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."

Comments

...this is because...and why...

[anglophobe_0]

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

I couldn't resist.

Re:taking the time to get it right

[Afforess]

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.

How can xterm be improved?

[SpaghettiPattern]

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

Re:How can xterm be improved?

[XanC]

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

Re:How can xterm be improved?

[Daniel Weis]

Try GNOME Do.

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

GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck

[QCompson]

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.

Re:WTH

[BikeHelmet]

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.

Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish.

[rocketpants]

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.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't, eh?

[jbn-o]

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".

Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish.

[thaig]

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.

Stop fucking with the interface

[leereyno]

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.

Re:WTH

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

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!".