The Notable Improvements of GNOME 2.22

Michael Larabel writes "Phoronix has up a list compiling eight of the most interesting improvements on track for GNOME 2.22. These improvements include the Epiphany browser switching to the WebKit back-end, transition effects inside the Evince document viewer, a new GNOME application for taking photos and recording videos from web cameras followed by applying special effects, a mouse tweaking module for improved accessibility, and a new GNOME VNC client. On the multimedia end, GNOME 2.22 has a few new features appended to the Totem movie player and the Rhythmbox player. Totem can now search and play YouTube videos and connect to a MythTV server and watch past recordings or view live TV. Rhythmbox now can utilize FM radio tuners, integration with new lyric sites, improved Podcast feed support, and even has support for communicating with newer Sony PSPs. There will also be a standalone Flash player and flash previewing support from the file browser in this release."

Comments

Epiphany? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone even use this (instead of Firefox) in GNOME?

Sounds like a bunch of very modest improvements.

I just want to say one thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please refrain from "What else Gnome has taken away?" thought of lane. There is no content there.

(Disclaimer: I am an avid KDE user - living on beta)

gtkhtml

[LizardKing]

I wonder if the move to WebKit for the rendering engine used by Epiphany will prompt other GNOME projects to transition from the various gtkhtml versions that are currently used. The maintenance of gtkhtml seems to be sporadic, and the API changes drastically between versions. For example, on a Fedora 8 install at work there's two versions of the gtkhtml library required by different apps in the basic GNOME desktop ...

Re:gtkhtml

[scorp1us]

By using WebKit, and with KDE/Qt switching to WebKit, and Apple already using WebKit, GNOME gets to use a very popular web core. This effectively divides the internet either as I.E., WebKit or Mozilla. By being part of the WebKit crowd, you get to ride the wave of Safari compatibility. I see the consolidation as good as eventually we should have the internet divided into I.E. or WebKit. I do expect some grumbling from Mozilla peeps, which have their own top-notch core. But the fewer cores the web devs need to support, the better.

Re:gtkhtml

[ozamosi]

Actually, the plan is to create a new "gtkhtml" widget that's supposed to be able to work with different backends, so that you can use Gecko, Webkit, and existing gtkhtml through the same API. http://www.atoker.com/blog/2008/01/10/putting-the-web-in-gtk/

Re:gtkhtml

[salimma]

Between xulrunner getting more mature (in the upcoming Fedora 9, Firefox, Epiphany etc. link against xulrunner, rather than every package depending on Firefox for Gecko, and thus needing rebuilds everytime Firefox is updated, even for non-Gecko-reasons), and WebKit's GTK port, yes, it would be nice if we are finally rid of gtkhtml.

Wonder when some projects will make the switch though. Liferea will probably switch quite quickly, but Evolution?

Re:gtkhtml

[UtucXul]

But the fewer cores the web devs need to support, the better.

I really have to disagree there. Web devs should not support any rendering engine. It may makes sense to test against more than one engine, but a website should never be written for a given rendering engine. We've seen the mess that gets us. Website should be written to standards and the people who write the rendering engines should then try to write their engines to that. Some of them do. No one gets that perfect, but with one exception, they all do at least an okay job. And supposedly even IE is doing better although I really have no way of testing that myself.

Re:gtkhtml

[Anonymous Coward]

Say you're a business. You have a web presence. If a rendering glitch shows up, or things just don't look quite correct, it reflects negatively on you. You must make sure it looks right, no matter how many bugs/problems/wrong behavior the rendering engine does, or develop exclusively for one browser, and if it doesn't look correct in another, saying that the other browser doesn't work right is much easier and simpler to understand, no matter the cause.

Re:gtkhtml

[freezin fat guy]

I for one am excited about a lightweight Gnome browser. Konqueror is blazing fast and has some sweet CSS support.

Re:gtkhtml

[node 3]

You're saying that web sites should conform to an arbitrary standard, even if no browser supports it?

Don't you think it makes more sense to write a web page in such a way that people can properly view it than it does to write it so that it conforms to an unused standard?

Re:gtkhtml

[UtucXul]

Obviously one still needs to test against browsers. But Gecko, Webkit, and Opera all do a good job with all but the most exotic parts of the standards. And I do realize that realistically, IE represents a large portion of web traffic. But does that mean we should all give in and just code to IE? I certainly don't feel that way and think it would be pretty sad if everyone else did.

Re:gtkhtml

[UtucXul]

I said some of this in the post answering the post above yours, but enough browsers (Gecko-based, Webkit-based, and Opera) support enough of the standard that yes, I think people should code to the standard. And even IE is supposed to be moving towards better standards compliance, so I don't think I would call HTML 4 and XHTML unused standards.

There is also the idea that html is supposed to degrade fairly gracefully, so unlike say a C compiler, even if a browser doesn't fully support the standard, things may (and very often are) still okay. That is where testing comes in. XML based things mess up this graceful degrading a bit, but that is a whole other discussion.

Re:gtkhtml

[tmalone]

I hope evolution switches quickly. Sometimes it's fine, but sometimes it takes so freaking long to render html email. I can go get a cup of coffee while it loads a single message. It doesn't always do it though.

Re:gtkhtml

[ClamIAm]

Oh, that thing. I had forgotten about it. When I read your post, I thought maybe 'gtkhtml' was a clever way of naming the GTK/GNOME port of Webkit. That is: GTK + KHTML = GTKHML :)

epiphany?

[macshit]

Does anybody actually use epiphany?

Re:epiphany?

[INT_QRK]

Yup. I do. I use a little known GNU/Linux distribution called Ubuntu 7.10 as my primary operating environment. It seems that for all of its goodness, otherwise, the Ubuntu version of Firefox is dumbed down from the version in the wild so that it doesn't support Javascript 1.5 (used to in early releases - one of those funny things). Since I need to access a certain University collaboration environment (WebTycho) which requires Javascript 1.5, I'm forced to install an additional browser which does. Opera works kind-of for my finicky site, but Epiphany renders and works in WebTycho perfectly...so there! (it's fast too!)

Re:epiphany?

[linuxpyro]

I use it, occasionally. It just kind of got sucked in as a dependency when I emerged Gnome. I ignored it at first, but now I use it occasionally. It's a pretty lightweight browser, and is nice once in a while. I'm too used to FireFox to use it entirely, though.

Re:epiphany?

[Anonymous Coward]

I absolutely love epiphany. Epiphany is always the first app I install on a fresh system. Its implementation of tabs has sold me on it for years. I can use the scrollwheel to quickly scroll through tabs, and it limits how small the tabs can be, letting them overflow instead. That is the killer feature for me. I have yet to see that in any other browser. It is the only browser in which I can practically have 50 tabs open in a single window. Once you get used to it, it is so hard to go back.

Re:epiphany?

[h4rm0ny]

Epiphany is a good browser. I started using it a while ago because I found that it didn't lock up when browsing Slashdot whilst Firefox 2 did (both on Ubuntu platform). I've recently ended up using Konqueror as I have a Kubuntu install this time round and I find it similarly faster than Firefox.The odd thing is, I didn't have any extensions in Firefox at the time, either. Anyway - Epiphany is very good and I suspect quite a lot of Gnome users use it.

Re:epiphany?

[xiaomai]

Yeah, epiphany is great. Much faster and more stable than firefox, plus it has native widgets instead of XUL. It's support for extensions is not as good, so I still use firefox when I need Firebug, but 99% of the time I'm in epiphany.

Re:epiphany?

[oatworm]

Ubuntu's repository support for Java and WINE are a little spotty, but you're not necessarily limited to that. What I do on my Ubuntu machines (Feisty and Dapper) is just grab the self-extracting installer from Sun. You can find instructions here. Granted, it's not as clean or as nice as the repository, but if you absolutely have to have Java support, it's not a bad way to go.

Re:epiphany?

[ksheff]

That's what I originally liked about galeon. I haven't tried either versions after one of the galeon developers left and started epiphany.

Re:epiphany?

[Anonymous Coward]

I kept using galeon for a while after the switch, but slowly moved over to epiphany once it settled down. I suggest that you try it out again.

A long time ago, I discovered that using a light, responsive GTK theme makes all GTK apps more responsive, and shows off the true speed of apps like epiphany. I am using epiphany on a 266mhz box, and although it is a bit slow as expected, the interface is still fairly responsive. And disabling anti-aliasing in the GNOME font settings increases speed drastically, but usually I don't have to bother with that. GNOME can be tuned to be incredibly fast.

Epiphany + Fast GNOME Settings + Fluxbox == Happiness.

Re:epiphany?

[Bob of Dole]

I do!
But only because it's a gecko engine browser and it's easier than figuring out the stupid firefox profile system.
If I need to confirm my site works when I'm not logged in, it's easier to load up epiphany than to kill all the cookies,check, and readd the cookies.

Re:epiphany?

[cptnapalm]

Haven't used epiphany in awhile, but that it is usable on a 266mhz machine perks up the ears. I've got this oddball 650mhz UltraSparc laptop which takes a good while to do anything in Firefox, so I'd like something a bit zippier.

Re:epiphany?

[Vexorian]

I would if it had noscript and downloadhelper.

But, it doesn't.

Re:epiphany?

[Vexorian]

I would for sure not use the webkit version though.

Re:epiphany?

[vhogemann]

Suport for Java limmited?

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre

Is that too difficult?

Re:epiphany?

[INT_QRK]

Actually the first responder misunderstood. I said that Ubuntu 7.10 dumbs down their Firefox implementation so that it supports Javascript version 1.4 instead of Javascript 1.5, which both Epiphany and Firefox in-the-wild support. (Javascript does not equal Java -- is different!!!!!!!!!!!)

Re:epiphany?

[zsau]

The real question is, when great browsers like Epiphany and Galeon exist for Gnome, why does anyone use Firefox? Firefox is ugly and not integrated into Gnome; requires extensions for the most basic of features (but, you can add plugins for Epiphany if you want); and has much less flexible search engine integration. Firefox behaves only broadly the way you expect unless you're only using GTK+ the way you'd use the Windowsn toolkit and so it's inconvenient.

I can't wait for the WebKit port of Epiphany to be stable. I hope it will spur additional interest in one of Gnome's greatest features.

Re:epiphany?

[ksheff]

I'll have to try that out. I've been using the thinice theme for years and it seems to work well.

am I missing something here?

[rucs_hack]

The main reason I like gnome is that its a fast window manager with a low cruft index. This looks to me like Gnome trying too hard, and adding too many capabilities to what is, so far as I understand it, just a window manager. Why, for example include vnc? It's not like seperate client/servers for this task aren't available, and most are pretty good.

Is all this new stuff going to slow it down, that's the thing that interests me. If the team have too many things to maintain, just how good a job can they do?

Re:am I missing something here?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you expect Gnome to be just a "fast window manager with a low cruft index", what about its CORBA server on which the whole beast is based? Gnome, as far as I can recall, has always strived to be a full-blown desktop environment. I think it works quite nicely in this role (even though I like KDE much more, I find it much more resource-efficent on older machines, and not that spartan, from the POV of a power user - oh, and being a friend of some of its developers, I don't want to make them upset :D), but if you want to use just a window manager, you should probably start using just Metacity (although I'd prefer Fluxbox in such case).

Re:am I missing something here?

[Tack]

GNOME isn't, and never has been, a window manager. It's a desktop environment, which has a window manager as one component. A GNOME VNC client makes perfect sense for a desktop environment.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Xordan]

Aye. I want a window manager to be fast, sleek and nice on the eye, to have a low resource usage (e17 is pretty nice), and to do nothing more than it needs to.
Leave anything more to separate programs, don't try and bundle as much as possible into the same package just to try and make your feature list bigger than the competitors.

Re:am I missing something here?

[gujo-odori]

First of all, GNOME is not a window manager. It is a complete desktop environment. When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again. The point being, you can use a number of WMs with GNOME; it is not, itself, a window manager.

Low cruft? Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE (I'm a KDE user, and neither KDE nor GNOME come anywhere near low cruft in my book; XFCE is reasonably low cruft, although you also give up some things to get there; one user's cruft is another user's indispensable feature. YMMV).

If you really want low cruft, though, you need to really run just a window manager. Fluxbox and IceWM are a couple of very good choices in that area. They really are low cruft and they are also very, very fast. Of course, unless you truly are willing to trade a lot of features for speed, you may find yourself wishing for a bit more cruft after a while.

Is this new stuff going to slow it down? Yeah, maybe. OTOH, they may make tuning improvements in other areas to offset it. Of course, GNOME is already slow [1], so you may not notice an incremental slowdown. KDE is slow, too (especially KDE 4; having tried it, I put it back on the shelf to wait for 4.1, and went back to the 3.5 tree).

[1] Compared to faster things like XFCE, or even faster things, like $WINDOW_MANAGER_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, but still seems relatively responsive compared to certain proprietary systems.

Re:am I missing something here?

[cparker15]

GNOME is a desktop environment. Metacity is a window manager.

Re:am I missing something here?

[hr.wien]

Neither KDE nor Gnome are just window managers (that's Metacity and Kwin). Desktop environment is a more fitting term for them. They both aim to include most of what you need for basic day-to-day use of your computer. They also make sure everything they include is nicely consistent, which makes for a good user experience.

As for your speed concerns, I don't see how inclusion of a few new apps will slow down anything? It will take a bit more disk space probably, but it won't slow anything down unless you use these new apps. You're also free to uninstall anything you feel is redundant.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Simon80]

You're confused, GNOME is a suite of applications that provide a usable desktop environment, not a window manager. The window manager used in GNOME is called metacity, and it certainly is not becoming a VNC client.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are missing something. GNOME is a desktop environment, not a window manager. Metacity is GNOME's default window manager. The article discusses improvements to the various applications that come with GNOME, not to the window manager (other than half a sentence mentioning that Metacity will finally have a compositor). (Why is it that such an uninformed post was modded "3, Insightful"? Sad...)

Re:am I missing something here?

[opypod]

what's wrong with the gnome developers??? do we need more eye candy and bloat to make gnome even suckier? instead of all that crap ... why don't you make a lighter, faster gnome. and i would just LOVE it if evolution (ok ... i know this is not gnome ... but it IS the "official" gnome email) would work right.
focus on the real issues ... not the eye candy. if i wanted a bloated sack, i'd re-install windows.

Re:am I missing something here?

[metalcoat]

I am not in IT, but have a vague background of 3 medium size utility companies in my area. They all use Linux (SLES 9,Debian,Ubuntu) to power their web servers and all use VNC to connect (but do not know what it is called.) I have had to teach the IT people for those various companies how to configure and maintain the servers through the command prompts. None of them have ever ventured outside Windows GUI.

The sad reality is that 2 of those servers rely heavily on Gnome (VNC) for maintenance, since I have left they have outsourced the work. I think VNC is becoming the norm now, and at least make it an easy option without a whole lot of configuration.

Re:am I missing something here?

[brunascle]

these are mostly just changes to applications in the "official gnome apps" list, and new apps added to that list. they're not really going to affect the performance of the desktop itself (i.e. gnome-panel, nautilus, metacity, etc).

Re:am I missing something here?

[mincua]

Gnome is a full desktop enviroment so iti is normal to include all this programs, Metacity is the window manager.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Ckwop]

This looks to me like Gnome trying too hard, and adding too many capabilities to what is, so far as I understand it, just a window manager. Why, for example include vnc? It's not like seperate client/servers for this task aren't available, and most are pretty good.

This is a very good point. Linux is so flexible because each project has a different agenda and a different set of design criteria it is trying to satisfy.

I think that Gnome should not try to be a direct competitor to KDE. KDE is huge, has tonnes of software included with it and tries to be everything to everyone.

We need a desktop environment that does that.

However, this doesn't mean that Gnome should try to be this too. If it tries to, it will lose. KDE's software base is absolutely huge, and it's all controlled from a series of close-nit projects. Gnome would struggle to match that style of development.

Gnome's advantage is that is simpler and less complex. It is my view, Gnome should be a like a good text-book; it is complete not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.

Free software is about choice. You don't have a real choice when both options put before you are the same. The differences between open-source projects are not weakness but strengths. Being different allows you to choose your software according to your needs; it allows you to adapt.

Simon.

Re:am I missing something here?

[FudRucker]

RE:["why don't you make a lighter, faster gnome"]

http://www.xfce.org/ = a lighter, faster gnome...

Re:am I missing something here?

[samkass]

I assume you're with the crowd that are (mis)using Slashdot's tagging feature to make editorial comments about window transitions not being a "feature". It's kind of ironic, because some of those same people will, at times, talk about Linux's viability as a desktop operating system, where utility of transitions are immense. In fact, transitions are probably one of the more valuable HCI movements lately, and give users great feedback as to what happened to their data/windows and where they went. All the way back to the Newton's "crumpling paper" when things were thrown away, Apple has been using them to great effect. When minimizing something to the dock in MacOS X, it's an extremely good way of showing the user where they can find it later.

Considering my 6-year-old PowerPC-based Mac can do them just fine, I think keeping things "lean" for lean's sake is counterproductive. All the visual aspects should be analyzed from a consistency and return-on-performance factor, and while transitions may have been too expensive to performance at some point, nowadays they're virtually free and a great tool.

Re:am I missing something here?

[oletk]

Metacity is Gnome's window manager.

Re:am I missing something here?

[VValdo]

When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again.

For a while now (since 2.2) the default WM has been Metacity.

W

Re:am I missing something here?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Low cruft? Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE (I'm a KDE user, and neither KDE nor GNOME come anywhere near low cruft in my book; XFCE is reasonably low cruft, although you also give up some things to get there; one user's cruft is another user's indispensable feature. YMMV).

Aye. XFCE is very nice, and it has kept on getting nicer for quite a long time now. If I had to choose from Gtk+-based desktops, I'd probably use XFCE. Even one my friends considers switching to XFCE, although he's a member of Gnome Foundation - but I'll keep the name secret for his privacy, I just found it amusing. :-)

Is this new stuff going to slow it down? Yeah, maybe. OTOH, they may make tuning improvements in other areas to offset it. Of course, GNOME is already slow [1], so you may not notice an incremental slowdown. KDE is slow, too (especially KDE 4; having tried it, I put it back on the shelf to wait for 4.1, and went back to the 3.5 tree).

I also thought for some time that KDE is slow. The thing is that on my old notebook (HP XE3, PIII Mobile 1,13 GHz, 256 MB of RAM - not exactly a racing machine), I've been using Fluxbox, with Firefox as a web browser. Then I noticed that with Konqueror, the whole machine became much more snappy, even though Konqueror was supposed to load a whole lot of libraries and run some KDE daemons in the background. Well, it did, but in the end, it was still much more of a pleasure to work with the system than with Memoryzilla behing my back. Of course, KDE as a whole was slightly more demanding, but still quite fine. Eventually, I stayed with Fluxbox and Konqueror. but mostly because I got used to it, not because KDE would be unusable. (Oh, and I'm using Arch Linux almost exclusively these days, just for the record.) Now I got a Thinkpad X60 with Core 2 Duo and speed doesn't bother me anymore, but anything Gecko-based still seems to be a bit sluggish even now. Maybe I'm just sensitive, these things can be very individual.

Re:am I missing something here?

[typicallyterrific]

First of all, GNOME is not a window manager. It is a complete desktop environment. When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again. The point being, you can use a number of WMs with GNOME; it is not, itself, a window manager.

Holy fuck, dude. Metacity has been the default client for almost five years now. The last time anyone had this conversation, in a serious manner, was also debating the merits of Red Hat 9, the average computer was probably a Pentium 2 or a Pentium 3, and we were ALL using 2.4 because 2.6 would only come out in December.

Today, the cheapest computer you can buy from Dell will almost certainly run the latest Ubuntu without a hitch.
Nothing against fluxbox users, it's just, well, Desktop Environments are way more useful than they used to be, and Moore's Law finally caught up with us. On my dual-core, how well my GUI layer performs is just about my last concern, and it multiplexes all the terminals I want either way, thank you very much.

I would *love* it if you were still running some similarly ancient distro, tho. That's hardcore.

Re:am I missing something here?

[ChristTrekker]

Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE. [...] If you really want low cruft, though, you need to really run just a window manager. Fluxbox and IceWM are a couple of very good choices in that area.

Between those "extremes" are even-lighter desktops like Étoilé and EDE, and somewhat-heavier WMs like Enlightenment. Lots of options in the X11 world. Readers may want to take a look at this comparison to start.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Power User" and "Mouse User" don't belong in the same sentence. If you're a power user, you don't need a myriad of options visible, because you use working from a CLI to accomplish what you want.

I get sick and tired of people claiming you can't be a power user on GNOME, and that KDE is for "power users". Real power users don't need a GUI or a mouse.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they only improved the file open dialog window, gnome would become vastly more usable

Re:am I missing something here?

[julian67]

I'd like to know how to define cruft and more particularly how it might be measured and indexed. Is there a gui tool that might scan my partitions and identify such cruft, perhaps displaying it's findings as a pie chart? Or maybe a cli tool...perhap dc -h (display cruft) which can pipe the output to rm? I'd like these tools to work in an integrated way in my distro of choice. Btw is anyone out there running a distro which was forced on them? Do you have a "distro of compulsion"? Thought not. That's my question of choice, written on my keyboard of choice, displayed on my monitor of choice. Ok got to go and walk the dogs (showing them at crufts this year).

Re:am I missing something here?

[rucs_hack]

I assume you're with the crowd that are (mis)using Slashdot's tagging feature to make editorial comments about window transitions not being a "feature"

Me? (I wrote the original post). I haven't even worked out how to do tagging yet, let alone abuse it...

Actually I turn window transitions off on every OS I use that has them, but that's because I'm still using my trusty old Gforce 6 series card, and the poor thing does choke a bit on the candy.

I don't do OS politics, I just y'know, use them.

Re:am I missing something here?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I am perfectly sure that many people would disagree, and see, you have been modded down. It's not about "visibility" of options (I take it you mean KDE Control Center), you can configure your KDE install both from GUI *and* from the command line, all the config files are there. It's much more about the availability of the particular options *in any form*, I'd say. (Some of the more Zen-minded so-called "Gnome UI experts" seem to suggest just that - don't allow the user to do anything beyond what 90 % of the users does, they "might be confused by the options"). And do note that the KDE config files are *plain text*, as opposed to the horrible XML and Windows Registry hybrid thingy that Gnome uses. Or would you rather edit XML files in vi? That's painful, I've tried it.

You suggest that "real power users" (whatever that means) don't need GUI and mouse. If that should mean that you don't need GUI do to graphics and webdesign. Many other apps also need GUI - mind mapping tools, anyone? - or at least profit from it. The GUI is always nice to have at least as an option. The way you have put, it seems to me that you're just a flamer. I'm perfectly happy in console-over-SSH, unless the task at hand requires graphics (me being a doc writer, this happens to me surprisingly often ;-)) but sure I don't mind working in a decent desktop environment for most of the time.

Re:am I missing something here?

[nguy]

Is all this new stuff going to slow it down, that's the thing that interests me. If the team have too many things to maintain, just how good a job can they do?

These are all done by separate developers, and they shouldn't impact core development.

Why, for example include vnc? It's not like seperate client/servers for this task aren't available, and most are pretty good.

I use VNC frequently, and the existing clients suck. Keyring support is worth having a Gnome version, and working full screen support would also be nice.

The main reason I like gnome is that its a fast window manager

Gnome is not a window manager, it's a desktop environment.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are deceiving yourself. Using only a window manager is almost certainly the way to aquire cruft, if there is one, at least if you making a fair comparision. Just try it out. Load up a KDE session, with a few konqueror windows with filemanagement, a few webpages, start the mixer, kopete maybe konversation as well, open a few pdfs in kpdf. Fire up a session in quanta, kdevelop or kate, etc, etc.

Then do the same with _equivalent_ applications in a window manager. (Equivalents being stuff like firefox, pidgin, nautilus, x-chat, evince, and ..anjuta?, eclipse?, I'm sure you can think of something reasonable.) I bet you'll be surprised pretty quickly by where the cruft is. :)

Obviously pitching a window manager and a bunch of console applications would be cheating, since that would be like comparing coconuts and steamengines.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Azuma Hazuki]

Another recommendation for IceWM here. I have a modern machine (Athlon X2 3800+) and use it and KDE as my primary desktops. I also have a very nice Vista/KDE4 hybrid theme in the works for it (sorry for the plug!). IceWM is familiar to Windows expats (and Gnome and KDE users) and with a little effort it can look nearly as good.

It's great for older hardware too! No computer with a P2 and 64 MB or better specs is junk!

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

2001 called, they want there troll back.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Power User" and "Mouse User" don't belong in the same sentence.

So why did you just use them both in the same sentence, then?

Your basic premise is of course flawed. Someone who tries to do everything from the CLI is as crippled and inefficient as someone who tries to do everything with the mouse. A true power user is someone who has mastered both methods of controlling their computer, and knows when each is appropriate for the task at hand.

Re:am I missing something here?

[DerPflanz]

Linux is so flexible because each project has a different agenda and a different set of design criteria it is trying to satisfy.

It also makes Linux (the OS, not the kernel) inconsistent, more buggy, slow and overall hard to use. Unless you have a decent distro what a big software repository, it is hard to install/uninstall software that integrates nicely into your OS (and in this case I count the windowmaganager/desktop to the OS). Every project owner has its own ideas concerning usability (or better make that unusability), stability, speed, features, etc. Even with that repository, not everything can be used: what if it isn't in? More than once have I stumbled on de-facto standard software for some application and found me either clicking in a pre-1988 pure Xlib interface, or typing on a CLI and getting obscure messages. Comparing this to proprietary OSs makes you wonder why the open source community still doesn't 'get' it (I mean, examples enough).

Re:am I missing something here?

[Knuckles]

Gnome was never really "CORBA-based". Some parts used it, like the panel, and IIRC most people planned it to use CORBA a lot, but the thing IIRC just became too heavy. All the hits on google about "gnome and corba" are outdated.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again.

For a while now (since 2.2) the default WM has been Metacity.

W I like to call it Metashitty. That's the only window manager I've used in the last 12 years of Linux usage that I can actually see it draw the window decorations (even on a core 2 duo, btw). I was so very glad to switch to Beryl and now Compiz. If it wasn't for that I'd probably have switched back to KDE. Kwin is fast. Beryl was fast. Compiz is fast. Metashitty is not. It's whole feel is just off as well.

Am I alone in my dislike of Metashitty?

Re:am I missing something here?

[loncarevic]

Enlightenment under Gnome?

It was never like you said, I'm with Gnome since forever and can't remember such thing.

Re:am I missing something here?

[chromatic]

Comparing this to proprietary OSs makes you wonder why the open source community still doesn't 'get' it (I mean, examples enough).

Rhetorical question: is comparing the whole of software installed by default (or provided in a repository) by any random Linux distribution really comparable to the paucity of software installed by default by a proprietary operating system?

Certainly, as you say, "examples enough" if you expand your comparison to include thousands of proprietary software packages from thousands of vendors.

Re:am I missing something here?

[DerPflanz]

My point is, that, in practice, installing or getting software outside of the distro's repository is usually very hard or completely impossible, let alone getting decent integration (I found out yesterday there are 3 (!) different ways for copy-paste on my Ubuntu system, and they all use their own clipboard!). Proprietary OSs usually specify APIs, guidelines, etc. When choosing the default, you can be sure that you app will run reliably on all OS installations, with install/uninstall ready and working, no zillion dependancies, etc.

Besides, the fact that the is nothing to choose (which with libraries and APIs/guidelines is a *good* thing), makes sure that you don't miss out on 50% of the installed user base. For example, I use Gnome, but because of lack of a Gnome torrent client in my repository, I use kTorrent (or Azureus, same problem applies here, but it crashed on me). Because of this so hailed 'flexibility' I now have to install two *complete* desktop environments, just because the program I want to use happens to use 'the other one'.

Note that I do not want to bash or praise Linux or any other OSs, I am just saying that flexibility has a price, in the same way inflexibility has. There is no silver bullit to computing.

Re:am I missing something here?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That is strange. Now I don't want to assert that Gnome ever used the *whole* CORBA infrastructure, but I had the impression that Bonobo is at least partly based on a subset of Corba. Well, I admit that I stopped using Gnome quite a while ago, so they might have departed from using Bonobo since then.

Re:am I missing something here?

[etrusco]

LOL, not at all.

Re:am I missing something here?

[NotZed]

Oh if only CORBA were the problem - corba is actually quite light-weight in C. It isn't really any worse than gtk+ is (these days) - and probably lighter for the facilities it provides (e.g. == gtk+ + d-bus + other things). Although more work for the coder, but not 10x more work.

Bonobo was just a bad idea though, too fine-grained for what CORBA does, and hell it was based on fucking COM, so it was always a dumb idea ... Most of the problem was with the design of the CORBA api's used in gnome. Not enough experience at the start, definitely not enough focus on performance, and then left with a legacy that everyone hated. Too many synchronous apis, and too many one-return methods, rather than async and batched, etc.

Re:am I missing something here?

[RiotingPacifist]

O dont know if you ever heard about this OS called unix, it was sort of pointless never got anywhere was full of these crazy ideas like * Open standards * Multi user system * hierarchical file system * Lots of small programs * Configure stuff in text files the kde way of configuring stuff is fairly easy, if you want to configure say kicker you can a) do it by gui (this is USEFULL for >90% of users and gives >90% of options ) b) do it by text file (this is USEFULL for the 10% of users that want the extra 10% of options) why text files, because some people like emacs, some people like vi, hell real CLI people can edit settings with a couple of cats and a grep. So now go crying back to your nazi leaders that say there is no extra 10% and ask them why they think theyre better than the principles that unix and linux are founded on! O and how easy is it for you to backup you just panel settings or just your window manager settings? why shouldn't a power user use a gui? because they dont have to? if thats the case then surely theyres no point in a power user even having a DE as theyre for 'noobs' anyway? AND if you dont like clutter you can just uninstall the GUIs and edit everything in vi! p.s sorry for the obvious godwinds law but you sir are an idiot, as even true power users (linus and co , think gnome is too noobed up)

Re:am I missing something here?

[snoyberg]

and we were ALL using 2.4 because 2.6 would only come out in December.

I was using 2.2, you insensitive clod!

:: Ducks ::

Re:am I missing something here?

[chromatic]

Because of this so hailed 'flexibility' I now have to install two *complete* desktop environments, just because the program I want to use happens to use 'the other one'.

That sounds like a packaging bug to me, honestly. Even if your KDE- or QT-based torrent client did mark dependencies on all of KDE, certainly having your package manager download all of the dependencies correctly is a huge advantage over almost all software installation I've seen on other platforms.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Power User" and "Mouse User" don't belong in the same sentence.

So why did you just use them both in the same sentence, then? Good catch, I wondered if someone would notice that.

Your basic premise is of course flawed. Someone who tries to do everything from the CLI is as crippled and inefficient as someone who tries to do everything with the mouse. A true power user is someone who has mastered both methods of controlling their computer, and knows when each is appropriate for the task at hand. A true power user is someone who can use their computer efficiently using whatever methods are available. It's not really about GUI vs. CLI, it's about efficiency. As a GNOME user, I can efficiently do what I need to do, and I don't need some twit (not directed at you, the only person to write an intelligent reply) telling me that I'm not a power user because I use GNOME.

This persistent insistence perpetuated by ignorant KDE fanboys that GNOME is for "noobs" is just total nonsense.

Similarly, this insistence that KDE must be better "because Linus says so" is nothing short of religious fanaticism. I respect Linus and everything he's done, but he's not right about everything every time.

Re:am I missing something here?

[ChangeOnInstall]

I recently visited dell.com to price out a new system. When they finally present the full specs, they use a "reveal" transition to display the page. On my 2.4GHz P4 under Firefox, this effect took about 30 seconds. Infuriating.

It's especially bothersome given that it is trivial to get this right. The obvious "trick" is to spec the amount of time a transition should take, rather than the number of frames that should be rendered. The transition-rendering loop then draws the appropriate frame for the time at which it is being executed. On fast systems, it looks perfectly smooth. On slow systems, it may be more notchy, but it's over in the correct amount of time. But alas, it seems everyone opts for the "I need to draw these 50 frames" implementation.

If these things are done right, there's absolutely no reason to hate them, and I'm sure they can be turned off.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Excelsior]

First, can you not wait to see the result before jumping to the bloat criticism.

Secondly, the world does want eye candy (see OSX or the IPhone). Gnome is competing with OSX, Vista, KDE 4, and others. In comparison, Gnome is behind in the eye candy department.

I know I've converted more people to Linux by showing them Compiz/Beryl/Compiz Fusion than anything else, by far. When I show them Avant Window Navigator and Compiz in the same desktop, they are snatching the live CD from my fingers. Like it or not shell huggers, eye candy sells.

When you say "do we need more eye candy", I guess you are referring to the "we" that is 0.8% of the browsing public using Linux. In that case, I guess "we" don't need eye candy. But "I" would like to see more people interested in open source and free(dom) software, and eye candy in Linux is one of the best ways to make that happen.

Re:am I missing something here?

[swillden]

I found out yesterday there are 3 (!) different ways for copy-paste on my Ubuntu system, and they all use their own clipboard!

This is incorrect. There are two, not three. Technically there is only one clipboard, but there's a separate selection buffer that can be used like a clipboard. This is different from other OSes that don't have a useful selection buffer.

If you ever give Kubuntu a try, you'll find something that is very nice: your clipboard is managed by a systray app called "klipper", which remembers the last 'n' clipboard contents. You can right-click on it and see all of them, then click to recall an old one. Very, very handy. I'm not sure if GNOME has an equivalent; they may. I do know that if it exists it's not installed by default. If you don't like the clipboard/selection duality, you can configure klipper to "unify" them. Personally, I like the duality.

Re:am I missing something here?

[tixxit]

Also, compiling Gnome is not a one-step process. All of those programs are, in fact, very separate (hence why they call them "modules"). You only need to install the ones you like, no need to worry about uninstalling. Ubuntu won't start shipping w/ Anjuta installed by default, trust me :)

Re:am I missing something here?

[mandelbr0t]

I have a powerful enough machine that the eye-candy doesn't slow things down. Compiz+GNOME can be configured to look very sharp indeed. It's not OSX, it's definitely not Windows, but I'd have no problem convincing someone that it's a very useable desktop environment. There's alternatives for people who don't like GNOME. As one who likes the look and feel and has had very few problems, I'm most looking forward to improved PSP support in Rhythmbox and MythTV support in Totem. Moving to libswfdec seems to be a good idea. I had GNASH installed, but I switched since seeing the article, and other than a missing symlink, no problems with FLASH support. The Flash-block behavior is ideal for me, who hates "Punch-the-Monkey" popping up all over the place.

Re:am I missing something here?

[miscz]

Compiz is fast. It is also broken. Wake me up when it finally doesn't have focus issues. Metacity in Gnome 2.21/22 supports composite rendering BTW.

Re:am I missing something here?

[andreyw]

It was only a matter of time before some fucker invoked Godwin's law. Congratulations on being that fucker.

Power users don't whinge about there not being a GUI, power users just figure out how to do what they want and do it.

Power users also know how to fucking spell. Go take some remedial writing classes before you try posting again. You forgot to add - power users also know how to use the enter key ;-)

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

That has always been the problem with desktop Linux is that the minority think they represent the majorities opinion.

So the agenda has always been to keep it very simple and not too bloated; until recently the last few years you see more and more of it as Linux prepares to handle all the daily problems Windows has had with users who are just not computer specialist.

Re:am I missing something here?

[alphamugwump]

In fact, transitions are probably one of the more valuable HCI movements lately, and give users great feedback as to what happened to their data/windows and where they went.

We've had transitions since Windows 95. '95 introduced an annoying animation where the title bar shrunk and zoomed down into the taskbar. Now we have people who want to do the same thing, but with expensive graphics cards. And it's still just as slow.

I mean, the fact is, the cognitive load of operating a window manager is not really that huge. And all those seconds spent drawing transition animations add up. Is the wasted time really worth the slightly increased ease of use?

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great News! Finally Its Over! Grear improvements... http://www.kanati.com.ph/

Re:am I missing something here?

[opypod]

"Gnome is competing with OSX, Vista, KDE 4, and others" ...yes...these are all slow, bloated, eye-candy-rich environments. You must be happy that after years of development, gnome can be included in such a caste. i don't deny that linux needs some "shine" to get more appeal in the mass market. but as gnome assymptotically approaches winsux vista, it will be harder to tell the difference. wouldn't it better to read ->
"Gnome blows away OSX, Vista, KDE 4, and others"???
There's lots of things I like about gnome...but it gets harder every year to convince myself it's worth it...

Re:am I missing something here?

[opypod]

oh please ... xfce is riddled with gnome apps and gnome libs. whatever happens to gnome will eventually happen to xfce. that being said... i love xfce and think it's the best out there.

Re:am I missing something here?

[jhol13]

The problem with all those animations is that I really, *REALLY* hate them. All of them.

I have never ever seen a single "windows transition" or any other animation which does not look boring when you it the second time and annoying when you see it third time. BTW Compiz is the worst, the wobbly windows makes me want to puke.

When minimizing something to the dock in MacOS X, it's an extremely good way of showing the user where they can find it later. Are you implying that it goes to a different place every time? If yes, it is a horrible misfeature (minimize ten windows and try to remember where all went ...). If no, I will remember it the second time and after that information content of the silly animation is zero. But the animation is still silly and still annoying.

Re:am I missing something here?

[ta bu shi da yu]

How the hell is that insightful? It's bloody well wrong! Sheesh. GNOME is the GNU Network Object Model Environment and it's a desktop environment, not a freaking window manager.

Way to go idiot Slashdot mods. If anything, I would have modded this as a troll.

Re:am I missing something here?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Really? Name one.

Re:am I missing something here?

[gujo-odori]

Almost five years would mean they were definitely not using Metacity when I stopped using GNOME :) I started using GNOME in the late 1990s and had moved on to other things by the time they migrated from Sawfish to Metacity.

According to this page:

http://developer.gnome.org/news/

They were using Sawfish as late as September, 2002, although there is a Metacity reference from May of that same year. It sounds like that was the transition period, although I can't be sure; I haven't found any really clear GNOME history timeline so far. I know when I switched from GNOME to KDE, though: it was in early 2002 when KDE 3.0 was in late beta or release candidate status, and not too long before the official release. Before that I was still using GNOME and Sawfish was still the default window manager, although I usually changed it to back to Enlightenment, which I continued to prefer even after Rasterman had become very distant from the GNOME project.

I'm not currently running an ancient distro (no more security patches is a deal breaker), but as recently as 2004 I was running Debian 3.x and I do have some moderately old CDs, such as Red Hat 7.0 (Japanese edition) and I may still have the TurboLinux knockoff of Red Hat 4,2, which they released under the TurboLinux name before they actually did their own distro. I had some 2.x FreeBSD CDs around as well, although I may have dumped some of that really old stuff.

Re:am I missing something here?

[gujo-odori]

You haven't been with GNOME forever, then, and maybe not even very long, as these things are reckoned :) Enlightenment was the original GNOME window manager, back in the day when Rasterman worked closely with the GNOME project. I started using GNOME in the late 1990s, and it was most definitely using E at that time. See Miguel's page on the early history of GNOME here:

http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html

E was later replaced by Sawfish, which I never cared for. I guess a lot of other people didn't either, because sometime in 2002, after I'd stopped using GNOME, Sawfish was replaced with Metacity.

Nice memories of those old days when Linux was still an adventure. Cheers!

Re:am I missing something here?

[gujo-odori]

P.S. I never used Red Hat 9, I chucked it for Debian when RH 8.0 came out and I hated Blue Curve :)

Re:am I missing something here?

[samkass]

Are you implying that it goes to a different place every time

Yes... Iconified windows don't pile up on exactly the same spot. They'll iconify to the bottom of the dock, and the transition will show people who are less amazingly awesome as you where to find it.

Re:am I missing something here?

[jhol13]

How do "amazingly awesome" people like me, who have ten programs minimized, find them?

Trying to remember where they went? Sorry, I'm not that "awesome" nor "amazing".

Searching some task bar/area/whatever? Ugh, never would have guessed the OS-X has that "amazingly awesome" system ...

Re:am I missing something here?

[Knuckles]

Even Bonobo is being phased out: http://live.gnome.org/Bonobo

Re:am I missing something here?

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Let me guess -- Debian Stable?

Re:am I missing something here?

[DerPflanz]

Okay, I take that back. Not complete desktop environments, but I still have to install two complete near-identical library sets (gnome lib vs kde lib), or even more if I decide to use some xfce programs.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, there is that as well. :-)

khtml

[Arthur B.]

Why webkit over khtml ? To avoid the irony ?

Re:khtml

[N3TW4LK3R]

AFAIK, the KDE team is also switching to Apple's fork of KHTML, WebKit.

KHTML is very good of course, but it wouldn't make sense to switch to an engine that's going to be made obolete soon.

Re:khtml

[LizardKing]

WebKit can be used in apps written in C and Objective-C, thanks to the KWQ wrapper, and unlike KHTML it has no dependencies on the Qt toolkit.

Re:khtml

[ArcticFlood]

I'm pretty sure that you can use GtkHTML, a KHTML fork, in GTK+ apps without needing Qt. But WebKit for GTK+ is better maintained, which is probably the reason it was chosen.

Re:khtml

[cozziewozzie]

Why webkit over khtml ? To avoid the irony ? Most likely because KHTML uses Qt internally, and Webkit took the Qt dependency out, and is therefore probably easier to integrate with GTK.

Re:khtml

[Xabraxas]

GTKHtml is crap. It was forked so long ago that there isn't a shred or resemblance between GTKHtml and Webkit.

Re:khtml

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt, wrong! KWQ has not existed in WebKit for a long time now, and it has never had much relevance to the API which WebKit exposes to client applications. It was nothing but an implementation detail. Please stop trying to sound knowledgeable when you have no clue of what you speak.

Gnome's notable improvements

[Colin Smith]

Just encouraged me to switch to XFCE...

And people say there should be a single desktop...

Re:Gnome's notable improvements

[Skewray]

Real men use Blackbox. I use KDE. My favorite is XFCE. Go figure.

Re:Gnome's notable improvements

[Sleepy]

>And people say there should be a single desktop...

Actually, NO ONE says there should be a 'single desktop'. (Well, I'm sure some people will say anything, but...)

What developers and managers often bemoan is that there is no SINGLE API for development of desktop apps.

In fact your example of XFCE is a PERFECT example of what happens when there IS a common API. XFCE uses GTK as the engine.. as does GNOME.
The 'core' functions are all there... and then extended.

I don't think there should EVER be a single desktop -- that sounds like a nightmare on so many levels.
I would however love to see a merger between Qt and GTK, or at least much larger co-operation (and there is some already, via freedesktop, but it's all bottom-up driven.

Things may get more interesting on that front, now that Nokia owns Trolltech. I hope they can manage something without scaring the KDE folks.

Re:Gnome's notable improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who do not understand KDE are doomed to reinvent it.

Re:Gnome's notable improvements

[4D6963]

Real men use Blackbox.

Real men don't touch no damn mouse, for icons and windows are for pansies. Saves them the hassle of having to tidy the desktop.

Re:Gnome's notable improvements

[3p1ph4ny]

Saves them the hassle of having to tidy the desktop. Then I just end up having to tidy up /home/* instead.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[ozamosi]

I used to. And my Gnome using friends that I've talked into trying it still use it.

Compared to Firefox, it's prettier (if you think "fancy colors and icons" is more important than "consistent", you'll disagree), is much better integrated into Gnome, has much nicer "search engine support" (type in the address field, and your installed search engines are at the end of the auto complete list - please, someone, give me a firefox extension for that!), and has a quite nice tag based bookmarking system which can be synchronized with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia.com. All of that, and just a fraction of the memory of Firefox.

I stopped using it approximately the same time as they switched backend, and now use Firefox 3 instead - it doesn't swallow all memory (only almost all), and it actually looks more integrated into Gnome, than Epiphany with a Gecko backend (the times I tried Epiphany/Webkit, it didn't really work yet) since it's not only has a native theme, it also has native form controls (which Epiphany/Webkit apparently has too, but not Epiphany/Gecko). It also works with Online Desktop, and has the famous extensions, which makes up for the other downsides of not using Epiphany.

In other words: people are actually using Epiphany, but I don't think they will for long.

A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem...

[Nemilar]

(Warning, the following might sound like a troll, but I promise it is just a rant -- against a piece of software I have learned to hate something on the level as myspace. I'll try to make some decent anecdotal arguments)

I know it isn't just me, because whenever I say it, a lot of people give me a "Hell yeah!" - Totem Player is terrible. It's just awful. I dare say it might be the worst media player on the Linux platform. Gnome needs a new default media player.

If I let Totem try to play a DVD, it hangs for almost a minute before it starts playing.
It stops playing halfway through my mp4 files, for no reason. Just hey, now would be a good time to crash.
Its picture seems inferior to that of other players, for example smplayer.
Its control interface is basic, at best. There are other words I would use to describe it, but you can use your imagination.

VLC is a great media player. mplayer is a great player, and smplayer is a GREAT frontend for it, especially in KDE. We've got Xine, too. We have all these great media players, and Gnome sticks us with Totem?!?

No contents in moving windows

[tsbiscaro]

That's what I want in GNOME. KDE has the option to not display contents in moving windows, makes your box a little bit faster if you move your windows a lot, like me.

Re:No contents in moving windows

[NotZed]

a gconf-tool now there's a great user-friendly interface.

a registry on linux! yay!

You're missing an entire desktop!

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME is not a window manager, it is a desktop environment. GNOME has a window manager (metacity).

Sounds great! But does it run on Linux?

[TheBrutalTruth]

Or Windows, like KDE tries to for some reason...

Re:Sounds great! But does it run on Linux?

[ArsonSmith]

No, it runs on X11 the X Windows environment.

Re:Sounds great! But does it run on Linux?

[BlackCreek]

Or Windows, like KDE tries to for some reason...

I don't have strong preferences between Gnome and KDE (though I currently use KDE more often), and I the only OS I use is Linux, but I honestly believe that the most promissing (long term) change of KDE4 is the fact that many applications will be ported over to Windows and OSX.

My hope is that given the sheer volume of windows users, if any KDE application gets remotely popular on windows it would increase its user base dramatically (be it from professionals or home users); which should lead to increase in support for the given application, and therefore in its overall quality. Be it testing documentation, or debugging.

Other than that, I believe that allowing windows users to, from within Windows, get familiar with applications they would use on Linux is a major help reducing doubt and anxiousness about migrating.

They should improve the gnome VNC server

[Werrismys]

vino sucks. It's totally unusable: buggy, slow, and fails with 3D acceleration. x11vnc, on the other hand, works very very well. Why not borrow the code?

Re:They should improve the gnome VNC server

[muszek]

Earlier today, I read Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Alpha 4 release announcement (due in two days). Vinagre is going to be installed by default... it looks like it might be inherited from Gnome.

Re:They should improve the gnome VNC server

[mhall119]

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is going to use Gnome 2.22, so I would assume it would have all the features mentioned in this article.

Re:They should improve the gnome VNC server

[Blakey Rat]

All VNC servers kind of suck. An ideal remote desktop system:
1) Would be encrypted by default. Yes, I know you can pipe VNC through SS-something and yada yada, but I'm not smart enough to do that, and frankly people shouldn't have to-- just encrypt it by default!
2) Send widget descriptions (1k) instead of images of widgets whenever possible to save bandwidth.
3) Locked, logged-out, or otherwise blanked the server system to prevent eavesdropping while connected remotely.
4) Had an option to transmit sound, at least alert sounds.

Note that Microsoft's Remote Desktop has all of these features. Right now, VNC has none of them. Let's catch up, eh?

Gedit wish list...

[apathy maybe]

I wonder if any of the items on my Gedit wish list are going to be looked at?

I use Gedit for my IDE of choice. However, I have wishes to make it better.

The big two are simple,
when working on an indented line and press enter, the next line is indented the same distance.

When the cursor is next to a bracket (brace, etc.) {([ ])}, or even quotes ' " " ', it highlights one that matches it.

The other items were fixed between 2.18 and 2.20, so no worries there...

As for Epiphany, someone asked if anyone actually uses it... I do. But not actually for web browsing, just web development. It loads faster then Firefox (esp. with all the extensions required to make Firefox usable...), and it has tabs. That's all I really need.

As for the other items, I'm not sure how many of them are actually going to affect me. There are other things that would be nice, like a better system for power management, but really GNOME is so much better then it was just a few years ago.

Re:Gedit wish list...

[deanlandolt]

I'm running 2.20.3 on Ubuntu Gutsy...

when working on an indented line and press enter, the next line is indented the same distance. Edit > Preferences > Editor > Enable automatic indentation

When the cursor is next to a bracket (brace, etc.) {([ ])}, or even quotes ' " " ', it highlights one that matches it. Edit > Preferences > View > Highlight matching bracket I'm not sure when the features came in, but perhaps you need a minor version upgrade?

Re:Gedit wish list...

[Drooling Iguana]

when working on an indented line and press enter, the next line is indented the same distance.

GEdit does that already, just not by default. I can't recall off the top of my head where the option is and I'm not at a Linux PC to check, but it should be fairly easy to find.

Re:Gedit wish list...

[sayfawa]

Yeah, And those have been there for years. Gedit has a huge amount of preferences that people don't seem to discover for some reason. I think people look at it's default state and just assume it's another extremely simple Gnome app with no user-defined preferences.

Re:Gedit wish list...

[tzhau]

I am a fan of gedit as well. Bracket matching and line auto-indentation is indeed available! (I am using version 2.20.3).

Also keep an eye on the plugin system taking off (python and c supported):
http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins

Gedit makes for a nice minimalistic editor that you can take as close to an IDE as you see fit.

Re:Gedit wish list...

[apathy maybe]

Bloody hell. I was just thinking, I bet someone is going to point me to a plugin that does just that... No... It is built right into the editor!

Thanks! This will make my job easier, that is for sure.

(Just goes to show, looking around in the options is a good idea...)

Re:Gedit wish list...

[PCM2]

(Just goes to show, looking around in the options is a good idea...)

And this, folks, is why the Gnome devs keep trying to [over]-simplify the UI.

Evince

[tloh]

....transition effects inside the Evince document viewer.... I'm not at all sure what this is, but there is one thing that I hope Evince will be improved on. When used to view some PDF documents with Chinese fonts, the text comes across as terribly mangled. Though readable with great effort, the rendering is very coarse with inconsistent line widths. I may not be speaking for a large number of affected users. However, Gnome under Ubuntu for me has been indespensible as the computing plateform of choice for my retiree father. Those of us living in the US have difficult choices in the way of foreign language text suppport in the Windows camp. Available retail OS from MS in the US target primarily English users. Alternatively, for me at least, the Multilingual User Interface add-on from MS has been a pain to deal with. Contrast this with Ubuntu, where a default install in the language of one's choice provides everything (dialog boxes, menu options, etc.) in one's native language - the choice is a no-brainer. Since deploying Gnome/Ubuntu on my father's box, he's been considerably more happy and I've cut down dramatically on time/effort spent on troubleshooting, support, and computer tutoring. But as my encounter with certain PDFs show, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Re:Evince

[Knuckles]

The Ubuntu folks are very interested in multi-language support, so I figure they would like to fix the bug. Have you let them know about the issue, if possible by including the document? It would be great if you could go to Launchpad and file a bug on evince.

Re:Evince

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried using xpdf http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ to read pdf files?
In everyday use, I find it better than the Adobe Acrobat reader and less incompetent/annoying than kghostview & evince. It's fast to load and use and has a small memory footprint (gnome pun not intended). Also, it can zoom in nicely and do text searches.

Evince

[Stuidge]

A serious question: have they improved the rendering time of evince? Because right now it can be torturous waiting for a document to be redrawn after zooming in, especially compared to Foxit on Windows

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME used to be, and still is, my preferred Linux desktop - mainly for its look and feel, to be honest. But with "who cares?"-releases like these, I really wonder how long it's going to stay that way. Seriously - those list items are supposed to be "improvements"? Who cares about epiphany's rendering engine? FWIW, Gecko renders pages just fine. And transition effects in evince? Did anyone need that? A release of a big software package such as GNOME where such a minor change with questionable utility is actually notable really can't impress me. I haven't used KDE in quite a while, but recently saw it running on a machine with a recent SuSE version. It seemed quite polished and made me eager to test 4.0 or 4.1. Seems to me the problem of choosing a linux desktop converges more and more towards "You want something full-featured? Use KDE. Want something that keeps things simple? Use blackbox / xterm / screen".

Re:Who cares?

[Knuckles]

While I agree with the concern that Gnome development is a little slow, in this particular case it is mainly the fault of the article author noticing the wrong eight things. Epiphany is proposed for inclusion, as is Gimmie. No guarantees of course that they will be, but nevertheless there are interesting developments going on. http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap

Does the file manager still suck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Nautilus still default to that horrible Windows95-esque behaviour of opening every directory in its own little tiny window and require users to dig around in gconf to change it to something more reasonable?

Re:Does the file manager still suck?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Does the file manager still suck?

[Chosen Reject]

I don't know what the latest default behavior is, but if you had to dig into gconf to change it, you were doing it wrong. It's in the preferences for Nautilus itself.

Re:Does the file manager still suck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. It still doesn't know how to consistently display or not display "hidden" and so-called "backup" files. Heck, it doesn't even know the difference between the two!

filechooser ?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

my pet peevee with _any_ GTK based app is the filechooser.

it's ugly and far from intuitive.

there's a wrapper aplication that allows some GTK apps use KDE's filechooser, but it doesn't work with everyting.

if GTK developers really don't wan't to fix this, could they at least put something to allow the use of KDE's dialogs when the app is not running under gnome ?

BTW, the wrapper is here: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=36077

Re:filechooser ?

[NotZed]

Umm, newsflash, the kde (or windows) file chooser isn't 'intuitive' either - fuck, they're not even easy to use.

The gnome one is awful, but so are the rest. I mean for fucks sake, in windows you double-click too slow and suddenly you're renaming files! Who wants to rename a file when opening it?

Re:filechooser ?

[xiaomai]

I hear this a lot and always wonder what is wrong with the file-chooser? It's got a list of commonly used locations on the left, file structure to the right, and the path at the top. What is missing?

Re:filechooser ?

[jhol13]

Usability.

Re:filechooser ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've actually improved it lately -- at least you can type a directory now and not have to worry about it trying to out-guess you.

Re:filechooser ?

[BlackPignouf]

my pet peevee with _any_ GTK based app is the filechooser.
it's ugly and far from intuitive.

Did you ever try it? I could write exactly the same for "_any_ KDE based app".

On the left panel of the file chooser, I got:

• home dir
• desktop
• search alocation
• last used files
• every mount
• every ssh/ftp/samba dir
• every bookmarked dir

What else would you ever need? With all those options, I access any file I need in less than 2 secs.

Anyway, as usual in Gnome/KDE flamewar, the conclusion is:

use any desktop environment for more than 2 weeks, and you don't understand anymore how you could have used anything different.

Re:filechooser ?

[zsau]

I simply won't touch KDE programs at all for, amongst other reasons, the ugly and far from intuitive KDE file chooser. It gives me way too much information and confuses me (I'm a programmer at the very beginning of my career and I've used Linux since the late 1990s — but if I don't care about something, I don't want to know about it and showing it to me will distract me and slow me down ... simply because I'm human).

Maybe the KDE developers should fix their file chooser, or if they really don't want to, could they at least put something to allow the use of GTK+'s dialogs when the app is not running under KDE?

(It's probably a good idea all round; abstract the entire process of saving so you can use GTK+ file choosers, KDE file choosers, ROX file choosers or the ancient file choosers used by FontForge. But it absolutely shouldn't be determined based on what the user isn't running under, but by what they are running under by default (I don't use Gnome), overridden by a preference.)

Re:filechooser ?

[chmod a x mojo]

Me, that is one of the very FEW things I miss from windows. if it really bugs you that much under windows just turn your double click speed down under the mouse prefs. Why should I have to hit F2 to rename a file when i can just slow double click it and not have to move my left hand from the homerow?


P.S. if anyone knows how to get this functionality under KDE 3.5.x lemme know

Transitions and frills...

[Anonymous Coward]

have just made the latest eog (eye of gnome) snapshots painfully slow.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give you a "Hell yeah!" on that. Totem is crap. It's slow, always prompts to install codecs and then the installation fails at least 75% of the time anyway making it prompt me again and 'round we go.

VLC is so much better; that's one of few programs that I have to install as soon as Ubuntu is running.

Transition effects = good

[thatblackguy]

For the proverbial 'year of the Linux desktop' this is the sort of thing that we need. The flashy stuff might not matter to the slashdot crowd but to the average joe, the cosmetic improvements itself would be a reason to consider linux. We just had that article about better designed GUI's rating over better functioning programs, looks like the Gnome developers have taken that to heart.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[MrDrBob]

Alright, I'll bite. I presume you're using totem-xine, as opposed to totem-gstreamer? The first two problems are completely beyond Totem's control, and are problems with the backend library. In my experience, libxine has more such problems than GStreamer, even though it has support for a wider range of codecs. Your fourth point about Totem's "control interface" could be valid, but some suggestions for improvement would be better, rather than just a "that's crap". In summary: file bugs or nothing can be done about it.

filechooser is terrible...

[neapolitan]

Was going to mod you up, but I'll reply instead (sorry!).

I completely agree.

The GNOME filechooser is an abomination. It is one of the reasons that Linus Torvalds uses KDE, and the reason that no sane person will touch GNOME.

1. COMPLETELY unintuitive (and difficult to get used to) initial layout. Instead of having an area with the file name that you can type in, there is simply a three-panel directory. What happens if you start typing? Some weird mystery box appears that is right on top of your filter dialog, which is unlabeled!

Want to type part of the filename? Go ahead, but as soon as you make a selection to change to a different directory, it is gone! What's more, if you were in a Save dialog, the default value is now gone forever.

2. The CANCEL and OK buttons are reversed from almost all other GUIs. Cancel to the left? Cancel above OK? What???

3. Windows-like distrust of any other directories other than your home. Want to save something in /usr/local? Well, go to "File System" first so you can then access your root.

Numerous other issues (resize behavior -- the whole dialog moves if you change file type), etc. prevent me from using this, EVER.

For those linux readers using firefox, a simple fix is to go to about:config and change ui.allow.platform.filepicker to FALSE. Do it now, for your own sanity.

Re:filechooser is terrible...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

thanks dude. i was going mad googling for that FF option. i had it set on seamonkey on my desktop box before i turned it into a hackint0sh (don't ask!!!), and now i was having a hard time trying to find it againg to apply to my notebook.

Re:filechooser is terrible...

[ABCC]

If you thought the stock file chooser was confusing wait until you see the modified abomination found in File Roller (aka Archive Manager on some distros).

Re:filechooser is terrible...

[prockcore]

2. The CANCEL and OK buttons are reversed from almost all other GUIs. Cancel to the left? Cancel above OK? What???

  Except the one that everyone on here raves about. Gnome's Cancel/OK button order is identical to OSX.

Re:filechooser is terrible...

[dysfunct]

Whoa, thanks for the ui.allow.platform.filepicker hint. I always thought there was no alternative to the Gnome one. My sanity really appreciates the difference.

Re:filechooser is terrible...

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem, and thanks! (have to AC at work.) A good opportunity exists for a book "GNOME Annoyances." I wonder if we could top 641 pages...

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[h4rm0ny]

Listen to this person. He or she speaks truth!

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[sayfawa]

I have to agree. I don't like to diss open source products, but man, out of several years of using Gnome I just haven't ever had a good thing to say about Totem.

But an interesting anecdote is that my flatmate recently converted to Linux. He was a Windows "power user", not afraid of getting into any aspect of the system, and he's the same now with Linux. And he is actually completely satisfied by Totem. "But don't you find that it never plays anything properly, ever?" I asked him. "Nope, it plays everything I throw at it" he tells me. I've seen it too. Weird how experiences can vary so much.

Evolution

[cigarky]

I'd be happy to just settle for support for Exchange 2007 in Evolution 2.22 (I mainly use KDE applications in a gnome desktop anyway). I'm getting tired of work-arounds. What did all that Microsoft money to Novell buy?

Re:Evolution

[pembo13]

Publicity I guess. Although they claimed it was interoperability.

Re:Evolution

[doktorjayd]

evolution talks to exchange just fine.

multiple ways in fact:

imap/imaps ( turn on the standard protocol handler at the exchange server, might need to futz with AD and sort out certificates for imaps )

same deal for pop3/pop3s

evolution exchange connector: talks to exchange through its webmail system ( enabled by default on the exchange server as http://your.exchange.host.local/exchange )

or is there some issue with exchange 2007 specifically that i havent had to fight yet?

  really, i fucking hate exchange. why? some project manager/exec demands integrated calendaring in their email ... hears only exchange can provide it, so it gets mandated as the corp mail server, which as luck would have it ( for microsoft ) REQUIRES active directory to run, which really needs to run the dns and dhcp services ( never mind they're broken in the MS implementation ), which then needs to handle all the desktop authentication in order for outlook to ntlm authenticate to the mail service in order to provide the shared calendars. and there you have it. nice lightweight dovecot or courier imap on linux solution completely turned to crap with multiple DC's, a backup mailbox server and NETBEUI domain names and windows desktops all fofr the sake of integrated calendaring. gargh.

back OT, gnome actually integrates with Active Directory pretty well too, just so long as you're prepared to have crippled unix posix accounts & group memberships on your linux box.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[julian67]

Best browser I've ever used. Does tabs better than Firefox, smart bookmarks better than Firefox, starts faster than Firefox, uses less RAM. I don't need any of the numerous Firefox plug ins so Epiphany is fine. It also fits well in other desktop environments (I use Xfce). A brilliant web browser imo.

Removed .NET yet?

[metamatic]

Any chance that they've removed the dependency on Microsoft's patented .NET technologies via Mono?

(Yes, I know you can manually remove bits of the Gnome environment to get rid of Mono; but the Gnome environment by default includes Mono.)

Re:Removed .NET yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any chance that they've removed the dependency on Microsoft's patented .NET technologies via Mono?

Why do you care? What's the worst that could happen to you, as an user of mono-based applications, if Microsoft decides to sue novell (and they won't). Worst case scenario is that the gnome people are going to start to rewrite the affected code. You lose nothing.

Re:Removed .NET yet?

[Billly Gates]

As a business user you can be fined under sarbines Oxley for running pirated and unlicensed software. MS could make that case that the user didn't pay a licensing fee to MS to use Gnome and .NET.

That alone is fud and can scare many managers away from using non MS products thanks to the whole split within the linux community.

Re:Removed .NET yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet, they can leave it in for people that want to use it, and you can stop trying to gain ./ street cred by making everything about Microsoft. Just don't use it.

Re:Removed .NET yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a business user you can be fined under sarbines Oxley for running pirated and unlicensed software.

1/ All software, closed or open has *potential* patent issues in any jurisdiction that allows software patents.
2/ Having potential patent issues does not mean software is 'pirated' or 'unlicensed'. You appear to be confusing patents with copyrights.

Re:Removed .NET yet?

[pizzach]

Gentoo currently defaults to mono being off if you don't specify a use flag for it. But I suppose I started off outside of the scope of your argement anyway...

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[tmalone]

I do. The reason I like Epiphany over firefox is the bookmark system. I've never liked bookmarks very much and usually find that they become a horrible mess after a year or so of using a browser. The tag based bookmarks in Epiphany make it very easy to manage the bookmarks. There are some things I don't like (no fine grained javascript control) but the bookmarks keep me coming back. I'm hoping firefox 3 will allow for epiphany like bookmarks (I've heard you can make bookmark plugins for FF3). Until then, I'm sticking with epiphany.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[KeyserDK]

Yes, tagged bookmarks have been there for a few years (and now finally in firefox).

But really - firefox looks like crap in a gnome desktop. Also for me - there are no extensions i really must have other than webdeveloper (rare) so i just run ff when with webdeveloper when needed.

But yes, many people will prefer firefox because of extensions.

Switching to WebKit?

[daemonc]

"In order to use the WebKit backend, Epiphany must be built with the --with-engine=webkit argument."

That sounds more like WebKit is available, as an option, if you are compiling from source, than "switching" to me...

Re:Switching to WebKit?

[ClamIAm]

This will likely be handled the same way other multiple-backend programs are. For example, in Ubuntu, there is a "totem-gstreamer" package and a "totem-xine" package. Pick your favorite.

Re:Switching to WebKit?

[pizzach]

What's the diff? I do hope Webkit is less of a compile than Gecko. (Gentoo User)

Re:Switching to WebKit?

[HeroreV]

Distros will choose which backend is used in the default Epiphany. In some distros, it may be that you'll have to compile it yourself if you don't want WebKit.

Re:Switching to WebKit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Already is:

>aptitude search epiphany
i A epiphany-gecko - Intuitive GNOME web browser - Gecko version
i epiphany-webkit - Intuitive GNOME web browser - webkit version

Re:Switching to WebKit?

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds to me like webkit is available as an option in this latest release, and that in the future it might well become the default. It's not the best of ideas to make such a big change as that all in one go, especially when you can go the gradual route easily enough...

Nothing Notable

[HermMunster]

Compared to KDE this is a non-update. It is almost irrelevant. One need not even look at it. I'm a gnome user and that's my opinion. There are tons of features they could add but mostly they could seriously fix the issues they have with it.

Re:Nothing Notable

[miscz]

Gnome releases are slow but steady. Unlike KDE there's predictable roadmap and revolutions happen on a small scale without actually breaking everything and making regressions. PolicyKit and GVFS are major updates and will allow a lot of cool stuff.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Anonymous Coward]

The point he was making was, regardless of if there is a better version of Totem, the one that ships with gnome and is default just plain sucks. And I concur. It's bloody unusable.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I will stay with KDE, thanks a lot!

[Maimun]

Last year I tried Ubuntu and the reason I ditched it and went back to RedHat/Fedora was Gnome. I can't stand Gnome, it is ugly, intrusive and non-configurable. Then I tried Kubuntu but gave up almost immediately on it -- it seems those who say that Kubuntu is Ubuntu's poor cousin have a point. So, now it's good old Fedora again. Sure, the update system is more primitive than Ubuntu but it has WORKING KDE, which far outweighs all its perceived disadvantages. I wish KDE was the primary environment of Fedora, of course :)

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[andre.ramaciotti]

Well, kaffeine uses xine as its backend and I've never had such problem with it.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[erwanl]

You're comparing Firefox 3 (not released) with Epiphany based on a Gecko 1.8. Wait for Firefox 3 to be released and Epiphany/Gecko to switch to a 1.9 base to compare.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[baadger]

Does totem-gstreamer even play DVD's? I've never been able to get it to work...

Mousetweaks

[cleepa]

From the article: This accessibility project has a contextual menu for those who are only able to control one mouse button Mac users?

GDM Greeter

[BadHaggis]

One thing I haven't seen listed here is the rewrite of the GDM. While the core GDM is being rewritten it will not be included with Gnome 2.22 in Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Gentoo. These three main stream distributions have already stated in the GDM mail list that they will stay with the 2.20 version of GDM.

The reasons stated for these distributions not including the 2.22 GDM are configuration issues, lack of a themed login, GDM Configuration tool and lack of testing. While many areas of Gnome are receiving improvements the GDM is one of those areas where there is a significant enough degradation that distros are not including it.

The new version of the GDM may be several release versions away and ultimately be less functional than the current version. I don't necessarily call that an improvement.

Re:GDM Greeter

[GauteL]

"The new version of the GDM may be several release versions away and ultimately be less functional than the current version. I don't necessarily call that an improvement."

That depends on whether the core functionality will be improved and whether the new code base allows for deeper integration between the login manager and the desktop sessions (ie. more sensible approach to fast user switching and desktop locking). AFAIK the rewrite is to allow for things that the current architecture simply can't do without horrible hacks.

Re:GDM Greeter

[Anonymous Coward]

gdm sucks balls. When Gentoo went to 2.20.1, I spent way too much time fixing broken crap like non-existant .dmrc files filling up our logs with "GLib-CRITICAL: g_key_file_free: assertion `key_file != NULL' failed" errors. (Google found lots of complaints about that error, but no resolutions.)

I tried 2.20.2 and it segfaulted on login.

I checked their repo for a fix, but discovered that they've dropped the existing 2.20 base to work on their new whizzy Console/PolicyKit bullshit. I really don't care about BS like "fast user switching" when my users can't even log in with getting errors.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You're exactly the kind of person who would be saying the complete opposite if Linus had claimed that Gnome was better than KDE. In fact, you probably made fun of KDE users back when Gnome was the hacker's choice and KDE was considered a Windows clone, up until Linus made KDE cool.

Seriously, there's nothing more lame than desperately trying to be cool.

Re:Who cares

[mhall119]

Maybe you should kill your self you stupid Gnome/Windows User.
Gnome means doesn't work like the Chevy Nova in Mexico. OMG, you have no idea who Miguel de Icaza is, do you?

Different designs

[Tony]

I would however love to see a merger between Qt and GTK . . .

That'd be tough, as Gtk+ is C-based, and Qt is C++-based.

This is one of the few cases where the choice of using a C++ toolkit has turned me off. Basing the entire desktop on C++ makes it harder for people who hate C++ (like me) to participate. It's essentially blocked off a huge section of developers from touching it.

Whereas with Gtk+ (and GNOME, and XFCE, etc) or EFL (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) it's pretty easy to write bindings for other languages, like Perl or C++ or Objective-C (far superior to C++, IMNSHO) or LISP or (insert your favorite language here). That makes GNOME much more egalitarian than KDE.

It also makes a merger between Gtk+ and Qt technically very, very difficult.

Things may get more interesting on that front, now that Nokia owns Trolltech. I hope they can manage something without scaring the KDE folks.

Yeah, that's gonna be interesting. They *do* have the N810, but the environment is not completely open. Fortunately, they can't take Qt out of circulation, so a project could always fork off, if Nokia proves too domineering.

Re:Different designs

[Otter]

Whereas with Gtk+ (and GNOME, and XFCE, etc) or EFL (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) it's pretty easy to write bindings for other languages, like Perl or C++ or Objective-C (far superior to C++, IMNSHO) or LISP or (insert your favorite language here). That makes GNOME much more egalitarian than KDE.

I find it hard to understand why someone who likes C would then dislike C++ enough to base a toolkit decision on that, especially given the quirky C required for Gtk+, but that aside...

There are, in fact, Qt bindings for C, Objective C, Ruby, Java and many other languages. (QtPython is probably the most widely used.) I'm not sure why you think it's so much more difficult to write bindings for a C++-based API.

Re:Different designs

[Anonymous Coward]

There are, in fact, Qt bindings for C, Objective C, Ruby, Java and many other languages. (QtPython is probably the most widely used.) I'm not sure why you think it's so much more difficult to write bindings for a C++-based API.

Maybe because he's used them. As somebody who was written (and maintained) large programs in both PyGTK and PyQt, I must say that these projects are a great argument in favor of using plain C.

The PyGTK project, for the past several years, has released an update to its bindings within a month of the corresponding GTK+ library. PyQt's last version lagged by about a year. (Not a good sign.) Long after the Qt people had gone to Qt 4.0, we were stuck with PyQt for Qt 3.3, because that's the latest stable release. (It was even hard to get PyQt fixes, because the few PyQt developers spent almost all of their time trying to get PyQt 4 out the door.)

PyGTK has always done just what I expected it to. In PyQt, we always seemed to have trouble with object lifetimes. Qt tried to be just a bit too clever with C++ destructors and object lifetimes and such, and it just didn't translate into HLLs. Between this, and needing to pass C++ method signatures (as a string!) to signal handlers, you really had to write C++-in-Python. It's not really possible to write PyQt code without constantly thinking about the C++ layer. In GTK, I never thought about C: I just wrote Python with a Python GUI library.

I also find the phrase "quirky C required for Gtk+" funny. The C used by GTK+ has always seemed perfectly normal to me. If you want quirky, take a look at the "meta-object compiler" (yet another preprocessor!) that Qt's C++ uses.

Re:Different designs

[MSG]

Won't someone mod the AC up?

Re:Different designs

[ta bu shi da yu]

Only after I point out that there are some amazing C++ bindings for GNOME called gnomemm, created by the gtkmm crowd.

Re:filechooser is terrible... not that bad

[Clansman]

Nothing like as bad as you make out.

What happens if you start typing is not "a mystery" but simply type ahead.

I just tried it - I have a file on my desktop called test.txt.

I open the chooser dialog in Firefox. I type 'de' and desktop is now highlighted. The mystery box is showing you what you have typed so far. I hit enter to go into desktop, then type te and test.txt is highlighted. I hit enter to open it.

And if i try it a second time it remembers where i was last so now just "ctrl-o te enter" and i have opened that file again.

really fast, really good - you just haven't tried it properly, mate :-)

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[ozamosi]

I know I'm being unfair that way - I tried to make it clear what versions I was comparing, but you're right. The comparison is unfair.

But the thing is, I don't think either Epiphany/Gecko 1.9 or Epiphany/Webkit will be That much of a difference to existing Epiphany. It will render more sites better, and with less resource use. I don't feel very excited. I mentioned a bunch of advantages of Firefox 3 in the GP post.

The thing is, Firefox 2 is quite crap, Epiphany 2.20 is mostly great, and Firefox 3 is quite good. Fancy extensions can't turn crap into something great. Fancy extensions can turn something good into something great, though. The only reason I started using Firefox again was because I wrote webpages and needed to access Firebug, and eventually, I just didn't feel like restarting the browser anymore. I could probably code that search engine extension myself - I've played a bit with creating Firefox extensions, and it's quite easy to rewrite the entire UI. On the other hand, I still haven't found a way to make Epiphany's tabs shrink, which annoys the hell out of me.

Firefox 3 is, in my opinion, simply Good Enough to make Epiphany pointless. But I'm probably, and hopefully, wrong.

Re:Who cares

[mhall119]

Oops, never mind, turns out he's not the same guy who worked on Gnome and Mono, my mistake.

Terrible is not strong enough.

[mattcasters]

I wish it was as simple as running away from it.
I use Eclipse and SWT for Java development. Because Eclipse uses SWT and SWT uses GTK+ to bind to, that piss poor dialog trolls all over the place in many, many SWT based applications.
The trick with FF is nice (and I applied it immediately on my Kubuntu box) but there are unfortunately other apps out there...

Man, how do I hate that dialog. I'm getting all worked up just thinking about it. Shees.

My pet peeve: you type in a filename, say "foo-bar.txt" and you hit enter. ANY sane dialog would close and accept this as being the same as hitting the OK button.
Well, in 95% of the cases it doesn't. In 5% of the cases (when you browsed around or something, can't figure it out exactly) it actually closes and accepts the filename.

That dialog has "amateurs" written all over it. Here's some advice Gnome fan-boys: get that dialog right before you do anything else. It matters.

Matt

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[uzytkownik]

Why you don't use for example gxine?
There is a lot of gnome media players - totem is just one of them (included into the default gnome installation).

Re:Who cares

[timberwolf753]

I don't care cause I have the freedom to say anything I want thanks to the first Amendment.

Welcome to the 21st century

[mattcasters]

Oh, now it's a user error, right? Blaming it on the users is so 1980 "mate".

That type-ahead "feature" is probably the most annoying type-ahead I've ever come in contact with.
Sure, it's fine if you have one or two files around. If not, it's a nightmare. I pray every time that type-ahead is disabled.
You see, for some reason it works in some situations and doesn't in others. I don't have time to look in the code to see why it wouldn't work in some situations.

The main problem with it is that you don't know when it will auto-complete and when it will not. Suppose you want to go to /usr/lib, right?
For me, it's probably faster to type /usr/lib and be done with it, but if I did, I would end up with /usr/sr/lib or some other bastardized variation of the real filename. (remember: you can't tell when it's enabled or not!)
Also, it's not proposing an option, it enforcing an option. That means I have to wait for it to pop up the only possible option after each character I type... really... carefully. I don't know how many options there are, so in a lot of cases it's a lot slower than just typing in the frigging filename.

Aaaaaarghhh!!!!!!!!!!! Time to call my shrink again, thanks a lot.

Matt

Re:Welcome to the 21st century

[Clansman]

Weird, I type /usr/lib/ and that is what I get, every time. I just tried some lother folders. Same. I either keep typing for sub directories or hit enter to get a list of files in that folder. Easy, fast and reliable.

I use this set of features all day, maybe 100 times a day. Type ahead on loads of files? Works as planned! Now the down key moves only within the filter you have typed. I combine this with the snap open plugin (in gedit).

Wasn't blaming the user, far from it, saying that it works well for me the way it was designed to work. Of course each user has their own ideal way of working and then they go on their way. But don't just slag it until we have established whether or not you have a buggy install, cos working-as-designed, the interface makes working easy. There is nothing particularly intuitive about win95 yet our users cannot switch to a mac when they sit down for the first time. They need to be shown all over again the absolute basics.

Take it easy mate and save your money for something better than a shrink!

Re:Welcome to the 21st century

[Barromind]

This is oh-so-true. It drives me nuts every time. And then, if you hit enter too soon when selecting some file, you end with a truncated /usr/bin/oku from hell or something, instead of autocompleting its own suggestion.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Knuckles]

Yes, but as always you need libdvdcss2. And it has no dvd menu support, which sucks.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you forgot something:
It uses a shitload of CPU, at least it does for me.

It's not really convincing to switch to linux if it comes bundled with software that uses about 40 % of your CPU just to play a damn MP3, whereas even "that stupid Windows Media Player" manages to only use 2%.
(I know this has nothing to do with linux, just saying...)

Worth upgrading?

[Tofflos]

I suppose Cheese and the improved integration with Flash are nice but these features sound rather dull.

Maybe this should be viewed as a good sign? I think the Gnome desktop has matured to a point where there are no glaring defects and no major pieces missing.

Re:Who cares

[mhall119]

I don't care cause I have the freedom to say anything I want thanks to the first Amendment. You also have the right to remain silent, which would have probably served you better in this case.

Oh, and the Chevy Nova thing? It's wrong.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Knuckles]

Same here, gstreamer is very good now, just realmedia is not possible. And the dvd menu support has been sorely missing for a long time.

But otherwise I like it. I don't need features to watch movies, and I resent how complicated other players can make it. When I doubleclick the movie, it should come up in the correct ratio and play. Totem does this, has a nicely integrated straightforward playlist (not a jumble of windows to manage like other players), and otherwise gets out of the way.
There are other video needs for which I will use xine or vlc, but Totem is great as a default player (with the above caveats)

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[MBGMorden]

What I don't get with the VAST majority (I'd say "all", but there may be an exception I don't know about) is why clicking on a spot in the "progress bar" for a video or song doesn't take me to exactly the spot. The seeker just jumps forward or backward a little in that direction. I can take it and DRAG it to the exact spot, but it won't jump there on a click.

This aggravates me to no end. Quicktime on my Mac gets it right. Windows Media Player even gets it right (though I instead use Media Player Classic on Windows, but it does it right too). I'm not even asking for this to be default behaviour - but for all the touted "customizability" of Linux apps, I sure as hell would like a little checkmark to enable this behavior somewhere in the program.

I've STILL not found a media player on Linux that I really like. Media Player Classic is the pinnacle of video player for me, but really all I want is a window, plays video, seek bar that goes to the location that I tell it, and I want my controls part of the same window as the video (I'll go full screen if I want to hide them). Get me that packaged into a program that doesn't crash when I play videos (a la VLC playing any WMV video on Mac :() an I'll be tickled pink.

Rant off :).

Totem & Realplayer

[SharpFang]

Does Totem with Win32 codecs still crash X so badly that it crashes nVidia kernel module and the rest of the kernel, leading to crash/reboot of the PC?

Re:filechooser?

[startling]

You're right. Those Gnome dialogs have been irritating me since I switched to Ubuntu. Three measly lines for a folder list? Pathetic! And not remembering when you manually resize them to something sensible? Amateurish! But when I discovered that they're not even going to consider fixing these horribly broken things you could have knocked me over with a light flick of a very small sardine's tail.

I'm planning to look at KDE4 when it's ready.

File Roller

[bob.appleyard]

I am a GNOME user. And I like it. It's all good. With one exception: the "File Roller" application, which is used to examine archives.

Using it is basically a chore. You open it up, and you get a list of files. So, you think, it's just a matter of dragging those files into a directory you want, and it'll extract them there. Oh no. Total rejection. So you click on "extract," and if you're already in the directory you want to extract those files into, you have to leave that directory, and then re-enter it, before the OK type button (it's also called "extract") actually does anything.

I'm very lazy. I don't want to have to open a terminal window, navigate to the necessary directory, and run tar or whatever in order to get at my files. File Roller makes me do that due to its problems of usability. I suppose I could try looking for something that integrates with GNOME better, but this is part of the package, it should already be integrated.

Re:File Roller

[TheDreadedGMan]

ah ha!! thank you

I had filed a bug regarding the non-functioning OK button, but this solves it, I just need to navigate in and out of the folder?

Sweet... Now if only they would implement drag-and-drop.. you know like a GUI metaphor invented decades ago...

This is the same problem with another application, I can't remember now, but you had to choose another folder first before it would respond...

yet again, the main thing wrong with GNOME: file choosers

Re:File Roller

[miscz]

Isn't drag and drop extracting present since Gnome 2.20? I'm at my Windows desktop right now and can't check it but I'm fairly sure it was fixed.

Re:File Roller

[aflag]

It does have the drag and drop feature, but it sucks. File roller has the worst usability I've seen in a gnome program. Using it with firefox is a pain. If you get the same file two times, the first one file roller will open fine, the second time it will be named something.tgz.1 and file roller will not open the file. I definetely think they should spend some time on making file roller better.

Re:File Roller

[bob.appleyard]

It is a real shame, because I do like pretty much all of the other applications. Granted, I use Firefox rather than Epiphany, but I'd rather have the extensions and suffer the dreadful lack of integration in that case. With File Roller, it's just annoyances all the way.

I know what needs to be done. I have a vague idea how to do it. By golly, I think I'm going to have a bash. Hurray for free software.

1990 called: want their "linux sucks" trolls back

[DrYak]

Unless you have a decent distro what a big software repository, it is hard to install/uninstall software that integrates nicely into your OS (and in this case I count the windowmaganager/desktop to the OS

the 1990s called : they want their "Linux is teh suxx0rs" trolls back.

Cite me a major distro that isn't decent and doesn't have a good library of softwares in its repositories : None.
- Ubuntu is universally praised as *THE* best distro which managed to transform Debian into something a grand-ma could use, all with nice candy coating on everything. With all main packets from the distro being well integrated, and for those who *really* need some obscure software, there's still access to Debian "everything-including-thekitchen-sink" repositories.
- OpenSuSE, is my favorite, because of their effort to fit everything nicely into something that doesn't look dumbed down to the extreme (as Gnome might look to some users), have also a very good selection of default applications, and have what I think is the best admin tools around : YaST. And if you need more software, there are the "download.opensuse.org" repositories with tons of application whose maintainer pay attention to make nicely fit, and which are available to the user with a single click.
- I don't know Fedora/RedHat enough but I'm sure the experience is similar.

Yes, there are a lot of lesser "specialist" Linux distro around. Some might offer primitive Xlib or CLI interface (often as part of their specifications : Rescuecd tend to ofer quick to use CLI tools in addition to desktops, and Damnsmall Linux features a lot of simplier Xlib software because, well, it tries to be damn small). And anyway those distros are targetting niches.

But for what I've seen, the major distro have clrealy "got it". They are strive to insure a better user experience (Ubuntu has sometimes been dubbed "like Mac OS X, but brownier").
They use application based around nice toolkits like GTK and QT/KDE, and use theme engines that insure nice consistant look accross toolkits (recently also including TK in the consistencyy stack).
Lots of KDE share a closely related interface design (due to the way KDE is developped)
and Gnome is doing efforts through their HIG initiative. ...meanwhile Windows XP just looks like an arse, doesn't provide meaningful functionality (ok, that normal : it's an OS, not a distro), usually is packed together with tons of crapware by the manufacturer of the PC (*they* should have done somethink similar to a distro, instead they regard the PC as nothing more than Ad-Space), as a consequence of which users have to hunt around the web for applications that might do the useful functions they need and will probably either resort to piracy, or end up installing adware/spyware/virus or both. 99% of the time the freeware will use ugly bitmaps for interface. And finally the whole costs too much for what it's worth.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[cyxxon]

Amen to that, brother. All of that.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[Psiren]

I could probably code that search engine extension myself - I've played a bit with creating Firefox extensions, and it's quite easy to rewrite the entire UI. What can I offer you to do that? Seriously. It's the single thing that's kept me with Mozilla all these years, but like you I have to keep switching to Firefox for things like Firebug. Why they thought it was a good idea to have yet another text entry box is beyond me. So, name your price Sir! :)

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Anonymous Bullard]

Middle-click works here as designed.

Re:Transition effects = bad

[NotZed]

No, they just make a slow interface feel slower. Computers are there do to work for you, not entertain you while they're twiddling their thumbs.

Preview in File Open Dialog

[FigOSpeak]

Still no file preview in the file open dialog I suppose?

Re:Preview in File Open Dialog

[TheDreadedGMan]

They are waiting until the release of Windows 7 for this feature.

Then they will release GNOME 2.6 with new terminal transitions, fading and animated letters in gnome-terminal!

I just wish that the file chooser was like a mini-nautilus... file previews, rename, delete, etc

Re:Preview in File Open Dialog

[Hemi Rodner]

I could live with that, but why the file size is not displayed?! And why can't I rename/delete files from it, unlike every other GUI?

Nice, but .....

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you copy and paste more than text between applications reliably yet?

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[xiaomai]

I don't think he's talking about the xine backend. I'm using totem-gstreamer and can confirm that it is indeed the worst thing that has ever happened to GNOME. The list of bugs is so endless that it would be much better to just scrap the crap and start anew.

Vala ftw!

[Anonymous Coward]

For anyone who hasn't played with it, vala is coming along nicely. I don't care for Gnome but Vala is looking awesome, it basically wraps GLib/GObject, making the latter usable. Why run a bloated VM when you can have a C# inspired language that outputs C and compiles down to native code (with optional GC). The plan is to be able to auto-generate bindings for C libs, I've not tried this yet.

Hopefully Vala will live up to it's promise and see use in the F/OSS world far beyond Gnome.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[TheDreadedGMan]

I agree... these are the most important features:

1. Decent seeking (e.g. accurate and not buggy like totems "look it's stuck to my mouse" seekbar)
2. No annoying separate video and control windows... what the hell is up with that?
3. Fullscreen that works well with double-click and a key (totem works fine here under metacity, and sometimes under compiz)

overall, with totem-xine (in Ubuntu 7.10), everything is well, except:

• Can't play MP3 file from a network share
• Seek bar sucks (jumpy and sticky)
• Flickering controls in fullscreen under compiz (works fine in metacity)

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[ClamIAm]

all I want is a window, plays video, seek bar that goes to the location that I tell it, and I want my controls part of the same window as the video

You might look into trying GNOME Mplayer, a simplified UI for Mplayer. The controls sit in the window (press 'c' to show/hide them). A click in the progress bar seeks pretty close to your click (it doesn't get to the exact point...I think it goes to the nearest keyframe or something).

Desktop Environments

[Vector7]

I just don't understand desktop environments like Gnome and KDE. Most of their efforts seems to go into building half-assed reimplementations of their previous half-assed reimplementations of various existing programs. I understand they want everything to fit together perfectly, with uniform look and feel, but most of their software just isn't very good, and I'm not interested in waiting another seven or eight years for them to "realize their vision" by rewriting every component a few more times. I'd rather use software that works today and, ideally, also worked yesterday and won't be arbitrarily discontinued and rewritten tomorrow.

I might go so far as to say that if there's anything holding back linux on the desktop, it's the clowns directing these desktop environments. Their perpetually half-implemented delusions of grandeur have for years been the public face of linux, with hopes of wooing people who don't want to use Windows but also don't want to learn anything new, and who become disillusioned when the whole barely-functional mess hardly works any better than it did when they tried it a couple years before. But rather than fixing the bugs and polishing the the software, these projects are too busy changing direction to follow their latest round of Great New Ideas, and never finish what they started. Worse, they just don't have the taste or discipline to resist pushing software that no one really wants, or simply isn't finished yet, and we end up with abominations like a Gnome-branded web browser, yet another lousy media player, a redundant xterm clone, and menus full of goofy, trivial applications that no one will ever use.

So, yeah. Keep up the good work!

Re:Desktop Environments

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, thank goodness Windows leaves us with no choice. I wish the Windows desktop could remain fixed at the Win98 green color though. (Too many choices for a desktop background makes me angry.) I agree- those Linux clowns need to quit giving people choices. What are they thinking?

Re:Desktop Environments

[Vector7]

It appears you've taken a criticism of a collection of computer programs personally. Who said I was endorsing Windows? A general criticism of the state of Gnome or KDE does not constitute an endorsement of any alternative. Indeed, such a "you're either with us or against" mentality is antithetical to the spirit of choice. Whether I install Windows or Linux with Gnome, I end up with something very similar - a large, integrated collection of mediocre applications which I don't really want to use once the novelty has worn off. Ideally, I'd use neither. The specific choice between e.g. the faint aroma of evil lingering around Windows Media Player versus the bungling incompetence of "Totem" -- and again my answer is "neither" -- is left to your personal preference.

You might also try SciTE

[jensend]

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html>SciTE is a similar lightweight editor which has the features you've mentioned (though from what I hear there's ways to make gedit behave that way too) and has, among others, the added bonuses of being cross-platform and not depending on gnome libraries.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[ed.markovich]

is why clicking on a spot in the "progress bar" for a video or song doesn't take me to exactly the spot. The seeker just jumps forward or backward a little in that direction.

That's how scroll bars work (in Windows at least) and I've seen some people use that feature. Perhaps the developer of the player you're pissed off about does a "fast forward" more often than a seek, and he wanted to be able to skip forward a little bit just by clicking somewhere in the right direction on the progress bar.

I am not a fan of this though ;-)

d'oh! That's what I get for not previewing.

[jensend]

SciTE

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[ters a-zA-Z0-9$_. !*]

totem-gstreamer is nice right now, everything that it won't play mplayer will play without a hitch in fact yakuake term and mplayer are all i need right now once i learned to generate playlists with find

Re:filechooser?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

it's ready since january 11.

check out www.kde.org, and if you're using ubuntu, check www.kubuntu.org. they already have a liveCD and packages you can install side-by-side with KDE3.5

test it out, but keep in mind that KDE usually is not all that usefull in x.0 versions, so test this version but keep your 3.5 in place until 4.1 is out, ok ?

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[jorgevillalobos]

Just wait for Firefox 3. It will have much, much better OS integration, specially on Linux and Mac OS. Next week you'll probably be able to take at peek at Firefox 3 Beta 3, which will include the new Linux and Mac OS themes.

Interesting

[entrigant]

So, the release of KDE 4.0 gets a minor footnote on /.'s main page, and Gnomes expanded mouse tweaking gets a glowing review? wtf?

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC is a great media player. mplayer is a great player,

I started off using mplayer, but as time passed I came across more problems with it and switched over to vlc.
I found that mplayer wouldn't play some .flv files (downloaded flash) correctly - skips through at accelerated speed; wouldn't play files with spaces in their names in some cases; and switched to full screen mode and back (as per my video preferences) when playing music only files. So far I've found no problems with vlc at all.
I only keep mplayer installed because some other programs use it behind the scenes for file/codec conversions (DeVeDe IIRC).

Awesome! Way to go devs. :)

[Yfrwlf]

Several nice additions. The thing I'm looking forward to the most is the webcam application. What would be even nicer though perhaps is for other programs (and maybe they can) to be able to use this as a "video device stack" or for a stack to be created, so that programs can much more easily adopt webcam support along with other video devices. This would greatly help out any video editing programs and IM clients (maybe webcam support for Gaim finally?).

Still, I dislike talking about these apps in Gnome-centric fashion, since all apps should be DE agnostic. It's fine to bundle them by default in your DE though, and if the development group is primarily those involved with the DE then fine, but it's still a bit silly. A better article would be "New neat programs, all to be included in Gnome!" or whatnot. :)

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[DiLLeMaN]

FF3beta2 already has the new UI code for MacOS, it comes as a plugin/theme combo. It's totally sweet, and together with the speed increase / mem usage decrease, has made FF my default browser again.

All I'm missing at this moment is del.icio.us extension, which, AFAIK, isn't available yet for beta versions, but it'll come.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[jetxee]

I use epiphany daily and find it much better designed than FF2 or even FF3 betas.

The killer feature in Epiphany for me is its tag-based bookmarking system. They really got it right. Places in FF3 is an attempt to catch-up, but it still has a long way to go.

I also like that URL and search box are the same thing in Epiphany. When I remember URL, I enter URL, when I want to search, I enter search request. Creating a "Smart bookmark" in Epiphany is much faster and easier than packing search engine plugin in FF. Thanks to this feature, my Epiphany is much better integrated with the sites I use.

What else? Epiphany starts faster and is more resonsive, its fonts are OK by default like in all GNOME applications (no need to tweak them like in FF), it respects GNOME settings. It is not bloated. Punto.

Earlier I lacked good adblocking extension for Epiphany. Nowdays it covers my needs. I know not all FF greasemonkey scripts work in Epiphany, but the only one I use on Flickr works well.

P.S. I still use gecko engine. I tried webkit-based engine, but found it not-ready-for-daily-use-yet. Probably it's gotten better today. Fortunately, switching rendering engines in modern Epiphany is easy for the end-user.

Re:1990 called: want their "linux sucks" trolls ba

[DerPflanz]

My comment starts with 'unless you have a decent distro'. I do not say there are none, nor do I say that Linux sucks, or any other OS sucks. I am also talking about what if the software you want is *not* inside a repository (proprietary software?) it is hard or impossible to install it. And using a CLI and having to run strange scripts, etc. is considered 'hard' in this case. I want to download a file (or buy a CD), and run an installer. After that, the program should be in my menu and I should be able to use it.

You want examples? Try installing vmware on Ubuntu. I have to download a file (good), then run it in a console (not good) and only just now have they fixed a bug to correctly compile kernel modules (very bad). Another example is the default installation of Eclipse, which uses the gcj. I have to extra install the java sun engine to be able to use it (with gcj it is too memory hungry, slow and overall crashy).

My point is only that flexibility is not always a good thing. And by the way, no Linux doesn't suck more or less than any other modern OS (noted that software sucks, generally). I have been arguing for a long time that there is no technical reason to prefer any one over the other.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Xtravar]

I have strange trouble with some (but not all) WMV files. It disappears when I delete the ffmpeg plugin (because I guess it falls back directly on the Windows binary?), but then I can't play some other files that require ffmpeg. It drives me nuts, and caused me to install mplayer.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[aflag]

Compared to Firefox, it's prettier (if you think "fancy colors and icons" is more important than "consistent", you'll disagree), is much better integrated into Gnome, has much nicer "search engine support" (type in the address field, and your installed search engines are at the end of the auto complete list - please, someone, give me a firefox extension for that!), Reaching the search field on firefox is as easy as reaching for the url field. It's just a matter of typing C-k or C-l. Your hands don't even leave the home row.

Re:Who cares

[timberwolf753]

Umm hell no I am not trying to be cool. I was a Gnome user after the first five minutes of using it and figured out that is was not good after the first five minutes. Its too dumb and windows like with hiding almost everything from the user. I have been using KDE since the 3.0 release cause it doesn't try to be so simple it hides the things users want. Linus is right KDE is better. Gnome is was started by a failed Microsoft potential employed who so far has been copying Microsfot for evey move and have the same results as software goes. That is my two cents.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[TheDreadedGMan]

so that's the problem I've noticed with WMV files where the colour goes crazy and stuff, I thought it was some features of WMV not being fully implemented... but if I just need to remove ffmpeg... that's interesting.

Need to focus on some basic functionality

[SpoonerNash]

Eye candy may be important for some users, but IMHO Evince needs to improve what I consider basic usability first.

I try to use Evince as much as I can, but it still has problems that force me to use Adobe some of the time. I use a lot of fill-in pdf files like IRS forms. Evince (to the best of my knowledge) is not able to tab between fields. You have to mouse click on each field, which makes it relatively unusable. It opens in huge windows that span desktops, so each time I open a file in it I have to maximize the window to get it all in my current desktop. I tried to print a file yesterday and it crashed and closed all instances of it. Adobe then printed the file no problem. Evince will not print multiple copies.

If this is a case of RTFM, then please excuse my ignorance and point me to where I can find decent documentation. When I am trying to complete a job I don't really want to get off the clock to spend substantial time figuring out how a software product works. Instead, I deal with the quirks and resort to Adobe when needed.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[zsau]

Linux user interfaces try for consistency. All ~continous user interface things like scroll bars and progress bars will jump if you left click them, and scroll directly if you middle-click them. Linux is a different operating system to Windows; you can kinda-sorta use it like you use Windows, just like you can kinda-sorta use Windows like the Mac, but you will not have as enjoyable a time as if you use Linux properly, the way it's meant to be done. The correct thing to say is not "this doesn't work exactly like Windows/Mac - it should", it's "this doesn't work the same as Windows/Mac - how can I do what I want?". No-one sane uses Linux because they want a free version of Windows!

As for the rest of your requirements, I've never had a problem with VLC on Linux crashing.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[zsau]

Linux (GTK/Qt) isn't Windows and doesn't work the same way --- with Linux scroll bars and progress bars, you can scroll directly to where you want by middle clicking. X uses all three buttons extensively. You pretty much need middle-button emulation if you don't have a three-button mouse, or if your middle button is a hard-to-press scroll wheel.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Xtravar]

The fix on this page works: https://bugs.launchpad.net/xine-lib/+bug/108453

In your config file put:
  engine.decoder_priorities.win32a:5
  engine.decoder_priorities.win32v:5

Usability is everything!

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I like about GNOME: Is the usability approach taken by the project.

Like many of you I'm a lazy bastard. So when I sit at my workstation I like my experience to be as intuitive as possible. Unlike Vista with all this "ALLOW DENY ALLOW DENY ALLOW DENY" shit and message boxes demanding me to okay them every 5 minutes.

My applications I want to be bare minimal, I don't want clutter or have to sieve though thousands of widgets to do get things done. If I wanted more functionality I would add a plug-in. Don't get me wrong, I do like to be able to tweak some of my desktop configurations. But never to the extent that KDE has offered. I much prefer being able to customise configurations files at my convenience then it to piss me off all the time.