GNOME 2.24 Released

thhamm writes "The GNOME community hopes to make our users happy with many new features and improvements, as well as the huge number of bug fixes that are shipped in this latest GNOME release! Well. What else to say. I am happy." Notably, this release is also the occasion for the announcement of videoconferencing app Ekiga's 3.0 release.

Comments

This is WONDERFUL news

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're a foot fetishist.

Re:This is WONDERFUL news

[thhamm]

>if you're a foot fetishist.

why do you think i am so happy? :P

Re:This is WONDERFUL news

[HappySmileMan]

I know that it informs us about this guys foot fetish, but does that really qualify it to be "informative" in this context?

I assume that it would be "off-topic" and that "informative" is reserved for informative comments about the article in question.

Re:This is WONDERFUL news

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't be when you pull a life-sized Gnome logo out of your ass!

Re:This is WONDERFUL news

[Anonymous Coward]

given the two dimensional nature of the logo, papercuts would be the chief concern.

Re:This is WONDERFUL news

[Curtman]

I assume that it would be "off-topic" and that "informative" is reserved for informative comments about the article in question.

Are you new here?

SmallerFasterLighter?

[Colin Smith]

Hmmmmm?

 

Re:SmallerFasterLighter?

[Anonymous Coward]

The trend with GNOME 2 has been DumberLessFunctionalLessStable.

Not to mention the eternam churn in the "standard" applications.

\mutterstocurmudgeonlyself

timothy

[martinw89]

I know typos in summaries and headlines are the norm, but have we really got to the point where the dept. gag has them also?

Re:timothy

[Anonymous Coward]

He's referring to Ekiga's tendency to fire little bits of rock and gravel at people. It's a feature.

Re:timothy

[martinw89]

Oops.

Whooosh'd by the editor, ouch.

Re:timothy

[timothy]

Naw, the editor was wrong. Though screeshots would be interestingly dangerous.

timothy

Huge number of bugs?

[Cthefuture]

Isn't it weird how developers (myself included) consider it a good thing that they fixed a whole bunch of bugs?

Personally I know it feels good to fix bugs because it feels like you're making the product perfect and somehow that feels like "development". However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[fractic]

However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.

Sadly the reality is that it's just too hard to write such complicated software without bugs.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[wanderingknight]

Or downright impossible. I believe that's one of the things FOSS is based on ;-)

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Yetihehe]

Some people can't even write summaries or headlines (and now even "from the xxx dept.") without errors ;)

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wish GNOME would fix the damn panels to keep them from rearranging the applets. That bug has been there since pretty much the very beginning of the GNOME project and they have "fixed" it many times but it is never really fixed. They have done things like introduce the "lock" feature that locks an applet into place. All that does is make it even more annoying because you then have to unlock them to put them back where they were before the panel mangled them.

Especially if you get a crash, freeze, or X otherwise terminates... but sometimes if you just logout and back on, it will rearrange the applets and icons on your panels. So annoying.

I mean this is simple basic functionality that has been broken for years. Whoever wrote the GNOME panel code deserves a cockpunch and some lessons in programming.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[HTH NE1]

Well, there's the theory that every program contains at least one bug and can therefore be reduced in size by at least one instruction. Iteratively then, every program can be reduced to a single instruction which doesn't work.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[knothead99]

It's just not feasible to write software without bugs. In fact, Jeff Atwood would claim you're an amateur developer until you realize that everything you write sucks. Go read his post on the subject: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001020.html

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[fractic]

There's an obvious flaw in that theory. If a program contains a bug that doesn't mean that it's possible to fix that bug by removing an instruction. It's very likely that fixing the bug would require adding more instructions.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Cthefuture]

I realize that. That is why I included myself. The question was rhetorical and I was just commenting on the psychological aspects of it.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Kjella]

Not impossible, but quite likely you'd maybe hit Gnome 1.0 in these days after 10+ years of development. And everybody else would be using the betas/unstable versions because they're soooo much faster and more featureful despite the odd bug. In fact, the FLOSS market seems to be going after exactly its own pace - live on the bleeding edge? You can do that. Stay with the ultra-stabile? You can do that and so the bug level is pretty much what you want it to be. In short, most people wouldn't want the bugfree version if one existed. It's too extreme in the "of these three things, pick any two" department.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[debatem1]

Its just a bug. I fixed it by removing a letter from the theory. Voila! Now it's a simple spelling problem, rather than a glaring logical fallacy.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

In short, most people wouldn't want the bugfree version if one existed.

It's not only the person using the OS, but the task they're using it for.

Empirical example: I use Ubuntu (reasonably bleeding edge) for my desktop, but Debian stable for servers.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

jeff atwood can lick my asshole clean. Anybody who takes advice from his is a retard.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[trouser]

Your asshole needs to be cleaned? Perhaps his is a retard, like such as The Iraq.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[knothead99]

Ahh. I didn't read it that way. I do agree that it feels great to squash bugs and see the outstanding issues closed.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[PunkOfLinux]

Same thing happens in KDE, for me, and I've NEVER had GNOME do this.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[MojoMagic]

As a software developer I feel confident in saying this:

If your software "doesn't have bugs", it either doesn't do much or you just aren't looking hard enough.

(I'm not pointing any fingers...)

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every program contains at least one bu?

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[temcat]

This can be partly mitigated using the Launcher List applet aka quicklounge. That way, at least your launchers won't rearrange themselves when they feel like it (and you can lock the whole applet). As an added bonus, you can drag and drop launchers (also from the menu) with the left mouse button.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[trastomatic]

If your software "doesn't have bugs", it either doesn't do much or you just aren't looking hard enough.

or you are DJB

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[lahvak]

Actually, the original saying, as I learned it sometimes in mid 80's, did not have the word "therefore", it was just a simple conjunction.

Also, the conclusion is obviously correct. I can easily replace any program by a single NOP instruction, which will not do what the program was supposed to do, and therefore will be buggy. Except for programs that are supposed to do nothing, you would have to use a different instruction for those.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[lennier]

"Sadly the reality is that it's just too hard to write such complicated software without bugs."

FAIL.

'Sadly, the reality is that it's just too hard to build robots which don't run amok and get hijacked by alien monsters and destroy everyone. That's just the cost of living with new technology! But look! It's SHINY! And NEW!'

On the Internet, where every bug is potentially a zero-day security exploit, that attitude is not just wrong, it's LETHALLY wrong. You lose at programming. Please choose a new career. Feel free to let the recycle bin hit you on your way to /dev/null.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[lennier]

BZZT.

If your software is released with ANY bugs, your customers' computers are already walking spam zombies and the bad guys have already won.

You want to know why the Net is drowning in malware that you gripe about every day on Slashdot? YOU are why! YOU, the coders who shrug and assume 'everything has bugs', and then blame the 'stupid user' for YOUR negligence to do basic array bounds checking because 'C is fast' and 'real programmers are smart enough not to make mistakes'.

Try again. The Internet needs less crap. Either go out of business already, or use formal methods if you have to, but QUIT WRITING ZERO-DAY EXPLOITABLE SOFTWARE.

Seriously. If your software has ANY security-exploitable bugs AT ANY TIME IN ITS LIFECYCLE then you have FAILED and have committed malpractice.

Oh, but the software 'engineering' industry doesn't have any kind of registration or licencing bodies, does it? Maybe it needs some.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[lennier]

Yes, I'm pissed because I spent the better part of last night reinstalling Wordpress because 2.0 got rooted. Nice going, open-source movement.

I've used computers since the mid-80s and I'm just losing patience with security exploits and especially with this slapdash attitude of 'it'll happen'. No. It does not need to happen. It should not happen. Real people may die when computers malfunction; it is not enough to say 'that's okay, we'll patch it afterwards'. We had the tools and the methods in the 1950s to make it stop happening, but the industry again and again refuses to apply them. And by industry I mean you and me right here. We keep picking cheap shoddy crap (and sometimes expensive shoddy crap) over correctness.

We have the same kind of quality crisis going on in software as exists in governance and finance and energy and the food industry. Like the other crises, it has the potential to crash us back to the stone age one day soon, and is already stealing real people's real money today. We've got to wake up and realise that we cannot afford to tolerate security mistakes, and then write tools and methods that allow us to work in a zero-tolerance environment.

Anything less, and we have to realise that we hand the keys to all our users' identities and life savings to the Russian Mafia the moment we release our buggy 0.1.

Seriously. Get it right to start with. Don't rely on patching.

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[Pete Slash Work]

Just a few remarks on your comment: -'Getting it right' first time may be extremely difficult, especially for more complex software. -Not all bugs are security flaws. -The OSS model lends itself very well to fixing bugs in a timely manner. -It's difficult to know really what you are calling for here to fix the problem. You mention, for example, registration or licensing - but then give the example of highly regulated industries which are causing problems (finance, energy etc). The software industry (like any other) is vastly better unregulated - I would hate to see it suffer from the usual unintended consequences of regulation. By the way, how much did you pay for the Wordpress software you were using? Did they offer any quality guarantees? If you were using life-critical software would you be prepared to pay more for it, and enter some sort of contract to ensure quality?

Re:Huge number of bugs?

[icantblvitsnotbutter]

However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.

"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."
("The best [the perfect] is the enemy of the good.")

- Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)

Sometimes, things have to be "good enough" or else nothing gets accomplished.

New? WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, yet ANOTHER version. I really wish they would sit down and code it right the first time around.

Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

It is nice to see more features that Windows had 10 years ago.

Except for one - the tabbed file browser windows look great, I'd like to see Windows do that also.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad but true. Linux desktops seem a lot like NT4 desktop with some extra bling, they do not compare with the huge update that was Win2000. Lots of that functionality is just not present yet.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DavidR1991]

And yet GNOME has been able to re-arrange items on its taskbars for years, and Windows still can't. Incomparable my ass.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Hatta]

I'd like to see Windows pick up some features that any UNIX desktop had 10 years ago. How about virtual desktops that actually work? Window shading? The ability to keep a window on top of the others? Can I even add something like a CPU usage graph to my panel in Windows? If so, it's not clear how, but it's trivial in my desktop environment of choice.

UNIX has had a superior GUI than Windows for a long time. The only thing it's really missing is wizards to help the less savvy configure it.

Caveat: this is coming from an XP perspective. I've not used Vista, so I don't know if these features are available there.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of that functionality is just not present yet.

I hear this from Slashdot Microsoft trolls occasionally, but never with any examples.

So come on Mr Troll: what functionality?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

Virtual Desktops - agree wholeheartedly. Window Shading - I don't see how this is better than minimize to the taskbar. CPU usage graph is now available as a sidebar applet in Vista, and has been available as a 3rd party active desktop applet since Windows 98, and like you said, it's trivial.
You don't mention much to explain just why UNIX has a superior GUI, but I expect a GUI to be able to control all aspects of the OS that I need to access. This is where Linux and UNIX fall way short, as is evidenced by the new feature list in TFA. 95% are items that have been standard features in Windows since at least Window 98. Call it flamebait for pointing that out, but it's just the facts.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

Are you prepared to say that Gnome is better than the Windows GUI simply because one or two display features either do not exist or do not match functionally? I'm looking at it from the perspective of functionality, not graphical organization. For instance, Gnome is now able to handle multiple monitor setups. They now have improved accessibility features, something MS implemented in Windows 95. They now have sound themes that don't conflict with music playback, which Windows had in version 3.0 if not earlier.
By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI. Linux still hasn't accomplished this, they are way behind Mac and Windows in this aspect.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

BS.

Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista is, only faster. Same bling available. Better consistency. Better features than WinXP (though probably not Vista). In fact, using Windows XP makes my ears bleed after only a few minutes.

X (not Gnome) has handled multiple monitor setups since before I started using it in 1997.

Gnome has strict accessibility and localization requirements and has since 2.2. Windows wasn't even localized in Thai until Gnome adoption there forced it to be, and even then they just half-assed the "start menu" and nothing else. A generation of Thais learned to do computing in a language they didn't understand.

ESD never had a problem with mixing stuff if you used it instead of OSS or ALSA. It even mixes stuff locally and outputs it to another computer if you want it to. Maybe your problem is that you didn't know what you were doing ....

Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.

Since we're playing this game, these are the places Windows doesn't live up to Gnome:

1. UI consistency
2. Context menus
3. Window management
4. Virtual desktops
5. Select and middle-click to paste
6. Deskbar applet (pre-Vista)
7. User filesystem layout
8. Menu layout
9. System messages
10. Mime handling
11. Panel layout
12. See them all

Gnome vs. Win95 or Win2000? Pshaw!

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

No, I call it trolling for being misinformation. 95%? Let's look at the details:

• 2.1. Stay in Touch
  This is about voice / video and the new IM client in Gnome. Has Windows had integrated AOL or Yahoo! Chat since Win98? No? Does it now? I didn't think so.
• 2.2. Track Your Time Better
  Did Windows 98 have an integrated time-tracker? No?
• 2.3. Ekiga 3.0
  Has Windows had an integrated Voice / Video / Text SIP client since Win98? Hmmm ....
• 2.4. File Management
  Complex Asian characters in Win98? Tabbed file browser? Tab completion in the file browser?
• 2.5. Do More With Deskbar
  Calculator, Google search, Yahoo suggestions, Twitter updates, and indexed search from a key press? Not even to this day.
• 2.6. New Screen Resolution Controls
  Windows has had this one for a while.
• 2.7. New Sound Theme Support
  Windows, annoyingly, has had this one since like Win95. I think it says a lot about Microsoft's priorities.
• 2.8. Better Digital TV
  I'd be really surprised if Win98 had DVB capability.
• 2.9. Extra Pretty
  Desktop backgrounds. Again, Windows has had numerous wallpapers for years, but it says something about what they think is important when they still haven't gotten window management to work correctly.

Two out of nine. 22%. Not quite 95%, eh? I give you a D+.

Let's talk about localization. Windows XP3 offers retail installs for Chinese Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish [1] (that's eight), while Gnome offers forty-five languages.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Hahaha! I'm so tremendously amused. Why is it that when I plug an external monitor jack into my input, output automatically shows up and I am given the opportunity to configure ignore, clone, external only in windows. Why is it that windows can actually hide taskbar icons that I don't use. That and the built in gnome network management tools fail, and don't expose wireless connectivity options, even if the underlying driver supports them. Oh, and my personal favorite, clicking on menus. I love clicking on a menu, having it appear without icons. Then, when my mouse is just about to the item I want, all the icons whoosh in lke a second later, and I have to find whatever I was looking for again.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

The graphics sussytem is not a part of Gnome, or Gnome wouldn't run on so many systems. Heck, you can almost get Gnome to run on Windows.

Gnome can hide panel icons that you don't use. You put them in a "drawer."

Managing the network is the job of the operating system, not a desktop environment.

I'll quote myself, since you obviously didn't read my post the first time:

Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.

Getting slow icons is certainly annoying, and has been improved in recent versions, but it's not more annoying than clicking on the Start menu and waiting for five seconds to have it show up. You can turn off icons in the menu, too, if you want that.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Tangent128]

So how is that UI consistency?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI.

That's true, but only because you can't configure anything without the GUI. I could remove all of the command line configuration tools from Linux, and then everything that could be configured would be what would configurable via the GUI.

Here's my list of Windows GUI functionality complaints:
Windows only has one panel, ever. You can't remove the start button. You can't move the start button. You can't rearrange the start menu. Application launchers in the start menu are not organized. There are non-launcher entries in the start menu. You can't add your own menu to the panel. In fact, you can only add application launchers to the task bar. Windows doesn't have virtual workspaces. Windows don't shade. Windows can't be made sticky. Window frame can't be changed. Window frame buttons can't be added, removed, or change position.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

Why is it that windows can actually hide taskbar icons that I don't use.

I assume you mean the system tray. My question is, if you don't use them why would you even want them in the system tray? The very fact that Windows needs a "hide" option is a problem.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

How is what UI consistency? That has no sensible antecedent here.

Gnome has the HIG, which makes Gnome applications and the desktop function consistently. It means that Gnome does the same thing that Apple does for Mac in this regard. No, I don't want to get into an argument about whether Macs or Gnome are more usable. I'm saying that Gnome is consistent with itself. The developers judge applications based on the HIG before those apps are allowed to become part of the official Gnome desktop.

Windows applications, on the other hand, have no standard and every one is completely different, which Windows users seem to enjoy. Sometimes a context menu on the desktop will get you what you expect. Other times, though, it won't.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

I expect a GUI to be able to control all aspects of the OS that I need to access

Why?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Draek]

By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI.

I'm sorry, but most of us don't consider "regedit.exe" a GUI, at least not anymore than "gedit /etc/httpd.conf" is. And without considering the registry, then yes, there's plenty of stuff in Windows that you can't configure from within the GUI.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Because every once in a while, I find one of those auto-start programs useful. For instance, the vast majority of the time, I want the last.fm thing to get out of my way and report my track plays. But then every once in a while I'd like ot use it.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I view thumbnails in my file dialogs at least now?

Further required specs:

• Must be larger than 32x32
• Must be for each item, a preview section does not count

Please be serious.. its honestly been a while (at least over year now) since I tried out a Gnome system.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

Gnome uses the preview pane by default, but you can just DnD from Nautilus if you prefer.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Tangent128]

If the graphics subsystem can affect the behavior, and is different on each system, then it's not very consistent, is it?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Brain Damaged Bogan]

download taskbar shuffle :)
not as good as being natively built into the UI, but there are plenty of workarounds for all the flaws in windows.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

Again, the behavior of what? The graphics subsystem affects the behavior of the graphics subsystem, not Gnome. The administration utilities for each system reflect that system and nothing else. Windows uses its system. OSX uses its own. Some Unix systems use X, but some don't. Don't confuse system administration with user experience. If you want to talk about a specific operating system's problems, then do that. Don't conflate them with the Gnome desktop.

Do you want the world to standardize on one graphics layer? Never mind. Looking at your responses, it's obvious that you do and which one you think that should be.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Tangent128]

The behavior of menu expansion mentioned several posts up would fall under Gnome, I'd think.

Also, system administration is very much a part of the user experience. I'll excuse a desktop environment for avoiding the details for sanity's sake, no problem.

I am also curious as to which of my words betrayed my preference. Actually, I'm curious as to what my preference is myself. Do tell me, since I didn't know I had an opinion.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I think you forgot to take your focusin. Windows 95 already knew how to hide panels and look like itself. Gnome is at Windows 3.0 level.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty disappointing knowing Nautilus is still used as workaround; but at least there is some sort of preview...

One step at a time I suppose... hopefully. Karma though.. (The captcha given is "disaster")

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

Agreed. I'd like to see more options and previews in the file dialog. Freedesktop.org has had a recent, long discussion about thumbnails and has a spec up for it. I hope this means that we can look for more integration of thumbnails into file dialogs.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Kjella]

Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista

That bad, huh? Well, I think I'll stick to something that's at least an upgrade from XP like KDE.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

Are you implying that Gnome doesn't hide panels or have a consistent appearance?

Compare

1. Abiword to
2. Epiphany to
3. Totem.

Next, compare

1. Internet Explorer 7, released on October 18, 2006 to
2. Microsoft Word, released in December, 2007, to
3. Windows Media Player 11, by the same company for the same platform.

Now tell me with a straight face that Windows knows how to look like Windows.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

Ha ha. Point well taken.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[pato101]

Window Shading - I don't see how this is better than minimize to the taskbar

It is better because when you minimize a window, it goes somewhere far from its current location (a place on the taskbar which also depends on further windows being opened).

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

All by itself, it would seem

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[JohnFluxx]

For example setting the hardware clock to GMT (Something everyone who dual boots probably wants). I couldn't believe it when I found out I had to do that via regedit.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

You're confusing the graphical subsystem with the UI. Every system has (1) a graphical subsystem, (2)a widget toolkit and (3)a window/desktop manager.

In Windows you have:
1) GDI/WDM
2) MFC/WinForms
3) Explorer/Aero

In Linux you have:
1) Varieties of X11
2) GTK, QT, XLib, Tk, WX, and several others
3) Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Enlightenment and several others

I don't know what the equivalent OSX layers are.

What the GP was saying is that X11 handles the multi-monitor setup on Linux, not Gnome or KDE.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

The behavior of menu expansion mentioned several posts up would fall under Gnome, I'd think.

It does, and I think they have a bug being tracked for that. It's especially bad when you are using vector graphic icons because it has to re-calculate them whenever the cache is invalidated. I only ever experience this when I change icon themes, or add/remove menu entries, which cause Gnome to re-build it's icon cache. Windows has a similar issue. If you'd rather not have icons at all, you can disable them (can I do that in Windows?).

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

[blockquote]And yet GNOME has been able to re-arrange items on its taskbars for years, and Windows still can't.[/blockquote]

Yes, but can it arrange them by penis?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[BlackCreek]

Don't confuse system administration with user experience.

I thought that what the GP was describing was exactly the user experience. From the user point of view the layer at which the problem lies is absolutely irrelevant.

If you want to talk about the programming merits of the Gnome devs, you should break things into layers and look at the layer that Gnome occupies. if you want to talk about user experience, well, do as the GP and look at what the user gets by using all the layers put together.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[r_jensen11]

By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI.

I'm sorry, but most of us don't consider "regedit.exe" a GUI, at least not anymore than "gedit /etc/httpd.conf" is. And without considering the registry, then yes, there's plenty of stuff in Windows that you can't configure from within the GUI.

To be fair, though, there are plenty of things which you can not configure in Gnome without opening up its own equivalent of regedit.

One example that comes to mind is enabling the different shuffle modes for Rhythmbox. I really dis-like its standard shuffle, but I really like it when the shuffle mode weights the probability of playing a song I haven't heard in a while more than a song I heard last week

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

Can I view thumbnails in my file dialogs at least now?

You can see thumbnail previews in the file chooser, but only on selected files, it still uses a simple list view as far as I can tell.

Ideally it would use Nautilus to render the files in the file selector, so that it can show thumbnails on any file Nautilus can.

The problem, I think, is that the file chooser is a GTK component, not a Gnome component, and GTK doesn't do thumbnails itself, rather Gnome components handle that. Even the "preview pane" offered by the file chooser is implemented by the application itself, not GTK code.

There was some discussion about adding support for the FreeDesktop.org thumbnail spec into GTK, but I'm not sure what the status is on that.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but most of us don't consider "gconf-editor" a GUI, at least not anymore than "notepad C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" is. And without considering the gconf, then yes, there's plenty of stuff in Gnome that you can't configure from within the GUI.

Admittedly GConf is not a full on registry, but still there are a large number of configuration only accessible through this tool set.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[agrounds]

Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista is, only faster. Same bling available. Better consistency. Better features than WinXP (though probably not Vista). In fact, using Windows XP makes my ears bleed after only a few minutes.

Stop. You are switching back and forth on your comparison environment. Pick one. Since 2.24 came out today, stick to Vista since that is the most recent. Comparing to XP would necessitate choosing a Gnome from that year. Something I rather imagine you would prefer to avoid.

Gnome has strict accessibility and localization requirements and has since 2.2. Windows wasn't even localized in Thai until Gnome adoption there forced it to be, and even then they just half-assed the "start menu" and nothing else. A generation of Thais learned to do computing in a language they didn't understand.

This is irrelevant to the comparison of desktop features, bugs, and usability.

ESD never had a problem with mixing stuff if you used it instead of OSS or ALSA. It even mixes stuff locally and outputs it to another computer if you want it to. Maybe your problem is that you didn't know what you were doing ....

It could be that, or it could be the well recognized and horrifying mess that is the linux soundsystem.
Here is some reading for you:
http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/05/sorry-state-of-sound-in-linux.html
http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5
http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2008/07/pulseaudio-my-last-post-on-topic.html

I used Gnome for years, and the inability to maintain consistent audio levels across multiple applications was always frustrating and painful (literally in some cases, thanks totem!)

Don't resort to ad homimem attacks. It cheapens your argument and hides the potential value of any possible truth.

Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.

This is entirely true, but it is still not an excuse for the poor consistency within Gnome and the inability for small things like keeping my taskbar arranged like it was before I logged out. Seriously. That is internal to Gnome and there is no scapegoat here.

Since we're playing this game, these are the places Windows doesn't live up to Gnome:

1. UI consistency
2. Context menus
3. Window management
4. Virtual desktops
5. Select and middle-click to paste
6. Deskbar applet (pre-Vista)
7. User filesystem layout
8. Menu layout
9. System messages
10. Mime handling
11. Panel layout
12. See them all

Gnome vs. Win95 or Win2000? Pshaw!

UI consistency works better in Windows Vista. Actually, it worked better in Windows 98 than Gnome does. When I arrange something in one of those, it stays that way. When I add something to the menu it stays where I left it. When I change my quick launch icons, they remain in the order I put them in. Amazingly, Mac OS X also got this right despite being newer to the market than Gnome as well.

Contextual menus work just fine in Windows. They have for quite a while. They work pretty darn well in Mac OS X. In other news the sun rose in the east this morning. I don't know what you mean or where you were going with this, but righ

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

Ease of use. Nobody wants to fuck around with long, obfuscated commandlines and man pages when they can just tick off of a couple check boxes, move some sliders and hit OK.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

And what if your choices are a short and simple command line, or a series of windows and dialog to get to check boxes on various tabs? For example, say you want to re-start a service in Windows, do you right click My Computer, select Manage, wait for the MMC to open, select Services, find the service you want, and finally restart it, or do you run "net stop/start ${servicename}" from the command line?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

If you want to talk about the programming merits of the Gnome devs, you should break things into layers and look at the layer that Gnome occupies.
This is a story about Gnome and we were discussing Gnome (and it's faults), so I think we've already done that. The GP was trying to bring something into the conversation which isn't relevant.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[svank]

CPU usage graph is now available as a sidebar applet in Vista

I can't speak for the GP, but IMHO, a CPU usage graph on the desktop is near-useless, since any window can cover it up. The graph I have in GNOME is about ~20 px tall, sitting in my panel where it's always easily visible (unless something is in full-screen mode).

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

I'm not going to argue with you about the problem of applets on the panels or with another poster about the slow loading time in menus. These issues suck.

I am going to clarify some things for you, though.

1. I don't consider myself qualified to compare Gnome to Vista on every bullet point because I don't use it often enough to judge. Trust me, I want to compare apples to apples, though.
2. Whether the desktop is available in a language you read or not is certainly a usability issue. The Thais I mentioned don't have a Latin alphabet, so staring at English for them is like staring at Thai for you. Since Windows isn't really available in Thai, I suggest that you try running a Windows desktop in Korean or Japanese for a while. Localization is extremely important and is something that MS doesn't give enough time to, considering how much money they make off of the product. Lower-class Thais have no real opportunity to use even community Windows computers.
3. David said "They now have sound themes that don't conflict with music playback," to which I replied that ESD has mixed sounds for forever. It wasn't a general comment about the Linux sound system. If he had used ESD for everything, he wouldn't have had a problem. My comment was a little snarky, but it was a serious comment, not an attack. Maybe he didn't know to set his non-Gnome applications to use ESD. Linux is also not the only platform Gnome runs on.
4. On UI consistency, consider my other post on this. That is not consistency. Those are all MS apps designed for their desktop.
5. In my experience, contextual menus in Windows XP (again, I haven't spent enough time in Vista to memorize anything) are hit and miss. In one MS application, they'll operate one way, and in another, there'll be another.
6. Window management is a large topic, but Windows still fails on this. No "always on top." I have to click to use a scroll wheel. Etc. The original link has more information.
7. Windows has multiple desktops as an add-on, but basically everyone agrees that the behavior is broken and half-done. My friends also claim it's unstable, but I've never seen that problem.
8. I like having two copy buffers without resorting to a clip manager. Middle-click gives me that.
9. I mentioned the user file system. Gnome works on many systems. Linux isn't the only one. I wasn't talking about the LSB. Having my files, folders, and configurations in one place makes backing up easy.
10. Menu layout in Windows is the joke. You're confusing the slow load times (which, again, suck) and the panel problem you mentioned earlier with the menu layout. Open someone else's Windows' menu and try to find the word processor if you don't know which one they have installed. If they don't have anything extra, it's in Accessories. If they have MS Office, it's in that menu item and waaay at the bottom of other stuff. What if it's OO.o? Star Office? Their copy of Hanword they brought over from Korea? These would all be in the "Office" menu in Gnome.

I'm not a Gnome fanatic. They had the awful bug of not being able to click a button when it appears under your mouse and it didn't get fixed for something like seven years. There are lots of problems. You mentioned some of them.

There are also a lot of issues under Gnome on Linux and Solaris. I expect Sun, Red Hat, Canonical, and the other Gnome desktop vendors to help fix that stuff. I don't blame the Gnome devs for those problems, though. That would be silly.

Something that doesn't get mentioned enough in discussions like these right now is FreeDesktop.org's role. They are creating a lot of specs that are making different Unix desktops work together quite well. Configuration is handled a certain way. Trash is handled one way. There are standard names for system icons. XRandR is a godsend. There's a new spec to handle previews and thumbnails. This is the kind of stuff that peopl

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

AutoHotKey. You can easily create a single icon or button that automatically does everything for you with a single click, although if you are constantly having to restart services like in your example, you probably have deeper issues with your computer and should fix it.

How about this? I want to listen to some music. With a GUI you double click the file and it starts playing. From a commandline you have to type the executable and the name of the music file. Even wth tab completion, it takes far more time.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP3 offers retail installs for Chinese Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish [1] (that's eight), while Gnome offers forty-five languages.

Your link is to an announcement for an early release of SP3 for WinXP, and it is often the case for SPs that every supported language is not initially available. But I'm guessing you knew that and were simply being disingenuous, so lest someone take your post at face value or not bother to check your link, here's the List of languages supported in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. Note that this article only lists the languages installed by default. There is support for other languages such as "complex script and right-to-left languages (Including Thai)".

There are plenty of valid criticisms of various editions of MS Windows - no need for this drivel.

- T

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[outcast36]

That is a valid argument for desktop systems. It totally falls apart for system admins who need to make a change to hundreds or thousands of systems. I would take a command line no matter how obfuscated over checkboxes & sliders in that case.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

That's pretty similar then to the CPU usage graph that shows up in Windows taskbar when the Task Manager is open. Had that since Windows NT4.0 If I remember correctly, at least since Windows 2000.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

Yes, running an individual file in it's default program is something easier done in a GUI, and it's perfectly easy to do in Gnome.

But let's say you want to open every music file in a directory and it's sub directories in a music player. That's easier to do on the command line.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

What if I don't know what the service name is? Aha! God Bless the GUI!!!

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

How is a GUI going to help you when you don't know what you're looking for?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

2.1 AOL instant messenger was available for free in 1997 for windows. ICQ was also available for free. There was nothing else, you needed nothing else. Windows messenger was available in 2001 with XP. It did voice, text, video and file transfers. Irregardless, this isn't an "integrated" OS feature anyways, it's a bundled app.
2.2 Track your time? Hello, this is just a applet for which there has been software available to do pretty much ever since there was multitasking. No, it wasn't built into the OS, but what does it have to do with the OS? Just another bundled app.
2.3 Hello AOL IM and MSN. Just another bundled app.
2.4 Finally an OS feature!! And the one that I mentioned I would love to see in Windows. Also, Asian language support has been available as a download from MS since windows 98, and starting in 2002 they started putting it in a package called Global IME - available in several flavors of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
2.5 Deskbar. MS has implemented a taskbar, that since Windows 98 has been able to perform these functions - however they chose to leave it to 3rd party developers to develop apps for it, which, by the way is what Gnome does too. They also made the entire desktop available for these lovely 3rd party apps. For some wierd reason MS took the ability to float toolbars and dock toolbars out of Vista, but it was available in every version of XP.
2.6,2.7,2.9 well you already pointed those out.
2.8 DVB? More 3rd party software, has nothing to do with OS operation. ATI's All-in-wonder has brought TV to the Windows OS since 1996.

Talk about localization. SP3 may only be available as of yet in 8 languages, but MS standardized on 24 localized languages starting with Windows 2000. In 03-04 they added the Language Interface Pack (LIP) for 27 more languages. That's 51 for those who are counting. And that's not 80% translated like Gnome, MS made sure things were finished.

By my count we've only identified one OS feature that Windows does not have or is not capable of doing. Just because 3rd party developers haven't created specific functionality doesn't mean that Windows can't do it. I don't really want most of these "features" anyways, like IM clients, TV broadcasting, and time tracking.
OK so that's 8 out of 9 user features that windows has done or was capable of going with 3rd party addons since Windows 98. There is also 3 accessibility features, all of which MS has done well since Windows 95. All total we're at 11 of 12, which is darn close to my original estimate at 92%. I give YOU a D+ also.
So maybe I misspoke. I really only saw 8 total OS features really listed there, the rest were 3rd party apps, which MS would typically get sued over including. So I'll give you just 7 of 8, so I really meant 88%. Sorry.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

Have you never used one? They are all listed there with descriptions. So if someone told you to restart all your SQL server services, would you know them by name? I'd just look in the services applett and find them and restart them.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

Have you never used one? They are all listed there with descriptions.

Again, what good is a description of something when you don't know what something you're looking for.

So if someone told you to restart all your SQL server services, would you know them by name?

Um, yeah. It's "mysql", as in "sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart". You seriously don't know what SQL server you're running?

I'd just look in the services applett and find them and restart them.

Okay, say you want to disable network file sharing and remote shell execution (rcmd) in Windows, what services do you stop? On my box, its "sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop" and "sudo /etc/init.d/ssh stop".

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

I'll give you that Gnome is faster. It's clean, well layed out, and looks modern.

Uhh... when did X become part of the conversation?

Admittedly, I don't have much experience with localization, other than my Czech friends who have fully localized, Czech language systems with XP that switch back and forth between Czech and English language as well as localization (keyboard layouts and the like) with a single click.
Thai happens to be one of the 17 main language groups that MS started including with Windows 2000. I don't know what was available with Windows 98. Did Gnome adoption in Thailand really begin that long ago, or is it just that MS made it too difficult to figure out how to set up?

Another list. Here we go.

1. In the native Windows apps (explorer, printer spooler, control panel, etc., the UI is quite consistent. Same set of menus. Been this way for a long long time. What a 3rd party app decides to do with it's navigational menus and contexts menus is up to them - they shouldn't be forced into including something because the OS forces it to in the name of consistency.
2. Context menus. They are CONTEXT menus, dangit. They should have content based on where you click, again MS included this with Windows 95 after a few third party apps included this functionality on their own. By the way, that is what I dislike most about MacOS, not being able to take advantage of right click context menus in the GUI. So really, how is Gnome better? I wonder what you see here. It seems quite subjective - there is not a clear standard by which to judge one product better than the other.
3. Window management I have never had trouble with in Windows. I've never had trouble in Gnome. I'm used to the upper left corner double-click to close a window in Windows, but Gnome doesn't let me do that (or maybe I just haven't found the setting for it). Can you explain further how Gnome manages windows better?
4. Virtual Desktops. Yep, big gaping hole here in Windows. Wish it was part of the OS, but there is software (at least from ATI) that have done this for a while.
5. If you have a middle click button on your mouse, the driver for that mouse will allow you to assign a multitude of different functions. My logitech mouse has 7 buttons, and a scroll wheel that clicks down and side to side. Every movement of those buttons can be assigned a function. It's marvelous!
6. Deskbar applett. Well MS decided to implement this as Active desktop, starting with IE 4 on Window 95. Crappy implementation, but notable in that they at least tried to follow Apple's lead. :)
7. User filesystem layout. Not sure what you mean by this. I've found Gnomes file system layout to be limited compared to Windows 98 and forward. Hopefully v2.6 will help this out.
8. Menu layout. Entirely subjective again. Windows has been fairly standard with File, Edit, View, Tools, and Help for a long time. Start menu layout has changed alot - they should really allow the user to customize it more, but at least it's very easy to add or remove items from the menu. Gnome makes this a bit more of an hassle. And I can categorize my apps however I want by just organizing shortcuts in folders; I'm not stuck with however Gnome decided they should be.
9. System messages. I really don't want to see system messages at all. Not that I want to go to the extreme of Apple and make them so dumbed down you have no idea what is going on, but I think MS handles messages well with a plain english description and the option to click a button for details. We all know about the famous BSOD, but in reality it's pretty useful to troubleshoot the problem - if you know what to do with it. Could you explain just what you like better about Gnome's system messages?
10. Mime handling - is your complaint with the built in Windows mail clients, i.e. Outlook Express and Windows Mail? I've never had a problem with those myself. But I use MS Outlook primarily, and there is simply nothing at that level available for an

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

There is a difference between support for entry of a language and the OS being localized in it. I did a Google search and took the announcement at face value. I assumed that XP had settled on its localized languages by the time SP3 came out. The list verified with all the versions I'd ever used (which include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) so it seemed accurate. In short, Windows isn't localized into Thai in XP -- at least it wasn't the last time I checked. Thai's still not on the list you provided, so I guess I'm not wrong on that count, anyway.

There are a lot of localities that would like Windows localized for them, but it doesn't and hasn't happened. With the kind of money MS makes from Windows, I think that's a shame.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Daengbo]

First of all, stating that "Windows has had" something since Win98 doesn't mean that there were third-party applications available for it, or you wouldn't have bothered comparing Gnome to Win 98 with the phrase "It is nice to see more features that Windows had 10 years ago." Gnome also had third-party clients for most of these things years ago. They just weren't part of the standard desktop. You can adjust your score back down to 20-30% again. ;)

You also fail to understand the difference between the Gnome Deskbar and a taskbar. (Gnome doesn't call them taskbars: it has "panels.") The Deskbar is similar to Vista's Instant Search, but does a lot more than desktop search by default. Gnome has also had this for a while. It just added some new features like updating Twitter and using recommended searches from Yahoo!.

Regarding localization, I Googled and provided a Microsoft link stating what their retail languages were. I assumed it was accurate. Based on your and another poster's response, I guess I chose the wrong page and that there are many more, but I stand by my original assertion that Thai is still not supported by MS. Based on their release of the "Thai Starter Pack," which had about seven words translated, I would also guess that the translations they do have are not as complete as you think they are. All I can say is that MS must do a better job of localization there in Europe than they do here in Asia. It really stinks here.

Anyway, I'm pretty much done with this thread, so you can flame away without worry of a rebuttal from me.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

To do what you say requires these steps for me.

Right click directory (with whatever music and subdirectories inside).
Click "Play in foobar2000"

That's it. I am willing to bet that is easier and more intuitive than using a commandline for the same thing.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

I've never heard of foobar2000, but I'm pretty sure that WMP and Winamp don't make it that easy.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

UI consistency works better in Windows Vista. Actually, it worked better in Windows 98 than Gnome does. When I arrange something in one of those, it stays that way.

Either you're lucky, or I'm unlucky. Windows XP regularly changes the order of the icons on my desktop. Installing a new application may put the application's folder at the end of the "All Programs" menu, but it may also put a launcher for the app itself somewhere in the middle (mixing files and folder? really?) And the most annoying of all is that the taskbar randomly forgets about an open window, I have to alt-tab over to it for it's button to reappear in the taskbar.

Virtual Desktops have been around in Windows for quite a while. My current desktop has 4. This has been provided free of charge from Microsoft for years now as part of the PowerToys collection.

I used the Microsoft one a few years back, it was slow and the usability was god-awful. Recently I've been using VirtuaWin which still falls far short of true virtual desktops, but seems to be less bulky. Still it's slow when I have a bunch of windows open.

Copy/Paste? Really, is that what we are reduced to? Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V is too hard?

This is probably the single most missed feature when I'm on Windows. Not because Ctrl-C Ctrl-V is hard, but because highlight middle-click becomes second nature because it's so easy. I am constantly trying to middle click when I'm on Windows, only to be disappointed.

Menu layout and panel consistency are a complete and total joke. See my previous comment on how much they change on just logging out sometimes. Seriously. This is so basic. Why is it not working after years and years of being buggy.

The only time I've ever had this problem is when I change screen resolution to something too low, otherwise all my applets stay in my panels exactly where I put them. I'm guessing this isn't something that effects a majority of Gnome users, so maybe you're doing something that's an edge case?

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

3. Window management I have never had trouble with in Windows. I've never had trouble in Gnome. I'm used to the upper left corner double-click to close a window in Windows, but Gnome doesn't let me do that (or maybe I just haven't found the setting for it). Can you explain further how Gnome manages windows better?

Gnome (and KDE and XFCE) allow you to make a window "sticky" or always on top. Certain Windows apps let you do this too, but it has to be provided by the app, it's not provided by the window manager. Compiz, of course, takes things to a whole new level with window-opacity, scale (expose), shelf (shrinks your window), grouping, and several others I'm sure I'm forgetting about.

5. If you have a middle click button on your mouse, the driver for that mouse will allow you to assign a multitude of different functions. My logitech mouse has 7 buttons, and a scroll wheel that clicks down and side to side. Every movement of those buttons can be assigned a function. It's marvelous!

Good for you, I don't have a super Logitech mouse, I have a basic 3-button mouse that doesn't have specialty drivers. At home, I have a laptop with a touch-pad, that emulates the 3rd button by clicking both left and right buttons at the same time. Still I can have this functionality, and it's consistent across mouse hardware.

6. Deskbar applett. Well MS decided to implement this as Active desktop, starting with IE 4 on Window 95. Crappy implementation, but notable in that they at least tried to follow Apple's lead. :)

Active Desktop? I'm not sure how that is anything like Deskbar. If I recall correctly, Active Desktop just allowed you to use some web content on your desktop, that's not at all what Deskbar does.

7. User filesystem layout. Not sure what you mean by this. I've found Gnomes file system layout to be limited compared to Windows 98 and forward. Hopefully v2.6 will help this out.

On Linux, all my user files are under /home/mhall119/, while on Windows they're under c:\Documents and Settings\mhall119\, except that some are under c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\, and sometimes my programs store their settings under c:\Program Files\AppFolder\ or, God help me, in the Registry. But the strangest thing is if I select "My Documents" (C:\Documents and Settings\mhall119\My Documents\)from the Start menu, and then to up a directory, I get to "Desktop" (C:\Documents and Settings mhall119\Desktop), from which I have to go down two levels ("My Computer" then "Local Drive (C)") to get to root of the file system (C:\).

11. Panels? your link in 12 helped clarify this. I just expand my taskbar, have my quick launch toolbar on one line, open app buttons on the other, and notification area icons split between both which minimized the width used on the taskbar. Perfect!

Perfect for you maybe. Personally I hate the start menu, prefer my taskbar at the bottom and my launchers at the top, and I really do like having a system monitor running where I can see it. On my kid's computer the bottom panel has nothing but launchers, is 48 pixels high, is only as wide as it needs to be to hold the launchers, and stays centered. I can't do that with Windows.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

I am almost certain it's just as easy with WMP but I stripped it out of my XP install, otherwise I would give it a test. I don't know about Winamp since I abandoned that years ago due to bloat, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could do the same.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

I tried that while at work, I had a directory with 5 MP3 files under it (not even sub-directories), and right-clicking the directory gave me no such options.

Selecting all the MP3 files in the directory gave me the option, and if I created a sub-directory then I could play them all if I selected some MP3 files plus the sub directory and right-clicked on one of the selected MP3 files (not the sub directory).

For added fun I put a JPG image in the music directory, did the same as above, and the JPG file was added to my play list.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

Oh that's right, you don't have MS SQL and Pervasive and others which have separate instances with their own service names. Sorry.

Oh and I'd just stop the Server service. And, let see. Windows remote management (Vista/2008 Server only of course, MS didn't want the security issues it posed in Unix I guess...

Joe average user wouldn't know that command line syntax let alone the service names.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

Oh and I'd just stop the Server service.

The "Server" service? That's the name of the file sharing service, or does it handle more than just file sharing? Ubuntu calls it "Folder Sharing Service", much more accurate I would think.

And, let see. Windows remote management (Vista/2008 Server only of course, MS didn't want the security issues it posed in Unix I guess...

I'm sorry, security issues? WTF are you talking about?

Joe average user wouldn't know that command line syntax let alone the service names.

Even if he didn't know the first time, he'd see their name when he used the Services GUI to manage them.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

Try http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/Locales.mspx
Also see http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/win2k/setup/localsupport.mspx

Lists Thai as one of the locales natively supported by 2000. I'd never heard of the Thai Starter Pack.

Either MS really poorly implemented it as you suggest, or you didn't implement it. I don't know, I wouldn't know Thai from Japanese.

Deskbar, Taskbar toolbar, Panel - call them what you want. Yes Gnome organizes them differently and calls them by different names. I'm not so impressed with adding search capabilities to a panel/toolbar/deskbar as I am with the capability being there. Nobody really even started doing indexed searching until a few years ago because it took too much processer time. As such I don't really give points to Gnome for adding the applet. We've had search capability in Windows since 95 even if they weren't as snappy, and I'm sure Gnome has had this since inception.

Hey I respect your opinion, it's been a fun debate and I realize that you've spent a lot more years on Gnome than I have; but I still see what I would consider core OS functionality - specifically in the areas of accessibility, graphics control, and driver sharing (specifically in the area of sound cards) just coming along in many areas that MS had implemented, crudely or not, as early as 1995.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

foobar2000 is smart about it. You can tell it to play or enqueue from the right click context menu and it will automatically grab all supported sound formats (ignoring any other file types) in the directory and all subdirectories under it. I've been using fb2k for years so I take many of its features for granted.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

Yes, the Server service. The description of that service is that it enables file, printer, and named-pipe sharing over the network.

SSH Security issues, for instance running SSH through a firewall with no VPN; for businesses, the inability to monitor a user's activites because of encrypted traffic; port-forwarding capabilities that could open a wide open tunnel to the server and network from a compromised client; to name a few of the major concerns. It may not be as much of an issue in a closed small network environment but it has the potential to be a concern in remote access and larger network implementations.

I'm glad you're blessed with a photographic memory of service names. In reality, I don't mess with these services enough for it to really be an issue. Once I have the system set up the way I want it, I rarely even touch those services. The whole point really boils down not to whether or not it's easier to accomplish things from the command line, but to whether you are unable to do it easily or at all via the GUI. That is where Gnome lacks IMO at the moment.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[mhall119]

SSH Security issues, for instance running SSH through a firewall with no VPN; for businesses, the inability to monitor a user's activites because of encrypted traffic; port-forwarding capabilities that could open a wide open tunnel to the server and network from a compromised client; to name a few of the major concerns.

Um, what? I'm going to have to take that one piece at a time. What is the issue with running SSH through a firewall with no VPN? Businesses monitor user activity on the systems they use, not by scanning packets on the network. Once a machine is compromised, of course there's a security issue, that's true even without SSH.

In reality, I don't mess with these services enough for it to really be an issue. Once I have the system set up the way I want it, I rarely even touch those services.

Okay, I'm probably an edge case here, but it was a specific example that was relevant to me. I'm constantly starting and stopping mysql and tomcat as part of day to day development.

The whole point really boils down not to whether or not it's easier to accomplish things from the command line, but to whether you are unable to do it easily or at all via the GUI. That is where Gnome lacks IMO at the moment.

Um, Gnome has a Services GUI.

Re:Catching up ever so slowly

[DaveWick79]

The point is not whether there is a services GUI. That was your example.
The point is the multitude of things that are not available to perform in the GUI. You seem to enjoy doing things via the command line because you find it quicker, but not every user has the know-how to do this and needs a graphical interface to figure it out. Too many functions involve going online and researching how to do something or why something doesn't work, and having to run a number of commands in your terminal window in order to solve the problem or perform the task. What MacOS and Windows have both done is make this entirely unnecessary either by making the task intuitive or at least providing a GUI for it that you can get help to use.

Is this feature available?

[bogaboga]

I would like to know from those who have test driven this new release, whether I can copy a PDF URL address link, paste it into the appropriate PDF application, and have the application open the file.

Is this possible? In earlier versions, one had to download the PDF file, then point the application to it...a nonstarter to me!

Just note that I handle PDF documents all day.

Re:Is this feature available?

[ReinoutS]

Just press Alt+F2 and paste in the URL. Evince, Gnome's document viewer, will open it nicely for you.

Good!

[Sasayaki]

Excellent!

Now when can I expect this in my Intrepid Ibex repositories, mmm?

Mandatory puns:

"Glad to see Linux really putting it's best foot forward in the GUI department."

"The new Gnome is a feet of software engineering."

"Maybe I'll revert from Kubuntu to Ubuntu, dip my toe in and see what it's like."

"I hope the new version doesn't have a much bigger footprint."

Re:Good!

[Facetious]

Just stop it or I'll have to put my foot dow... Oh, damnit! Now you've got me doing it!

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

This foot really smells.

Re:Good!

[Sasayaki]

Yep, you totally put your foot in it that time.

Re:Good!

[Trelane]

Now when can I expect this in my Intrepid Ibex repositories, mmm?

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/gnome-utils/2.24.0-0ubuntu1 the day before yesterday.

Re:Good!

[Flammon]

I think that you just put your foot in your mouth.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

You really put your foot in your mouth there!!!

Completely Offtopic, but...

[SevenHands]

"I want to tell you a story
'Bout a little man if I can.
A gnome named Grimble Gromble.
And little gnomes stay in their homes,
Eating, sleeping, drinking their wine.

He wore a scarlet tunic,
A blue-green hood, it looked quite good.
He had a big adventure
Amidst the grass, fresh air at last.
Wining, dining, biding his time...

And then one day...
Hooray, another way for gnomes to say
Ooh my...

Look at the sky, look at the river.
Isn't it good?
Look at the sky, look at the river.
Isn't it good?

Winding, finding places to go.

And then one day
Hooray, another way for gnomes to say
Ooh my ooh my..."

Rest well Richard Wright...

Re:Completely Offtopic, but...

[trouser]

Only slightly further off topic....

I'm having a lentil nightmare,
everything has gone black,
except for the lentils in the nightmare,
they're a sort of greeny, yellow sort of colour,

Ahhhhhhh

etc.

What is left for them to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't they managed to strip out most of the useful features of a Desktop Environment already?

Things like being able to configure the screen or add/edit MIME types? You know, the types of things that any DE since Windows 3.1 has been able to do.

I don't see how they can dumb Gnome down any further.

Re:What is left for them to do?

[abigor]

My favourite is the terminal cursor. I was stuck on shitty Gnome at work, and the default terminal cursor is a blinking block. I prefer a non-blinking underscore, so I went into the terminal app's preferences to change it. Guess what - you can't. Eventually, I found a place in the general desktop config to change the cursor from blinking to non-blinking, but it affects the WHOLE desktop, not just the terminal! And I was still stuck with a block instead of an underscore.

So I spent the time to rip the whole thing out and install KDE 4.1, which has proper configurability. Now I have my non-blinking underscore...ahh.

Re:What is left for them to do?

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

You shouldn't use such over-the-top language.

I can fully relate to wanting certain little things to be improved because of growing annoyance with them. I absolutely hated when I scrolled over the sound and it sometimes showed mute (even though it wasn't), etc.

However, GNOME is open source. If you really want stuff done find the appropriate developer and send a detailed (and nice) bug report.

Better yet, have a go at fixing something yourself. If you manage to do something and pop up on irc or whatever as a minor developer, people will take you seriously and they should fix easy bugs you are having very quickly (as you will have had exposure to the code and should know better what to include in the bug report).

PS - I am not a GNOME developer, but I have done minor other stuff.

...install KDE 4.1, which has proper configurability.

PPS - you really put your foot in your mouth with that comment there.

Re:What is left for them to do?

[awrowe]

So, how will they respond to a bug report on fixing the screensaver configuration?

Probably not well.

Don't get me wrong, I like Gnome and use it every day, but this answer "file a bug report" just doesn't wash all the time, particularly when upstream developers have this attitude of 'won't fix' something as simple as this.

It isn't just gnome developers who do this, I recall something similar with KDE4, where the lead developers refused to even talk about what they were doing much less respond to the users.

find the appropriate developer and send a detailed (and nice) bug report

doesn't work when the appropriate developer is being precious about the code.

That said though, this looks like a pretty good maintenance release with a few nice little features added in. It has no immediate benefit for me, but I can see how it can all be built upon, which is great.

Re:What is left for them to do?

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

So, how will they respond to a bug report on fixing the screensaver configuration?

Case in point. Read down a bit to here.

If some programmers are not receptive, they probably just need a bit of prodding (you explaining why your approach is better), or they are right not to try (if it is clearly not going to work well this way).

Remember that developers might like coding new stuff better than fixing old stuff. In my opinion, filing bug reports for enhancements might work better if you are on the same wavelength as the developer.

Gnome is too heavy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly enough, I just switched to Xfce yesterday.

Re:Gnome is too heavy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly enough

No.

Exchange 2007/MAPI Connector waits for GNOME 2.26

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like the Exchange 2007/MAPI Connector we've all been waiting for isn't in this release.

The road map shows it's planned for the Gnome 2.26 release.

RoadMap Link - http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap

500

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sooo looking up for "500@ekiga.net"

Um, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a feature of firefox's for a while now.

I thought they were skipping this release?

[pizzach]

and going straight to 3.0?

Re:I thought they were skipping this release?

[Randle_Revar]

2.24 -> 2.26 -> 2.28 -> 3.0

Re:I thought they were skipping this release?

[mhall119]

I think it was GTK that was going to do a 3.0 release, not Gnome.

Re:I thought they were skipping this release?

[mhall119]

I'm working on a Fx/Tb extension for importing Photos to F-Spot. Comments/Testing appreciated.

You know, not two days ago I was thinking that it would be nice to import an image from a website directly into F-Spot. I just installed your extension, and it's fantastic!

Re:I thought they were skipping this release?

[pizzach]

Oh.

Re:I thought they were skipping this release?

[pizzach]

Welcome! It's good to hear people finding it useful.

Did the "people picker" in GDM ever get fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or does it still prevent you from turning off the "people picker" display (which is a serious "information leakage" issue and precludes its use in secure environments)?

Re:Did the "people picker" in GDM ever get fixed?

[donscarletti]

It always was optional, just open up gdmsetup and turn it off.

Re:Did the "people picker" in GDM ever get fixed?

[J.Y.Kelly]

It always was optional, just open up gdmsetup and turn it off.

gdmsetup has gone from recent releases. GDM is undergoing some fairly major changes and the developers haven't got round to reimplementing the preferences. You can make some changes by directly editing custom.conf, but the documentation is a bit sparse right now. Things which used to be easy (like turning off the people picker are currently difficult or not possible. Things are likely to improve soon but I don't know if they're sorted in the 2.24 release.

tagged bsd?

[mdemonic]

Don't try to push this onto us. This is gnu all the way

Where is the "Cancel" button?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want my "cancel" button in the option windows!

Re:New? WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you'd like to get involved and do some coding yourself?

Tabbed browsing...

[sdac]

It took six months for them to implement tabbed browsing? What the hell? Isn't that just another widget in GTK+?

Xfce

[Sp4c3 C4d3t]

Switched to Xfce over a year ago and never looked back. I can get all the same functionality, while maintaining the ability to control certain aspects of my computer. GNOME is just too bloated and is going in the wrong direction. If Xfce can clone the functionality and do it with less resources, there is something wrong with GNOME.

Teach them a lesson

[gbutler69]

Show them how it's done!

Re:New? WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everybody can march in the parade. Some of us have to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

                                      -Will Rogers

BSD tag?

[incripshin]

Whoever tagged this 'bsd' needs to wise up. Gnome developers don't give a frak about BSD.

Re:BSD tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Users in general could give a frak about BSD.

Re:BSD tag?

[LizardKing]

Gnome developers don't give a frak about BSD.

Really? The core GNOME developers may not develop on, or principally for, the BSDs but they are pretty receptive to patches from the ports and package maintainers. Since the release of GNOME 2.0, the code has certainly got more portable across different Unix like operating systems, which is quite remarkable as there's far more features that rely on OS specific implementations of things like Bluetooth. (Freedesktop initiatives have certainly helped).

some humane features of gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

*ubiquitous mouse wheel to cycle through gui element

*hold alt and/or shift and move and resize a window with magnetic locking to edges of screen and other windows

*mini pager autohiding at the left middle edge of the screen for multiple virtual desktops. hover at the edge of the screen and cycle through desktops with the wheel

*also i have a tasklist widget in my upper right so i can very easily move the mouse to that corner without having to aim and then cycle through all windows on current the desktop with the wheel. no need for a task bar at the bottom (or anywhere) so i get rid of it. this frees up the most valuable realestate on the screen.

*select and middle click paste (old), no need to click to change focus

*middle click on title bar to send a window to the back of the stack, making the next window under it visible

*being able to make any window 'always on top' or 'visible on all desktops'

*having scroll and window-move/resize events work without having to first click into and have that window brought ontop of everything.

ever have to scroll in a document while you want to keep a window in the foreground, simply use the wheel on the document window. lets compare;

WINDO$
1) click on background window to get focus
2) scroll
3) identify, aim and click on taskbar to bring original window back into focus

vs

LINUX
1) scroll in background window, no need to change focus to another window

  your eyes are constantly scanning from top to bottom moving towards the bottom of the screen, so getting rid of the bar at the bottom of the screen is #1 in my list of improvements for a more humane gui. now you can use it for actual user content. imagine that! getting to use your own computer for your own content, instead of having micro$haft bully you into letting them constantly advertise themselves on the most valuable part of the screen.

of course micro$haft want to condition you to a more masochistic less efficient gui, which requires many more steps and much more effort so that you have to work hard to use your windows box. you become used to the contrived inconvenience and value being able to perform these unnecessary acts 'quickly' and 'accurately'

my linux desktop is just so much more relaxing to use than xp. think tabbed browsing*1000

your statement of "Window Shading - I don't see how this is better than minimize to the taskbar." really says it all. its because its more relaxing, it requires fewer steps and less effort, and it frees up the waste due to the taskbar. you have to constantly move the cursor up and down, on average over a distance of half the height of the screen, identify and then aim at a relatively small target on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, then bring the cursor back up to interact with the window that has been maximised. its much more relaxing to be able to middle click on the taskbar which is a larger target than say a tiny minimize window button, while youre carefully avoiding the close window button which in the case of a maximized windows is the easiest to hit.

Congratulations

[realwhz]

GNOME still evolves forward. That's good news. Telepathy based instant messenger, empathy, is finally officially included. Although there have been so many discussions on the topic empathy vs pidgin in GNOME related communities, it may still be an interesting question now. Anybody would comment on it?

CPU Usage

[wild_berry]

Can I even add something like a CPU usage graph to my panel in Windows?

In WinXP, you can have Task Manager 'Hide When Minimized' and use that to monitor CPU usage. There's your usage box in the SysTray, but no graph. Sorry.

Re:CPU Usage

[TheDreadedGMan]

That's why you have windows freeware! :)
This program is really slick, it doesn't interfere.
http://codefromthe70s.org/perfgraph2.asp

Not available for u

[Yfrwlf]

Too bad they don't support some standardization with packages, so that any normal user can easily download and install the new software. That would require them helping out the Burgdorf Packaging API perhaps, or some other system which worked to standardize packages. We're tired of being tied up, waiting for our distro of choice to compile it for us, we want cross-distro binary packages. kthnx.

Re:Not available for u

[GenP]

And GetModuleFileName()!

Re:Not available for u

[Anonymous Coward]

Great News! Gnome 2.26 is completely open source and is available in a highly portable source code format that can be installed on ANY linux (or for that matter, unix) disto!

Re:Not available for u

[Yfrwlf]

Bad news! Only those who know how to compile can access that software, which rules out 95% of everyone on Earth!

Re:Not available for u

[Yfrwlf]

Oh, and I'm forgetting the additional 4% who don't care to compile even though they know how, who'd rather do better things with their time instead of redundant CPU work and would much rather just download/install/run quickly. It's the software developers who should compile it once for everyone. Anyone downloading and compiling the source should only be doing so if they want to look at the code, but no one should ever be forced to do that just so they can run a fucking program, so wake up and smell reality and think about users other than yourself.

Re:Not available for u

[Yfrwlf]

I honestly don't know what that means exactly, because I'm no programmer, but since you had "module" in there, I can only assume it will help both modularity and possibly dependencies, and that would certainly be good for Linux. ;)

I Probably Won't Use It

[ido50]

I recently purchased the Asus EEE PC 4GB Surf, and after a few months of using Xandros with KDE, I installed Debian testing on it and decided to give GNOME a try. For some reason, GNOME was very slow compared to KDE. For example, movies were freezing constantly and games such as Open Arena, which worked flawlessly with KDE, were slow as hell. So I removed GNOME, installed KDE, and the EEE was fast again... I was interested with this and decided to give GNOME a try on my desktop computer. I reinstalled the entire distribution (Debian unstable) and installed GNOME. Just like in the EEE, it was slow, laggy, freezy and all sorts of words that convey this obvious meaning. After removing GNOME and installing KDE, everything was going fast and I was happy again. So no, I guess I won't give GNOME another try.

Re:New? WTF

[Abreu]

...and some jeer and throw peanuts

Its a fact of life