Shuttleworth's Take On GNOME 3.0, Coordination with Debian

suka writes "In a fresh interview with derStandard.at, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talks about GNOME 3.0 — its strengths, but also about what he thinks is missing. He also mentions ongoing talks for a common meta-release-cycle with Debian which could delay the next LTS."

Comments

Pulse Audio is what I worry about

[wrook]

I'm not worried about X breakages, personally. I even have an Intel 945G and I can live with the problems its causing. What I can't live with is the extreme instability of Pulse Audio. It crashes my apps contstantly from broken pipes. OK, people should be checking their pipes. But Pulse Audio itself crashes very frequently (about every hour or so on my machine). Rhythmbox won't go for more than 10 minutes without either crashing or audio failing. This is incredibly bad for me.

I realize that it's probably due to older, underpowered hardware (3 year old cheap laptop), but this should not be happening. I've yanked Pulse Audio from my machine altogether now and it's a lot more stable. I was also getting lock ups in Firefox every hour or so. Now that I've dumped Pulse Audio, I've only had one lock up in the past 3 days (still can't figure that one out -- related to video drivers???).

So, I plead with Ubuntu developers: either fix Pulse Audio, or punt it. The extra features it has is *not* worth the massive pain that some people experience.

Not the KDE4 way, plase

[VincenzoRomano]

I only hope they will follow a different path than KDE team.
They rushed to release 4.0 and since then I'm still struggling to have all the features I used to have in KDE v3.5.
And, more important, I hope that Ubuntu people won't trash GNOME v2 from night to day like they did with KDE v3.5.

Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase

[mrtommyb]

What KDE4 proofed is that you can also sit down and have really interesting conceptual changes that get introduced as big shifts.

What KDE4 proofed is that if you make really awful software that is full of bugs even long term fans will switch to using an alternative.

Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase

[Razalhague]

They release a 4.0 and are surprised people start using it? WTF?

Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase

[segedunum]

HTML malfunction.........

The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish...

Hmmmm, it wasn't from KDE's perspective. It's the way things have always worked. The KDE developers set themselves some goals for KDE 4.0 and they achieved them - mainly API and ABI stability. What happened was that distributors then blindly started compiling and packaging it and then whinging when they found out that their users weren't too happy with it. Virtually all distributors are braindead when it comes to putting together a whole system and looking intelligently at the software they want to use. It's why we have PulseAudio being thrown into desktop systems today. That thing isn't stable at all, let alone feature complete.

GTK

[Haiyadragon]

Well, GTK+ is due for an overhaul. Fix the damn file picker. Get rid of all that excessive padding, maybe by making it themeable. Some consistency in menuitem dimensions would be nice.

Also, either give Metacity some features, at least the bare essentials, or switch to another window manager. That non-optional minimize effect is cringe worthy.

Re:GTK

[marcansoft]

The GTK file picker is quite possibly the worst file picker I have ever seen. Even Windows 3.1's crappy stuff was better - it might not support long filenames, but at least it didn't require one extra click in order to do anything useful.

Seriously, "browse for other folders"? I still maintain that the genius who thought that up needs to be shot.

Re:GTK

[qupada]

People who modded this troll really need to stop and think about it - parent is just about spot on. The look and feel of the vast majority of GTK apps is frankly awful.

Some consistency in menuitem dimensions would be nice.

Now admittedly maybe this only manifests when you're using small interface fonts (I'm using 7pt here, for reference). Taking GIMP's menus as an example, menu items with images are significantly larger than ones without - a full 25% larger (20 vs 16 px). I don't have a huge number of gtk apps on my system to check this in, but inkscape and wireshark seem to have the same issue.

Fix the damn file picker.

This is a pet peeve of mine too. Bearing a striking resemblance to one I remember from Apple Mac systems pre colour monitors, the current design of the filepicker was in no way an improvement.
For some reason or another the "location" text field is hidden by default (and even when shown, is oddly not populated by default with the path to the current directory). What could have been useful breadcrumb-style navigation buttons were added, except all but the one representing the current directory is hidden until you click a different button (this is despite there being the entire width of the file picker for them to fill). The lack of switchable view modes in the file listing is mystifying, it seems to display "thumbnails" of images when browsing, but it doesn't seem to be possible to make those thumbnails any bigger than 16x16px.

That non-optional minimize effect is cringe worthy.

Also the effect that draws big bold black rectangles on your screen to indicate the borders of hidden windows while alt-tabbing. Something regrettably KDE copied. I don't need this, if I wanted to waste my time with annoying and ultimately useless visual effects I'd install compiz.

In reality, once it has become difficult or event impossible to make the system behave in a manner conducive to it actually being useful for anything, it's time to look elsewhere. As I often have to remind people, just because they are happy with the default settings doesn't mean everyone will be.

Re:GTK

[Haiyadragon]

Picking a directory is tedious and unintuitive. When I just click the OK button to pick the current directory, nothing happens. I have to click an empty space in the directory, to 'select it', first. When I use the crumbtrail to navigate to a parent directory, it automatically selects the child directory I just came from. When I click OK does it pick the current directory, or the selected directory? Who knows. When I open the file picker later it always opens in the parent directory of the previously picked one. Why in the parent?

There are many usability problems with the current file picker.

Re:Don't include Gnome 3 in the next LTS

[Norsefire]

Long Time Service release. They have to support it for 4 years, fixing bugs, preventing security problems etc. That would be more difficult to do if the LTS ships with Gnome 2 but Gnome 2 isn't being actively supported by its developers (who are working on Gnome 3).

Re:The only thing I got out of TFA...

[slim]

In meatspace:

• a file is a container for storing paper
• a folder is a container for storing paper

They are almost synonymous. So someone with a non-computer background won't intuitively know which one is supposed to contain which.

In computer lingo:

• a file is an entity that might be analogous to a wad of paper (e.g. a word processor document), but might not (e.g. an MP3)
• a folder is a container for zero or more files

So it's completely unintuitive.

I think the word 'file' has its roots from the days when a 'record' was still a fundamental concept. So a 'record' is a sheet of paper, a 'file' contains a bundle of records.

I prefer 'directory'. At least then it doesn't push a false analogy on an already confused mind.