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Release Team Proposes Gnome 3.0 Plans
benuski writes "Today at GUADEC, the Gnome User and Developer European Conference, the gtk+ team announced their plans for gtk+ 3.0; immediately after, the Gnome release team announced their plans for Gnome 2.30 to be changed into Gnome 3.0. This would mean a release date a year and a half to a year in the future. Details are short at the moment, but the Gnome team seems to be following in KDE's footsteps, but hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."
Worthless without pics ;)
Is there any anticipated changelist for 3 yet?
Just re-name 2.2 to 3.0 and you've released ahead of schedule!
Gwow, this is Great Gnews! Let's Ghope they are Gstill Going to Geep Gusing the Gletter "G".
It gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's how I likes it.
Can Gnome 3.0 allow programs to render to the root window? Try running xplanet in gnome - you might catch a glimpse of something when you shut down. Try playing video on root with VLC - no uh uh. There are hacks to get screen savers and things to run on the background. This seems to be a fundamental design "feature" of gnome - the kind of thing you'd want to change in a major version bump. Or are they calling it 3.0 because 2.30 sounds too much like some really old software being patched over and over?
Funny that this is a precise opposite of the position that the GNOME project has held for so long - perhaps the KDE people are beginning to scare them? I sincerely hope not (and doubt it)
In other words, at this stage this is about the development team, not about the technical issues.
The problem with KDE 4 has nothing to do with features of stability, but the transparency of the project.
Many of the nicer features like Solid, Phonon, Sonnet, Akondi, etc. aren't visible. Plasma is extremely visible. It affects the users directly.
Yet no one knows what the long term design plans ffor Plasma are. The users keep getting surprised, and they feel that Plasma over-promised and under-delivered.
On top of that you have Aaron Segio now suggesting that users should have less control over configuration, fewer choices, and saying that end users are dumb. He also has suggested repeatedly lately that if you're not a coder, then you can't comment on UI issues.
Gnome already has a few of those problems (removing choice, treating users like they're dumb) but Gnome users don't seem to mind. For corporate environments, or people who can't be troubled to configure things, they just want working defaults and simplicity. That isn't a flame, but rather the way things are.
I can't expect Gnome users getting upset unless they don't have a good working, default desktop.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The link leads to a tersely worded page which captures the entire essence of the plans for GTK+3.0 :) which in turn leads to another blog with a color scheme that threatens my corneal legerdemain.
"but hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."
instead they're gonna have all sorts of their own problems. it happened before, it'll happen again.
all major projects have this kind of stuff when major releases come out the door. examples ?
MacOS X 10.0
Windows Vista
Gnome 2.0
Netscape 4.0
.
.
.
maybe it'll be a set of completely diferent problems. but they'll be there. murphy is unforgiven.
What ? Me, worry ?
"the Gnome team ... ... hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."
/.ers could stop obsessing over release dates and numbers, that would be good as well.
Let's hope so, and if
Luckily for Gnome, when 3.0 ships missing a lot of features, nobody will notice.
I don't want to upgrade to Web 3.0 yet.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Let's hope they just get the basics right at last, and make the menus and widgets draw seamlessly, without visible artifacts. If they do that alone I'll be happy with GNOME 3.0..
Exciting!
I made the folly of installing KDE-4 on my mom's new computer (she had KDE-3.5.x before). There were no "problems". There was a total disaster.
The amount of features available in KDE-3 for years, that did not make it into KDE-4 is staggering... Add bugs to that.
And I was not entirely unprepared — I knew better, than to try KDE-4.0, when it came out with the enormous (and Google-sponsored) hoopla. I waited for 4.0.2... You can't even move widgets around on your task-bar yet — that's "scheduled" for version 4.1!
The all-new "plasma"-desktop can't show you the contents of files in ~/Desktop/ — that's still "in the works". Showing the list of files themselves is buggy — every time you login, a new set of icons (one for each of your files) is added to the desktop.
And to think, that I was getting impatient with FreeBSD KDE-team for not upgrading the KDE-ports! These guys were simply protecting me, but no, I wouldn't listen... I installed the much tauted Kubuntu and paid the price (don't even get me started on Ubuntu itself)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If they want to avoid KDE's mistakes, all they need to do is use "alpha", "beta" and so on instead of 3.0, 3.1 - like the rest of the world.
I've been disagreeing with a lot, but I don't like to see people bash him as a person.
Frankly, he seems to be a great coder, and plenty of developers keep prasing Plasma as a framework.
My concerns are more about his philosophy and PR capabilities.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
GNOME HCI guidelines are one of the best I know of. Following the HCI leads to surprisingly good physical and mental health. 1) Navigating the GNOME dialog box with just the keyboard provides a rejuvenating and rigorous finger and mental exercise at the same time. 2) The font choices make pupil dilation effortless 3) The occlusion of "OK/Cancel" in elongated dialog boxes make accepting/rejecting dialog boxes into a fun hideAndSeek activity.
What I would really like to see from the GNOME team is a pledge to keep the framework free of unencumbered technology. Specifically, this means we need them to promise that both the framework itself, and its core applications, will not be built with .NET (Mono).
Miguel de Icaza may enjoy appeasing Microsoft, but most of the Free World does not.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Aren't these the guys who talked about how a 3.0 would be more trouble than improvement an was unnecessary (versus just continuing to work with the well established and stable 2.x). Their points were proven by KDE4's release, but now... here they go! Leave it to the bandwagon.
I seem to recall that Miguel announced (a while back mind you) that gnome 3.0 would be based on Mono...
Are we to believe this won't happen then?
A/C
Pics, or it didn't happen.
If it was GNOME 4, then we would have a buggy release. Since it is GNOME 3, we won't have any problem... yet. Wait for GNOME 4 and see.
I don't want to see 3.0 break API with 2.0
But I would love to see Lazuli
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Just curious, how did you map alt-n in screen?
Race for Development http://princeton.aidindia.org/marathon/anish.html
The way Microsoft released the specifications for the .NET it is not encumbered. Plus, there aren't really many alternatives for using C#/.NET.
It (C#) is a fine language, built on the learn lessons from earlier languages. It is more expressive, less error prone to work with, and also performs quite well. On top of that, there is a huge standard library (.net core libraries), which makes it quite easy to start implementing the features instead of re-inventing the wheel. The only mature enough language alternative that I can see is Java. The same goes for standard library support as well.
However, Java and C#/.NET are not really comparable. Microsoft built theirs learning from the mistakes of the Java as well. They did very, very well. Technologies like LINQ and WPF are good examples of awesomeness.
The only real problem that's plaguing it is that people are assuming that it's the complete product, rather than a work-in-progress as the development team has repeatedly pointed out. Granted denoting it as "4.0" was a questionable decision, but the reasons given by the devs were logical.
The devs had the choice of either completely rewriting the KDE framework to keep it up to date, or stick with the old system and suffer the problems that are plaguing other projects, such as X. They chose the former, and thus it will take some time to reach maturity. Meanwhile, users are free to stick with KDE 3.x, which is still being maintained.
Thankfully, there are distros like Ubuntu who are refraining from making KDE 4.0 the default until it is mature. Thus, for those who are having problems with 4.0, the problem really lies with the user, as the user would have had to make the choice to move to 4.0 in the first place. (Unless it was a distro that embraced KDE 4.0, in which case the maintainers are to blame.)
If Gnome 3 also allows for some radical changes to its framework, I expect there will be similar complaints, unless it is kept in beta until a mature version is released. This, however, could result in slower development for the exact reasons that convinced the KDE team to name their latest release 4.0.
I didn't realize you could do that. Can KDE4 apps run on KDE3.5?
I ask this partly from my visit to the kde-apps.org website recently. Many of the apps were for KDE 4, or the newest version was shown to be for KDE 4. Can I still run them from my KDE 3.5 environment? I tend to be conservative and would rather have the older, more reliable KDE 3 than the flashy KDE 4 which might fail me at a time when I can't afford any time to tinker.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Gnome 3.0
All we have is some article that says Gnome 2.30 = Gnome 3. Nothing else. No details, nothing. No details on GTK 3, which will have to happen before Gnome 3, and I'm not sure what problems did affect KDE 4.0's release. .0 releases are what they are, and it was the same story when Gnome 2.0 came along.
Although using XFCE, I'm very disappointed about the fact some gnome apps started using mono.
Although mono might be a better implementation of .NET, I really don't like to see windows .dll files being installed on my system.
If gnome keeps being embraced and extended, it will for sure be extinguished in the near future.
There's only so far you can scale a given design down before you start to get aliasing.
That's why icon renderers can use coverage rendering plus full-scene filtering before tossing the final bitmap into an icon cache.
Vector graphics always look great when scaled up, scaling down is a trickier affair. You have to design your graphics in advance to look good when scaled down, i.e. not using small details or text that would get lost when scaled down.
Blurred details are the result of filtering. Aliasing is a separate problem caused by the lack of filtering.
If you have to design icons specifically for low resolutions anyway, why not just provide a bitmap version? It'll run faster that way.
How well do a 32x32 pixel bitmap and a 16x16 pixel bitmap scale to, say, a 21x21 pixel space?
From the GNOME website:
Some GNOME hackers have discussed what form GNOME '3.0' would take, such as radically changing its user model or taking advantage of new technologies. However, the changes in this roadmap are more incremental, designed to fit within the basically stable UI and APIs we guarantee within the 2.x series. For more on the radical changes that could be in a GNOME 3.0, see the long-term ideas at ThreePointZero. And remember, even then, the GNOME 3 APIs would be available in addition to the existing GNOME 2 APIs, so there is no risk that today's applications would break in the future.
=> Further see http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero
I liked that idea. Maybe it's just a version bump to reflect the progress they're making.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
How is this not modded funny yet?
This is the best comment I've read in days.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Many people have suggested part of the issue is that GTK was never designed from the beginning to being the heart of a platform. It was designed for the GIMP. It was extended in less than optimal ways, and backwards compatibility had to be maintained, which meant people couldn't rewrite core piece to make necessary improvements.
Gnome 3 will involve rewriting those portions of every app in the same way that KDE 4 meant porting over every app to QT 4. That work is going to be done regardless. The question is, what is the framework going to be that they port to?
Building upon existing technology that is already better saves development work on establishing that framework.
If you ask the question "What does QT 4.x lack that we need for Gnome?" that might be easier than saying "How do we rewrite GTK and the Gnome libs from the ground up?"
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Unfortunately in this case the bug is in the developer. Currently removing such bugs are very expensive and must be done by the bug containing developer. Applying such remedies without the cooperation of the buggy developer is currently illegal as it requires the application of various drugs or the more preferable method of surgery using a rusty saw and steel wool.
Why can't the church still run the insane asylums?
You could, you know, wait for them to finish KDE4.
Will they release it as 4.0 then? How will we ever know it's considered stable enough to use?
How about some native support for dual windows so I don't have to rely on nVidia TwinView and have all my apps ALWAYS open on the left side of the faux screen, which in reality it is my left monitor, when I want it to go on the right monitor.
Hopefully this will come in time {before November 1} so I can upgrade from Windows 3.11.....
Mine is bigger.
1) Please take the file selector dialog to the XXI century by allowing copy/paste and displaying thumbnails for all files.
2) Teach Metacity to tile windows.
3) Create a pretty, functional, and non-resource intensive GTK+ theme with widgets that don't take so much screen real estate. For widget sizing, see Redmond theme.
4) Speed up GTK+. You already have quite a bit, so keep up the good work.
5) Allow setting all hotkeys in a human-readable way (no keycodes!).
I wonder if the Save as dialog box will get an overhaul? It'd be nice if it were more like the Open dialog. And it'd be great if it could remember its window size and settings. I expect I'll be disappointed, though.
[Posting as AC rather than 'jdickey' because logging into /. and then clicking on the article header showed me as "not logged in" - in five different browsers on two platforms, all with cookies fully enabled. Of course, /. lives on perl...]
There's always a gconf key somewhere; gconf is only slightly more inscrutable than random noise or the FY 2009 Budget, and reading a mere few thousand lines of source code will inevitably lead you in the correct general direction (plus or minus 179 degrees). KDE 4 has its problems, yes, but it's a far more coherent and discoverable system. Any question that gets formed about 'How do I..' generally directly implies its answer, with at most one or two rephrasings for context. To me, Gnome v. KDE is a poster child for Free Software v. Open Source; one is an ideology, the other a proven way to get things done. I have no doubt that KDE 4 will be brilliantly usable by at latest the 4.2 release; if Gnome had gone off similarly half-baked with a dot-0 release, they'd take most of a decade to even identify all the failure modes; a truly Borgian 'recovery is futile' endeavour. Oh, wait; that was Gnome 1.x, wasn't it?
[/rant]
I've been spending roughly equal amounts of time lately in Mac OS X, BSD/KDE, Linux/Gnome and Windows XP; after having used and developed for the latter three for roughly their entire existence, I list those in order of usability and stability (and oh, I was a UI specialist for roughly the first decade of my career). I believe that there will in the not-too-distant future be a FLOSS software stack with the usability, stability and productivity of OS X today (we've already left Windows as a tiny speck in the rear-view mirror), but from what I've seen in the last five years, I'd bet the rent on that stack NOT having a Gnome desktop. GNU have done great things with regard to philosophy and various technology projects, but Gnome is to the GNU stack as IE is to Windows; a beacon of overweening, arrogant egotism that is now politically/culturally immortal even though it causes inordinate aggravation to usees.
[CAPTCHA: "critic". Cute.]