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GNOME 2.30, End of the (2.x) Line
stovicek writes "GNOME 2.30 was originally intended to coincide with GNOME 3.0 — a massive cleanup and rethinking of the popular desktop. However, GNOME 3.0 is delayed for at least another release, which leaves GNOME 2.30 as most likely the last version in a series stretching back almost a decade. [...] 2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series. For those who were around for GNOME 2.0 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence of how far GNOME in general and the free desktop in particular have come in the last decade in usability and design. If you do a search for images of early GNOME releases and compare the results with 2.30, you can have no doubt that, although GNOME sometimes tends to over-simplify, its improvements over the last decade remain unmistakable."
Fail.
I remember gnome when it first arrived on the scene. I seem to recall testing it around late 1998 on a workstation. Definitely not the same as current stuff.
Is this some kind of reverse psychology? Well it will never work.
Damn dude. Sorry. I accidentally stole your moment of glory. : (
this could be the last good release if it goes bad. i didnt like some of their ideas for 3 but im sure they will try to please us.
he who controls the spice controls the universe
bonobo is dead... they are using spinoff of kde tech (dbus, khtml, etc)..
If this is done properly, I think it'll be good for GNOME. From where I sit, they sound like they're shooting for a major architecture redesign. In other words, this 2.30 release is analogous to the 3.5 releases of KDE.
And I think starting largely from scratch will be a net benefit. I've never personally used GNOME (though I've recommended it to others) and I've found it to be technologically lacking compared to KDE (KParts and KIOSlaves are awesome, and while there are GNOME counterparts they aren't as used).
One thing I think GNOME does very well is their HIG - probably the best outside of Apple. The new release is very simple - dump a lot of legacy code and keep the HIG. Maybe drop the old-fashioned look too.
Though my fantasy is to see them use Qt.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You can try it out without any harm. It's ... interesting. It is actually quite usable and does give a lot of features that will be quite nice for people that use multiple desktops. I tend to use a single desktop and gnome-do to provide quick access, so I find it gets in the way a bit. There's a few things I don't like about it that I can't change, like the panel at the top of the screen. I prefer it at the side instead, as my netbook and laptops both have decent horizontal resolution but crappy vertical. Perhaps they'll fix that.
... as long as they leave the damn window controls where they belong.
I haven't tried 2.3, but I'm sure it will be minimal incremental improvement over the previous version. Nice to see that they're trying new things
2.30 is totally overrated... 3.0 would be buzz...
I know it's sin to actually RTFA, but I've been a GNOME user since the 1.x days and figured I'd take a read. The author seems to use the number "3.30" to refer to the current release..
Your official freetard party line bleatings are tired.
www.tmrepository.com
The GNOME Conference (GUADEC) will be in The Hague (NL) this year from July 26-30. You can bet there'll be a lot of GNOME 3.0 hacking going on there. More information: see the GUADEC website.
LGPL is less free than GPL, really?
Because some of us don't like KDE4, and prefer the simplicity of Gnome.
Trolling? I think so. If not: [Citation Needed] I very rarely see someone using KDE. In fact, its a bigger surprise, to me, to see someone using KDE than Linux itself.
I resemble that remark.
Powered by Django
Heh. Freetard win.
It's called the "Lesser" GPL for a reason.
Also, unless you get mono exclusively from Novell, you are (potentially) infringing on Microsoft intellectual property. And Gnome has been adopting mono like it doesn't matter.
Yes, Gnome is less free now. Gnome fans totally miss the irony.
--
BMO
Good thing you didn't waste it.
I got first post once, but I didn't even say "first post" or any other misspelled incarnation of it, as I assumed (incorrectly) that someone else would have gotten it by the time my comment went up.
But there it was, at the top of the pile.
Now, when I hear someone say they have no regrets in life, I can only sigh and sadly look down at my feet.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
It should not be a surprise to you that there are less KDE users than linux users. Because only a subset of linux users can use KDE.
I think like 99% of linux users use kde
Don't think so.
The latest figure is 98.9%
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Given the popularity of Ubuntu I find that hard to believe.
TM Repository is officially the saddest, most pathetic website I've ever seen: A tiny community of people who get together just to snark at Linux propaganda. It's like setting up a site to mock the CPUSA.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
See subject: The panel can be rearranged to to the side, bottom, whatever. On my netbook I tend to delete the top panel and add the things I need (task switcher, main menu, clock) to the bottom panel.
Right or left should be no problem either, though.
Because no one who uses Linux uses the default install of Ubuntu... got it.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Not to mention Fedora's default is Gnome too.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
DjangoIsFreetardTechnology(TM)
GNOME is just jealous that they could be more popular if they just made it look and work more like KDE.
Seriously ... look at the difference between the fugliness that is Ubuntu (even with the new "blight" look), and the KDE variant. If they want to fix Ubuntu's visual problems once and for all, they should just do this. Because going from Halloween Orange-and-Black to "Rotting Eggplant" might be a change, but it's not much of an improvement
Sorry sir, but clearly you have never read the LGPL. The "Lesser" part refers to less rights being retained by the granter. The license gives MORE freedom to the users.
FUD, plain and simple... interesting coming from a *nix supporter though.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Wait, what? The LGPL is less free because it's called that way? The LGPL gives me, as a developer, MORE freedom. It's all a matter of perspective.
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
Yes, I DO remember the early days of Gnome and how much better it was than now:
- automatic save and restore of multi-workspace sessions
- handy window operations like maximize-vertically and maximize-horizontally
- easy to change settings like which app to handle movies, etc.
I remember when clicking on a menu button gave an instant response,
not a several second delay for the first time in a session.
Gnome has become bloated and slower while becoming less stable and less powerful.
It is neither easier nor harder for beginners. It has more eye candy.
Gnome clients have also gone downhill: Evolution used to support my mh mail folders.
Now it uses a database that crashes when I try to load my old mail and fails to work
with my rules. It still doesn't integrate the contact manager with the mail rules.
I'd switch to KDE but they've been destroying themselves even faster!
You miss-understand me, I was implying that I see plentiful of Linux users around here, but that KDE is still so uncommon that it invokes surprise on my part.
What's fud about it?
Novell signed a contract with Microsoft. It indemnified people who got mono from Novell from liability. It doesn't cover third parties.
You go find the clause that covers third parties and get back to me.
--
BMO
Call me when the $%%&$%#^ that maintains that part of it allows people to actually tune the Gnome-screensaver modules without ripping it all out and replacing it with xscreensaver.
If you do a search for images of early GNOME releases and compare the results with 2.30
Actually, now when I do a google search for "images of early gnome releases", every result on the first page is just a link back to this slashdot story.
Can anyone tell me what type of images I might have seen before this story was posted?
There are a lot more things I don't like about KDE4. It tries to be all integrated, with a common notification daemon for example, so that status messages can appear with a consistent look in the corner of the screen. The problem is that virtually nothing supports it except for KDE apps that start with "K". If you want that sleek, consistent QT4 look, you're limited to a small subset of free software - there are a lot more GTK applications than QT applications. And I'd prefer to be able to use, for example, a different file manager. Without dolphin, you're unable to take advantage of KIO and whatever search index thing that KDE uses. KDE as a whole seems really tightly coupled - I regularly use gnome apps on my XFCE system without having the gnome libs installed. That's unheard of for KDE.
A particular barrier for me to use KDE is a decent web browser. I've used Konqueror for a few months and it's OK, but KHTML became intolerable. Arora (webkit powered) is good but incomplete. I have similar complaints about the usual KDE chat programs, music players, and Konsole.
KDE lost me as a user when they took away the ability to have a different background on each desktop (yeah, petty point, but it was still a really neat feature in my opinion.) That did cause me to take a closer look at KDE4 before I dropped it, and I found myself not liking the feel of that environment overall. Then I took a look at Gnome and tried it out briefly, but didn't care much for that either (plus, still no multiple backgrounds).
That was when I finally started taking a more in depth look at alternate desktop environments, which led to me settling on Enlightenment. It is definitely very different from what I have been used to (still have a lot to learn and unlearn), but the more I work with it, the more I like it. And the only annoyance thus far is the inability to have both an image as a desktop wallpaper and a different background color (either solid or a pleasant gradient) other than painful white if the image does not fill the screen.
I still use various Gnome and KDE based apps as required (K3B, Nautilus, GDM, and assorted others), but for the overall environment, I am converted over completely to Enlightenment.
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You can run Firefox on KDE.
Your site is a close second.
I'm really tired of the trade-off between simplicity and functionality. This trade-off should not be inherent to either windowing system. Rather, the variety of options presented to the user should be configurable. Each distribution should be able to decide how simple or how configurable they want to make their windowing environment when it is first installed.
A great windowing environment would be able to be made to look very similar to Gnome, KDE, Windows, Mac OS, etc. I don't just mean superficially similar - it should be configurable down to the menu options presented and the types of configuration options presented in dialogs. All of this presentation of options and behaviors should be managed in a special layer, much like CSS is used to configure the presentation of a website.
For example, Ubuntu might choose to ship with a very simple, user-friendly interface. In the system administration, this interface could be changed to a more configurable preset if the user so desires. It wouldn't be a matter of switching from Gnome to KDE. Visually, the change might be as dramatic as a switch from Gnome to KDE, but the basic windowing system would just be running with an alternate configuration.
Do you really think Kubuntu looks good out of the box? I mean, I get it, it's not brown, but it's still ugly. Just a different kind of ugly: blue retard instead of poop brown. The fact is, if you want a tasteful desktop, you have to customize it yourself.
It's called the "Lesser" GPL for a reason.
Yes, it has less restrictions. (ie, more freedom to do different things)
Also, unless you get mono exclusively from Novell, you are (potentially) infringing on Microsoft intellectual property.
/me rolleyes
Remember a while back they were claiming to have some triple-digit number of patents that the Linux kernel infringes on? Remember IBM warning off that mainframe emulator a couple days ago? I'm not convinced that mono infringes significantly more or stronger potentially-hostile patents than any other similarly complex piece of software.
And Gnome has been adopting mono like it doesn't matter.
I thought they only used it for a couple of trivial/perhiperal things?
Yes, Gnome is less free now. Gnome fans totally miss the irony.
Yes, true freedom is an OS that will refuse to run anything except locally-compiled programs, with a compiler which will only compile code that has the GPL licensing headers.
"2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series"
I've noticed that open source software generally seems to be more hung-up and obsessed with version numbers than proprietary software. For example Linus Torvalds has said that there will never be a version 3.0 of the Linux kernel. So I guess 2.9.99.99.999 will be the end of the line.
I don't get the big hang-up with version numbers. Who cares if it is 2.30 or 3.0? My current nVidia video driver for Windows is 196.21 -- as long as it works, who cares?
Qt has been LGPL for a few years now, and KDE has always been part LGPL (like WebKit, a derivative of the old khtml).
Does this version of GNOME allow for easy global key rebinding? There was a version not long ago that sent me off to KDE that appeared to impose some rather autocratically determined key-bindings.
Epic fail.
It looks like it's theoretically possible to build firefox with Qt widgets thanks to Nokia, but it's difficult and unstable.
And yes obviously you can just load both Qt and GTK libraries but it's ugly and memory-inefficient.
Correct. I need to get work done, not play around with the GUI all day.
RAM is cheap today. Just throw a couple 2GB sticks and you won't notice.
HelsinkiSyndrome(TM)
"simplicity"? SIMPLICITY???!
"xfce" is simple.
GNOME, on the other hand, is now a more bloated pig than CDE ever was.. which is amusing, because one of the gnome1 boasts was that it was much lighter than CDE.
Remember a while back they were claiming to have some triple-digit number of patents that the Linux kernel infringes on?
Yes, how can one forget?
IBM and TurboHercules debacle
Yes. TurboHercules is suing IBM in a SCO-esque lawsuit. IBM is supposed to take it lying down?
I'm not convinced that mono infringes significantly more or stronger potentially-hostile patents than any other similarly complex piece of software.
It was enough to convince John Dragoon and Ron Hovesepian.
Given the choice between technology that is potentially more infringing than the other, which one would you pick?
I thought they only used it for a couple of trivial/perhiperal things?
For now. Perhaps you've forgotten Miguel's rantings about how it should be used throughout Gnome? Perhaps you forgot that Miguel works at Novell and that Novell has SuSE with which they can "differentiate their product" with mono (depending on how it's used) in a yet to be determined crucial application. This is not tinfoil. This is how companies work.
snippage of insult
Yeah, whatever. Perhaps you forgot that Qt is LGPL?
--
BMO
Tmrepository is entirely unfunny and a lame ripoff of Adequacy.org.
Get some better writers.
--
BMO
Kill GTK+ off? Maybe when Qt has more than one decent theme that doesn't require installing half of KDE, or when Qt themes don't require a compiler to create. Until then, get lost.
> And Gnome has been adopting mono like it doesn't matter.
You are out of date. Have Fedora 13 Alpha + all updates in a VM right now and behold:
[root@Fedora13 ~]# rpm -qa | grep mono
dejavu-sans-mono-fonts-2.30-2.fc12.noarch
liberation-mono-fonts-1.05.2.20091019-5.fc13.noarch
Everything works just fine. They ditched F-Spot for Shotwell and replaced Tomboy with the C++ port GNote. With those gone mono doesn't need to be installed. Somebody caught the cluetrain and stopped Novell from infecting GNOME with their patent poison.
Democrat delenda est
That may be true. Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass because Microsoft will never, ever go after an insignificant, individual end user like me for patient infringement.
If you're thinking of GNOME in a business setting or are are distributing Mono, you may want to think twice. However, for as long as Mono exists under a free license, I'm happy to use it.
I used KDE from KDE 1.0, when I switched away from TWM. I was fully integrated into the KDE "way of life," and reliant on lots of KDE apps.
I tried to use KDE4.0 but after about two weeks it got the boot. Though it has theoretically improved and I keep a KDE 4 installation on my Fedora 12 personal machine, logging into KDE thus far provides no incentive to switch back, despite updates.
Dolphin is still intolerably slow. Important apps still don't share a consistent appearance; Firefox, Chrome, and OpenOffice in particular look good in GNOME but are full of distracting artifacting and other appearance problems in KDE. GNOME apps in general don't mix well with KDE themes right now. The graphics still don't work right. A notification balloon is likely to take out half the taskbar, etc. They blame this on the radeon driver and I believe them, but that's the hardware I have, and GNOME shows none of the same problems. Desktop management for multiple monitors doesn't behave as I expect it to, and it's difficult to create a configuration that jostles well amongst varying configurations of external, internal, or both, monitors without taskbars disappearing or desktops shifting from display to display unexpectedly. The default icon theme is far too colorful and luminous for focused desktop work of the kind that I do (lots of writing, editing, and calculating) but there are few replacement icon sets to be found. The wireless connectivity manager seems incapable of working with my simple home WiFi installation without needing constant reconfiguration and tinkering, while in GNOME it "just works."
Yes, some of these things could be fixed, but to trudge through each one of them would require rather a lot of time and effort that I just don't have to spare. So despite the fact that I'm still not wild about GNOME either, KDE4 is simply not on the cards in the near future for me. What's missing everywhere is polish. Not the kind that makes widget corners have a "glass" appearance, but the kind that keeps widgets from disappearing or artifacting unexpectedly, or the kind that doesn't leave you wondering why the hell the widget doesn't work, or there isn't a widget for that at all, in the first place. Details work. Not big thoughts. KDE needs to cut out the innovation for a while and patch roof leaks.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many other KDE users right up through KDE 3.x switched to GNOME with the KDE4 release.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Oh, for Christ's sake. Mono is safe. Microsoft made a legally-binding promise not to sue. No judge would even hear the case if they attempted to bring a suit against <I honestly have no idea who they'd sue> unless the GNOME people managed to infringe upon something else in Microsoft's portfolio.
We have much bigger fish to fry. Squabbling about Theora and Mono isn't a productive use of your time, no matter how valid your arguments might be. The standards have been set.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
You go find the clause that covers third parties and get back to me.
Here you go.
Fine, so then LGPL is less free then LGPL?
I think the idea is that X + Mono is less free than X.
It still hasn't been proven that Mono isn't a patent trap.
The problem is that they're trying to push Gnome/Mono into all the Linux distros, and Linux is increasingly being used by businesses and governments. If there is a patent trap in Mono (which exists regardless of its license), then that means that MS can then sue all those businesses and governments for patent infringement. Of course, the real idea probably isn't for MS to get money from people from patent suits, but basically to scare everyone away from Linux for once and for all, and only use "safe" MS software.
The reason that the Linux software you now enjoy is as usable and functional as it is is because many businesses and governments have been investing in it, working with it, and using it. If it were some project only used and developed by hobbyists at home, like ReactOS, it wouldn't be good for anything but playing around. Instead, we have an OS and thousands of apps that are all free, and we can use to do just about anything you can do in a Windows environment (and sometimes much more). The only thing we can't do is run some Windows-specific apps, but that's becoming less and less of a concern as more companies make Linux versions of their apps, and as more alternative apps become available or mature (e.g. OpenOffice).
So these issues which seem to affect only the larger players may not seem to affect you personally, but in reality they do.
It still hasn't been proven that Mono isn't a patent trap.
It hasn't been proven that Qt isn't a patent trap, either. Thing is, to prove that, you have to go through the entire patent database, one by one, and see if any of them are applicable. In fact, you can be almost certain that both Qt and KDE are covered by at least a few, though their validity may be questionable (but then the same is also true for any MS patents that supposedly apply to Mono).
Anyway, this turns out to be irrelevant, since, as someone else pointed out in this thread, Gnome does not depend on Mono in this release.
and interestingly in kde 4.4 with firefox 3.6 it's even using the kde notification thing in the corner whenever it finds an update for things. I believe this is because its using a "standard" (don't know if it is or not) dbus thing to do the notifications so that both gnome and kde can use the same code.
"Simplicity" can mean different things.
Ask a regular user: a "simple" system hides any complexity; in this sense, Ubuntu is simple - everything is automated or set by GUI-based tools.
Ask a developer: a "simple" system is transparent; in this sense, Slackware is simple - there are few GUI-based tools to set the system.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The contract that Novell signed is not the same as the "promise" that Microsoft published later. There is a difference. Novell is indemnified, and so are Novell's customers and people (e.g., developers) who get mono directly from Novell instead of a third party.
Come on, Microsoft does not like standards and interoperability. They are already undermining their own OOXML by using the proposed standard (the one that passed ecma, but not iso) that was rejected instead of the one that the ISO actually approved.
I didn't fall off the kielbasa wagon yesterday.
Call it tinfoil. I don't care. You're naive.
--
BMO
It's more challenging to be the... ... LAST POST!
Or you can switch to a distro that wasn't put together by someone who is color-blind, aided by someone who is spatially challenged ... because like you said, it's STILL ugly.
My opensuse desktop and laptop both look gorgeous with the black Oxygen taskbar. Every once in a while, I change the wallpapers ... just 'cuz ...
Yes, but with Qt, you don't have a rabid Microsoft fan bent on directly implementing Microsoft technology on Linux. Trolltech does not have Miguel. Novell does. Judging from Miguel's actions and his words, I think we have something to worry about. I don't think that Miguel is some sort of Manchurian Candidate, but he is driven by his admiration of everything Microsoft.
--
BMO
GTK+ themes require a compiler to create as well. Unless you count the color tweaking that you can do with the gtkrc files (something you can do easily through the GUI with KDE and isn't considered a theme). Of course, I don't see why a couple of megs of KDE libs is really a problem unless you are using a ten year old computer (but then it wouldn't be fast enough to use GNOME anyways).
The toolkit/DE zealots really amaze me sometimes.
I use KDE. 3.5.10 is still unbeatable when you want fast, clean and powerful. However, it's officially dead now, and the 4.x series sucks.
KDE4 is full of tiny little features that look like what you're used to, but do something completely different. Or they removed the most important button on the Konsole window, injected Amarok with featuritis, and k3b simply does not exist. (Wanna guess my three favorite applications?)
I'm starting to think Joel was right. The KDE project wasted two years trying to produce something "better" than what they already had. They failed miserably.
KDE lost me as a user when they took away the ability to have a different background on each desktop (yeah, petty point, but it was still a really neat feature in my opinion.)
When was this? KDE4.3 has that feature.
I'm really tired of the trade-off between simplicity and functionality. This trade-off should not be inherent to either windowing system. Rather, the variety of options presented to the user should be configurable. Each distribution should be able to decide how simple or how configurable they want to make their windowing environment when it is first installed.
Uhuh.
And then people would bitch about bloat because supporting all those features, options, and workflows would required a fuckton more code.
So here's an idea: pick the environment that fits your needs. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or heck, throw components together that fit your needs. But quit expecting these projects to be infinitely flexible, it's completely unreasonable.
The MCP only covers the ecma parts.
Anything mono that is not ecma is not covered.
The Novell situation is a whole different kettle of fish.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21784/C_CLI_Under_Community_Promise_Mono_Split_in_Half
Would you want to touch that with a 10 foot pole?
I quit from being a vocal KDE4 supporter and moved on to GNOME with the KDE 4.4.x release. The forced Akonadi/Nepomuk/MySQL messup coupled with the perennially unstable Kontact made me throw up my hands in disgust. Why the fsck do I need 100MB+ of Akonadi/MySQL stuff (Nepomuk can be disabled, mercifully) just to run Kontact? Besides, Kontact cannot seem to work properly with anything else other than itself. It cannot sync to Google Calendar, cannot sync to Exchange. Using KDE4 in a corporate environment as a desktop became a chore for me to do. I simply gave up and moved on to GNOME, where I am more than happy with its offerings.
Well, I don't think that looks are a legitimate reason to switch distros. But I concede that I always thought that (open)Suse looks the most stylish.
GNOME will happily run without Mono. Heck, even in Opensuse you can perform a "Mono-sectomy", remove F-Spot, Banshee, gnome-do, Monsoon (whatever that crap is) etc and still have a perfectly well functioning system.
Shouldn't that be "the free desktop in general, and GNOME in particular"?
The contract that Novell signed is not the same as the "promise" that Microsoft published later. There is a difference.
Yes, there is a difference. In one case, Microsoft can't sue because of a contract. In the other, they can't sue because of promissory estoppel. Either way, they can't sue.
But enjoy the hat, I'm sure it's very shiny and stylish.
If there is a patent trap in Mono (which exists regardless of its license), then that means that MS can then sue all those businesses and governments for patent infringement.
I'm getting sick of this meme.
Tell me, are you a patent attorney? What is your expertise for making claims like this one?
Now I'm not a patent attorney either, but here is my understanding: If Microsoft does assert some kind of submarine patent, the main effect will be to cause GNOME and everybody else to yank out Mono. At that point, we will just have to port the Mono apps to Java or something. That is the absolute worst case. Can you give me an example of any time where some company had a submarine patent, then suddenly asserted it, and successfully extracted a bunch of penalties from businesses and governments?
Furthermore, while I'm still not a patent attorney, I have read Groklaw for a while, and I read some essays there about the "unclean hands" doctrine. If a company has patent rights, and discovers that someone is infringing, that company has a duty to inform the infringers as soon as possible; it is not allowed to just let the patent sit there ticking like a bomb, and then demand extra damages because the infringer was infringing for so long.
So, let's review: Mono is a technology that is very similar to the JVM, which in turn is similar to other virtual systems, going all the way back to the UCSD P-system. The amount of prior art is staggering. Besides that, the only danger is a submarine patent, not a new patent: the .NET stuff has been around for years and years, and you have to file for a patent before you publicly disclose a technology, or you lose your chance.
So, the alleged threat is that there is a patent already granted, that nobody has noticed, on technology that has a ton of prior art; and Microsoft is deviously not asserting the patent, but is going to later. Microsoft won't care about the negative publicity for itself and for .NET, because it stands to gain so much and is certain its patent will survive all challenges. And anyone infringing will somehow be on the hook for penalties.
I for one don't believe any of it. C# is as safe as Java and Mono is as safe as the JVM.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It may have been up through 4.2. I am pretty sure I had given up on KDE before 4.3. And I remember at the time, a web search on KDE +"multiple wallpapers" brought up tons of similar complaints with no one being able to offer any solution.
No matter now. I am becoming more and more enamored with Enlightenment these days, and feel no need to switch back to either of the "Big Two" desktop environments. :)
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In one case, only ecma mono is covered.
In the other case, all of mono is covered.
The former is the Microsoft promise.
The latter is the Novell contract.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21784/C_CLI_Under_Community_Promise_Mono_Split_in_Half
There you go.
--
BMO
In one case, only ecma mono is covered.
So only use the ECMA bits (which will soon be factored out), and use the free software stack bindings for everything else, just like, well, basically all existing Gnome Mono applications (last I checked, F-Spot wasn't using winforms).
There, problem solved. Happy now?
http://live.gnome.org/GNOME3Myths#GNOME_3.0_depends_on_Mono.21
So here's an idea: pick the environment that fits your needs. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or heck, throw components together that fit your needs. But quit expecting these projects to be infinitely flexible, it's completely unreasonable.
That was my solution when I saw I didn't like the direction KDE4 was going. Openbox with netwmpager, fbpanel, and feh allowed me to keep my environment free of garbage all over my desktop.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The stuff that's happening with gnome desktop is fantastic. It's especially nice on small laptop/netbook/tablet machines. The latest Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx in beta) has built in social networking that actually jumps ahead of OSX or Windows. The fact that I have something like TweetDeck built into my OS is pretty cool. Sure there are some rough edges. OSX has rough edges too. But I rarely find myself explaining away huge deficiencies. It's just a different bug from your OSX or Windows bug.
I'm excited. But then again I'm trying to be accepting of change as I get older, rather than screaming at the kids to get off my lawn.
I have always thought that KDE's early popularity was a combination of its similarity to Windows (look and feel), and the popularity of Knoppix as the first wide-spread live-CD.
With the latest versions of KDE, it is now once again possible to have a different background for each desktop. I use Kubuntu 9.10 with KDE 4.3.2 and use a separate background for each of my desktops. However, it is was not very obvious how to enable that feature.
The following article mentions how to do that. In the article, read the paragraphs just after the heading which says "Combine Virtual Desktops With Plasma Activities." Notice that the last sentence says "This will allow you to have a different wallpaper on each virtual desktop, as well as a completely separate set of widgets. "
Seven Great Tips To Make KDE 4.3 More Friendly
Kubuntu 9.10 actually uses KDE 4.3.2, but the instructions in the article refer to KDE 4.3. However, those instructions still worked fine for me. Having a separate wallpaper for each virtual desktop has always been one of my favorite features. I was very disappointed, when with the early versions of KDE 4.x, they took that ability away. I am glad that it is now once again possible to to have separate wallpaper for each virtual desktop when using KDE.
I use KDE. 3.5.10 is still unbeatable when you want fast, clean and powerful.
100% on the same wavelength here. Wrote a blog praising the benefits of CentOS 5 w/KDE 3.5.
I spent the better part of a year trying out new distros when they all started switching to KDE 4 and nothing seemed to click. So I'm crossing my fingers and hoping the distros polish KDE4 and get it back to the level of 3.5.
I have been eyeing XFCE, though, it looks like it might do. Gnome just does not work for me for a productive environment.
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
It would be easier, and ultimately more satisfying, to upgrade to Slackware 7.1 and FVWM2 than to stay on the DE hamster wheel. (And, for the pipsqueaks here, I remember running gnome 1.4 on my Linux-PPC install on a gossamer G4. Fast, solid and easy to use and configure. Downhill from there, but I'm glad mono-man has steady employment now).
So is your mom, but you still love her. What's your point?
Exactly right. The biggest key here is that Mono is Microsoft technology reimplemented on Linux. Qt isn't a reimplementation of any MS technology, so if there are any patents covering it, they're just incidental. With Mono, however, the likelihood is high, simply because it is a direct clone of MS technology.
It's interesting to me that my idea received one positive and one negative mod, but your negative, dismissive response quickly shot to +5 insightful. We could do with a little open-mindedness.
Depending on the implementation, my idea could result in a bloated mess. I readily admit that. But it's really easy to criticize an idea and call it impossible. When browsers were first released, it would have been thought impossible for them to do anything close to what they do today, and yet here we are. Javascript performance has made great leaps forward because Google was willing to question if those leaps were possible.
I can see two factors which could help my idea succeed. One is the continuing increase in computer power. The other is the chance to actually simplify and optimize the core windowing system code. For it to be sufficiently flexible, it would need to be carefully written. For example, when displaying a tree showing directory contents, the developers wouldn't be thinking about the specifics of the graphics, colors, and spacing. They'd be writing to a general case, which could be made very simple and efficient. Then another piece of code would apply a style to this element. CSS has already shown that styles can be applied with great efficiency.
Actually, Microsoft does benefit indirectly from Mono (even if nobody gets sued), because it's bringing more C# developers into the world at a time when Java is arguably the most common language.
The "standards and interoperability" thing is bullshit too. Any claim you could make against Microsoft with regard to C# could just as easily be made against Sun and Java a few years ago. They've come a long way too, in terms of supporting open standards in good faith -- targeting IE is essentially no longer an issue for web developers; Interix (Windows' little-known Unix subsystem) is surprisingly good; Microsoft are contributing code to JQuery; and PHP on top of IIS is officially supported (while Microsoft also contributed an open-source SQL Server driver for PHP)
All of these are technologies that originated elsewhere, and compliance with the standards is generally pretty good. OOXML was a debacle to be certain, and Microsoft faced a pretty hard backlash from their customers for it and Vista. A major course-correction seems to have taken place from within the company at some point during 2008 or 2009. They know they're losing the desktop market to Apple, and the server market to Linux, and are doing an admirable job of "catching up."
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
1. Make it possible to hide the taskbar/panel/whatever. In every version of Gnome for years now the best you could do is make it hide to 1 pixel tall, and this requires gconf. The default "hide" is an incredibly stupid looking thick 6 pixels. PS: KDE has had this working for about 10 years now, so you can't claim it is some technical defect in X or some other excuse.
2. Fix the setting so that clicking in windows does not raise them. Apparently this configuration option causes it to ignore ALL attempts to raise the window, including the program itself calling XRaiseWindow()! This is completely broken. What we want the configuration option to do is stop clicks inside the window from raising it, NOTHING ELSE!!!
Of course I am wondering if they are purposely leaving these things broken so that they can later claim "nobody uses those options so we will remove them".
For those who were around for GNOME 1.2 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence that Linux on the desktop and GNOME in particular have made awfully little progress in the last decade. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, not 2000, and it was horrid; maybe if your first experience with GNOME was 2.0 then you might think 2.30 was a vast improvement- heck, TWM is a vast improvement on GNOME 2.0. 2.0 was extremely bug-ridden, and if you wanted to change anything from its mind-numbingly bad defaults you had to putz around with finding where in gconf's xml you could go to change things.
If you were around for 1.0, the RH 6.1 "October GNOME" release, or 1.2, you know that GNOME made a lot of progress, was centered on the needs of those most likely to use Linux rather than on unsubstantiated usability claims, and was becoming quick, convenient, and powerful. The progress GNOME made between 1998 and 2000, the big improvements in the 2.2 kernel series, and a host of other developments made it seem like Linux really would overtake Windows for desktop use soon. But I really don't find much about modern versions of GNOME that really improves on 1.2 or maybe 1.4; the last 9 years have seen little improvement in the Linux desktop IMO.
I think you didn't get modded up because you stepped into an old flamewar that people already have strong feelings about. Everyone has their own idea of what the perfect GUI should be, so unless you have extremely good writing skills and really help people to see what is so great about your idea, they are going to just stick with what they already think is best. FWIW I think your idea is a good one, but the implementation is extremely important. KDE used to be extremely customizable (maybe it still is, but I use Windowmaker because focus-on-mouseover rocks, although no one really agrees with me on that) but the implementation was horrible, so it was just a mess.
Qxe4
I agree. I'm about to say something that almost everyone here will think is completely crazy, but I'm going to say it anyway: some of these DEs and Linux distros should focus less on being infinitely flexible and configurable, and more on coming up with one single configuration that works.
Not that I don't appreciate the flexibility and configurability, but having all these different options ought to mean that at least one option is consistant, standard, and controlled. give me a distro that only supports one DE, but make sure that DE's experience is really smooth. Take away all the different themes, and give me one single theme that's extremely polished. Maybe even don't try to support every possible kind of hardware, but certify some set of hardware and support that hardware really well. Go ahead and make some choices for me, just so long as those choices are really good choices.
A lot of people would say that sort of mindset is antithetical to the open source movement, but I don't think it is. Leave it open source, and let other people make any changes they'd like.
Anyway, I it's part of the reason for the success of OSX. While the geeks are all complaining about the lack of configurability, everyone else is happy with how well crafted the defaults are. I think Gnome operates along the same line (but not to the same degree), and while that earns it the wrath of a lot of geeks, it's the reason why so many Linux distros use Gnome as the default environment.
> GNOME in general and the free desktop in particular
So gnome is a generalisation of free desktop. Cool ^Gool!
I quit from being a vocal KDE4 supporter and moved on to GNOME with the KDE 4.4.x release. The forced Akonadi/Nepomuk/MySQL messup coupled with the perennially unstable Kontact made me throw up my hands in disgust.
But those are just apps that you could replace with other apps.
I do not like KDE 4.x, specifically the desktop environment. Because I do not care at all about the "look and feel" of the apps I use, I have no problem using KDE apps in a Gnome desktop. I use RkWard and kMyMoney on a daily basis, in a Gnome desktop.
The problem for me is the KDE desktop which has always felt very "breakable". On every KDE desktop I have used, it is very easy to get the crocodile or now the bomb icon after a "core dump" crash. Meanwhile other desktop environments or operating systems behave normally at the same computers.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I never had any desire to get a first post, but I noticed once that I was reading a story without one, so I gave it a shot. "First post!" I said, and I was right!
Won me some negative karma of course, but whatever. I'm glad I did it, so one day I can tell my grandchildren that I once got a First Post on Slashdot, who I suppose will somehow manage to care even less than my friends do now.
Property is theft.
"On the other hand, 2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series."
No it won't. 2.32 will be published in parallell with 3.0. The new gnome-shell (et.al.) that introduces new UI concepts to gnome heavily relies on HW accelerated graphics. The state of many Linux graphics drivers still need to mature to be able to run gnome-shell properly. The 2.x era will live on (and *my* magic crystall ball tells me it will do so for a long time.)
My impression is that Bruce Byfield never seem to get much stuff right. Who is he and why are people listening to him?
By the way, first person to say that my having successfully made a First Post guarantees that I won't have any grandchildren gets hit.
Property is theft.
The problem is that virtually nothing supports it except for KDE apps that start with "K".
Actually, that's not true. With the latest Fedora, for example, Firefox uses KDE notifications under KDE, and GNOME notifications under GNOME. The integration's spreading really, really quickly, now that the DBUS API has been fixed down for a release cycle.
Pirate Party UK
if you mean "focus follows mouse" by "focus follows mouseover" then I heartily agree with you. In our office ALL the linux users use this feature. Gnome and evil supports it, and everytime we need to work on an OS that doesn't support it we get very frustrated.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I am happy with an old version of RatPoison for serious work. Less distractions, more focus on the task at hand, and plenty of scripts and plug ins to get the job done.
When I don't care about productivity, GNOME with bells and whistles keeps me amused. Although, I do miss the 1.4 days.
Well, wine is a far worse patent trap than mono nad companies still use it as basis for some linux ports
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
> And then people would bitch about bloat because supporting all those features, options,
> and workflows would required a fuckton more code.
Perhaps they could use that new-fangled programming thingy that makes additional features modular add-on's....
Thanks for posting that link, that was the single most insightful ANYTHING I have read on programming this whole year.
Great read.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I wonder if there is a first post achievement? I recall getting some first posts on stories a few times, and like you I never "frist prost" ed, but a first post achievement would be pretty darn cool.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Yes! I was one of them! I too used KDE since the 1 release and found KDE3 a joy to use. Although I did use KDE4 on the first early releases, it struck me that everything on my desktop was shiny, but I couldn't actually do anything. So I switched back to GNOME, but found that they'd taken away the configuration for *everything* or I had to use GConf. So now I'm trying XFCE or just switching around. *sigh*
Simplicity is a bad word in this context, as you point out. There are two concepts that it points to which are always getting confused.
Ease of learning: Something that is easy to learn lacks conceptual complexity. It is easy to understand quickly and it is easy to remember after being exposed to it only a few times. The downside to ease of learning is that you usually can't do things that are conceptually complex.
Ease of use: Something that is easy to use lacks operational complexity. It is easy, fast and convenient to do what you want to do, no matter how complex. The downside to ease of use is that the ability to do complex things quickly usually requires an interface that is difficult to learn.
You can optimize for either of these kinds of simplicity (ease). Your interface can be unnecessarily complex in either or both categories. Good software chooses the least complex solution, while still optimizing for the type of simplicity that is required.
This. I miss the KDE that was nice and easy to use, but Gnome got good enough right about the time KDE got shit. Maybe if I wasn't on Ubuntu mostly I'd consider switching back now, but Kubuntu is still the poor cousin, and Ubuntu has enough problems with consistency without having to worry about more of them.
Surely, you mean "less freedom"? The users lose freedom because they get more proprietary programs in the market. If anyone gains freedom, it's developers, and among them proprietary and selfish developers.
Move the Minimize button to the upper left, the maximize button to the lower right, the close button the lower left and for the upper right: a button that does nothing.
So say we all.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many other KDE users right up through KDE 3.x switched to GNOME with the KDE4 release.
/Raises hand!
To this day I don't know what the KDE (and Amarok!) developers were thinking in blowing apart their fantastic software, rebuilding it from the ground up, and choosing to throw out all the great functionality they had and replace it with "Look isn't this shiny!".
I switched to Ubuntu from Mandriva after the first KDE4 Mandriva release came out and haven't looked back. I never particularly liked GNOME but KDE took a flying leap backward and put GNOME in the lead by default.
Depending on the implementation, my idea could result in a bloated mess. I readily admit that. But it's really easy to criticize an idea and call it impossible
I never said it was impossible, I said it was completely unreasonable.
They'd be writing to a general case, which could be made very simple and efficient.
See, statements like this demonstrate that you're not a developer.
Writing code for the general case is *harder*. It makes code more *complicated and slow*. Why? Because ever piece of added flexibility means more lines of code to implement that flexibility. Hell, just look at the massive complexity of the GtkTreeView widget to see what can happen... great, it uses an MVC architecture to make it possible to display a whole range of different tree and list styles, allowing a single control to be used for multiple purposes. But the result is extremely complex.
They'd be writing to a general case, which could be made very simple and efficient. Then another piece of code would apply a style to this element. CSS has already shown that styles can be applied with great efficiency.
Hint: CSS affects presentation, not behaviour. And every GUI toolkit out there *already* makes it possible to customize presentation, they're called themes.
What you're talking about is customizing *behaviour*, and that must be coded into the widget/framework/tool from the get-go, and every piece of customized behaviour is more lines of code and more bloat.
As for the other AC suggesting plugins, once again, clearly someone doesn't understand how software is written. In order to build plugins for customizing behaviour, you have to implement the software so that there are entrypoints for those plugins to hook into. That means every piece of behaviour you might possibly want to configure will need to be specially designed so it can be hooked into and overridden. That's highly non-trivial. And you'd have to do this *for every single application*.
In short, it just makes no sense. The best solution, IMHO, is to go down the path we're already going down: standardize desktop protocols and APIs so that people can slap together a window manager, panel, file manager, etc, that suit their preferences. Fortunately, EWMH already exists, and Freedesktop is working hard to standardize other desktop-related APIs.
I regularly use gnome apps on my XFCE system without having the gnome libs installed. That's unheard of for KDE.
If they don't use gnome libs why should they count as gnome apps?
The most interesting thing to me about Gnome these days is that it's memory footprint is still ridiculously fatter than Xfce's, even though Xfce has caught up with Gnome's basic features.
My "family computer" has been running default Ubuntu with Gnome, and my non-technical wife has been happy with it. However, it's starting to show its age, and with each major software update it gets a little slower and slower. So for the hell of it last month I thought I'd experiment with Xfce and see if I could postpone the next computer purchase until the holiday season.
I might postpone a lot further out than that! Thanks to Canonical's packaging of Xfce, it looked pretty much the same as Gnome right out of the box. After 5 minutes of tweaking the panel icons and theme settings, it was almost indistinguishable from my machine's previous setup. My wife didn't notice at all until three weeks later when she went to copy some files from a USB drive, and noticed that the file manager was Thunar rather than Nautilus. She turned out to be happier with Thunar though, because it doesn't randomly freeze up during drag-and-drop operations.
For years now, Gnome's "niche" has been with those who want something more feature-rich than Fluxbox, yet simpler and more lightweight than KDE. However, Gnome's basic functionality has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and lighter-weight desktop environments are catching up with the core expected feature set. Right now, I don't know of any compelling reason to run Gnome other than wanting to use a lot of Compiz visual effects, and Xfce is almost caught up with that too.
You know that WebKit is based on KHTML right?
Yes, my understanding is that it's a FreeDesktop.org standard (at least a proposed one?)
See this YouTube video for more details: http://youtube.com/watch?v=YjnCXKQ3MUc
Really as long as a Desktop environment has the features you need it can not be over simplified.
I have not used KDE4 yet but I did use KDE3 a good bit. Frankly I liked both KDE3 and Gnome about the same. The thing is I really came to like Ubuntu for it's simplicity and unified look and feel. It is a little plain but very functional.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Not for me. I came from an Amiga background. KDE was cool in the 2.x and 3.x versions because it was fast and complete. Now it's destroyed and has become a developer playground and effects fest.
Dolphin is still intolerably slow.
I use dolphin on my 5 year old laptop. Works fine.
Important apps still don't share a consistent appearance; Firefox, Chrome, and OpenOffice in particular look good in GNOME but are full of distracting artifacting and other appearance problems in KDE.
openSUSE does a pretty good job with Firefox and OpenOffice.
The graphics still don't work right. A notification balloon is likely to take out half the taskbar, etc.
They blame this on the radeon driver and I believe them(...)
Works fine more me. Using ATI.
The wireless connectivity manager seems incapable of working with my simple home WiFi installation without needing constant reconfiguration and tinkering, while in GNOME it "just works."
It just works for me in KDE.
Yes, some of these things could be fixed, but to trudge through each one of them would require rather a lot of time and effort that I just don't have to spare.
It just works for me in KDE.
KDE needs to cut out the innovation for a while and patch roof leaks.
They've been polishing KDE4 for some time now.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many other KDE users right up through KDE 3.x switched to GNOME with the KDE4 release.
If they preferred KDE 3.5 to GNOME up to there, why would they switch to GNOME just because KDE 4 came out?
Not to throw dirt in the direction of the GNOME developers- they've done great things. It's the only environment I use. (Other than the classic, "fork-spoon-knife" paradigm of biological input. :)
The Gnome world would grow and expand greatly if ham-handed office workers could shape high-level code into things useful to the office. Think VisualBasic and all that embedding stuff on the other leading brand.
Being able to ask for a (sheet,row,colum) address of a sheet to print a separate document without reading a manual. Or construct a basic database for simple stuff in the office, again without reading a manual and/or immersing oneself in a whole new environment.
Anyone ever use Informix 4-GL's environment, for example?
Allowing the typical office worker to do things that *can't* be easily done on Windows is key to adding desktops. The more ad-hoc stuff an office worker can do without going to a seminar or conference, the better!
I'll bet ALL THESE THINGS CAN ALREADY BE DONE...but it's still not quite 'easy'.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
First, WINE reimplements the Win32 API, which has been around for ages, although it's evolved some. Maybe not quite 20 years, but pretty close, so if there is any patented stuff there, it's about to expire. Mono reimplements .NET, which is much newer ( 10 years).
Second, WINE isn't needed for any Linux distro, and is only an optional install. I'd guess that most Linux users either never or rarely use it. No distro uses it for any standard included software. Contrast this to Mono, which many distros have included as standard, along with various apps that require it. The people behind Mono are pushing hard for Mono to be included as standard in every distro, and for as many apps as possible to use it, so that it becomes as integral to a standard Linux desktop as glibc, and thus much harder to remove or work around.
It's also a lot more advanced than KHTML from what I've seen.
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
Frankly, what you do to your patent's disgusts me. I hope Microsoft go after you with the full force of the law.
The Machine stops.
Actually, opinionated choices are very much the nature of open source. Ubuntu follows this (especially with Quickly, one of its programmer tools), but a better example is PERL, the Pattern Extraction and Reporting Language. It's applied everywhere (in spite of | because) it was designed for such 1 specific purpose.
Sometimes I wonder if we should give up on the DE entirely and have an Eclipse-like arrangement of interrelated pieces that target one specific purpose.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I agree that the GUI should be as flexible as possible.
Although you really are dealing with two forces:
GUI code is something that will be executed more than any other application code, it ought to be very fast and efficient. At the same time, humans are rather slow, begging the question if optimizing the GUI code is worth the performance gains.
It's interesting how thousands of objects can potentially slow down GUI controls. Should they?
I presume that GUIs are often object orientated because it makes GUI design easier and more flexible. This makes styles changeable on the fly and hence slower.
If you take a look at Java's GUI related design you will find that a lot can be overriden.
I would love the day when I can select one of a number of default layouts and workflows such as Windows, Mac or a particular Linux distribution and have lots of platform specific details set themselves - while being fully revertable. It would be clever if the policy were completely separate from the mechanism so that even fine grained behaviours like where buttons are placed, dialogue button order. They could even be mixed together if that is desired.
Imagine having a Windows centric 'screen', Ubuntu, Mac and whatever else without leaving the same OS...not that there would be much point.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
and I should not. Since none of those things work for me. I guess they just like you better.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Seriously?
GNOME is working. Therefore I use GNOME. I have better things to do than conduct the Desktop Inquisition to make a determination about whether or not KDE should be exonerated.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
1. The notification system on KDE is a FreeDesktop.org standard. Anyone can choose to implement it. Firefox already does.
2. The Qt-Curve theme will allow your GTK2 apps to share the same look and feel as native Qt apps. I'm typing this on Firefox right now, it fits in with the rest of my desktop quite nicely.
3. w/r/t your comment on Dolphin and KIO, it sounds like you're saying "Gosh it's wonderful how integrated KDE is, but I really wish it would integrate with [whatever non-KDE app you want]." Well... no. That's not how it works.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I don't think that's true. I think there are several DEs that work and are polished and work well and are ready for John Q. Public to use and enjoy. Really, just pick one, it doesn't matter, they're all great. But if people like the GP insist on not using them the way they're meant to be used, and try to mix and match shit and expect it all to work exactly the same, well, they'll end up pissing and moaning because that's not how it works.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
No, I'm saying that KIO is a mistake because it requires Dolphin instead of being transparent.
Well, I can run GTK# stuff without dealing with the non-ecma MS portions of the tech, so "yeah"... not to mention that ASP.Net MVC is under MS-PL license, which is pretty libre.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
KIO requires Dolphin? Um... no. Really, no.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!