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GNOME 3 Delayed Until September 2010
supersloshy writes "Contrary to popular opinion, GNOME 3 will not be released in March next year. It has been delayed until September 2010, six months later. According to the news message, this is because 'our community wants GNOME 3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more appropriate.' GNOME 3's main goal is to re-define the ways people interact with the desktop, mainly through a new UI design (currently called 'GNOME Shell'), while GNOME 2.30, set for release in March, will have a focus on being stable. An early visual tour of GNOME 3 has been posted at Digitizor."
for POST in $(cat slashdot); do
beGrammarNazi $POST
done
I couldn't resist.
is a badge of honor and a sound development strategy, one M$ doesn't care to follow. hence that great difference between open-source and $$ driven.
+1 Insightful
Looks like ice cream, Batman, and football are the culprits.
this is your chance buddy! Shine on.
All GUI experiences I had always were some combination of stuff that's around since ages. Artistic freedom in CS is at its best when it is heavily curbed. Hell, saving your document in MS Word has become an art form. Even my Mac, which allegedly comes with the most wonderful GUI on the planet, drives me up the wall. All I want and all we need is Firefox, Eclipse, a terminal and Openoffice and plain and simple menus with it. Anything else just plain and simple. Brothers unite and let's get back to the roots. I say "No more rotating, sliding, enlarging, diminishing menus!" Saving a document is best done using a simple key sequence :w
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Gnome3 looks unusable anyways, delay it forever. Go through the early tour and tell me that is more usable. I've no idea wtf they were thinking.
Lose the ability to 1click to open aps. Clock takes a huge chunk of real estate. The aps button is needlessly large and boring text. Opening a common folder takes more time now. This is just my first look at it but still wtf...
Do we laugh or cry? It's like KDE and Gnome are in some sort of frantic struggle for who can botch desktop Linux the most.
I hope some commercial company like Google puts grownups to work like they did with Android on some replacement for these two basketcase projects.
80% percent of the tour looks like stuff in the current gnome. I mean we already have a NetworkManager and you already get a calendar when you click on the clock.
Virtual desktops get more recognition. The UI is more modal and Mac like. So what if their default configuration has just the one panel? Thats how I configure it anyway.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yeah, lots of people will be in an uproar! There are millions of problems with Gnome 3! For starters, it won't be enough like KDE 3, so everyone will think it's broken when there's really no problems with it!
So it still looks like crap...
Until then the Gnome developers can just keep using their Apple laptops running OS X, as that seems to be all they ever to write about. Makes me wonder if they even use Gnome. In the meantime, I'll be sticking to Fluxbox. While they keep making things for Joe Average (who won't use Linux).
"Gnome3 looks unusable anyways"
I just switched to Ubuntu 9.10 it has been ok. Very rough, buggy, and unpolished compared to Windows but I really wanted to soldier on.
Seeing this Gnome 3 garbage just makes me want to throw my hands up and go right back to Windows.
Something is very, very wrong with the Gnome developers to have them honestly thinking this fiasco of an effort is going to attract anyone but the most diehard of existing Linux users.
Grow the fuck Gnome devs. No one wants yet another retarded attempt at 'reinventing' the desktop. It's a solved problem. People have work to do with their computers. Gnome 3 is nothing but juvinille wanking.
Well done! Many times open-source projects compromise on quality (usually on features rather than stability) to make sure they make it on the scheduled release cycle. Often this is not possible, and it should be acknowledged.
For example, one particular Ubuntu release (thankfully only one), was released too early, according to me. I considered it a disaster, even though almost everything worked. A delay is always better than a bad release.
Thank you, guys at GNOME, for reinforcing your commitment to making GNOME 3 a better experience and not a let down. I hope that everyone will appreciate that this delay is better for GNOME in the long run in terms of how much people believe the claims for future releases and the quality it produces.
Remember, no one believes Mark Shuttleworth when he says that "X.YZ" release will have a new look (Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic have all had those promises made). At least we know we'll get all those awesome features in GNOME, even if it means waiting for six months more.
and they sure didn't fix it.
This isn't what I'm missing in Gnome. I'm missing desktop sharing and conferencing software like Livemeeting. I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
Instead, some *person* for want of a better word, thinks I need to have yet another new way to select the same applications, wants to "improve" (i.e. remove the choice from) the task list to be *more* application-centric (so retrograde it's laughable).. What a waste of time. What about an Object-Oriented or task-oriented desktop? How about some *actual* innovation? Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant;.
This is all just my personal opinion.
This works really well with Ubuntu's planned LTS release. The 10.04 release will focus on stability, and probably wouldn't have adopted any of the new Gnome features anyways. This supports Mark Shuttleworth's idea that projects should align their release cycles.
http://mono-project.com/OpenSUSE_Build_Service
according to that page, Gnome Do uses mono
look under the "Desktop Applications" section
I kinda hope allot of open source projects can start making wise decisions like this.
Though I haven't used it yet, I must say I don't really like what I see. It seems like they're moving towards more context based menus and I really dislike that direction. I'm already not terribly happy with some of the dumbing down GNOME has done for the 2.28 release. Some of those things seem to mimic the Vista not-so-start menu and they seem to smack of a ribbon based UI. I've been using GNOME for years now, but I may have to switch to something else soon. Not a terribly big KDE fan either so I'm not sure where to go yet. That being said, I'll give it a try before I dump it, but as it stands it doesn't look great. It looks like a move backwards in usability.
...but from an Ubuntu scheduling perspective this sounds like good news. The last thing Ubuntu needs for its next LTS release (10.04) is a big new jump to GNOME 3. It'll be nice to have an LTS that will let less bleeding-edge users wait until GNOME 3 has a year and a half of polish, integration, and (most importantly) actual user feedback to upgrade, while still retaining full support
Plus, it'll be just plain interesting to see how Mark Shuttleworth reacts to this frankly rather iffy-looking overhaul. (Oh well, so much for not commenting about it.) Although let's be nice - the screenshots in the link seem to be design mockups, while in the actual screencasts they seem to have solved the billions-of-elipses problem.
Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant
If the was Microsoft, and you didn't know better, then perhaps it's fair to say you are being "force fed" this change. However, this is OSS, and nobody is forcing you to use Gnome Shell. You have options: stick with Gnome 2.x, use XFCE, KDE or any of the other window managers available. Just stop whinging about how you don't like it.
Maybe they're trying to innovate and do something new and different. I don't share your doubts but if I did, I would rather give them the benefit of any doubt then criticize before I had even tried the software. It seems to me that they're in a tough spot: do what UIs have been doing for a long time and get accused of copying rather than doing something new, or do something new and get bad word from people who reject the free software out of hand at their "first look".
Digital Citizen
Why is this a preview if they don't want people to say what they think?
You really aren't going to help F/OSS by calling people whingers - it's a kind of whinging in itself.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Lack of taskbar makes it unusable.. Ubuntu remix way is so much better than this.. so gnome people.. please stop working on useless stuff like gnome 3. I was considering giving some money to the foundation but when i see where they're heading to.. no thanks.
What GNOME really needs (in my mind): * better dual screen support * customizable virtual desktops (different layouts for work, entertainment etc) - would be cool if the second display could be one virtual desktop * fixed theme management (everything should be configured from one place) * "run as root" in the menu under right mouse click * "open terminal in current location" * better drag&drop * better networking configuration (usb and bluetooth modems) - like to see why something isn't working. etc gnome doesn't need new menus..these are already great. maybe a search bar for programs in the application menu. like in win7 and mac
It's fine to offer constructive criticism, and you started out well. However it's difficult to find anything that could be construed as constructive in your second paragraph:
"some *person* for want of a better word"
"So retrograde it's laughable"
"What a waste of time"
"Being force-fed..."
Yeah, yeah. Windows control 99.99% of germs, I mean desktop computers.
I've been freed from Windows for about 4 years now, and there is no way in hell i am going back. I barely tolerate it on my netbook (hardware driver issues), and I install linux on all of my other machines now for these reasons:
1. I spend 95% of my non-work computing time in Firefox.
2. I spend 95% of my work computing time in Firefox and Eclipse.
3. The other 8%, there are linux software for those.
4. I use Virtualbox for the 2% of the time I _need_ Windows.
In return for not using Windows, I gain:
1. I don't worry about firewalls, or anti-virus software.
2. Complete incremental backup of computer to network drive, usb drive, whatever.
3. nfs, and sshfs. They really are awesome. Windows/mac users don't even know what they are missing.
And most importantly:
4. New OS every few months, FREE. FOREVER..
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
it looks like GNOME is now copying MacOSX instead of Windows *eye roll*.
At least now their copying something that at least works, but still, they're copying, and thus ensuring that they are always playing catchup, and creating an inferior product. This is not a new problem, and has been talked about repeated on /. 2005, 2006, and even last June. With the notable exception of Firefox, there hasn't been anything original, innovative, and well good from the F/OSS community, which is very disturbing.
Hell, read some CHI, USENIX, and SIGIR papers people! Stop making a poor facsimile of two years, and start making the next five. Ask yourself, why the hell is Wave coming from Google, instead of us?
I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape the geek-in-a-basement marketshare, it has to focus on the average non-tech user. And no, pasting a link to a windows share is not what this user does.
Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file" that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is. He doesn't organize his files, he doesn't care about file hierarchies, he just wants his file. He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour. Believe it or not, no desktop environment makes it really easy to do such basic stuff.
IMHO Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist is a step in the right direction for the average user.
If Gnome really wanted to improve they'd organize and minimize.
As long as programs and the logic of them are created as text, a text based system will be the most powerful. All the GUI should be doing is making it easier to use a text-based system. I hate programs that try to pretend there's no configuration files and command line options behind them; this is what gnome programs do with their lack of man pages and plain text configuration files. While I'm at it, there's gotta be a better way to manage settings than gconf. I fucking hate gconf.
... they need to take some more options out.
Take something very popular that people like, something that works, is highly configurable, and logical, then toss it out the window due to developer vanity. I now use Exaile. Looks like I might not use that much longer because if this is how GNOME is going to work, I'm going to have to switch to something else. Quit taking away options. Seriously.
I was always a KDE man but when version 4 came out GNOME actually looked decent by comparison, which is why I'm still using it today (over a year later). If they go and muck up a near-perfect desktop for the sake of fixing something that ain't broke, then I will be voting with my feet, and returning to KDE.
GNOME should be working to improve things that are still ridiculously complicated, like configuring input devices (reassigning mouse buttons for weird devices, etc) and improving Nautilus (which hasn't had any love for years). For general GTK apps, things like Evolution could do with less "mac-like dictatorship" and allowing users to minimise it to the tray, and to return to the Inbox when deleting a message. These simple things that some Nazi has decided people shouldn't be allowed to do is what makes people dismiss Linux and stick with their Windows or Macs.
Reading about Gnome Shell reminded me somewhat of what the Enlightenment guys were going after with E17, quite a few years ago.
Of course Raster et. al. would work for a while and then decide to start again from scratch, what, three times at least with E17? So maybe Gnome 3 will get there first...
#DeleteChrome
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Between mono and this you may just want to start switching early.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Make a system any idiot can use and only idiots will use it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
what the fuck do you do for work? moderate a web forum? if i could spend 95% of my work time in a fucking web browser i'd think of myself as one lucky chump -- and then i'd spend it doing something else anyway to avoid people like you.
I used to like KDE 3.5 more than Gnome. Now I like Gnome more than KDE 4, because all handy things of the desktop are lost with KDE 4's new way. And now Gnome is also going that route? NOOOOO!
You are aware that OS X natively supports NFS and MacFUSE works exactly like Linux FUSE?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
nobody cares.
Nobody except the millions of people like me who use Gnome. The current version is near-perfect and the new one seems to have lost all the good points and added nothing. OK, all the desktops on screen at once could be useful once in a while, but WTF! If it ain't broke (and it ain't), don't "fix" it.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Thanks for your deep insights, I am now convinced that the Gnome people should listen to anonymous trolls like you to make their decisions.
If the GUI changes aren't controversial enough the fact that it is based on Mono will probably kill it.
So you are saying to the non geek modifying links to support windows instead of linux is easier than just pasting it? Do tell...
No show, no show,
Gnome's just like a cheap ho!
Promise a lot, insides all shot,
You'll catch mono!
No show, no show, ...
To KDE I go!
Looks up to date, not fugly, mate,
Like gnome, you know
Gimme a "G"! ... it's pining for the fjords, it is!"
"GEE !"
Gimme an "N"!
"ENNN !"
Gimme an "O"!
"OWE !"
Gimme an "M"!
"EMMM !"
Gimme an "E"!
"EEEE !"
What's that spell?
"GNOME'S NO OPTION, MUST EVADE!"
"Huh? It's not dead."
"Sure it is mate."
"It's not. It's
Seriously, I hope they achieve what they want, but they're going to be MIA for a full year ...most distros will have shipped at least one version with an even more advanced KDE on them by then.
My first reaction when I saw this news was that it was delayed specifically for the Ubuntu LTS release. Probably just a coincidence though, but everybody likes a good conspiracy theory.
:(){
I'm yet to be convinced that that is the correct approach. Users should learn to save their god-damned files somewhere sensible so they can actually find them again, and close windows when they're done with them. This isn't a technical user, this is a user with a clue, for goodness sakes. If you're so dumb you can't learn the concepts behind these tasks, I really do wonder whether you are suited to the operation of a Turing machine.
[FUCK BETA]
Regarding desktop sharing, are you aware of the newer features in Empathy? It can do video/voice and desktop sharing (for xmmp at least).I believe (like Livemeeting), both end would need to have Empathy installed.
Regarding the link clicking, I'm guessing you mean UNC paths like \\smbserver\share\somefile.doc now you've mentioned it, I'm missing it too. A bug was filed in 2007 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=446136, nothing has happened unfortunately.
Alex
It looks like the task bar is missing. It looks like you have to click more to get where you want to go. It looks shiny. If I wanted all that I'd go to windows. Maybe I will. Windows 7 isn't bad at all. Hopefully when 3.0 IS released it will be customizable to get it back to where it was!
Well, as long as the core isnt dependant on the mono crap. People can make external applications in mono for all they want but i and others wont touch them with a ten foot pole. The real gnome devs (not Novells puppets) should be aware that mono in proper gnome will kill it off very fast.
HTTP/1.1 400
This is terrible. And I just moved to GNOME after years with KDE. I hated KDE 4 trying to "redefine the way we work with the desktop" and looking at the visual tour I hate the way GNOME tries to do the same. I hope this shell thing will be optional, and if not, I wouldn't mind seeing a fork.
Imagine you were looking to buy a new car. Going to a dealership, you are presented with a sedan that is marketed as "redefining the way drivers interact with their automobile." Getting behind the wheel, you discover that standard conventions like the steering wheel, turn indicator, gear shift, accelerator and brake pedals have all been replaced with New and Improved devices that the salesman assures you are so much Better.
Would you buy the damned thing?
I'm sick and tired of coders who pretend they are cognitive psychologists or ergonomics experts.
Just implement a standard GUI using normal conventions. Anything more and people like me will either find ways to turn the bullshit off, or we'll avoid using your product.
Microsoft is about to learn this the hard way with their new bullshit replacement for the task bar.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Well if the Gnome people listen to you, we all have to endure a user interface dumbed down for the lowest common denominator. Some of us actually use GNOME. And may have used it for the last 5 years or more. And get to watch it getting worse and worse, while loads of useless junk gets crammed in, and someone decides to remove some more options.
Hey everybody, lets make things easier for people to continue to be idiots.
PS: Maybe he wouldn't have 20 windows open if some moron hadn't decided to thrust the "spatial" mode of nautilus down everyone's throats.
I wish there was a split-mod, because I'd love to mod the first half of the post insightful or informative and the second half Troll.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"If you open more windows in the current desktop, the windows are automatically arranged to give you the best possible view."
Just one question: Are the GNOME guys on crack?
I put my windos where they are on purpose. Don't go around moving them.
The idea of designing a new approach to the desktop is commendable and shows one of the advantages of open source. If people doesn't like it they can switch to other alternatives. The idea of making it work well is also a positive innovation on some well established practices of both the FOSS and proprietary camps.
However there are for sure some strange things in this Gnome Shell.
On the positive side, the large Activities menu could be very useful on the forthcoming generation of touchscreen computers because it provides a larger target for fingers than the menu items we have now. It reminds me a lot of the interfaces used by some Linux distributions for netbooks it is seems good. Maybe it's not so handy for computers that only have a mouse (too much travel).
Finally I hope that the top bar can be moved to the bottom because I just hate top bars. They are placed right where my eyes look by default but they are the less important piece of information on the screen. Apple made it totally wrong IMHO and MS improved their design, maybe the only time they did it.
So, I'll be using Gnome Shell in its present form? Maybe I'll give a try but I bet I'll soon switch to something else, back to Gnome 2 if I can. Other desktops I so for Linux look to much like Windows, something that cannot be good considering all the years I had to use it and never liked the way it worked.
I will be voting with my feet, and returning to KDE.
Oh no! Don't take your free downloads elsewhere! ;)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Gawd, the hell. I want a system that forces the user to organize his stuff. I'm sick of seeing desktops so cluttered with icons that there's no room for anything else. I wouldn't mind shoving that Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface down their throats. I mean, I make my desktop a mess too, but I clean up my shit eventually. Tons of people (like my sis) simply DON'T, EVER. EVERYTHING GOES ON THE DESKTOP. That's ridiculous. Can't understand the concept of folders? No computer for you!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Gnome 3.0 is not based upon Mono. It's still the 'old' C/glib framework. No Mono. Get your facts straight and stop spreading FUD. Who moderated that 'insightful'?
What was it...oh, yeah: The alpha-tester reviews of Vista.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Since 80% of the population of the earth are idiots, that's a large market share.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Before I get used to that, I'd rather get used to another desktop environment.
why would I want to use a smelly foot?
And that's it, this. People in the future are going to want their cellphone to be a major part of the computing experience, and when they get home, toss the thing on the desk and it just reopens on the monitor there. The focus should be on making that transition really smooth and consistent.
Right now it is backwards, try to force a desktop OS on the phone or synch it, etc, nuts. The phone os will be more important, the phone hardware will be powerful enough to do most tasks, and the monitor and keyboard on the desk will just be an extension of that primarily, and where your big storage lives. It will *have* to focus on being functional on the phone, then be able to scale up smoothly to a larger screen, and fast.
The next generation practical GUI/desktop therefore should start focusing on that next big step. Whomever gets their first with functionality and smooth transitions and synching wins. Android might be it, but one of the phone OSes will be it for sure, for most people, it won't be gnome or KDE at this point.
Your computer is still hackable.
Also available on OSX & Windows. It sounds like you just don't know much about these two.
Sounds like you're too busy upgrading all the time to actually use anything anyway.
-]Phreak Out[-
Different things work for different people. I find that I organize files on my computer the same way I organize files on my desk -- in piles. If it's in a pile, it's important, and if it's on top it's *really* important. Every day or so I go through the piles and one of three things happens to each thing in the pile: 1) I deal with it (pay bill, file statement, etc.); 2) Decide it's no longer important and throw it away; 3) Leave it in the pile to go through later.
On my computer, everything first goes in the Desktop folder. Why? Couple of reasons:
1. It's staring me in the face until I file it away, delete it, or otherwise handle it
2. It's easy to find. Desktop search tools are slow and useless. grep "foo" in a single folder takes a lot less time than find . -exec grep {} \;
3. Most of my documents fall into several categories, and I don't remember where I put things. Did my SQL script go under doc/sql, lib/sql, examples/sql, snippets/sql, hotfixes/sql or what? Did my HR document go under company/doc, doc/company, etc.? I don't have time to obsessively categories and maintain consistent directory structures and cross-references.
Something like meta tags would be very useful. Something that says "oh, a .sql extension ... let me automatically assign the tags 'script', 'sql', and 'txt'" and then let the user add, modify, and search that list.
Uhm...BS. Since automotive examples are a gold standard on Slashdot:
Look at the interface of a car and supporting infrastructure. It's great at this point (people tend to forget it wasn't always like this). And "idiots" routinelly can handle it, can use it. But not only them...heck, UI of a rally car or F1 car is basically the same.
As a matter of fact, it's quite safe to assume you also use it. That makes you an idiot, right?...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Can we get some sort of campaign going against some of the changes in the Gnome 3 Shell? Architecture changes and performance impovements? Yes please! Altered usability and workflow? No thank you.
Gnome already works!
I'm seeing this kind of "MMO style" user interface more and more, where the desktop becomes more and more obscured by locked down immovable user interface elements. I've gotten used to the task bar on Windows and the Menu Bar on the Mac and the Panel, I can deal with that, there's one box and it's pretty small and I can stuff everything into it... but Microsoft keeps turning menus into big obtrusive blocks (ribbons and sidebars and the start panel and so on) and this new Gnome scheme seems to be putting this horrid scheme on steroids.
No, no, no, ten thousand times, no.
I know I would like a working Gnome, and I'm sure many others would as well.
Y'know, jacking with the UI worked *so* well for Vista. I use OpenOffice.org as much as possible now because it's more Office-like than Office 2007.
Make it faster and less buggy. But please don't change it.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
> If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape
> the geek-in-a-basement marketshare, it has to focus
> on the average non-tech user.
Actually, focusing *exclusively* on the average non-tech user will put you where Apple was in 1995, before they got Jobs back.
There has to be a balance. A good rule of thumb is, the default setup should be geared toward the end user, but it's important to provide more flexible features and configurability for more advanced users.
> And no, pasting a link to a windows share is not what this user does.
Actually, users do (or try to do) an astonishingly wide variety of things, many of which do not make a heck of a lot of sense to a computer geek. Pasting a link to a CIFS fileshare into a web browser and expecting it to show them the contents of the fileshare is barely the tip of the iceberg. They print email that they don't want, even if they're being charged by the page. They type URLs into search boxes. They use the mouse upside down. They use spaces to center text on a line and blank lines to create double spaced copy. They type several pages of text into a six-line textarea on a web page, hit print, and expect to see all of the text they typed on the paper, and they get very upset when it's not there, because they *need* it to be there, to show the court. They set the zoom level in print setup to 300% and get upset when the ends of some of the lines get chopped off. They print white text and get upset if it's not legible. (I tell them the printer is all out of white ink.)
> Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file"
> that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is.
Yeah, recently used file lists are useful. Welcome to the state of the art of 1991.
> He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got
> lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour.
Actually, in all the considerable time I have spent working with, observing, and supporting end users, I have never yet seen an end user deliberately open more than one window at a time. I've seen them get several browser windows because client-side script links open windows without their knowledge; this, of course, confuses the user, who typically doesn't understand why the back button won't work. But I've never EVER seen an end user open two word processing windows at once.
I'm sure there *are* users who do this. As I said, users do an astonishingly wide variety of things. But opening lots of windows is not at all common among the computer illiterate, I can tell you that for free.
Now, power users open lots of windows. Amazingly large numbers of windows. But power users also like for things to be configurable and are willing (usually eager) to learn how to do new things. That's a whole different category of users.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file" that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is. He doesn't organize his files, he doesn't care about file hierarchies, he just wants his file. He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour. Believe it or not, no desktop environment makes it really easy to do such basic stuff.
I just have to ask, who are all these people? That really have no concepts of folders, piles, boxes or whatever metaphor you want to use. I've met people that put everything on the desktop and they're the same people that have all their papers in a big pile, it's not computers they don't understand it's organization. Many, many otherwise quite uneducated computer users get it quite fine. You can't organize unorganized people because you have no idea what belongs together in their mind and trying to divine metadata out of the files themselves is useless except in extremely few limited circumstances where others have filled in the metadata like mp3 id tags. You'll never know that the mp3s, the cover image, the lyric text and their homepage bookmark somehow belongs together unless someone tags it, and it's exactly what those people won't do. They won't even put it into different piles!
If the first one is somewhat common, I've never met anyone with the second problem. Even preschoolers and people well into retirement age don't seem to have a problem with this concept. It's like having a book shelf and a desk, if you keep opening up books and putting them on your desk you'll have a mess, you should close those you are done with by clicking the X in the top right corner. It's a common element you'll find in browsers and tabs, chat messages, email messages in outlook, any of a million normal places in all common applications. If they really are this unfamiliar with computers, they should take some remedial classes at the local community college. This is like trying to design some incredibly complex (and epic fail) system to create a car without a brake pedal on the assumption the driver won't know when to brake.
For example, one source of endless confusion I've seen is launching multiple instances of one application. That one does not translate well from the real world, it's likc taking a book off the shelf multiple times. It makes sense in some contexts, but often what they really want is to bring the current application to the front - or they've forgotten launching it in the first place. Being able to configure that, without any application support, would be solving a real problem. Just configure any application to run in single instance mode and they'd never to get confused again, either click it from taskbar or launch it again and the same instance will be brought to front. Just one example of things I think they could be solving.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I dual boot my MacBook between Ubuntu and OS X, so the screen shots were interesting to me. I liked the multi-desktop preview with window drag and drop but OS X already has that - very convenient when arranging work flows. I thought that the central date display with drop down calendar was good also.
OTR: love to see innovation: I think that software engineering and computer science are the premier creative avocations because what we do is both 'self interesting' and enables most other fields.
Make a hyperbole and everyone will believe it.
I noticed filesystems on MacFUSE have a greater tendency to crash, actually. Makes it quite frustrating to use for long periods of time.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Users should learn to save their god-damned files somewhere sensible
And the U.S. Congress should repeal some of the expansions of copyright foisted upon us by the 105th Congress. But Congress doesn't, and users don't.
Your computer is still hackable.
Care to describe what you mean by that? For various definitions of "hackable", no computer is unhackable unless it is never turned on. One could resort to rubber-hose or black-bag cryptanalysis to gain credentials to access a system.
I use Virtualbox for the 2% of the time I _need_ Windows.
And you still need to pay for Windows, and you need to upgrade RAM to support multiple operating systems at once.
Every time I use MacFUSE I get a deluge of kernel panics.
Wow, I never knew about sshfs before. It's *awesome*! Nice info GP, and thanks for highlighting this for me, parent, since I didnt actually read the GP to the end ;-) Wicked.
Time to switch to xfce.
Linux needs this.
I'm not sure what your exact specification is, but there's Gnome Do which claims to be smart about converting short key sequences into program names (so "ffx" will likely turn into "firefox", "opow" into "open office word processor", i.e. oowriter). There's also the default GNOME run dialog which autocompletes things in your $PATH. And you can set up keyboard shortcuts for your favourite applications with xbindkeys.
So exactly what's missing?
If you use Gnome and liked Amarok 1.x, you could also take a look at Exaile. It's pretty much Amarok 1.x for Gnome, except that it's still actively developed. It doesn't feel as bloated as Songbird either.
I never used Gnome, or Linux for that matter, so out of mere curiosity, how can anyone thrust anything down one's throat with it being OSS? Isn't it the whole point of open source that vendors can't thrust anything down your throat as it is the case with Apple or Microsoft?
When did you last use MacFUSE? In my experience it's quite stable - and apparently both VMWare and Parallels think so as they bundle it with their desktop virtualization software.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I spend 47.5% of my work computing time to figure out why the some thing does not work.
I spend 47.5% of my work computing time to browse net while waiting for build, version control commit or bug tracker to load the page.
If I use Windows the build time many times slower.
I get paid by hour so I really don't care. But if you care, keep user interface minimal and responsive - and servers functional.
Don't get me wrong: I love KDE3.
But I think it's a good idea of them, to not repeat the "fun" with the KDE 4.0 misunderstanding. And the "more fun" of KDE 4.3 still being pretty much unusable for an experienced KDE3 user.
If only the GNOME team would care for things like choice (= building in options/configurability), and that part of the Gaussian curve that does not want dumbing down to unusability... (which sadly now is half the hype with KDE4 too.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
i'd spend it doing something else anyway to avoid people like you.
I spend my time avoiding people who can't read complete sentences. I said "firefox and eclipse".
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I used to be an old-school Mac user. Back when Macintosh was *really* kicking ass (UI-wise), it was simultaneously one of the easiest-to-use and most powerful desktops ever made. AppleScript in its prime whoops the *crap* out of any other GUI scripting language, to this day.
Of course, since people whine and cry over every little tiny UI change *anyway*, I'm afraid that doesn't hold much weight anymore. We've figured it out: the whining doesn't indicate dissatisfaction, it indicates that you changed something, no matter how tiny. It's just something to be filtered out and ignored after each change.
Or, in the words of a long lamented Fark admin, who posted this brilliance in the middle of a giant thread bitching about Fark layout changes: "You'll get over it."
But really, the point is this: if you don't like the direction GNOME is going, just don't use it. Right? There's not much more to it than that. Otherwise, if you want to define the direction GNOME is going, then become part of the project and do that.
None of those two options require bitching about it on Slashdot.
Comment of the year
The last time I used it was about a month or two ago, and I had to disable it or I'd get a kernel panic about every three days.
Users should learn to save their god-damned files somewhere sensible so they can actually find them again, and close windows when they're done with them.
Should, would, could. Reality is: they don't.
Cope with reality. You can't live your entire life in some fantasy world where people do exactly what you'd like them to do all the time, because that's simply not going to happen. People have evolved to be the way they are for millions of years, you're not going to change that after a couple of lectures about what they "should" do.
UI design is as much about psychology as it is software engineering. I hope that someday people like you figure that out, so we could get more usable software for everybody.
Comment of the year
Experience suggest Linus will be switching back to KDE shortly after :P
He so fickle... Or is it practical?
It works like this, new major version $Competing_Desktops comes out,it lacks the polish, he goes back to the one that's had the polishing.
Just the pendulum swinging and not needing to be ahead of the curve, but still fun to watch the flames.
My experience with *inexperienced* users always shows one thing that no Desktop GUI seems to have addressed/solved yet: the User who does not care whether the program they want is already running or not, they just want to use it. At the moment you look to see in one area if, say, you have a web browser already running and if not then you start one. This is one step too many. The User should just have one button to press per app and then the GUI decides whether to simple bring an existing app window to the front, or start the app for the first time. (Some programs play well with multiple startups, others do not.)
I was thinking the same thing. "Please don't shoehorn this crap into the next LTS!" Hopefully they'll just stick it in the intermediate releases, however. I'll give it a spin around the office, but i'm not getting my hopes up for this.
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
Make a system any idiot can use and only idiots will use it.
It's this attitude that guarantees OSX and Windows a 99% share of the desktop.
The ordinary user expects sensible defaults that allow routine tasks to be completed routinely.
He'll tolerate less-than-optimum solutions to more complex tasks if the solution is easy to find and easy to implement.
People have learnt to live with the idea that when they step off a high cliff, they don't get a second chance. They would learn to live with the harsh realities of rm if we gave them the chance. Yes, it will involve a generation of tedious whining, but for a truly powerful interface paradigm, it will be worth it.
[FUCK BETA]
If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape the geek-in-a-basement marketshare
A-ha! There's your problem sir. Your supposition is false to begin with. Who here really cares about market shares? Who are you talking to? Most free software developers to it out of a hobby, some of them (I hope I'm in that group someday) even get paid for it. But very few developers do stuff because 'the boss told them to'. And I think only the boss would care about market share. We, developers, mostly care about interesting code, fun functionalities and technical problem solving. I'm selfish, I'm not in it for the money, I'm in it for my own pleasure.
I was thinking of it somewhat differently. My thought was:
"I'm glad that they aren't doing this for a year. By that time KDE4 might be nearly as useful as KDE3.0 was."
FWIW, I'm currently using Gnome, but I'd used a KDE desktop since the days of Gnome1.x. (When they changed that out, I switched to KDE...over the same kind of usability issues that have currently caused me to switch back to Gnome.)
It's not merely bugs, it's design issues. Interface designers don't seem to be able to design a new interface without including so many usability problems that it's nearly always a disaster.
(N.B.: The KDE2.x->KDE3.x wasn't a major change in the interface. The major changes were under the hood, and showed up as bugs. There are known ways of dealing with bugs. They don't work perfectly, but they exist. There don't seem to be known ways of dealing with basic UI design errors. Not even ways to collect the information that would let you know that you've made a mistake.)
To me this looks like a massive redesign of the interface. And it looks terrible. (Quite esthetic, but terrible from the usability standpoint.) I could be wrong, because I'm judging from still images, and I don't know how or why those images were selected, or how common it is for the system to get in that state.
The dual bar design is excellent. It allows one to have a constant display ot the most common tools used, and the currently active applications, in a very small area of the screen. The images showed render the screen unusable when that information is being displayed. Quite very much not good. Twice as bas as double plus ungood.
So I'm really glad that it won't show up for another year. Maybe by then they'll have realized a few of their mistakes. And I don't mean bugs, I mean design errors. Until then ... well, the latest revision of KDE4 was approaching the usability of Gnome. It still has a ways to go, but a couple of more revisions and I may be able to switch back to it.
P.S.: Eye-candy is all very well, but it doesn't have much, if anything, to do with usability. It often seems to be an inverse relationship. And usability trumps eye-candy any day in my use.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That means put the hard and unglamorous work into providing an desktop experience as seamless and polished as Microsoft and Apple do right now.
That means sitting their asses down in front of their computers and putting 40+ hours a week into shitty and unrewarding bug fixes and finishing the hundreds of half-assed features implemented in Gnome right now.
In typical Slashdot fashion, a -1 Troll comment contains, sadly, the most truthful thing I have read in a long time.
Yet it seems to be the center of this new gnome shell :). With it in the middle of the panel, it ultimately limits what can be done with the "panel", if it is still that underneath...
Application switching and taskbar; Ubintu Netbook remix (UNR), which this seems derived from, actually gets it right and best. Using just icons, one for each app, expanding along the top panel, it is both easy to switch and takes up far less real estate than the old taskbar, making it effective to converge on a single taskbar. Just give it the functionality to close, minimize, etc, by right clicking on the application icon, and have it open a "normal" window rather than automatic maximize with the titlebar in the panel, and the underlyng logic of UNR already accomplishes most of what is needed for a "new" gnome shell, with more functionality easily accessible, and with a very similar look. Indeed, it means gnome desktop and netbook could then converge on many common interface elements rather than this new and rather ugly thing. No pager? Sure, let's go back to the 1980's in desktop functionality, or have a castrated desktop experience, like typically on Microsoft Windows. The only thing that could reduce desirability even further from what I have seen so far would be to make it depend on Mono.
Activity: this may be okay, it clearly takes some getting used to, but to me it overloads different functionality. Hopefully it can be done with a icon rather than the long text on the panel, that way one could also park some launch icons for favorite apps, followed of course by an icon version of taskbar and of course time de-throned from the center. That is what I would want to see.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've never understood the hostility behind comments like this. What skin is it off your nose?
Even advanced users can benefit from features like these, especially if they are customizable and substitutable. Computers are supposed to automate tasks like that. Just one example: I used to have a complex system of folders to organize my email. I could find things easily, but it also required consistent effort to maintain. Now, with gmail, I can still find things just as easily, but the effort of maintaining that ease is handled for me. I may have the skills to operate a computer from the silicon on up, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate not having to use them.
This space intentionally left blank.
I find I get closest to what I had on real kde running xfce with the kde backend and the kde applications. I use the new QGtkStyle which makes the kde /qt applications use gtk to draw the widgets. and compiz expose and cairo-dock (I don't like the always on top of the xfce panel). This gives me most of what I had with kde 3.5 and compiz except different wallpaper per desktop.
I just got done trying kde 4.3 for 3 weeks. It is to much of pain to get it to give me MY desktop not what they fucking want to give me.
Most of the applications are as good as the old ones (the only complaints I see are 2 i don't use konq. and amorock).
Since the kde devs. now talk about options being bad! sort of like gnome did from 1.4 ->2 i don't see kde ever going back to a useful desktop os again. I think they are going for the new name of KCE K Cellphone Environment.
Oh I was the same as you in I used gnome 1.4 and tried gnome 2 could not get used to how unfriendly it was to configuring what you want and moved to kde.
Complete incremental backup of computer to network drive, usb drive, whatever.
Because we all know Windows computers can't do that.
nfs, and sshfs. They really are awesome. Windows/mac users don't even know what they are missing.
SSHFS I'll give you, because that would be awesome. But NFS? Besides a question of whether NFS even holds a candle to something like CIFS (I can't speak to NFSv4, but I'd use CIFS before any previous version of NFS any day of the week), Windows has an NFS server and client.
"If you open more windows in the current desktop, the windows are automatically arranged to give you the best possible view."
So, no doubt about what the 'best possible' view is, and no room for another opinion. You will accept the best possible view and like it!
The bigger the OSS projects get, the quicker the transformation becomes. Pretty soon they will rename themselves Microsoft Gnome... I'd like to say that I will be leaving them to go with KDE but unfortunately they're just as bad. What horrors they all are.
Someone please fork Gnome, get rid of Mono and go some way, any way other than the daft bunch of nuts which is Gnome 3.0
Have you figured out how to get it to play a sizable playlist of music files in multiple different formats, without choking?
Running whatever the most updated version is for Ubuntu 9.04 (have downloaded 9.10, haven't had time to install just yet).
I can't figure why, but every time I just set it to play my full collection, or even a sizable subset thereof, Rhythmbox will inevitably choke at the start of playback of some song (different songs all the time) at no regular interval. I can't tell for sure, but it might be when it moves on from one file to another in a different format. I've got mostly mp3s, some m4as, and a sprinkling of oggs. Rhythmbox thinks it's playing -- the Play button up top is still shown as pressed -- but no output. Pausing and playing again does nothing. Stopping and playing again does nothing except make Rhythmbox hang, from which it might or might not recover, only to sit there again and do nothing. Quitting and then trying to play the same file will make it work again, but that's a drag when the whole point of what you're trying to do is to get it to play a long playlist with no intervention. :(
Anyway, curious if you have any ideas.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
ctrl-shift-n makes a new folder when in list view. Not quite what you were looking for but... it's something.
I use Gnome because unlike KDE it has a clean, simple, uncluttered interface. Gnome 3.0 looks very much as though it is introducing the worst elements of KDE plus a few novel ones of its own.
Remove the significant differences between the two and you remove the incentive for me to stay with Gnome. Come September when Gnome 3.0 appears as a default in Ubuntu, I will move over to KDE, and good riddance. The Gnome project managers obviously don't care what their users think.
Might want to use a different calculator, though. By my count, you have accounted for 105% of your computing time...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I agree. I wish GNOME was made by Debian "developers". That way, Linux fans might be spared the stupidity until KDE gets their shit together and finally releases something that looks like a half-assed Mac OS X or Windows 7 with some tech that works approximately close to Quartz on Apple. GNOME can just die.
Here's my proposal: millionaire Shuttleworth buys the GNOME boys lots and lots of books about human-computer interaction and funds usability studies. He would actually make normal humans use that shit. Wait...It's better if he funds KDE. At least they're not clueless, just a bit slow and lacking manpower. Oh, that and the C++ fixation Apple and Microsoft got over years ago.
How long do GNOME boys they think they can keep up with that moronic idea of delivering a GUI programmed in C (!), for fsck's sake! (Meanwhile, Apple has moved to garbage collection in their Objective-C and Microsoft is miles away with their C# and CLI (that's Common Language Interface, in case your frozen in a time capsule and think it's "Command Line Interface").
Yeah, the technology lag in Linux is kinda showing...And you know what? It'll only get worse, much worse. It looks pathetic now, but I dare not think where we will be in a decade. I'm guessing dead and buried on the desktop (and it doesn't matter - Linux has never been a priority on the desktop - we can all buy a perfectly fine Unix for desktops made by Apple, right?)
And you what I find *amazing*: how GNOME developers just make shit up as they go along, without any regard to usability or any empirical evidence collected by them that takes into account usage patterns by normal humans. Really, really good. Because, of course, in Linux, you're a "hacker." You just make shit up as you go. And that goes for GUIs, file systems, packaging systems, X, whatever...
With over a decade of Linux usage, I'm getting to the point I might actually buy myself a Windows notebook and just forget about the whole experience. It's made by clueless people, with the exception of the kernel people that work for hardware companies that would like Sun Microsystems to fold.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Don't you recognise great art when you see it. Gnome 3.0 will have a place in the Museum of Modern Art when you and your stupid 'practical' applications are long dead and six feet under.
As an artist, I can tell you that Gnome 3.0 can be appreciated on many levels, is both dynamic and static at the same time and exhibits all of the features of greatness, genius and profundity worthy of an icon of the age. Future generations will look back and ask themselves how the font of creativity which Gnome 3.0 represents was able to flow midst the sea of ignorance which existed at the time.
I don't know why i'm bothering to even talk to you load of ignoramuses. Gnome 3.0 is in the same class as the Sistine Chapel, Piero de la Francesca's Virgin dell Nino and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup.
One day, windows managers will no longer require 'functionality' and then they will be free of the bonds with which the sorry minds of plebeians have sought to restrict them.
Except that Microsoft actually tests their GUI usability on normal humans with focus groups for months. GNOME, OTOH, was using an outdated guideline plagiarized right out of Mac OS 8 and today just makes shit up.
Windows 7 is not XP or Windows 95.
Face it. Microsoft got their shit together. Superior GUI. Superior methods in software engineering. Even superior security, some might argue.
Linux? Just look at it. It's what happens when you're stuck in the 70s.
And you probably know quite a few ex-Linux power users that feel all smug and warm with their Apple computers.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
They don't listen to anyone. They don't even read bug reports. You would know this if you had been following GNOME for the last few years. You'd have read the huge debate about how they have stuck their heads up their asses a long time ago.
You're the fucking troll.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Ever since I upgraded my P4/Intel-845-motherboard to Koala, GNOME or the X server has been crashing several times a day. The mouse still moves the cursor, but nothing can be clicked, no keyboard presses have any effect. I can telnet into the box, but the screen gets no updates. Stopping and/or restarting gdm has no effect (the scripts report OK). No errors in the console, or in dmesg.
I can't wait for GNOME 3 to fix this. I haven't even seen anyone else reporting it, and none of the updates since the Koala release have fixed it.
What will fix this?
--
make install -not war
1. I don't worry about firewalls, or anti-virus software.
Sucker.
4. New OS every few months, FREE. FOREVER..
This is a good thing?
i'd spend it doing something else anyway to avoid people like you.
I spend my time avoiding people who can't read complete sentences. I said "firefox and eclipse".
Not meaning to be rude, but you don't seem to be very good at this.
Seriously? It's humiliating that after two decades, Linux still doesn't have a half-usable desktop manager. What do you think makes Windows popular? Is it the stability or the power? Or is it the fact that any idiot can use it?
Perhaps you should rethink your business model before only members of High IQ societies can use your intimidating GUI.
I, too, haven't had good luck with MacFUSE. It crashes all the time and just doesn't work well in general. Still not as bad as CyberDuck though. I realize they are for different purposes, but click and drag actually moved something off the server and to my computer, instead of copying. Then it crashed and I lost all my data. It was not a good day.
I remember reading that GNOME 2.30 was going to be relabelled GNOME 3.00, or something like that. Where did all these ideas to change (read stuff up as per KDE rivals) a perfectly workable base desktop environment suddenly come from?
Why not focus on improving the 2.x series, and maybe add in some extra features for a 3.x release?
I would be very happy with a GNOME desktop that:
If GNOME developers did at least some of this kind of stuff, I'd be a very happy person indeed. They've made an excellent desktop so far and really doesn't need much more than polishing in my view.
I watched the demo or mockup for Gnome 3.0 and from what I saw, the main screen is constantly shrunk, as activities are opened up and displayed. With the shrinking comes a scaling down of the displayed window, including font size. I already have trouble with fonts the size of 8 pixals; My crt monitor can handle the resolution to 2000x1500 but my eyes cannot. Time to rethink functionality. Perhaps it is best to design for dual monitors, or monitors with screen ratios of 2 to 1.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I think I'll back the 'force feeding' notion from the standpoint of a problem I hit when I just switched to Ubuntu. First off, the force feeding in the Linux world is different from that in the proprietary world. None the less it is real and still quite unpleasant.
To start, I was coming from a distribution that did not require Pulse Audio. Right there means I have more choice than with Microsoft. I came from Gentoo. Not exactly a user friendly experience. Not for Grandma. I discovered something called Pulse Audio that absolutely would not work with my sound card, and if it could it would not take advantage of the hardware sound mixing that some sound card (like mine) can do. It's like force every one with a 3D video card to do software rendering, but for sound.
Pulse Audio has some good design points and can solve a few problems that can't be solved without it or something like it. But most of what people need does not require Pulse Audio. And Pulse Audio is still the source of a lot of problems. It can't support some sound cards & drivers that otherwise work great on Linux. Now the natural thing to do would be to make Pulse Audio support optional. Use it if you want to (or if you can if you want to force opt-out) and don't otherwise.
In my still brief experience with Ubuntu I've discovered that removing Pulse Audio is quite difficult and Ubuntu keeps making it more difficult to remove with each release. There's no shortage of bug report that either get closed saying there's no problem or that Gnome is forcing Pulse Audio so there's nothing Ubuntu can do or some other dismissive thing. ("There is no problem...best release ever! ... lalala ... Shut up, stop complaining and be collaborative! ".)
Likewise, while investigating my problems with Ubuntu it appears that Fedora may be going through the same or similar situation. I haven't look and Mandriva (or what ever it is that Mandrake calls themselves now) but I'm getting the impression the 'user-friendly; side of Linux is ramrodding Pulse Audio out no matter how broken it is. I've been on Linux, and I suspect I'll find a way to kill it when I need to, but it's getting more difficult as distros like Ubuntu is installed packages that default to PA support and provide no alternative. I may have to go back to something like Gentoo again for the long term. Right now I'm holding out for Debian for my next install.
In the end, if you are a hacker and you have the time to swim against the stream, then there is no being "force fed" in Linux. Just re-write and maintain everything you don't like.
The way in-house applications SHOULD have been going for the last decade and a half is to have a web browser as a front end. Some commercial applications have gone that way as well, such as the accounting package used in my workplace where apparently everything is done via the web front end - thus one decent machine to run it and who cares about the desktop boxes.
A lot of people do 95% of their work time in a fine web browser which may be really just the front end to an inventory system.
I hope they use the extra time to make things stable, organized, configurable and documented. More descriptive tooltips would help, too.
I recently installed Fedora 11 and in only 3 weeks I've lost the abilty to see the top of the cube, to focus on no windows, to zoom using the scroll wheel, and to bring up a menu by clicking over the desktop. Compiz configuration is hopelessly disorganized. Advice from user forums points to menu entries that don't exist and suggest changes that have no effect.
On the plus side, gnome has the first edge flip I've ever used that is good enough that I don't turn it off after a few days. Now if they'd only make an option to require an ALT key or button press for edge flip and I'd be a lot happier.
Also, it crashes occasionally, but I don't know for sure that the fault is with gnome and not firefox or something else.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I want a system that forces the user to organize his stuff. (...) Can't understand the concept of folders? No computer for you!
Oh, so you're one of those that actually thinks that machine learning algorithms are a setback from the Gopher era, right? LOL.
You and the moron who modded you up. LOL. LMAO at you, you poor thing.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
whinging? Are you British? No that's not allowed on my slashdot.
Perhaps you meant to say whining. Yes whining:
whine (hwn, wn)
v. whined, whining, whines
v.intr.
1. To utter a plaintive, high-pitched, protracted sound, as in pain, fear, supplication, or complaint.
2. To complain or protest in a childish fashion.
3. To produce a sustained noise of relatively high pitch: jet engines whining.
Courtesy of your local online dictionary, you wankers.
When you just need to get shit done.
Seriously though, gnome 2.28 is pretty damned nice. If a little more flexibility were allowed in sizing panels, and Gnome-DO were a default, advertised part of the project, Gnome 2 would be great. Stability and performance are what Gnome needs to work on.
nobody cares.
+1 Troll
Because such systems end up very easy to use if your workflow corresponds to what the designers decided. If it's not, it's a major pain in the bahookey. I can't for the life of me figure out how to configure SoundJuicer to rip CDs at 128kbps CBR, and I struggle to make it save the resulting files the way I want it to. I ended up running abcde, a command line script, to carry out what should be a very simple task. We can make systems powerful without reducing their simplicity - the example you cite, Gmail, is a good one. I'd love to see a filesystem on similar lines. But we risk destroying the beauty of having a Turing machine on our desktops - the ability to compute any damned thing we want - for the sake of letting people not learn a few basic concepts. Sure, easy things should be easy, but hard things should be possible too.
[FUCK BETA]
Installing and using MacFUSE is a joke compared with Places>Connect to Server.
Before Duke Nukem Forever?
I am not devoid of humor.
You're right. I'm a nobody, and I care.
I am not devoid of humor.
Noooooooooooo! ... WTF are you thinking? That's why we are NOT Windoze, for f*cks sakes!
There are already *plenty* of efforts focused on the average non-tech user; if I was one of them I would be happily using what the majority uses. Do you really need another way to find that "god-damn file"??? It's already invented, do the same; if they change it to something better follow suit, if they don't, don't. Don't try to "innovate" on how to do things average, it's bad for innovation and bad for the average!!!
And as for arguing in favor of dumbing down the interface so that LINUX becomes more appealing to the "average" user at cost of its core constituency
It's fine to offer constructive criticism, and you started out well. However it's difficult to find anything that could be construed as constructive in your second paragraph:
In fairness, I suspect that the GP looking for an argument but was directed to abuse instead!
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
"whinging? Are you British? No that's not allowed on my slashdot."
Bloody colonials! I say, it's time we brought the Redcoats back to give you a piece of what for. After tea.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Of all the replies to this post yours was the best. Uniquely, you appear to make a valid counterpoint. However, like all analogical arguments, this one only works to the degree that the items used actually do match up in important ways. In this case, you are comparing a general purpose computer with a car, and I would submit the two items have large differences specifically in ways that are directly relevant to UI design and therefore the car analogy fails. A car does a relatively small number of things. Driving the car is simply a matter of varying a handful of basic parameters - steering deviation, engine speed, drivetrain gear ratio, and braking are the core functions of the car. Now it just occured to me that this analogy actually *does* work, just not how you are using it. But the computer equivalent of the general customary layout of controls on a car would be either a high level language like C that has a single instance available and working on basically every platform - sounds like gcc to me - or at a lower level in common constructs of the machine language and microcode of different architectures. What you are talking about is an entirely different level of analysis, however, and at this level the analogy fails spectacularly, because a general purpose computer is not normally perceived or treated as if it only is a machine that can perform a limited number of simple mathematical functions with I/O functions tacked on, which is the literal truth, but it must still be analysed in terms of human experience and society, of course. And at that level of analysis a general purpose computer is a meta-machine. It is a machine that becomes (or controls) other machines. It does not simply accelerate, decelerate, and vector in a three dimensional system which is a close approximation of a two dimensional one - it is easily thousands of times as complex.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
No, people must whinge. If nobody whinges, all kinds of bad ideas that would otherwise be scrapped will get through. Whinging is necessary.
It's only the way Linus talks when he sees something he doesn't like. Actually, maybe it's a bit kinder than Linus usually is.
Windows sucks. Gnome sucks. KDE sucks. etc, etc, ad naseum. The consistent theme I see in these comments is that everyone is an expert. "Designing a GUI is simple, you simply..." "Why aren't they doing this simple..." "I would like to see them add a simple..." Be prepared to have your mind blown:
It isn't simple.
Do you have any idea how challenging it is to design a desktop that basically meets the needs of EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET . Not just programmers. Not just open-source proponents. Not just mom and dad. Not just the elderly. Not just the young. Not just those with 2 iPhones and 6 computers. Not just artists. Not just professionals. Not just luddites. Not just English speakers. Not just multilingual. Not just those who can see. Not just those who can hear. Not just those that are colorblind.
Everyone.
Where do you find the balance between simplicity and capability? What conventions are most of the millions of people going to be familiar/comfortable with? Should new conventions be established despite them being unfamiliar?
One thing Microsoft has over open-source community projects: enormous amounts of research. Even with all that, it's still going to be hard. The majority of users will probably dislike it, simply because you have to design it for everyone.
Complete bullshit. SUN funded a usability study for GNOME years ago and the findings were formalized in GNOME's HIG.
Time makes more converts than reason
Would http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47948 be the reason why? A very basic feature of even MS Windows will not be implemented for ages. Other stuff appears to be more important than a decent desktop.
The KDE2.x->KDE3.x wasn't a major change in the interface.
Because it wasn't a major change in the underlying toolkit. Qt3 wasn't fundamentally different from Qt2, only better, whereas the KDE3-to-4 switch was a switch from Qt3 to Qt4, and that was a *massive* change internally. Since they were going to have to rip apart the guts of KDE anyway for this change (necessary to take advantage of the new features of Qt4), they also decided to make some UI changes as well.
Ubuntu was never going to switch to Gnome 3 in the next release anyway, before this announcement there was still a planned 2.30 release which is what the next LTS is going to use.
I don't think this announcement affects Ubuntu's plan's at all. If there is any effect, it'll be Gnome 3 being introduced in Ubuntu 11.04 instead of 10.10, but I don't think that'll be the case.