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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.
That isn't true. Blizzard rarely releases a game on time, they are of the up-most quality, and they are money driven.
I'm glad that we can make such broad sweeping generalizations these days, that Microsoft now represents the entire private sector.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
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!
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.
...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.
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*!
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Make a system any idiot can use and only idiots will use it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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]
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.
Except that it isn't. According the GnomeShell page on Gnome Live, "Much of the code of the shell is written in Javascript and Clutter and GNOME platform libraries via GObject Introspection and JavaScript bindings for GNOME."
GObject Introspection is actually quite cool IMO, it makes it much easier to create bindings from dynamic languages libraries that use GObject, like the GNOME platform, GStreamer, etc.
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.
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.)