDE's libraries doesn't it? [I've never programmed for KDE so I'm not saying this is the case]

What if I only wanted to use GTK+ and say, some other specific part of GNOME, like GConf, but that's all I wanted? I can do that, thanks to the modular way the libraries are set up in GNOME/GTK+. Hell, I can even use stuff like Pango without using all of GTK+! If you ask me, they did it right. Yelling at the GNOME guys because you need to include 5 libraries and 5 header files instead of one just tells me you're a lazy programmer.

Re:Not for free

[segedunum]

I don't get magical VFS access just by including some KDE header file; I have to use the library.

Yes you do. KDE has one library called kdelibs, and IOslaves are always there for you. If you create a menu and toolbar structure for your application, it's the same as everyone else is using. That's called a desktop environment.

Its just the same with GTK+/GNOME. If you decide not to use the libraries (and some "purebred" GTK+ programmer chose to to just that for their programs (say "Thunar") then they are not integrated.

I don't think you understand the concepts of layered programming and code reuse. If you want it, it's there. If you don't want it, it's still there, but it doesn't cost you anything.

Re:Not for free

[pherthyl]

If (and I'm assuming it is not the case and if you wanted to you could use only QT) you must use the entire KDE framework to build an app, well that locks you in to using all of KDE's libraries doesn't it?

Yes you could use Qt only. And "only" is semantics here, Qt4 provides you with everything you need for most apps (far, far more than GTK). Since Qt4 came out, the kdelibs really don't have much in them anymore that an application developer would care about if they're not targetting KDE specifically. There is some stuff, but a lot of it is mostly useful because of the integration it brings with other apps.
That doesn't mean you're locked in to anything though. With KDE 4, you'll even be able to link to the kdelibs and compile on Windows or OS X. You get all the features, and none of the porting.

Yelling at the GNOME guys because you need to include 5 libraries and 5 header files instead of one just tells me you're a lazy programmer.

Good programmers are lazy. That drives them to develop frameworks that allow you to do powerful things easily. If your framework isn't convenient to use (like, having to pull in 5 different libraries that have different api's and complicate the build and packaging process just to build a basic interface) makes developers invent their own thing, or do silly things like copying library code into their apps instead of linking to it. ( http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=205 )

Re:Not for free

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you do. KDE has one library called kdelibs, and IOslaves are always there for you.

You are incredibly dense. What the GP said was that fopen doesn't magically gain the ability to open remote urls just because you include kdelibs. You have to use the kioslaves API for all your file operations.

GNOME works in exactly the same way, only instead of kdelibs you need to include gnome-vfs and instead of kioslaves you use the gnome-vfs api.

File dialog

[eimikion]

I have to ask, is there something new with the file dialog requester? I was once a gnome user, but after few hours with KDE I promised myself never going back to this ugly GNOME file requesters.

Codec

[hey]

Its cool that it will search online for codecs but they should avoid that word.
Its only understood by nerd (like us). They should just say: download the files necessary to play this movie?

Mandriva

[BokLM]

Packages also are available on Mandriva Cooker, and they will be on Mandriva 2008 RC2 to be released soon.

Here we go again...

[jesterpilot]

And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default.

And that is why Gnome, XFCE and especially Apple (hatesit!hatesit!hatesit!) completely fail to make a decent GUI. There is no default user. It might come as a surprise, but people are not the same. What's fine and intuitive for me is a hell for someone else. Really. Users should be able adjust the GUI to their wishes, not the other way around. Defaults are for people who don't care enough to change it. Which is a reasonable choice by the way, and should be supported by the system. KDE is the only GUI i ever used that gave me the possibilities to adjust it's behaviour exactly to fit my intuition. The holy grail of THE perfect GUI that fits THE intuition of THE user is a fiction. It seems only KDE understands this.

Re:Here we go again...

[crazybilly]

mod parent up. KDE's a little too bloated from a performance standpoint for me, but Gnome drives me crazy: gconf-editor? It's practically the freakin' registry.

Re:Here we go again...

[obi]

It's true that there is no "default user" but that shouldn't stop projects for finding really, really good defaults.

Some random reasons:
a) when people first start using a new system, the habits they form usually correspond with the defaults - the better the defaults are, the more likely it is that the users won't want to deviate from them. The point is that users start tweaking their system in lots of different ways because they're searching for good defaults (for them), when the original defaults fail them.

b) sometimes it really is better to have the user adapt to the system: see Palm's Graffiti handwriting recognition vs the Newton's. While the former was a lot more restrictive, and while there is no "default handwriting" shared by people all over the world, it still worked better than the latter. You could argue that's because the Newton and a lot of similar systems since then were really crap, but you have to realize it's a trade-off - sometimes simplicity is better than flexibility - especially when creating a "perfect" system is very very difficult.

c) every choice you offer forces the user to think about it, hesitate, etc. If you see screenfulls of radio buttons, checkboxes etc it becomes difficult to find the setting you need. If most of the settings are something you want to change maybe once or twice in your "desktop lifetime", and some of the settings you need more regularly, you're always going to be bothered with the rarely used ones when trying to find the commonly used ones. I've always thought adding checkboxes and dialogs to be laziness on the part of the programmer. If you can avoid asking the question altogether, don't bother the user - get out of the way of the user's focus.

d) I'm advocating simplicty in UI, not in the underlying apps and libraries. I still believe that if you really really want to tweak something, you should be able to do it. I don't understand why gconf and its editor gets so much hate: you can easily tweak it there, and there's even a "short" and "long description" of the keys in there. For the one or two times I really want tweak something really specific, I can find it fast enough in there.

Re:Here we go again...

[Draek]

well, 'sane defaults', 'only the choices that matter', and 'do one thing and do it well' are inside my personal definition of "a decent GUI", and KDE only has one if any, whereas both XFce and, lately, GNOME are pretty close to ideal on all three.

of course you're right that what's appropiate for me may not, and probably won't be for everyone else, but Linux is Free, let them install a different GUI such as GNUStep or IceWM rather than trying to please everyone with only a single DE.

We're all just drones over here...

[tjstork]

is no default user. It might come as a surprise, but people are not the same

People are the mostly same. Usability studies prove that. You take a 100 people, and tell them to do a particular task on the computer, then, 90 of them will flounder at the same set of problems. Go fix your U/I, then, onto step b.

Putting in a bunch of widgets to edit things randomly, like KDE does, just shows that the developers didn't really think holistically about how the computer would be used. They just punted, and left you to waste your time thinking about how you want to use the computer, rather than just using it.

Industrial design is a discipline, like any other.

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[pherthyl]

People are the mostly same. Usability studies prove that.

Sounds like you've never conducted a usability study. Results from usability studies are almost always quite fuzzy. They don't "prove" things as such, they just provide evidence that one approach may be better than another. Aside from the overused Fitt's Law, most of usability is very qualitative and subjective.

The other problem is that usability studies are time consuming and expensive, so they are not carried out that often, and usually only measure the experience of new users. Things change once you've gotten over the initial learning curve, but measuring that is even more time consuming and expensive.

You take a 100 people, and tell them to do a particular task on the computer, then, 90 of them will flounder at the same set of problems. Go fix your U/I,

Sure, if it's overwhelming like that, then your UI is broken, but most interface decisions are not like that.

the developers didn't really think holistically about how the computer would be used.

That's because you can never anticipate how your users will use your software (apart from the basics), no matter how holistically you think about it. These features weren't added randomly to KDE, they were added because a significant number of users requested them.

There are UI design best practices, and some well known guidelines, but pretending that designing a good UI for complex software is a black and white issue is completely delusional.

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[mike_sucks]

These features weren't added randomly to KDE, they were added because a significant number of users requested them. You mean, "they were added because a significant number of users who were motivated and willing to submit feature requests using the appropriate mechanism, who were technically competent enough to do so and knew that such a mechanism existed requested a particular feature". Which, of course is a flaming great classic example of response bias - the same thing that makes television and newspaper polls useless as an indicator for the actual value of a population parameter.

What you have is an bunch geeks and hobbyists - the very people to want extreme, nifty and mostly useless features - in control of functional requirements for KDE. Something gets posted to the Dot and all of the geeks who read it rush over and vote or whatever and the feature gets implemented because "everyone" wants it. If KDE has any user base outside of these groups, they they (and their needs) go completely unrepresented by KDE's requirements gathering "process". Awesome. And people wonder why KDE has 3 billion (approx) random configuration items and pointless features.

And you're right, usability studies are generally qualitative in nature, but using mixed methods allows you generalise the qualitative data while still being able to look at individual differences. It, you know, removes the "fuzzyness" (Is that a technical term?) - it makes what would otherwise be a particularly useless study quite useful for improving the ergonomics of your user interface.

But in no way is a usability study any less useful than using an obscure popularity contest accessible only to an extreme part of the user base to determine what should go in. Also, what about removing useless features? Does that ever get voted on? No? Damm, that must be some serious bloat going on.

So you can talk about how it's not fair that the GNOME developers ignore bug reports and how they can't possibly know what is needed and what is not - despite the fact that major usability studies were run on GNOME in 2001 and 2005 and continue in part at betterdesktop.org - and waive your hands as much as you like and cry "what about my obscure feature request" but in the end it it much better that someone is at least thinking about and trying to improve actual usability, rather than relying on such a fundamentally flawed, biased and mediocre process such as the one you have outlined.

-Mike

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[pherthyl]

You mean, "they were added because a significant number of users who were motivated and willing to submit feature requests using the appropriate mechanism, who were technically competent enough to do so and knew that such a mechanism existed requested a particular feature". Which, of course is a flaming great classic example of response bias - the same thing that makes television and newspaper polls useless as an indicator for the actual value of a population parameter.

Yes, there is bias there, but not as bad as you would make it seem. Technical users make requests on behalf of less technical ones as well. And face it, the majority of Linux users are technical users. You can ignore this and not cater to them if you want, but you're targeting users that may never even use Linux. Usability tests have shown that user have just as easy a time doing tasks with KDE than Windows XP. The current desktop is not an impediment to user adoption. Less technical users don't use Linux because of hardware support, pre-installs of Windows, and lack of awareness. Sit down a normal user with Linux (KDE or Gnome) and they won't have more trouble with it than with Windows.

What you have is an bunch geeks and hobbyists - the very people to want extreme, nifty and mostly useless features - in control of functional requirements for KDE.

Face it, that is the majority of your user base. You can't neglect your primary user because of some mythical novice user. They are also extremely valuable, because technical users _contribute_ while novice users just use the software.

Also, what about removing useless features? Does that ever get voted on?

Yes, and features get removed from KDE regularly if they create real problems or can be replaced with a better system. Removing features just because someone is confused by them is not a valid reason. You have to think about it more critically than that.

despite the fact that major usability studies were run on GNOME in 2001 and 2005 and continue in part at betterdesktop.org

So? KDE has similar studies, on that site, as well as http://openusability.org/ and from the KDE usability team http://usability.kde.org/activity/testing/relevantive-kde3.2/index.php and independently http://www.linux-usability.de/download/linux_usability_report_en.pdf

Please, Gnome are not the only ones thinking about usability. They are just suffering from the delusion that less features and less configurability makes for usability, when in fact the problem is much more complex than that. Making simple software usable is comparatively easy to do. The real challenge is making complex and flexible software usable without removing any of the power. KDE hasn't solved that problem, obviously, but they are working towards it without throwing out what makes KDE worth using over something like Windows.

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[mike_sucks]

Yes, there is bias there, but not as bad as you would make it seem. Actually, it is. It completely invalidates the usefulness of such a poll. C.f. "Statistics" and "The Scientific Method".

Technical users make requests on behalf of less technical ones as well. And face it, the majority of Linux users are technical users. You can ignore this and not cater to them if you want, but you're targeting users that may never even use Linux. You're actually saying we should assume that non-technical users will never use Linux and hence we not bother to cater for them. I see.

Removing features just because someone is confused by them is not a valid reason. You have to think about it more critically than that. Thanks for repeating the myth, yet again.

Please, Gnome are not the only ones thinking about usability. They are just suffering from the delusion that less features and less configurability makes for usability And... bam! And there's the myth again, twice in one post. That has to be some sort of record. So go on, provide some references to back up these assertions.

-mike

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[pherthyl]

And you're right, usability studies are generally qualitative in nature, but using mixed methods allows you generalise the qualitative data while still being able to look at individual differences.

No, I'm saying normal users are just fine with the desktop environments as they are today. There is room for improvement, but desktop usability is NOT a factor in why people don't use linux. See the last link for a study supporting this point.

And... bam! And there's the myth again, twice in one post. That has to be some sort of record. So go on, provide some references to back up these assertions.

*sigh* You can't argue that a lot of configurability has been removed from Gnome since the 1.4 days. These changes were done in the name of usability. Some of them justified, of course. I'm not going to dig through the mailing lists and bugzilla to find you references. You're a smart guy, you know this happened, and can find your own references. Good job nitpicking though and not actually answering the important parts of my post.

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[mike_sucks]

You can't argue that a lot of configurability has been removed from Gnome since the 1.4 days. These changes were done in the name of usability. Yes, of course, "everyone" knows it is true. I'd like, just once, even one example of this.

You're a smart guy, you know this happened, and can find your own references. Heh heh. Of course you're not. Wouldn't want a little bit of reality raining on your parade. Unfortunately, as the person making the claim in this instance, it's up to you to provide the burden of proof. C.f. Russell's teapot. Funny how of every anti-GNOME troll that repeats this mantra on /., no one has ever provided some evidence.

-mike

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[pherthyl]

Yes, of course, "everyone" knows it is true. I'd like, just once, even one example of this.

Yes and I would like, just once, an example of the common myth that water is wet.

Yet, I am loathe to let you wallow in your ignorance, so I've done a quick search for you. I follow gnome development only from a distance, so I'm sure I've missed a lot here.

The menu editor, removed somewhere in the 2.x cycle, not replaced until years later: http://www.linux.com/articles/57088
Sawfish replaced with Metacity, losing tons of features/configurability. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-December/msg00069.html
Galeon 1.2 replaced with Galeon 1.3, losing features, and then later replaced with Epiphany, losing more features.
http://wouterverhelst.livejournal.com/46098.html
xscreensaver replaced with gnome screensaver, which has no options at all https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/22007

And an example where important features are intentionally not implemented for usability reasons:
https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/desktop_architects/2005-December/001587.html

There are many more, this list was just the product of a quick google search

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[mike_sucks]

The menu editor, removed somewhere in the 2.x cycle, not replaced until years later Removed because GNOME swapped over to the FDO menu spec, breaking the old one, which replaced when manpower allowed. Not removed for reasons of simplicity or usability.

Sawfish replaced with Metacity, losing tons of features/configurability. Replaced with something that gasp, still manages windows, does so in a sane way by default and actually integrates with the desktop. In the end, no net loss of function as you can swap Metacity for Sawfish again (yes, it's configurable!).

Galeon 1.2 replaced with Galeon 1.3, losing features, and then later replaced with Epiphany, losing more features. Galeon was never the official browser. Epiphany was the first. The Galeon devs decided to stop working on the project because Epiphany was seen as a better basis going forward. If you bothered to look, Galeon's missing features are being replaced with plugins for Epy.

xscreensaver replaced with gnome screensaver, which has no options at all Actually, it the saver itself is just as configurable as plain xscreensaver. No, savers are not configurable but if you read the bug report the developer is planning to implement this. It was replaced again for better integration with the desktop as JWZ wasn't willing to do/allow it. Most (all?) of the main configuration options that were lost were actually moved elsewhere (e.g. to the power manager).

And an example where important features are intentionally not implemented for usability reasons And the reply clarifying GNOME's actual position - which is that features will be implemented if they are genuinely useful and a reasonable way of doing it can be found.

Next.

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[pherthyl]

Removed because GNOME swapped over to the FDO menu spec, breaking the old one, which replaced when manpower allowed. Not removed for reasons of simplicity or usability.

That reeks of poor project management. If switching to the FDO menu spec will remove a major feature, then why didn't they wait until it could be done properly?

Replaced with something that gasp, still manages windows, does so in a sane way by default and actually integrates with the desktop. In the end, no net loss of function as you can swap Metacity for Sawfish again (yes, it's configurable!).

Of course it still manages windows, but there are far less features, which was my point (whether you use those features or not is completely irrelevant). Your argument that you can swap Sawfish back is inane. Sure, I could also maintain my own branch of metacity, and code the features myself. That doesn't make it a realistic alternative. For 99% of users, all that functionality is gone.

Actually, it the saver itself is just as configurable as plain xscreensaver. No, savers are not configurable but if you read the bug report the developer is planning to implement this. It was replaced again for better integration with the desktop as JWZ wasn't willing to do/allow it. Most (all?) of the main configuration options that were lost were actually moved elsewhere (e.g. to the power manager).

"planning to implement this" being the key words here. That doesn't mean it will get done, and if it does, it will finally gain a feature that every desktop for 10 years has had.

And the reply clarifying GNOME's actual position - which is that features will be implemented if they are genuinely useful and a reasonable way of doing it can be found.

This is exactly the problem. If I want to print in draft mode, I don't give a flying fuck that there are plans to implement that feature, or no one has found the absolutely ideal way to present it in the GUI. I need that feature, and I need it NOW. Like Linus said, until you have a feature, you can't even talk about usability, you can only talk about UNusability. So even though the KDE print dialog might look messier than the Gnome one, the KDE dialog possesses at least some measure of usability, while the Gnome dialog is COMPLETELY UNUSABLE for any task that requires the missing feature.

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[mike_sucks]

Blah blah blah. Keep on waiving your hands.

Get over it, I have.

-mike

Re:We're all just drones over here...

[pherthyl]

Why would I voluntarily give up or relinquish my hands?

Re:I removed Gnome about a month ago, went with Ic

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't advertising your computer specs like going to a bar and telling all of the ladies you have a 3 inch cock? (that's what your computer equates to btw)

Re:Obviously new to these things- politics started

[fm6]

Did you compare the post times of your post and the previous one? Hours apart. And did you read my response to it? Which is actually the only part I care about.

Re:Gnome go home

[fm6]

Great, Apple is allowed to use the Unix brand. Which just means they passed a bunch of compliance tests, and still doesn't make Apple a "Unix vendor".

Besides which, it's a brand nobody cares about any more. The leading flavor of Unix is these days is Linux, which is not allowed to use the brand, because nobody can be bothered to submit a Linux distro.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[Anonymous Coward]

They do not have Mono installed by default, it's rare.

And yes I agree with the original comment, Mono and M$ are poison. Avoid them.
It's like allowing Real player or quicktime at the expense of OGG etc.

Re:Obviously new to these things- politics started

[dbIII]

Do I really have to give excuses as to why it can take me ages to complete a post at work in moments of free time? I did not read the other post - that should be obvious.

Re:Mono IS part of GNOME

[metamatic]

Mono is required for the full official GNOME desktop release as described on the GNOME web site. Note the list stating what order to compile things in, and that tomboy is listed.

The fact that you can rip Mono out and still run most of the GNOME desktop does not mean that Mono is not part of GNOME.

Mono is the reason why I switched from GNOME back to KDE.

Re:Obviously new to these things- politics started

[dbIII]

I've just read the other posts. They are different. Some words may be identical but there is other information in there. I also do not agree with your response - at the start gnome was all politics and no code apart for the bits borrowed from the gimp. Then political choices for design and pretty good code for those starting to learn how to program and unfortunately completely unfamiliar with the unix platform. Then the initial developers learnt a bit and other developers that were less politically motivated moved in. Anybody that tried to compile gimp around that time could tell you about the effect of the politics.

gnome-kde

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome/kde flamewar starts in 3,2,1...

Re:Obviously new to these things- politics started

[fm6]

In other words, you can't give the conversation your full attention, but you still expect others to give you their full attention.

What KDE could do to get me to switch

[Anonymous Coward]

Reason I use GNOME is pretty simple; it just work for me.

Whenever I use KDE, I always feel as if I was stuck in some sort of perpetual "Edit mode". Every contextual menu in KDE is like over 20 items high with obscure commands that I'd never ever use.

I'd go to KDE in a pinch if I could switch between configuring my interface and using it, but it seems that the KDE developpers think everyone always want to change their windowing manager' default behavior.

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[namekuseijin]

I see the source file is written in C# to be run on a .NET environment, which are both M$ technologies covered by whatever patents. If I were to run it on a Linux distro which has a deal with M$ to cover such patents, as Novell Suse, fine. Otherwise, please keep this stinking proprietary junk outta my free distros and outta free pure C projects like Gnome.

Re:Obviously new to these things- politics started

[dbIII]

Since that identical post doesn't actually exist the point is moot isn't it?

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger

[callinyouin]

Yes, you're right. I wasn't thinking straight and could only think of a literal "infection" of the code. Microsoft has indeed proven to be very crooked competitor and I would, by nature, distrust any sort of Microsoft application/library/whatever being integrated into a GNU/Linux environment.
I wouldn't be surprised if they randomly decided to file suit for intellectual property infringement.

Re:I removed Gnome about a month ago, went with Ic

[walterbyrd]

>>Isn't advertising your computer specs like going to a bar and telling all of the ladies you have a 3 inch cock?

No, not at all. Frankly, I find peculiar, that anybody would make such a comparison.

I did not post my computer specs to brag, but to inform. Saying "gnome feels sluggish on my system" is completely meaningless unless I give basic system specs.

BTW: chicks are not impressed with your PC specs. Take it from somebody who has actually scored in his life.