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Shuttleworth's Take On GNOME 3.0, Coordination with Debian

Posted by timothy on from the why-can't-numbers-jump-like-this-at-my-credit-union dept.

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."

4 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Not the KDE4 way, plase by VincenzoRomano · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
    For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
    1. Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase by mrtommyb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:GTK by marcansoft · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:GTK by qupada · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.