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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."

22 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. ...this is because...and why... by anglophobe_0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    for POST in $(cat slashdot); do
    beGrammarNazi $POST
    done

    I couldn't resist.

  2. Re:taking the time to get it right by Afforess · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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    If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
  3. How can xterm be improved? by SpaghettiPattern · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)
    1. Re:How can xterm be improved? by XanC · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You're looking for Yakuake. It's just like Quake: hit the tilde and a command console drops down from the top.

    2. Re:How can xterm be improved? by Daniel+Weis · · Score: 5, Informative

      Try GNOME Do.

      The "Docky" frontend is a fantastic dock experience as well.

    3. Re:How can xterm be improved? by ceeam · · Score: 4, Informative

      You're looking for Katapult. And you know what - that was probably the first (or one of the first) apps of such kind.

  4. WTH by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:WTH by BikeHelmet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I respect that they're aiming for stability (quite different from what KDE did), but I'm not sure I like the direction their UI is going. I'll probably hop to KDE or LXDE.

    2. Re:WTH by fnj · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oh, for Pete's sake. That's unbelievably lame. If you lose single-click-to-open capability, then it's a huge step backward and a crock. Double click is an abomination. It BARELY had some feeble justification when there was only a single mouse button, but it's a complete crock in the real world of 2 or more buttons.

      If it takes even longer to open a folder than current Gnome, that's just unacceptable. Compare navigating folders containing thousands of files using the Gnome file-open dialog now, against the Kde file-open dialog. It's night and day. The Kde version is faster when you first hit such a folder, and then it caches the contents and is blazing fast after that. Night and day.

      Time to branch at 2.28 and maintain a sane alternative.

    3. Re:WTH by Rhapsody+Scarlet · · Score: 5, Funny

      I respect that they're aiming for stability (quite different from what KDE did), but I'm not sure I like the direction their UI is going. I'll probably hop to KDE or LXDE.

      So it's finally happened. After months of "I hate where KDE is going with KDE 4, I'm switching to GNOME!", now it's GNOME that's making unpopular changes and people are saying "I hate where GNOME is going with GNOME 3, I'm switching to KDE!".

  5. GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It is a major ongoing failure. The problem with relying on people that are motivated by their inspiration is that you tend not to get "normal." You have to pay people to work on "normal". Refining and polishing is not fun. Inventing your own bespoke miracle from whole cloth and taking it no more than 10% of the way to functional before you lose interest and wander off is infinitely more fun.

      There are some amazing products among the Gnome and KDE collections. Amarok, kate, konsole, k3b, etc. Individually these are nice programs.

      KDE 4 is and ongoing failure. I haven't bothered to get my hands on 4.3 yet because 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 killed all hope. They haven't had the 5 years it's going to take to fix what's wrong with 4.x. I'm sticking with 3.5.x until that interval has passed.

      Gnome is still plagued by Nautilus [1]. Dolphin appears to have a point, although pursuing it at the expense of a real file manager is another fail. The vast collection of background services sucking down hundreds of MB of RAM doing who the hell knows what is also on-going and ever worsening problem.

      Both systems pollute home directories with vast file hierarchies hidden in dot-file directories making a shared NFS home a practical impossibility. You'd think they were being paid by the dot-file. No one in either group seems to realize why this isn't desirable. It doesn't even occur to them that it might not be!

      [1] Just boot XP and clone Windows Explorer, mkay...? A badly done clone of Explorer would trump anything Gnome/KDE has produced to date wrt file management. And remember kids, detail/list view is, if not pretty, absolutely fucking critical; alphabets replaced pictographs for a reason.

    2. Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck by QCompson · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So true... both desktop environments are missing the point. You have misguided ego-hounds like Aaron Seigo chasing after some elusive new "desktop paradigm" which no one has asked for nor wants.

      The formula for a popular successful desktop is so simple: something fully integrated with all options available via menus (program launching, suspend/hibernate, screensaver, etc), and something fast and stable. Very few everyday users care about some translucent twitter widget on the desktop. They want a platform to launch applications from that is simple, fast and stable. That should be priority number one.

  6. Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. by thaig · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. by rocketpants · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Damned if they do, damned if they don't, eh? by jbn-o · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  9. Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. by thaig · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. by Arker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Make a system any idiot can use and only idiots will use it.

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    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
  11. Leave well alone! by Smivs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. by u38cg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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]
  13. Stop fucking with the interface by leereyno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Stop fucking with the interface by MrHanky · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not only that, but this supposedly "fucking with the interface" doesn't actually happen. In KDE4, you still close windows by single-clicking the small [x] up in the right corner of the window, you still open apps by clicking icons in a menu, you can still put files on your desktop. Yet, you have masses of assclown know-it-alls like the GP who will complain that everything is ruined, because, oh -- they never really say, they just whine, whine, whine.