Linux Mint Developer Forks Gnome 3

An anonymous reader writes "Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, has forked Gnome 3 and named it Cinnamon. Mint has experimented with extensions to Gnome in the latest release of their operating system, but in order to make the experience they are aiming for really work, they needed an actual fork. The goal of this fork is to use the improved Gnome 3 internals and put a more familiar Gnome 2 interface on it."

Comments

You're...

[tywjohn]

...Joking!!!

Re:You're...

[muszek]

A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome. Just Gnome, we didn't have to call it Gnome 2.x. Now we have Gnome 2.x, plain Gnome 3.x, Unity, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions, MATE and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?

I'm still happily using Gnome 2.x (on LMDE), but it won't last forever :/

Re:You're...

[obarthelemy]

Linux as a whole (kernels, UIs...) has turned into a developers dick size contest. Everybody wags their own, nobody debug/documents/supports appropriately for end users.

Re:You're...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think people understood that they could make gnome3 do whatever they want.

Suddenly... tantrums.

Re:You're...

[gbjbaanb]

yeah, you'd have thought that devs would have "grown up" by now, focussing more on end-product with all the responsibilities that entails rather than a somewhat teenage approach that is more based on the developer's egos.

Maybe in another ten years, but I imagine the current crop of devs who participate in this environment will give up, leaving it to a new bunch of kids who perpetuate the same old attitudes.

Re:You're...

[jejones]

Actually, Jon McCann, in an interview, seemed to say that user configurability is a bug, detracting from GNOME presenting a single face to people who might consider switching to GNOME. "And I think there is a lot of value to have that experience you show the world to be consistent. In GNOME2 we didn't do that particularly well because everyone's desktop was different."

Re:You're...

[somersault]

What? This fork sounds like it is entirely to create the best end product. Keep the parts that have improved in Gnome 3, but get back the good stuff from Gnome 2.

I've been using Mint for months, it's a good OS. It seems to me that this guy has his head screwed on right - as opposed to those who are desperate to turn their desktop OS into something that only makes sense on a tablet.

Re:You're...

[hoxford]

what the hell went wrong?

My theory is that everyone who is in any way involved in UI development now thinks they're the next Steve Jobs and that they are justified in imposing their brilliant and unparalleled vision on everyone.

Re:You're...

[jedidiah]

Then a "Gnome2 theme" should be pretty trivial then?

Otherwise, this kind of fork is exactly what a lot of users have been screaming for since the new UI changes were shoved down everyone's throats.

The community screamed bloody murder and someone decided to "step up" and do the work for the benefit of the rest of us.

Suitable renumeration should be sent in Mint's general direction.

Re:You're...

[smash]

Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems. OS X has even carried compatibility with old apps for at least 5 years, and its been through a major operating system redesign and CPU architecture shift.

Can I do that with the free unix desktop? Sure, vanilla X apps probably work, but every major rev of KDE (haven't tried old gnome apps on newer gnome versions) breaks heaps of old apps. Every version of KDE or Gnome i have ever used since both projects began (i remember compiling KDE 1.0 and QT from source and being impressed :)), i have found "wierd" shit where i can make part of the UI crash or errors thrown on screen.

Please: stop fucking around with eye candy and the colour of the bicycle shed. Debug what you have, get it stable and THEN go about adding new stuff. Just because Windows or OS X has new feature of the month, it doesn't mean you need to kludge a clone of it on top of your DE within 2 weeks in some shitty half-assed way.

"Usability" of a UI is to a certain extent, bullshit. Most users can adapt to design decisions made on your environment. Apple knows this - yes, I wish i could customise the OS X desktop a bit more, but at the end of the day the fact that I can't is no major deal-breaker. Because it actually works. Yes, UI testing can make soemthing a little nicer to use - but if it is full of bugs, crashes, breaks your old apps that you like and generally misbehaves, then all that usability testing and research is WASTED.

I didn't mean this to turn into a big unix-desktop rant, but i've been really wanting to like the unix desktop since 1995. Some aspects of it, I do love. But since the days of say, KDE2 (or gnome equivalent - essentially when we got a usable file manager style desktop), there's been very little actual progress in real world usablity that I can see. Sure, there's new eye candy. Whoopie. Can it help me get shit done better? Not really.... progress appears to have stagnated.

Re:You're...

[jbolden]

Gnome is doing a major breaking change, that is going to cause a huge shift in its user base. Ubuntu created a whole generation of Linux users that were Gnome users by default. Those people are now picking their replacement desktop and well.... that's a good chunk of the /. Linux users.

Nothing went wrong, Gnome's intention was to make this change.

Re:You're...

[jbolden]

The issue is that Windows adopted the Aero interface. That means both Mac and Windows have interfaces vastly more sophisticated than what is available on KDE2. If they didn't do the eye candy work Linux desktop would look a decade behind minimum.

Also there have been features added, for example unified notification, that is all applications being able to send messages to end users in a unified way that is configurable by the end user. That is a major shift for both KDE and Gnome.

As for old apps, this is Linux apps should recompile and be sent out by the distribution. Linux has never sought binary compatibility.

Re:You're...

[s4m7]

Linux as a whole (kernels, UIs...) has turned into a developers dick size contest. Everybody wags their own, nobody debug/documents/supports appropriately for end users.

Linux as a whole, is the kernel. The kernel. There are different versions, patches, etc. but it's one kernel.

Maybe you mean open source as a whole?

Maybe you mean software as a whole. That would make a whole lot more sense. Except it hasn't "turned in" to anything... it's always been that way.

Re:You're...

[0123456]

Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI.

A stable ABI is the reason why Windows is such a crock of crap and Microsoft can't fix poor decisions made twenty years ago. It's also pointless when most software people run on Linux is open source.

Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.

Re:You're...

[s4m7]

A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome

Clearly, not everyone was as happy as you thought. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many people working on so many alternatives.

and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?

Not a damn thing. You can use gnome 2.x until MATE is working well enough to replace it. It's really the same thing.

I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI. I've used fvwm, twm, windowmaker, enlightenment, kde, gnome 1, gnome 2, xfce, unity, gnome shell (with extensions). Honestly I think these things just keep improving over time. But seriously. If you are a romantic masochist, just install the window manager that emulates the amiga workbench and be done with it.

Re:You're...

[Dan93]

While I agree that there has been progress on the unified notification, there has been 3D accelerated composited desktops (which IMO look better than Aero and Aqua) for a while now in the form of Compiz. Yeah, it may be tacked on, but in many ways, it can integrate well with Metacity and Kwin. I even still use it in KDE4 over it's built in compositing as it adds more options, and generally runs faster (for me anyways). I never really understood why neither desktop just didn't stick with that instead of reinventing the wheel.

Re:You're...

[smash]

The issue is that Windows adopted the Aero interface. That means both Mac and Windows have interfaces vastly more sophisticated than what is available on KDE2. If they didn't do the eye candy work Linux desktop would look a decade behind minimum.

Actually i was more referring to the rip offs of spotlight/windows search, launchpad, etc., but good point. A new Windows feature is no excuse for Linux being broken. Haven't tried it recently, but when the composted desktop was first implemented, it broke openGL apps (unless turned back off). Wtf. I'd rather have my OpenGL apps work than some desktop candy. Its probably fixed now, but an instance of my point about stuff being rushed out the door "half-assed". Sound is another example. Fix the mixer at a system level once properly rather than rooting around with sound daemon of the month.

As for old apps, this is Linux apps should recompile and be sent out by the distribution. Linux has never sought binary compatibility.

Am aware of this, and this is why it is still a niche (and will remain so). End user doesn't care for recompiling apps, they do care about app X going away and rendering their workflow broken. However, unless you're manually installing old libraries (which may not work with newer versions of system libraries, new compilers, etc), even a recompile often isn't possible to get the old apps back.

Re:You're...

[smash]

I'm not sure if you've used Windows recently, but its actually quite a way away from being a crock of crap. Resource intensive? Yes. RAM is cheap. All my hardware works properly, virtually all of my apps work properly, and I'm not having to go track down old versions of library X to recompile simply to find myseilf mired in dependency hell.

Don't get me wrong: Windows is no shining example of desktop design. But in terms of getting shit done with a minimum of fucking around fixing broken shit - we're not in 1995 any more.

I agree, being WILLING to break compatibility to FIX or IMPROVE is arguably a strength. My point is that people are breaking compatibility more often due to bikeshedding, rather than any fundamental need to do so.

The appearance to me, having tracked Linux and the unix desktop in general since 1995 is that waves of new programmers hit a project every few years, decide that they can reinvent the wheel better than the last guy (or that whatever Apple/Microsoft did last week is a must have), break a heap of stuff rewriting in flavour of the month language/programming paradigm and end up with essentially the same real world functionality we had 5 years ago but with double the resource usage - and broken apps.

Re:You're...

[Kevin108]

There's a number of users making it do what they want but they're running up against nonsense, like having to edit files in a specific order.

Re:You're...

[flosofl]

Suitable renumeration should be sent in Mint's general direction.(emph. mine)

Must... resist... must... resist.... AAGGHH!!

REMUNERATION

Re:You're...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just please stop expressing your opinion about things you don't know, would you?
Based on this: ...and I'm not having to go track down old versions of library X to recompile simply to find myseilf mired in dependency hell. you have not used any major GNU/Linux distros over the last few years.

I have not used Windows since 2003 at home and the last time I had to do things you mention was ... I don't exactly remember.

The appearance to me, having tracked Linux and the unix desktop in general since 1995

Please don't mix taking a look fooling around with giving a real try to use over at least a few weeks period of time.
As for Windows desktop usability: still no virtual desktops in Win7? No comment...Go enjoy

Re:You're...

[jbolden]

and this is why it is still a niche (and will remain so). End user doesn't care for recompiling apps,

The model of having to redownload apps is the model on iOS. End users seem fine with it. Under the Linux distribution model end users don't have to recompile apps but distributions do.

If you want slower turnover, and don't want to recompile, and long term app support have you considered Debian?

Its probably fixed now, but an instance of my point about stuff being rushed out the door "half-assed".

I agree all the desktops don't do much Q&A. I find the general lack of quality in Linux pretty infuriating. But I understand, QA takes a lot of money and a lot of time. That being said, things working the same way for almost 20 years is why I like WindowMaker when I can.

Re:You're...

[jbolden]

Compiz subs out fine for Mutter or KWin. Almost all the distributions include it. Mandriva and Suse both do this subout.

Re:You're...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing that happened to KDE, dear friend. It got to 3.5 and looked like it was really on its game, just needed a few more improvements. Then KDE 4 came out and that was the end of that game.

Re:You're...

[JDG1980]

I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI.

Muscle memory.

Once you've gotten used to using a specific UI for years on end, the commands are basically hard-coded into your body. Changing this takes a lot of time and effort and you will often find yourself automatically doing things the old way.

Re:You're...

[pxc]

If anything, this will probably be good for the greater Gnome community. It means that Mint can have its desktop and applications based upon the same tools (Gnome 3.x libraries & applications, Gnome 3.x-based desktop). The developers of libraries and apps for Gnome will have a larger userbase, more people testing, and more developers looking at and using their code.

Re:You're...

[smash]

My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.

And multiple virtual desktops with a decent sized monitor are over-rated. Having used them extensively back in the early 00s, i can't say i desperately miss them. And as to enjoying Windows 7, well i have to use it at work, but my desktop of choice is currently OS X.

But, keep denying the problems exist if it makes you feel better. The lack of new users putting up with random BS in the free unix desktop will enable you to feel "leet" for a while yet. Personally, i can't be fucked dealing with it any more. I don't care how shiny it is ,if it doesn't work properly.

Re:You're...

[smash]

Not sure what iOS has to do with this. An end user does need to recompile their apps if the distribution discontinues support for it. Assuming the dependent libraries are still available on the new platform, or can be compiled against the new system without problems.

I agree all the desktops don't do much Q&A. I find the general lack of quality in Linux pretty infuriating. But I understand, QA takes a lot of money and a lot of time. That being said, things working the same way for almost 20 years is why I like WindowMaker when I can.

I ran Debian for 10 years and yes as far as Linux goes it is my distribution of choice. But it still suffers the same problems, just at a slower pace. If i want to run a proper unix (vs OS X) i run FreeBSD. The quality and change control in the base OS is far superior to what i've experienced in the Linux world, however the desktop environment world is still a pain in the arse. It wouldn't be so bad if actual progress was made, but as I said, most of it appears to be bikeshed related.

I too like Windowmaker, i just wish GNUstep would take off so that there was a decent level of source compatibiity with OS X.

Re:You're...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we mention the white elephants in the room? Debian and RHEL don't play fast-and-loose, they just scoop the cream from the churn. We're pointing fingers at Ubuntu and Fedora, which aim to be cutting-edge. We're playing with fire, and screaming bloody murder when we get burnt on our desktops, but I think the whole server thing is working out.

Re:You're...

[TheLink]

Can we mention the white elephants in the room?

but I think the whole server thing is working out.

What you're talking about is irrelevant and off-topic. Most linux servers do not have GUIs installed and even when they do, most linux server apps do NOT use the GUI stuff. So no problems with GNOME, KDE, X, or lack of backward compatibility with GUI libraries/APIs.

Re:You're...

[Raenex]

Spot on.

Re:You're...

[advocate_one]

This is it in a nutshell... I was monumentally p'd off with the removal of configuration options and stuff hiding in the Gnome Registry... It was as if they'd decided what it was going to look like and to hell with anyone who wanted to change things...

Re:You're...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! I want to second this for the only reason that I want people like this to get some encouragement from the community. Make it better for all of us, please! (and thank you :)

Re:You're...

[xtracto]

such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems

What makes you able to run such apps is not a stable ABI but an active Microsoft effort to provide backwards compatibility. One of the thigns that Microsoft has always tried very hard is to be compatible with the majority of software which is already run. That's why you have all those compatibility modes (Bill Gates mentioned in an interview that before releasing Win95 his team went to a local supermarket to buy all the software available so they could test it).

On the Open Source side, nobody really cares about that. Instead, you have comments like 0123456 saynig that it is a "feature" when you are not able to run some program after updating your OS:

Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.

Re:You're...

[jbolden]

Not sure what iOS has to do with this. An end user does need to recompile their apps if the distribution discontinues support for it. Assuming the dependent libraries are still available on the new platform, or can be compiled against the new system without problems.

IOS has the same model you are saying is unacceptable. On IOS after a OS upgrade any number of apps can be broken. However, the end user redownloads those apps from the app store. Apple can and does break binary compatibility all the time and upgrading is a regular part of the process.

End users don't have any problem with it at all. They don't care about poor binary compatibility as long as they can redownload easily and their data remains intact. What IOS does is provides a counter example to your theory that end users demand binary compatibility over the Linux distribution system.

Linux does not have or want a binary compatibility model. If you disagree with that, you disagree with a fundamental design choice of the product. It is not a lack of change control but a lack of Linux doing something it has never asserted any interest in doing. For open source apps the model is the distribution recompiles. For closed source apps the model is becoming the app releases itself with a specific version of the OS and runs inside a VM.

I think you are wrong that it is a bad thing. I consider the distribution model to be a huge plus of Linux, one of my favorite thing about it, and when I'm on Windows or OSX and having to deal with 40 different vendors and contracts and license management and working through products that are only semi compatible and lie to me about when they are going to update, it is misery. And this vs. something like "yum update (package name)". I'll take the Linux model any day. But your problem isn't KDE or Gnome it goes back to Linus.

It is funny you mention BSDs. With BSDs I have to recompile all the time. I like ports but I don't find the platform binary stable. I actually find myself dealing with source related issues more often.

Anyway... a very stable Unix with good binary support I'd have said Solaris. Probably the only one left at this point is AIX that really does what you want, and IBM's commitment to AIX is iffy.

Re:You're...

[Anonymous Coward]

The GNOME designers have a totalitarian mind set. They act as comunist planners, they pretend to know what the users need better that the actual users.

To succeed, the free software must be built as any product in a free market: to satisfy the users demand.

Re:You're...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. It's like 3 "on switches", and gnome3 is almost indistinguishable from 2.

Re:You're...

[poofyhairguy82]

Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI.

That is why Android will probably end up being the consumer Linux OS.

Re:You're...

[smash]

You don't have to (and I don't, generally) use ports with the BSDs.

Re:You're...

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Dashboard (the spotlight equivalent) was announced before spotlight was. Indexing, started in GNOME first. In fact with Zeitgeist we are taking it to the next level. For instance, it's possible to click on a file and get all the git version logs on it. How many versions did it have etc. KDE is following suit as well. So, Linux desktops are innovating. You're giving an opinion without trying anything recent. I suggest you try Fedora 16, or Ubuntu or whatever and try both KDE and GNOME and see how they fare. You might also consider that GNOME now has http://extensions.gnome.org/ which can now modify your desktop behavior. GNOME 3 will continue to evolve and because we now use web technologies to rapidly change behavior we'll be able to try out new UI faster than both Mac and PC.

Re:You're...

[Rutulian]

My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.

The point is nobody ever does that. I have never done it. GP has never done it. Nobody here (except you, apparently) has ever needed to do that. This must be some seriously precious software if you need it that badly. For everybody else, if it isn't being actively developed anymore, there is likely a better alternative available.

I find that on Windows, app developers are exceedingly lazy. They originally develop their software for a target, say Win95, and then they never update the app ever. They just rebundle and call it new version X! And because Microsoft maintains backwards-compatibility so well, this actually works the majority of the time (there were issues for some with XP service packs and Vista/7 upgrades). So if new features are introduced, dialogs refactored, library cruft removed, older functions deprecated in favor of newer functions that do the same thing better, all things that can make the app run better and more smoothly (especially with respect to things like hardware utilization), none of that gets used by the app, because they never clean it up and get rid of the crap. If it breaks, they are forced to. But since it doesn't, they don't bother.

Re:You're...

[s4m7]

Muscle memory.

I wish it were that simple. But the things you hear people complain most loudly about usually have nothing to do with muscle memory. "it doesn't need all this eyecandy" is one of the most common complaints, presumably because it doesn't run so well on old hardware. The scrollbars are a big issue with Unity, but hey look they _work_ exactly the same as they did before, you just have to mouse over it to see it.

With linux desktops, you're not really using it unless you've got your hotkeys configured anyway... AFAIK there aren't any DE's that simply remove the option to change your keybinds.

Long-Term?

[headkase]

How long can he keep it up and what about long-term compatibility with GNOME 3 apps? Eventually I'm sure their "lineage" will drift far enough apart that you're either pulling in multiple families of libraries that do the same thing or you get GNOME 4 apps that don't work on Cinnamon 4 and vice-versa.

Anyway, I'm typing this on Arch Linux 64-bit with GNOME 3.2.1 and a few (needed!) shell extensions. I find it fine and I thought I would be a GNOME 3 hater but I'm actually not.

Re:Long-Term?

[Nerdfest]

The extensions are what's really needed. The hidden bar at the bottom is a very silly idea as a default. I keep ranting about not having a persistent visible notification for Thunderbird messages. With a handful of extension that have already added, Gnome-shell is getting close to acceptable, but there's a few very important things that are missing. Unity is still buggy and slow.

Re:Long-Term?

[bcmm]

The goal of this fork is to use the improved Gnome 3 internals and put a more familiar Gnome 2 interface on it.

TFA actually says that it is a fork of the Gnome shell rather than the entirety of Gnome. Presumably, it would be built against and installed along with the official libraries and applications. Just a single component being replaced; a bit like changing the default browser to Firefox.

Re:Long-Term?

[EdwinV]

Unlike what the summary suggests, it's not a Gnome 3 fork but just a Gnome Shell fork. With the whole back end untouched, they should be able to keep compatibility issues to a minimum.

Re:Long-Term?

[headkase]

In Arch (from AUR) I have "gnome-shell-extension-icontopbar" installed which does exactly that. My "system-tray" icons are always visible and on the top-right of the screen on the top-bar!

Re:Long-Term?

[Hatta]

Does it really matter? You pretty much have to mix libraries already on a desktop Linux system. If you want the best file manager, Krusader, you have to load KDE libs. If you want the best spread sheet, Gnumeric, you have to load Gnome libs. Thankfully RAM is cheap and this is not a real obstacle in practice.

Re:Long-Term?

[erroneus]

If no one tries, it never happens. GNOME3 with its GNOME shell sucks ass and turns a desktop into a netbook candy toy interface. Perhaps if they are successful at giving it older/better functionality, then after the public appreciates it, they might merge it in with GNOME3 in some way.

GNOME3 shell extensions need to be better managed and maintained. My second attempt at using Fedora... this time 16 is still a failure as far as I'm concerned. The extensions idea is nice but it doesn't inherently manage the options. What resulted was a GNOME3 shell that wouldn't load unless I kept shuffling extensions to try to get what I want. GNOME3 and its extensions interface does not account for or manage the extensions which are present and running. (It seems kind of obvious to me that when a UI element is being manipulated in some way by an extension, a 'lock' preventing other extensions from acting on it should be created and enforced.)

I have heard there is now some sort of central extensions repository and I hope it alleviates the extensions mess I experienced but I think over this holiday time, I am going to load CentOS 6.x instead of Fedora.

Lately it seems software projects are refusing to listen to their users and it shows. GNOME3's shell, Firefox and SME server are three that have affected me in a large way and none of them seem interested in listening to the feedback.

Re:Long-Term?

[dmbasso]

I love Gnome 3's concept, and I tried really hard to get used to its current limitations. But in the end I gave up and searched for a more usable setup. I made a Frankenstein composed of LXDE with Compiz and Nautilus. It is significantly faster than Gnome 3, and has all the keyboard shortcuts I'm used to for handling a 3x3 workspace grid (mapped to Ctrl+KP_n).

Re:Long-Term?

[fnj]

Absolutely. I always thought that only an idiot would use gnome-terminal and gedit when the vastly superior konsole and kate were only an apt-get or yum install away, even under gnome.

Re:Long-Term?

[dissy]

How long can he keep it up and what about long-term compatibility with GNOME 3 apps? Eventually I'm sure their "lineage" will drift far enough apart that you're either pulling in multiple families of libraries that do the same thing or you get GNOME 4 apps that don't work on Cinnamon 4 and vice-versa.

Considering the underlying libraries will be identical, since it will be Gnome 3 installed, I don't see why you would blame Mint if the Gnome project decided to break their own libraries. Seems a pretty silly situation to claim will happen.

It's like installing Midnight Commander on Windows and then wondering when win32 apps will stop running under win32.

You can always apt-get the original Gnome file shell to replace this new Cinnamon if you feel that would help. But if the Gnome group does as you say and breaks compatibility with all Gnome software, I would venture a guess that the native gnome shell will stop working too, since it uses the same libs that Cinnamon will use.

Re:Long-Term?

[Nerdfest]

I've got exactly the same config as a backup, and yes, every once in a while I ask myself why I'm trying to adapt to what is effectively a less usable interface.

Re:Long-Term?

[shutdown -p now]

Which makes perfect sense. Gtk3 and other developer-side stuff is not broken, and so long as they keep it as is, apps written for Gnome will work. The problem with Gnome 3 is the UI design of the desktop itself.

Re:Long-Term?

[perryizgr8]

you would do well to try the latest mint. it has a hacked version of gs3 and still works pretty good. its very usable, the top-right hot-corner thing works amazingly, minimize works (mostly), multiple desktops works, you also have a traditional 'start' menu and its much, much faster than unity. oh, and i can't seem to find any obvious bugs either. there are plenty of customization options too.
one thing i completely hate is the custom icon for firefox, its really irritating. but it can be changed by a simple theme change.

Re:Long-Term?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I am going to load CentOS 6.x instead of Fedora

Why not stick with Fedora but use a different DE? I don't understand this illogical association of a distro with desktop.

Re:Long-Term?

[erroneus]

I want my old DE back. Simple as that. GNOME 2.x.

GNOME has come a LONG way to arrive at 2.x (2.3 is what I'm using now) and I watched it grow from unstable and unusable to what it was only a few months ago.

Among the things I miss is compiz-fusion and all the neat little things I had grown accustomed to... especially the wobbly windows and the semi-transparent thing I can do to windows like my solitaire when I an waiting for something to happen in the background.

I'll give GNOME Shell another try in the next Fedora. But I've got to say with Fedora 15, I was caught off-guard but I started to understand the interface a bit more as I reverted back to F14. I gave F16 a try when it came out and was more open-minded and more task-focused on tweaking the environment to suit my wants. It was the promise of extensions which clashed and crashed each other that wasted hours of my day and eventually caused me to give up. Extensions is a great idea, but it gave too much control and freedom back to the community. (Sounds weird coming from me) They all wanted to do different things in different ways and ended up stepping all over each other. In GNOME Shell, they should say "this is the list of things you can tweak." And in the end there should be some sort of anti-conflict control over extensions to prevent them from fighting each other.

Re:Long-Term?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Mint 12 rocks, but it's not good enough of a change. The unity crap, slowness and lack of customization is so irritating that I actually use the Gnome 2 selection when logging in. The desktop doesn't function correctly. (I cant put whatever icons I want on it easily! ugh!) Menus are slow, etc...

Btw, I just dumped Windows for good as of last week. It took me 5+ years to do it, but I did. (tried Ubuntu for a few years on a second computer)

Re:Long-Term?

[Anonymous Coward]

umadbro?

Re:Long-Term?

[Anonymous Coward]

>the cancer that is killing slashdot
>gb29gag

Re:Long-Term?

[somersault]

I prefer Guake and Emacs :)

Re:Long-Term?

[Anonymous Coward]

Konsole superior? It can't even change the color scheme of the currently running term! What's the point of themes when the only way to choose between them is when opening a new terminal? Gnome terminal wins hands down, but there are far better terminals than either.

Re:Long-Term?

[somersault]

I dumped Windows for Ubuntu for a few years and switched to console gaming. Since they pulled all the Unity shit, Windows 7 is actually preferable to Ubuntu though (and Mint preferable to both for getting web development work done). Unfortunately there aren't full Linux drivers for my ultrabook yet so I'm using Windows 7 as the host OS, with Mint in a VM right now.

For home I bought a Windows 7 pre-loaded machine to play Skyrim properly among other things. Windows 7 is acceptable. Only took MS 25 years to write an OS that I don't mind. Good job Microsoft *sarcastic clap*.

Unfortunately Windows 8 looks like it's going to try to pull the same shit that Gnome Shell and Unity are doing though, so I definitely won't be upgrading to it or even buying it with a new machine where I can avoid it. Why do these companies think that just because mobile OSes made mobile computing more popular that they are somehow going to work for desktop computing too? The reason that desktop OS paradigms were unpopular and awkward for mobile devices is the same reason that is making mobile interfaces awkward and unpopular on desktops. Desktop machines have lots of screen estate, high precision pointers and lots of buttons. They don't need to be limited in the same way that mobile interfaces are.

Re:Long-Term?

[rubycodez]

not the solution, now you need *developers* for what used to be very simple user configuration actions. Let's use a bad car analogy, your GNOME 3 is like having a car that needs three co-pilots.

Re:Long-Term?

[fnj]

I'm a bit puzzled. I must confess I have for the most part never messed with anything except black on white, but I just ran an experiment. You can change any individual tab from one profile to another at any time while running. Profiles include colors. It works pretty much exactly like gnome-terminal that way.

So I would absolutely agree with you if your objection was so. Maybe you encountered severely reduced functionality in the very early days of KDE4? Or you're thinking of KDE3? I'm only on KDE 4.3.4 on my main system.

On the other hand, konsole has very real advantages over gnome-terminal:
* I can bookmark by location in the file system and instantly switch back and forth between bookmarks
* I can set independent scrollback buffer sizes for each tab, including "unlimited"
* When I cd to another directory or ssh to another host, the tab name automatically changes to reflect that

Cool

[CanHasDIY]

I liked the look of Gnome 3, but missed the functionality of Gnome 2...

Cinna-Mint, anyone?

Excellent

[ichthus]

Excellent idea, stupid name. But, excellent idea. Mate is the way to go for LM12 (IMHO), and I'm sure this will be a very popular decision.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Second that, the name is only temporary as I'm sure GNOME will come to it's senses and integrate the whole thing to create "GNOME/D(esktop)" and "GNOME/T(ouch)", each with optimized experiences for Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse (a.k.a. "painter's paintbrush") and Touchscreen (a.k.a. "fingerpainting"); apps can then be built using either or both interface options available.

Re:Excellent

[Kagetsuki]

Stupid name? Cinnamon vs GNOME? Come to think about it all these years I've been telling people "I use GNOME", I wonder how that sounded to them. Maybe I should have been putting emphasis on the G or something and made it sound like a rapper name. "I use gee-nome dawg".

Re:Excellent

[Hogmoru]

But, excellent idea. Mate is the way to go for LM12 (IMHO), and I'm sure this will be a very popular decision.

I thought Mate was a Gnome2 fork, this (Cinnamon) is a Gnome3 fork.
So, which is the way to go ?

Re:Excellent

[fph il quozientatore]

Agree. Mint and Cinnamon together? Yuck!

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

My mother overheard a conversation I was having about a certain linux distribution. After the conversation she asked "who is Debbie and why are you talking about her open sores?"

Re:Excellent

[fnj]

Only you can answer that question. Try 'em both. You can install both on Mint 12 and log into either one. Just be aware that MATE is nowhere near mature yet.

Re:Excellent

[Em Adespoton]

We all use genomes... I think they should have called it helix though... Helix GNOME has a ring to it, with some amazingly bad puns.

Re:Excellent

[Kagetsuki]

I think RealPlayer changed their name to Helix at some point so that name is probably cursed or something. Though I do agree, you have an excellent point and I like the name.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually pronounced "guh-nome."

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it supposed to be pronounced like "The Human Genome Project" ?

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.churchm.ag/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/foxtrot-open-source.png

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Lipton begs to differ (and so do I), it's delicious

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/tesco-price-comparison/Tea/Lipton_Morocco_Pyramid_Tea_Bags_20_per_pack_40g.html

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it is actually pronounced "ga-nome".

Re:Excellent

[MaskedSlacker]

That joke is older than electricity (Shakespeare makes it in Merry Wives of Windsor).

Yeah!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been railing against the dumbing down of the user interface ever since Gnome 2 came out. With the KDE 4 going all stupid and Gnome going that way, I'm glad someone had the knowledge and balls to just fork it and keep going!

Re:Yeah!!!!

[multiben]

Yeah, usability sucks.

Re:Yeah!!!!

[DadLeopard]

Looks promising! Though I still like two panels, both top and bottom, they serve different purposes. I also like to have certain applets running, system monitor at the top and netspeed monitor at the bottom! Lets just say I like Gnome2 and want something as close to that as I can get and still stay up to date with all the fixes and patches! Oh, and at least this one has what looks like to be a usable Applications menu, now if we can just get the system menu back!

Re:Yeah!!!!

[rubycodez]

uselessness sucks, unneeded eye candy sucks, brittle configuration needing developed apps for what used to be simple configuration by user sucks, bloat without benefit sucks. To sum up KDE and GNOME suck.

Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever they do, they need to make sure that they do everything in their power to keep away the self-labeled "UI designers" who have fucked over GNOME, Firefox, and numerous other major open source projects lately.

These people may think they know how to create a usable UI, but experience shows that they have no fucking idea what they're doing. Just look at how damn unusable Firefox is these days. The menus are gone, the status bar is gone, the protocol in the URL bar is gone. It's hard to get anything done in Firefox. Sure, I can dig through the settings to re-enable those things that should never have been disabled by default, but that takes far too much effort. It's easier to ditch Firefox. The same goes for GNOME. The "designers" fucked up its UI, and now it's unusable. Now we see real software developers trying desperately to fix the situation.

It's more harmful to an open source project to let them contribute than it is to constantly shut them down. Do not respond to them on mailing lists or IRC. Do not let them get any sort of commit rights. Close any "usability" bugs they open. Do not let them participate in any way.

Only let actual software developers create UIs. They may not be pretty, but at least they'll be functional and much better than anything "designed" by the "UI designers" that have ruined GNOME and Firefox.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right that UI designers have become obsessed with simplicity at all costs. But the evisceration of features was also driven by influential developers in the case of Gnome.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[fnj]

Firefox (unlike Chrome) still has options and addons to undo just about all the fucked-up changes, but yeah, the new defaults are stupid, and Gnome3 as intro'ed is just stupid through and through. You can take all these UI self-appointed experts and give them a boot in the ass.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox

I'll never understand what people are talking about with this. Firefox's UI changes have been absurdly minor. You can't handle tabs being moved above the location bar? (You can even change it back. There's an option clearly visible in the menu. Apparently menus are too complicated for the Slashdot "nerd" crowd.) Somehow that's a paradigm change comparable to GNOME 2 vs GNOME 3?

Or perhaps you're talking about the status bar. Again, something I can't believe anyone would notice or care about. A largely blank, useless bar that was practically only good for previewing link URLS was removed from the GUI and replaced with something smarter. Again, how is this a major change? How is it comparable to GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3?

You make it difficult for people who actually have good, valid criticism and feedback of GNOME 3, etc., to be heard, because you dilute the discussion with completely bizarre, emotional, thoughtless statements.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[0123456]

Or perhaps you're talking about the status bar. Again, something I can't believe anyone would notice or care about. A largely blank, useless bar that was practically only good for previewing link URLS was removed from the GUI and replaced with something smarter. Again, how is this a major change?

Useless to you, perhaps. But the replacement is a kludge for tiny screens that's a horrible mess on a desktop with a decently sized monitor. I find it's contnually covering up things I want to click on all for the sake of not 'wasting' a few pixels on a 1920x1080 monitor; it's annoying, it's ugly and it provides no benefit over the old status bar.

You make it difficult for people who actually have good, valid criticism and feedback of GNOME 3, etc., to be heard, because you dilute the discussion with completely bizarre, emotional, thoughtless statements.

Or perhaps you just don't bother to understand why people want these 'useless' features.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[fnj]

The more minor part of the hostility is that the defaults are stupid. Sure, you can change them if you want, but why should the 99% of sane people have to go to even that much trouble just to cater for the 1% of idiots who like the tabs in the wrong place, and the utterly pointless Amazing Invisible Menu?

The destruction of the status bar was just plain stupid, and there is no option to bring it back. You have to install an addon to regain elementary usability because of this moronic decision.

The major part of the hostility is because this is all a sign that all the developers have now become too superior (in their own minds only) to adhere to a common user interface, signaling a trend back to the wasteland of every app being completely idiosyncratic - a trend that is completely destructive to usability and learning/training.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[jrumney]

the protocol in the URL bar is gone.

Because we really need to know when we're using gopher, not http. If you meant https vs http, then that information is still there.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[ifiwereasculptor]

But the replacement is a kludge for tiny screens that's a horrible mess on a desktop with a decently sized monitor. I find it's contnually covering up things I want to click on all for the sake of not 'wasting' a few pixels on a 1920x1080 monitor; it's annoying, it's ugly and it provides no benefit over the old status bar.

Your points seem to be "the space it saves is too minuscule to make any difference on my screen" and "somehow those few irrelevant pixels are where all the links I want to click reside". I'm all for silly debates, but come on. And a fixed bar would be better than that how, exactly? Maybe you don't know about a Firefox feature called "scrolling". It's actually pretty common among browsers. But the most ridiculous part abot your trolling (intentional or not) is that the status bar only appears when your hover over a link, and if said link is to be covered by its appearance, then it shifts position and appears on the right.

To sum up: you're talking out of your ass. The problems you describe cannot exist. Please shut up.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh, 1080 vertical pixels! It's almost more than what we had in the 90's.

Seriously, do you think that's many? Some are easy to please, it seems. In some ways. that is.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[smash]

Here here. If i want to get rid of the UI, that is what the F11 key is for.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Useless to you, perhaps. But the replacement is a kludge for tiny screens that's a horrible mess on a desktop with a decently sized monitor.

A horrible mess? A tiny little pop-up that shows up at the bottom of the browser (where the status bar would be anyway) when your mouse goes over a link somehow turns the GUI into a horrible mess? See what I mean by bizarre, emotional, thoughtless statements?

I find it's contnually covering up things I want to click

Anyone can download Firefox and easily verify that this is completely false.

You've only proven my points, just fyi.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Kjella]

Firefox is at least copying an interface that hundreds of millions of people use in Chrome, maybe it's not for you but it certainly seems to work for a lot of people. I'm using Chrome on a 24" screen right now and I can't say I miss any of the things you mention much. Mozilla is quite deluded if they think that's why I use Chrome though. GNOME on the other hand choose to go their own way, really their own way. Which wouldn't be so bad if they didn't constantly collapse the path behind them, if you liked it the way it was then tough, it's changing. Even Jobs didn't have that much god complex thinking he could dictate the new way of doing things. And you damn well better have the direction right, sometimes GNOME gets really lost in the woods. It's like following a guide through the jungle and being almost certain that he's lost and going in the wrong direction but either you keep following him in whatever direction he's going and hope he gets back on track or you're alone on an unsupported path. At least you can switch easily, but running into dead ends aren't fun.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

When your choice is between Microsoft's shitty clone of Chrome, Mozilla's shitty clone of Chrome, and Opera's shitty clone of Chrome, you might as well just use Google Chrome. It has the same shitty UI as all of the other browsers, but at least it's slightly faster than they are.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[radish]

Speak for yourself. I'm a software developer with an interest in UI design and there's no way I'd let myself or any of my team design an interface without someone who knows what they're doing getting involved at least in an advisory capacity. The average developer has no clue whatsoever how to build a good UI, and that's fine - the average UI designer has no idea how to write c++.

I'm sick and tired of the mantra that it's everyone else who's responsible for bad software - the designers, or the managers, or the marketing people, or whoever. Anyone except the precious engineer who, simply left alone, would produce the most perfect god-like software known to man. That's just arrogant crap.

Oh, and I like the new Firefox interface - it's a great improvement. I can't say I give a damn about any of the things you say are missing.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Osgeld]

funny just tonight after all this time I wanted to look through my history ... where the fuck is it? Oh its in that firefox menu that replaces the standard since dawn of windows, window control menu why didnt I think to look there? (cause its never been there before that's why!)

fuck it, firefox,office, chrome? make your own UI's shit make your own WM's too, while we are at it make me choose a sound card in a separate application before I start, then we will right back to DOS sans command line, cause ya know ... having to learn fifty fucking UI designs is much simpler than the one we have been using for nearly 30 god damned years right?

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you talking about? You can't even use the Slashdot interface properly, and here you are cussing out someone who raises some valid points?

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[mixmasta]

Where's the up mod when ya need it?

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kludge? No, do explain yourself further. Because when you have 600 vertical pixels you count them all. Do you have any idea what sort of resolutions people are surfing the web at? You're on the high end.

Maybe your use case isn't typical. Maybe your 'problems' aren't anything more than pointless bitching. Ugly? Clearly your issue is that you weren't consulted before the change was made. Maybe you can give the dev team some style pointers. Maybe you're just an asshole.

Anyone who can write paragraphs on a minor UI change, pro or con, is an asshole. Get over yourself. If it's a big problem, take action. Otherwise, stop bitching.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[evilviper]

The average developer has no clue whatsoever how to build a good UI

Give the average developer a stop-watch (or equivalent software) and make them TIME how long it takes to get something done with their interface. Think of it as OBJECTIVE UI metrics, rather than the dogmatic artsy crap.

I'd much rather have streamlined operation than a slick-looking interface, and the inverse is exactly what's happening, everywhere. It's a disease that needs to be stopped.

Now, that doesn't obviate the need to bring in new users once in a while, and get their first "WTF" impressions about how non-obvious it is to look for Settings under the File menu, or some other unlabeled button, but even those need to be moderated by an expert.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[elashish14]

F11? Sorry, I think you mean Alt+F4

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[vashfish]

All you've done is list the differences and assert they are dumb changes. You have said nothing to actually show that these differences are detrimental to usability...

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Pentadactyl, and I didn't find out that the menu bar and the status bar were gone until two months after the events.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[bug1]

Maybe i can help, i actually think Gnome3 looks nice, i think it would be pretty good on a touchscreen, but dumb unforgivable desktop changes include;
  - Disabling desktop icons by default (can only have a bare wallpaper unless you modify the registry, which average users wont do)
  - If you do have desktop icons enabled, you can see them at the same time as the applications selector thing.
  - No minimise button, instead you have to rightclick, select minimum press button. 3 steps instead of 1.
  - When selecting between applications with alt-tab, if you have say two firefox windows open, it shows them as tree, so you have alt-tab with one had, and mouse over to sub-tabs to select which of the windows you want to maximise.
  - To open new applications is more mouse-intensive then the old start-button style menu (actually a foot iirc) they had, first you have to zoom the mouse to the top left and click, then move across a little and select application, then move all the way to the other side of the screen to select a category, then scrolling through the list.

Overall the interface is much more demanding of the user in terms of co-ordination and total movement.

Thats why i see it as less usable.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[bug1]

woops, meant to say
- If you do have desktop icons enabled, you cannot see them at the same time as the applications selector thing.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[bug1]

'It's more harmful to an open source project to let them contribute than it is to constantly shut them down. Do not respond to them on mailing lists or IRC. Do not let them get any sort of commit rights. Close any "usability" bugs they open. Do not let them participate in any way.'

Or perhaps give them guidelines to operate under, off the top of my head;
  - Be able to perform an action with the mouse or keyboard.
  - Minimize requirement to use mouse and keyboard at the same time.
  - Minimize mouse movement wherever possible.
  - Resource hungry effects should be easy to turn off.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

You run into problems with 100% height layouts. For example, if a site had a "start menu" in the lower left, it would constantly get obscured, but if the status bar is permanent it will appear above the status bar.

The question is why a web app would put clickable content in the lower left. It's a difficult target to reach, because mouse cursors usually remain in the top half of the browser window, and the lower left is awfully close to OS UI elements in many environments, making overshooting your click target potentially very annoying (by launching an app). Web apps will learn that the lower left is not a good place to put clickable content, and the problem will disappear.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[aaaaaaargh!]

I'd have no problem with self-proclaimed UI designers as long as they'd respect the following very basic "rules of thumb":

* Every command can have a keyboard shortcut.

* Issuing a command immediately provides visual feedback (always and with absolutely no visible delay, even menu items should blink).

* While a command is issued or visual feedback is given other commands can be issued without delay, provided that processing has not become very slow and the queue becomes long (the latter must be avoided at all costs by using suitable programming techniques and data structures but of course sometimes a machine is just doing too much work).

* Important commands are no more than one mouse click away, less important ones 2 or a maximum 3. There is really no need for an UI where you need to click or open 3 different menus/views/buttons/windows to get anywhere.

* All visible GUI elements such as toolbars, panels, buttons are freely configurable both in their content and their spacing and place.

* All interface elements can be selected and used with the keyboard or there are equivalent keyboard commands.

* Windows and interface elements always remember their settings such as position, size, etc.

* Modal dialogs are avoided as much as possible.

* Instant/live update of the results of search fields is welcome, but then it must be instant--no delay.

Voila! A working GUI...at least in my opinion.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[marcosdumay]

Yep, knowing that is kind of relevant.

But worse is that the text on the bar is different from the text you type, different from the text at the favorites, different from the text you get if you copy it...

Not that huge a problem, but still a problem.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have both cause and effect in there because to my mind much of the UI horrors of late stem from software developers who think they know UI design. That combined with a total lack of understanding for why someone uses a given platform and the strength and weaknesses of that platform produces things like Unity, a DE for an OS with lousy 3D driver support that requires 3D...

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[marcosdumay]

Give the average developer a stop-watch (or equivalent software) and make them TIME how long it takes to get something done with their interface. Think of it as OBJECTIVE UI metrics, rather than the dogmatic artsy crap.

That is what UI designers normaly do... Well, at least the competent ones. But they use people from the userbase, not developers (unless they are designing an IDE or something like that).

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[nyfle]

F11, as in 'Enter full-screen mode.'

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen Brother!

Although nobody listens to me, I think the next big development in User Interactivity should be 3-D GUIs

Imagine Half-life, where each object in the room was an icon for a program that you could activate by picking it up.

The TV set is your Web browser, and the remote control is the URL bar...you can make up more for yourself.

But this could allow the Linux environment to leapfrog over Windoze, making it look like the antiquated crap it really is.

And no more menus embedded in lozenges , PLEASE! Have Mercy....

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox (unlike Chrome) still has options and addons to undo just about all the fucked-up changes, but yeah, the new defaults are stupid, and Gnome3 as intro'ed is just stupid through and through. You can take all these UI self-appointed experts and give them a boot in the ass.

Or send them back to Redmond....I think they've come from there...

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The "designers" fucked up its UI, and now it's unusable. Now we see real software developers trying desperately to fix the situation."
TOTALLY. ALL POWER TO THEM.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[evilviper]

Using developers (experts) is exactly the point you're missing. I want to know, AFTER I've leaarned an interface, how quickly I'll be able to get things done. The user studies with beginners are what we shouldn't be spending so much effort on... Discoverability is nice, but only important in cirumstances where users are going to approach an interface once, use it briefly, and never again... Point me to an interface, aand tell me that I'll be able to do everything much fast AFTER I've learned it, and I'll be happy, even if the learning curve is steep.

The opposite ISN'T true... Tell me I'll be able to learn a user interface quickly, but it'll ALWAYS be slow to use, and I'll tell you I don't want a damn thing to do with it.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[marcosdumay]

That's an interesting point. But going too much into that vision is as wrong as going too much into the "everybody is a newby" vision. I guess there is just no simple way to select a testing base...

Or maybe there is, whoever you test your softwre against will become your userbase, so chose your ninche.

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

minimise button - there's an extension for that
alt-tab - try to pres alt-` (alt-{the thing over tab})
nope, the new way is "press Win (or Alt-F1), start typing something you know about application until it's selected, press Return"

Your post shows you try to use new tool without changing your ways - you should either change to something with more win98 UI, or (an I hope you'll first try this, you may find some functionality you like) try to learn how gnome shell should be used

Re:Keep away the UI "designers"!

[Anonymous Coward]

What extensions do you use. I have two Firefox profiles, on the basic one with only a couple of extensions installed I find the URL thingy moves to the right when you hover over a link in the bottom left, it doesn't get in the way at all, that is unless an extension somehow interferes with that behaviour like it does in my main profile (I think NoScript is responsible, but I'm just guessing and maybe it is a different one), but that is hardly the fault of the Firefox devs.

And I care because ..?

[wdef]

Seriously. On Linux I consider Fluxbox overfeatured and enjoy using a fast light desktop and a terminal. If I want desktop bells and whistles and bling or for officey work with spreadsheets and such, I use Mac OSX, though I can still do most of that on a light desktop.

Re:And I care because ..?

[micheas]

WTF? fluxbox over featured? There are not many window managers that have noticeably fewer features, windows 3.0, and twm, although I think that the config file of twm actually has more features, IIRC bash 3 uses more memory than any of the *box window managers.

Re:And I care because ..?

[pseudofrog]

So you're like the "I don't own a TV" guy.

Nobody cares that you don't care. Get over yourself. Seriously.

Re:And I care because ..?

[neo8750]

Funny because what you consider a great WM started as a fork....

Re:And I care because ..?

[Anonymous Coward]

That damn status bar is too much bloat; OpenBox is superior.

Re:And I care because ..?

[fnj]

Good for you (sincerely). But for the VAST majority this is wonderful news. In the end, we can both be happy.

Re:And I care because ..?

[wdef]

And a geek needs all of these alleged UI features and the sluggish torpor of a bloated fat desktop which takes longer to customize than it's worth because .......? I'm not saying there aren't people that need all those layers of fat for their reasons, I'm saying I'm not sure I'm one of them. Not being too sheltered from the innards makes Linux fun and keeps command line skills alive. Anyway much of the boring office productivity stuff can be done passably enough on Gdocs in a browser, I did most of that kind of work in Firefox on Tinycore linux for several years and was rarely inconvenienced.

Re:And I care because ..?

[wdef]

Ha! I don't own a TV. So there. Broadcast TV sucks. I stream all my media watching - what I want when I want. Funny how people are getting defensive over what is actually a very unoriginal /. meme: criticizing cholesterol-clogged, undercooked, over-egged desktop interfaces. And as I'm fond of saying: no non-touchscreen UI has improved conceptually on Mac 1984 all that much in 27 years, bling and ponies notwithstanding.

Re:And I care because ..?

[micheas]

Well blackbox is half the size of openbox and still has a status bar :)

Re:And I care because ..?

[smash]

wm2. or wmx, try it you might like it.

Re:And I care because ..?

[uvajed_ekil]

Good comment. Seven people across the world agree.

Re:And I care because ..?

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider Fluxbox over-featured only because I don't like or want a taskbar, so I use Openbox.

I don't use a minimalist wm because of a minimalism fetish though. I primarily want something that is:

1. usable - I use Openbox with otherwise GNOME and Xfce utilities on Linux Mint
2. clean and quiet - as few distractions as possible. That is, no taskbar, dock, etc.
3. appealing to the eye - I don't mean OpenGL whizbang bullshit, I simply mean nice themes, colors, fonts, window decorations, etc.

The crazy thing is, it's quite difficult to achieve all of these.

Re:And I care because ..?

[Anonymous Coward]

PROTIP: Xmonad: The source is small that you can read it yourself: 1200 lines. I'm not kidding! And yet it's one of the most featureful ones I know. Also that makes it really easy to adapt it. And fast, obviously.
You don't need to learn Haskell just to use it though. (Although one gains so so much from that, that in retrospect it feels absurd not to learn it.)

Re:And I care because ..?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Broadcast TV sucks. I stream all my media watching - what I want when I want.

So you're basically still a media consumption unit beholden to what the corporations dictate you'll watch.

Since you've taken the first step of jettisoning your TV, why not try now to break the addiction? Stop watching TV shows.

Re:And I care because ..?

[wdef]

You're right. I just love the speed of a light desktop running all from ram even on old machines. Like AC, I want it to work sufficiently though for the set of use cases I use. You can still have drag and drop, configure to open applications when you click on a file, set keyboard shortcuts etc. What else is really needed? But I'd probably draw the line at Ratpoison - just that bit too hair shirt.

When I've run Gnome or KDE, it's usually because some package I needed insisted on parts of one of those as dependencies eg k3b. I know the major interfaces have to keep one eye on a touchscreen future, despite the fact that tablets and smartphones are being dominated by iOS and Android and the latter is already free. And they've done this dance where they built in a huge amount of complexity to enable features and then they go and disable features.

Re:And I care because ..?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't own a TV, and I'm not alone in this. Several of my coworkers also don't own TVs. What can I say, the internet age is upon us.

So Use Gnome 2.0

[GeneralTurgidson]

Why fork it?

Re:So Use Gnome 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Using gnome 2.0 effectively means the same thing - because unless you want to halt all development (inluding fixing bugs), you're going to have to maintain the whole thing, create your own repos, commit patches, and so on.

However while gnome-shell may have done some questionable things, there are many other improvements in the various parts of Gnome 3.0, and it makes sense to keep those as is, and simply change gnome-shell itself to be a bit more like Gnome 2.0, that means there's a lot less that needs to be forked.

Re:So Use Gnome 2.0

[fnj]

Seriously? Gnome2 is on a fast track to official abandonware. You won't get security patches, you won't get any new functionality, new apps that use GTK3 won't work right with it, the underpinnings will change and Gnome2 itself will no longer work right. MATE is the fork to Gnome2, and Cinnamon is the fork to Gnome3 Shell. Absolutely no reason not to have both, for different reasons.

Re:So Use Gnome 2.0

[Fri13]

You won't get security patches, you won't get any new functionality, new apps that use GTK3 won't work right with it, the underpinnings will change and Gnome2 itself will no longer work right.

When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?
Last few years GNOME has been same. Even KDE SC 4.8 has now more features than KDE 3.5 had and when compared to amount of those, GNOME has almost none.

GNOME 2.x users are going to be fine as long as just their needed applications can be ran on it.

Re:So Use Gnome 2.0

[0123456]

When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?

Somewhere in the last year or so it got one of those Windows-style 'Program Load of Bollocks is not responding, do you really want to shut down?' dialog boxes that made me want to uninstall it almost overnight. One of the things I've always liked about Linux is that I could tell it to shut down and walk away, knowing that when I came back in two weeks it would actually have shut down, unlike Windows where it would be sitting there at some stupid dialog box waiting for a response it would never get.

And then the Gnome morons had to go and add one just to fsck it up.

Re:So Use Gnome 2.0

[shutdown -p now]

Mainly because it uses Gtk 2. There's no full compatibility between Gtk 2.x and Gtk 3.x, so applications will have to decide which one to use - some already did, others will be forced to eventually, and it's clear what the choice will be for most.

And we care about what you like because ..?

[OliWarner]

You're free to carry on using whatever you like but the rest of us want a usable desktop.

Re:And we care about what you like because ..?

[wdef]

Thank you for granting me your permission to use the desktop of my choice.

I thought Gnome

[CruelKnave]

. . . was already forked. Yeah. I'm pretty sure Gnome Shell "forked" it up proper.

GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME has always had the shittiest developer and user community of all of the major Linux desktop projects. This is because politics, rather than the development of practical software, have been its driving force.

It was initially created to "fight" against KDE, solely because KDE was using Qt and Qt had a proprietary license at the time. There wasn't any technical need for GNOME. Most people were quite pleased with KDE and its abilities. So GNOME wasn't even addressing a real technological deficiency in the first place.

Their architectural approach has been rather fucked up, too. Instead of using a true object-oriented language like C++, Objective-C, Python, Java, Smalltalk, or one of the many other OO languages out there at the time, they instead chose to create GObject. For those who don't know, GObject is a horrible kludge to add pseudo-object-oriented capabilities to C. It's a unholy mess of macros and other stupidity, and the result is completely shitty. Don't take my word for it. Go use it yourself! See how horrible of an experience it is compared to using a real UI toolkit like Qt, or Cocoa, or wxWidgets, or even MFC or Swing.

Then there was the decision to implement it as 50+ separate libraries. Compiling GNOME 2, for instance, is a massive burden.

Recent releases have seen some of the most stupid UI design decisions ever made. It's unbelievable that some of these ideas were proposed, never mind actually implemented!

This is the kind of crap that drives away good software developers, and attracts the lousy ones. Good developers don't care for unnecessary licensing politics. They don't create software when there are perfectly fine alternatives they could use instead. They don't try to craft their own bullshit OO extensions to C, when they can just use C++, or Java, or Objective-C, or Python. They don't create projects that consist of over fifty small libraries that are distributed separately. They don't make stupid UI decisions. Since GNOME isn't developed by good developers like that, the GNOME project has apparently decided to make every mistake possible. That's why the project and its software is in such a sorry state today.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't checked out GObject, but if it's anything like GtkObject then you are just badly informed. The code base is immaculate in anyway you look at it, top-notch formatting and commenting, excellent use of patterns, easy to make sense of. Arguably one of the best pieces of open source code out there, judging by code quality.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[MrEricSir]

I use GObject all the time. It's not that bad, especially if used from high-level languages.

No, if you want to complain about Gnome's libraries I can give you some places to start;GObject isn't one of them.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[mrmeval]

KDE was the first to drool the reduced feature mantra before guhnome. It appears however that guhnome has drank Jim's special krewl aid and are doomed.

Linux Mint is not as functional as many claim it is not as feature laden or stable as very old KDE or Gnome before the idiots took charge.

I will just run my current version until I have to find something that might work. I would not want to use an MS product unless the entire Linux phenomena continues to collapse from delusional developers.

I don't understand the abhorrent removal of features and configurability. Ubuntu went so far as to go to the source code of X and rip out some configuration options.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[caseih]

You've made a number of unsupported assertions there. And of course since you talk as if you know what you are talking about you've been modded up.

I can't disagree with your take on the politics. I do take issue with the technology. Gnome certainly has had problems with being over-designed and over-abstracted. And I won't argue with your assertion about stupid UI choices.

Compiling Gnome, though, is pretty easy using but time consuming using jhbuild. Most users of course aren't affected in the least by the build process. Qt's build process is self-contained, but takes hours still. The end result is really the same for end users. Having every widget toolkit re-implement every wheel is fairly tiresome. Why not use lower-level libraries like libxml that already work well, and most importantly, are C-based.

As for the language, basing it on C was a wise choice. It's a far more portable language than C++ or Objective C, and *way* easier to bind other languages too. The GObject model works very well in other languages. Programming GTK+ in C++ is a joy (doesn't need moc either). GTK+ in Python is slick too, and actually manages to be fairly pythonic, unlike PyQt, which is really just C++ code in a python syntax.

Writing new GObject code is a chore, since there's a lot of boilerplate code to implement vtables, etc, but using GObject apis in regular C code is quite easy. I don't think Gobject is a BS OO extension anymore than C++ is. Functionally and under the hood they are fairly equivalent. No language support is a pain, but Vala is nice for providing that. I basically consume GObject code in other languages, and there has never been any issue there.

The tl;dr version of this post is that when you say that Gnome has made every mistake possible and that C and Gobject are responsible for Gnome being in a sorry state strikes me as being a rather baseless claim.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[bananaquackmoo]

I would mod you up if I could. I have not experienced this first hand, but your argument sounds perfectly reasonable and logical to me.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[smash]

"Its not that bad" is damning with faint praise, when there were already c++, and objective C out there. Why the waste of time reinventing the wheel when that time and effort could have been put into actually making a better desktop environment?

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

What matters most in a desktop environment is how fast and easy it is to use for the end user. Gnome 2 is a far more intuitive and lightweight interface than KDE. Rather than having a haphazard system of menus, everything is accessible in just 3 clicks max. The themes are simple and don't interfere with programs the same way KDE themes do. Gnome 2 is far faster to boot and requires less space to run. KDE is far more prone to crashes than Gnome 2.

Gnome 3 on the other hand is terrible, no disagreement there.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[jbolden]

At the time objective-C developers were, if they were interested in desktop development working on Mac, OpenSTEP or GNUStep. Java was too slow for a desktop and had bad Linux support, though this was a major consideration. QT was amazingly good for C++, Gnome couldn't compete. So they created a system for C programmers who didn't know C++.

They had to reinvent the wheel because they had to recruit people. There were a lot of C programmers that were willing to work on Linux desktop apps.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[laffer1]

I disagree with you. As a vendor, I find shipping gnome to be a nightmare. It had a ridiculous number of dependancies and is rather unpleasant to build. I haven't looked much at the Gnome 3 stuff yet so perhaps they've improved it, but Gnome 2 had dependancies on webkit and firefox. What kind of idiot thought that up? Epiphany rocks with webkit, but using libxul to get help is stupid. It should be ported to webkit.

Further, the gnome community only cares about Linux. if you're not a linux distro, they don't take upstream patches and they don't like you. Considering what Ubuntu went through with them (not that i agree with all the ubuntu changes), I'm not shocked to set yet another fork of gnome. I think this fork will fail on the sheer weight. Too many things depend on parts of gnome and you'll end up trying to track updated libraries yet trying to keep old code running. It gets ugly.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you've never written a user scriptable system before in any of the languages you suggest. Your credibility is showing, and it's quite ridiculous.

I'm creating a fully 3D "window manager" and scripting environment (actually, it's a game engine, but it could also be a 3D application platform). Aside from distributing the libs separately, I'm doing exactly what you think is shitty in my own project. There's no technical need for me to do so, people are generally pleased with current engines & platforms. However, I talk with 20-50 people online a day who would love to write a dinky 3D app, but are daunted by the complexity or price of other solutions... I'm doing this for the love of 3D graphics, games, and lack of a compelling FLOSS system that scratches my itch. Hint: GNU started when RMS scratched his free software itch; Linux started when Linus scratched his x86 kernel itch... Does anyone really need any other reason?

I've tried several OOP languages, but it's SLOW as hell to implement a scripting language's interpreter in anything but a native compiled language. C++ gets in my way trying to use their broken built-in systems (polymorphism doesn't work with templates well if at all, you can overload methods if you use multiple inheritance, etc), so if I'm not going to use the parts of C++ that are different than C, why waste all that compilation time with C++? So, I just use C.

There are a few minor OOP features I'd like to use, but any language with dynamic memory allocation can provide OOP support; So, I'm doing this with C. Although, I am staying the hell away from macros as much as I can, and provide a much simpler API.

I've created about 20 small libraries, each can stand on their own and rely on a public interface for compatibility. This is so that I can make a few changes in one library without having to recompile the entire codebase: To make it LESS of a headache to compile. It makes development and deployment simpler. Additionally, it's nice to be able to debug a much smaller slice of pie at a time. I've done the monolithic C++ library before, it's a HUGE pain. I've learned my lesson -- C++ isn't what you use for libraries thanks to it being an excellent pre-processor for C: C++ Classes and functions (esp. overloaded ones), aren't cross platform... You have to use the same compiler, even down to the version # sometimes in order to compile against it -- otherwise only use C in public facing APIs. So, that's why I'm not doing that anymore; I've learned my lesson. You can link my small libs statically if you desire to create a bigger stand alone distributable, but at least you don't have to include the entire massive codebase binary if you're only using say the scripting and console components.

Two of the reasons why I'm not using an existing platform to build from are licensing and politics. I don't care for them, but I must care about them because I want to provide sane licensing terms and a good user experience -- I care about end user freedoms more than developer freedoms and I'd eventually like to license my software under the AGPL so that if myself (or anyone else) pulls the plug on a "server", the users will be able to compile their own and keep on running (server sources must be disclosed). Ergo: No forced obsolescence, a serious problem my current target audience frequently faces. If licensing and politics aren't your forte, why then not go back to using Windows or OSX exclusively? Perhaps I'm not pleased with the current politics in my field. How else can I change it other than to participate? Gorilla (.bas) Warfare?

Some fools have also called my decisions stupid, but I have done my own research and am the only person qualified to dictate the way forward that will work best for me, and actually be completable in my life-time. It's harder to make stupid "design" decisions in my project because of the corners we're all painted into; There's only a few ways to proceed. With UI, my system is flexible, so you won't find something you do

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[icebike]

I can't disagree with your take on the politics. I do take issue with the technology.

Very odd. After making that statement you go on to validate just about everything the GP said.
You get modded up for starting an argument, but before you've written 2 paragraphs you've agreed with the other guy by just using different words.

Are you guys brothers?
My brothers used to fight against each other on but the same side of the argument a lot too.
Seems like the arguments always ended with "Ok then". To which the other replied "Fine".

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[caseih]

Very valid points. I have built Gnome with jhbuild before, but only in the 2.x series (I built parts of Gnome 3.2, only the GTK3 stack though). Won't disagree with that and stupid decisions in the dependency tree. And the Linux-only thing is becoming more and more prevalent and not just among Gnome. Any environment that implements FreeDesktop protocols, which let's be honest make things better and better for the end user, focuses first and foremost on Linux. KDE is focusing more on OS X and Windows (not quite what you're driving at though I realize), which is goo in my opinion. Gnome, well who knows. we shall see. Some Gnome apps sort of run on Windows now.

Good points, thanks for sharing your experiences.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[icebike]

What matters most in a desktop environment is how fast and easy it is to use for the end user. Gnome 2 is a far more intuitive and lightweight interface than KDE.

No, its not more intuitive, and its no longer (probably never was) more lightweight.

If all you want to do is surf the web, and read email Gnome is usable. Anything more than that an you quickly realize all those options are in KDE for a reason. As for the three clicks, that only works because Gnome is so horribly limiting and constraining.

Don't get me wrong, KDE went off the deep end for three years, but its back now and better than ever. It was totally re-engineered for the future, while Gnome is struggling to hang on to the past.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[bonch]

I don't understand the abhorrent removal of features and configurability.

The world has moved on from the 1990s desktop. Windows 8 is replacing the Start menu with a radical new touch interface, and OS X Lion has adopted iOS features. Mobile operating systems that look and feel nothing like desktop operating systems are a huge hit. The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.

You may consider it abhorrent, but you are a minority. The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't agree more :). Gnome developers do not listen even their users, they are just blindly pushing their own incomprehensible ideas.

I wish there would be a way NOT to install any Gnome 3 packages, EVER. I'm currently masking all gtk-3-derived packages (on Gentoo), but I'm afraid that I cannot do that interminably...

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Lisias]

There wasn't any technical need for GNOME. Most people were quite pleased with KDE and its abilities

I failed to follow you here.

Most people is not all the people. If not all the people are pleased with something, then we have a valid technical need for an alternative.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Lisias]

PLEASE MOD PARENT UP. Abusive moderation detected.

I do not agree with what it's saying, but the opinion is valid and the guy didn't do any offense!

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[evilviper]

It was initially created to "fight" against KDE, solely because KDE was using Qt and Qt had a proprietary license at the time. There wasn't any technical need for GNOME. Most people were quite pleased with KDE and its abilities. So GNOME wasn't even addressing a real technological deficiency in the first place.

GNOME 0.x and 1.x was a considerably better desktop environment than KDE 1.x. While GNOME was created because of license issues with QT (and it worked pretty well, didn't it?) it was also technically better in it's own right from early on. Unfortunately it didn't take long for all the familiar GNU/FSF nonsense to slip in, splitting everything into dozens and dozens of libraries that will never, ever be used by any other project, cloning the worse features of Mac OS, poorly, and generally obviously going the wrong direction. But from the offset, there was a lot of good reason for it to exist.

Good developers don't care for unnecessary licensing politics.

I think the OpenBSD developers would take exception to that (see: OpenSSH, PF, ksh, OpenCVS, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, etc., etc. and probably others I don't recall). And how about Debian developers (see IceWeasel and others)?

And good developers most definitely DO care about license issues... I can put lots of effort into developing KDE, but no distro can distribute QT (and thus KDE) if they include any patches at all? Gah!

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Pi1grim]

I use my computer as a tool. And as such it must be efficient. If make a hammer from soft rubber justifying that "common user might get hurt when using metal hammers" then you are making a goddamn toy, not a tool. And that is exactly what Gnome crew is doing. I get that they are trying to make an impressive interface for tablet PC, but why should regular PC users suffer? Would it hurt them to go play in a "Gnome-Tablet" version of the interface without crippling the desktop version? Those that would not need customizability and would be happy with all the bling could play with the new interface all they want and those that do any actual work could continue to do so without switching DEs.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's exactly this bling bling hype idiotic thinking which lead to the failure of Gnome 3, Ubuntu 11.10 etc. What about "never change a running system"? When Microsoft decides to fuck up again Windows with version 8 as they did with Vista, it doesn't matter for me because I am a Linux only shop. In the past though I thought Ubuntu is driven by another logic. I hope that Shuttleworth is falling very hard on his arogant ass after the tablet hype is over!

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[mangobrain]

WTF? Did you read the same two posts that I did?

GGP says: "Their architectural approach has been rather fucked up, too. Instead of using a true object-oriented language like C++, Objective-C, Python, Java, Smalltalk, or one of the many other OO languages out there at the time, they instead chose to create GObject. For those who don't know, GObject is a horrible kludge to add pseudo-object-oriented capabilities to C. It's a unholy mess of macros and other stupidity, and the result is completely shitty. Don't take my word for it. Go use it yourself! See how horrible of an experience it is compared to using a real UI toolkit like Qt, or Cocoa, or wxWidgets, or even MFC or Swing."

GP says: "As for the language, basing it on C was a wise choice. It's a far more portable language than C++ or Objective C, and *way* easier to bind other languages too. The GObject model works very well in other languages. Programming GTK+ in C++ is a joy (doesn't need moc either). GTK+ in Python is slick too, and actually manages to be fairly pythonic, unlike PyQt, which is really just C++ code in a python syntax."

You read this, and claim that these two people agree with each other on everything?

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[xtracto]

QT was amazingly good for C++, Gnome couldn't compete

But the idea was to make an *open source* desktop environment. I am sure a lot of C++ programmers would have gone helped an effort to make an open-source version of QT.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[m50d]

Most users of course aren't affected in the least by the build process. Qt's build process is self-contained, but takes hours still. The end result is really the same for end users.

Sure, it's mostly the same for end users, but someone has to manage the insane build process. I remember gnome being dropped from Slackware because just packaging it was taking up too much of Pat V's time.

Having every widget toolkit re-implement every wheel is fairly tiresome. Why not use lower-level libraries like libxml that already work well, and most importantly, are C-based.

Mostly, portability. Qt-based programs are easy to port to even quite silly systems; porting libxml and all the other random libraries different parts of gnome is a lot of effort. Thus there's a fairly complete kde on e.g. windows, wheras only a handful of individual popular gnome programs have been ported.

Programming GTK+ in C++ is a joy (doesn't need moc either). GTK+ in Python is slick too, and actually manages to be fairly pythonic, unlike PyQt, which is really just C++ code in a python syntax.

Disagree, and I think the relative popularity backs me up. Have you read the post from rosegarden's author (wish I could find it) talking about moving from gtkmm to qt?

I don't think Gobject is a BS OO extension anymore than C++ is. Functionally and under the hood they are fairly equivalent.

That this is true is really the worst thing about the gnome approach. C++ and GObject are indeed basically the same thing (and vala makes this even clearer), but Gnome chose to reinvent the wheel, throwing away all our existing experience and tool support with C++.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[DrXym]

Actually GNOME served an excellent purpose, one that arguably KDE still doesn't get - usability. GNOME 2 was developed according to a set of Human Interface Guidelines and the project strictly enforced them. As a consequence GNOME 2 was minimalist, consistent, not laden down with heaps of settings, forgiving, and sane out of the box. It can be reasonably thought of as the first Linux desktop usable by mere mortals - people who want their desktop to be compliant, forgiving but otherwise sink into the background while they do other stuff. I believe that usability is why GNOME ended up becoming more popular than KDE.

I really see GNOME 3 as a continuation of that, taking usability further into producing a context sensitive, task centric workflow. Does it get everything right? Of course not and some things are arguably very annoying or immature at present. But I think the foundation is sound and as the iterations pass and extensions appear it will become more refined. Version 3 serves a second purpose which is dragging the experience away from the W2K / MacOS wannabe world of other desktops. I also think that it will facilitate the move to Wayland which I hope and expect will replace X11 for the local desktop experience within a few years.

KDE is still a nice desktop and is making its own advances in compositing and in dumping X (which will be first to Wayland I wonder). But it is still a desktop for which usability really hasn't played a central role. It's very busy with settings, menus, dialogs etc which may be great for people who absolutely have to tune every last setting but confusing and intimidating for people who just want to use the desktop for something else. GNOME may be considered too minimalist by some but arguably KDE is too cluttered.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[DrXym]

The point is you can write C++ or Objective C or python bindings on top of GTK with relative ease because GTK is written in C so it represents the lowest common denominator. This is also why Firefox, Eclipse and other projects use GTK in preference to QT because they don't have to wrangle pre-existing C++ objects to make use of the widget primitives.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[luxifr]

I know and support a lot of people who use their computers as a tool and not as a hobby. The more tech-savvy (and even those only somewhat tech-savvy) have a good idea of how they want to interact with the computer - being pissed of by unnecessary graphical effect and/or limited configuration possibilities in newer versions of what they are using (be that Windows, Gnome, KDE, all the way down to specific applications - doesn't matter!). The not so tech-savvy people (mostly older people, frankly) learned to use the desktop metaphor and when confronted with something different they're feeling and acting insecure because they don't have the mindset to adapt to such huge changes rapidly enough not to be complete thrown off by them. That's because they wouldn't have to. Those are the people who started working with computers in this century and use them as tools to get specific tasks done and nothing else. Frankly this means that the target audience for the intended improvements in usability in these new interfaces consists mostly of people who will have a hard time adapting to something so radically different. For people who never really used a computer it makes no difference, of couse as they start from scratch anyway. So I'm wondering whether those UI designers actually conducted some meaningful usability studies with some REAL people before getting to the drawing board trying to reach nerdgasm by ripping of broken UI concepts from apple et al.; heck, the reduced usability even doesn't have to do with people exclusively... basic issues arise even from ignoring what kind of input and output devices will be used... Metro Launcher on a 27" screen + mouse and keyboard? WTF? Unity is the same, as is Gnome3! Touch for regular office work? Not so much! More mouse then? Yeah... your wrists will thank those braindead ui designers... I'm not even arguing that keyboard navigation is usually faster - everyone knows that. KDE shines here - I haven't seen such a good use of the activities (which can be used easily to accommodate to different form factors) concept anywhere else and while coming with sane default configurations for big and small screens where you wouldn't have to change anything you're still empowered to make it your own completely by mostly easy and well structured configuration options. Heck, even Windows shines here as there are a gazillion programs and more or less documented tweaks with which you can tune it for your needs.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Spugglefink]

Have you read the post from rosegarden's author (wish I could find it) talking about moving from gtkmm to qt?

The irony is that Guillaume left Rosegarden years ago, and abandoned Qt and Linux in favor of Cocoa and OS-X. He found true bliss from what I heard, and basically thought Cocoa was everything Qt ever tried to be, and failed at.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[marcovje]

Exactly that. Not limit GTK to one of those two choices.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[bug1]

"They don't try to craft their own bullshit OO extensions to C, when they can just use C++, or Java, or Objective-C, or Python."

I think the problem with GObject isnt so much how it operates, the issue is that they are trying to solve a problem that they should be going near.

GObject is really about being able to use C++, and Java, and Objective-C, and Python in a layer above the libraries. It shouldnt try and do that.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[kangsterizer]

Yes and no.
It's the "Silicon Valley effect".

That is, some guys change stuff in the UI and declare it's where the innovation is. It's not that it's good. It's just different, and backed with strong advertising (Apple, etc).

Then others feel they *have* to follow a similar path to survive and "have something new to announce". Otherwise, you're not news worthy, etc, etc.

I also call it being blind :P

It's fine to copy concepts, but copy the ones that are actually good.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[pizzap]

I can't stand Windows 95 interfaces any longer.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[rioki]

I use gtkmm for all my development needs (even on Windows). It is the best framework I know of and that is allot. True I could not care much for GObject, but that is a different thing, I can ignore. True ravioli library layout is not the best think, especially since gtkmm adds one to each other one, but that is ok; link the stuff statically or don't care.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Cherubim1]

Touch and smartphone interfaces are not a huge hit at all unless one believes all the propaganda and lies from companies like Canonical. These interfaces are pure garbage and are simply a way of making desktops less customizable and dumbed-down. The end result ? - little or no control over one's computing device.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[rioki]

If I remember correctly the went for C, not necessarily because of technological reasons, but rather by following the GNU coding guidelines, which strongly favors C. This has made GTK and friends really easy to wrap into other languages. If you don't like C or GObject, just go with the version for your favorite language, C++, Python, Perl, Ruby, .Net... just pick one

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Rich0]

The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.

The rest of the world uses windows or OS X.

I find it odd that FOSS advocates are willing to reject much of what they find useful with desktop enviornments to make them more appealing to people who will likely never use them...

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Mystra_x64]

Actually GNOME served an excellent purpose, one that arguably KDE still doesn't get - usability. GNOME 2 was developed according to a set of Human Interface Guidelines and the project strictly enforced them. As a consequence GNOME 2 was minimalist, consistent, not laden down with heaps of settings, forgiving, and sane out of the box.

Removing features that's what Gnome HIG is. I prefer to live without usability if that means what it means in Gnome.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[t_ban]

Good developers don't care for unnecessary licensing politics. They don't create software when there are perfectly fine alternatives they could use instead.

I have no idea about the Gnome development process or the community, so I won't comment on that specific point.

But if you're making the general statement that political ideology is unnecessary, and is mutually exclusive with technical skill, you may want to think again.

Writing the best code is an important goal, but don't you also need to think why and for whom you're coding? I'm sure you wouldn't want to think of yourself as a coding machine that mindlessly churns out the best code for whoever happens to own it. If you discern on that point, then you are already politically aware.

It is the hegemony of the have-s that makes some have-nots regard the politically motivated as zealots and lunatics.

Don't let them take you unawares, and turn you into their willing shill.


- t.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[jbolden]

There was a project to make an LGPL QT clone called Harmony. It didn't attract a ton of developers. Strategically the FSF (and Harmony was on board) was that the desktop needed to go first. Otherwise, Harmony would be chasing Trolltech and the free Harmony based desktop would be years behind the proprietary QT based desktop. The free version would be a poor quality knock off of the original.

That is essentially the situation that GnuSTEP has always found themselves in. They can't lead they have to follow.

So yes, what you are proposing was in fact what they were doing.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[GameboyRMH]

I don't even mind a mobile interface on a mobile device, but they have no place on a desktop device. Also a mobile interface doesn't necessarily mean a loss of control but sadly the two often go hand-in-hand in this dark age of curated computing.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[jbolden]

Gnome was a pretty big project in its own right. I think if they were following the GNU coding guidelines, Gnome would be a lot more scriptable and there would be a lot more Scheme in Gnome. Frankly I wish they had been following the coding guidelines, a highly scriptable modern GUI would be wonderful.

As for GTK bindings and wrappers, GTK pre-existed Gnome. It was originally the "GIMP Toolkit". And I agree GTK has a long history of working pretty well with non C based languages.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[DuckDodgers]

The competition from GNOME is probably one of the reasons that Qt 2.2 was released under the GPL in 2000. Even if nothing else good came out of GNOME (and plenty of good did come out of it and continues to come out of it), that alone justifies the existence of the project.

But the real problem with GNOME is as you said, the political atmosphere. I don't care how they want to configure their default user experience. It's their project, they can do what they want with it. But GNOME has just not been friendly to user or distribution packager customization of the user experience. That more than anything hurts the popularity of the GNOME desktop.

I welcome the forks of the project. I hope the most customization-friendly fork wins the broadest user and developer base.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[marcosdumay]

Hum, sorry, but the world didn't "move on from the 1990 desktop".

At least not yet, and we don't have data to know how normal people will react to that change. You can speculate anytime you want, but all that we know is that the experts don't like it.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[DuckDodgers]

Configurability is not a bad thing. The sane approach to Ubuntu's Unity or GNOME 3 would be to make the user default experience exactly what it is now, but allow people who wanted to change it back to something more like GNOME 2.32 or XFCE or any other window manager the option to do so.

Selecting a single coherent user interface experience as the default makes a lot of sense. Blocking users from changing the settings makes no sense, especially for an open source project.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. I think people forget how few C++ programmers were in the OSS arena back in the days. Look when GNOME first started I would dare say the majority was 85% C programmer, 15% whatever other languages existed at the time that were actively working on OSS projects. GObject was invented to tap that C resource. Of course, things have changed over time.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[AthanasiusKircher]

The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.

There can never be too much configurability, and there is no reason to disable it. You want to make a mickey-mouse interface that will appeal better to idiots who don't know anything? Fine. But hidden away on that "advanced settings" menu or whatever should be a way that allows you to continue to configure things as you wish and return the system to something with the features you might actually want as a more advanced user.

You can put all sorts of warnings on that "advanced" menu ("DANGER! CLICKING BEYOND THIS POINT MAY REQUIRE YOU TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT HOW A COMPUTER WORKS!!), but there's no excuse for removing it.

To do so is to adopt the fascist Apple ideal of a lowest common denominator user who is forced to use something with limited options and features. Apple has done a great deal of good work in making slick and usable interfaces that are very intuitive for most people to use (and I'm a fan of many of them) -- but I don't believe that such things should justify the removal of choice.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[jbolden]

Absolutely and C++ developers frequently were coming over from the Windows world and had never done lower level stuff. So while they could make Linux applications the low level stuff required for a GUI was beyond them.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Zds]

Indeed, for us who use computer as tool, solid interface that provides clear list of windows and switching between them is what's needed, no fancy graphics and animations.

Windows is a good example of this - Windows 7, and most likely Windows 8, too, supports everyway of configuring your window access and taskbar someone actually used on Windows _95_. That's 16 years from now. Windows 7 has lot of more options and features and has different default settings, but still, everything can be configured to work just like you have found the most efficient way for yourself in earlier versions.

And this is what Gnome project should have done. It's fine to remove the advantage of PC (over tablets) for users who prefer eye-candy over "just a tool", but it's not fine to make it *impossible* to use it like you did on earlier versions.

This is the reason the people I know who used to use Gnome 2.x now all use XFCE. Even with extensions Gnome 3 is just a quickly hacked demo when it comes to configurability.

To make a good, new, user interface you need a clue on what's the workflow for your user base. Just removing features is not how it's done; it's done by offering all the customizability _somewhere_ but prioritizing the user goals most needed to be easier to access than the rest.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Toonol]

The world has moved on from the 1990s desktop.

Except that every attempt to do so on the pc has been a miserable failure.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Toonol]

There are some posts that are superficially reasonable, but are so obviously wrong, that you suspect deliberate trolling. This may be one of those cases. Can you really imagine that anybody with any technical sense or computer experience thinks the mobile desktop paradigm would be good on a desktop PC? That comment may have been posted purely for trolling purposes, because it'll get a massive negative reaction from everybody. I suspect that's why it was modded down, initially, fair or not.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Radical new? It's the same interface from Windows 3.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Windows 8 is replacing the Start menu with a radical new touch interface

Woah now, its not replacing it. Its an optional environment for the increasing number of users on combo tablet-notebooks.

For us regular desktop users the old style is still in there.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Lisias]

Can you really imagine that anybody with any technical sense or computer experience thinks the mobile desktop paradigm would be good on a desktop PC?

Man, I'm going to scare you, but.. YES. I know a LOT of people, some of them in key holes in software development on my country. A very few of them are techies, but that's does not matter anyway. Techies does not goes to management and, so, does not make key decisions around here.

I still think this is just plain wrong, but as Grand Parent states: You may consider it abhorrent, but you are a minority. The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.. I fear he's right on that point.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[bonch]

I didn't say the mobile desktop paradigm would be good on a desktop PC. I said the old desktop paradigm is a dead end and that mainstream operating systems are adopting certain features from these hugely successful mobile operating systems that had the advantage of not being tied to a legacy paradigm. People love the simplicity and reduced scope of smartphone operating systems.

I wasn't even really arguing or against it. I was just explaining why Linux desktop developers might be interested in doing these things that seem crazy and contrarian--because it's what the rest of the industry is doing.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Lisias]

I managed to misplace "role" to "hole" X-D

While being accidental, it's perhaps convenient - such managers are, in fact, leading the software industry to the hole! :-)

("leading to a hole" is a literal translation from brazilian slang "levar pro buraco", meaning something is going to fail epicly because of someone)

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[diego.viola]

I really want to see Wayland being adopted soon too.

I think sane defaults is a good thing, however, the problem becomes when those sane defaults are the limitation, when you need to do something else and you cannot tweak things. That's when people start to become frustrated.

I don't think it would be a bad idea to provide a nice desktop with sane defaults and then add OPTIONS to do what more advanced users want to do.

Regards.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[diego.viola]

Options in the sense that those options will be there only for advanced users, e.g. inexperienced users won't see them if they don't want to, but experienced users will have them if they want to.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

no, they use gtk because qt on windows when those project wasn't a viable alternative.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[DrXym]

I think there should be options too to cover the normal spread of things a user might change - mouse speed, desktop background, themes etc. And configuration for things like setting up wifi, screen resolution etc. Beyond that I think most of the stuff in a desktop could be relegated to a generic config editor. KDE has way too many settings, GNOME has too few.

A good rule of thumb I think for any setting is to look at the analog in Windows and OS X and see what happens there. If the setting is absent then it can probably be absent in GNOME / KDE. If it's present then it should be given a similar level of prominence. In other words leech a bit off the usability testing that Apple and Microsoft have done.

Problem for KDE is they're attempting to play the same notes as Windows but without understanding the tune. Arguably GNOME 3 is going to far in the other direction but I think it is far easier for GNOME to add options and new functionality than for KDE to take it away.

Re:GNOME has always been fucked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this fork will fail on the sheer weight. Too many things depend on parts of gnome and you'll end up trying to track updated libraries yet trying to keep old code running. It gets ugly.

FYI: Only the GNOME shell has been forked, not the whole GNOME Project.

Not wrong ... RIGHT

[fnj]

Nothing went wrong. It's going RIGHT. Just like when we had - not just Gnome like you say - but also KDE (and now Trinity), Xfce, LXDE, etc. - oh wait, we still have all those. It's an open world. Options are not circumscribed.

Not so similar to Gnome 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or isn't this interface more similar to kde and windows than it is to Gnome 2? Gnome 2 had two panels, menu, status icons on top etc this new mint interface is nothing like that... why do people keep saying "Similar to Gnome 2?" They should say "Linux mint forks Gnome Shell to look like KDE and Windows"

Re:Not so similar to Gnome 2

[fnj]

Nope; wrong. Gnome2 had as many panels as you wanted. Some distros defaulted to one; some defaulted to two.

Re:Not so similar to Gnome 2

[Stormwatch]

That's how Gnome 2 was set to look in Mint.

Re:Not so similar to Gnome 2

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how Gnome 2 was set to look in Mint.

Yes. Panel on bottom - the way God and Fitts' Law intended.

i want to fork Gnome too...

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to fork Gnome and make it more usable, just so I can call mine the Human Gnome Project.

Anyway, I gave up on gnome when it jumped off the "dumb it down and remove anything resembling configuration" cliff. I moved to KDE and haven't looked back. KDE 4.8 == the sweetness.

Re:i want to fork Gnome too...

[Em Adespoton]

Humane Gnome Project. AKA: KDE.

Re:i want to fork Gnome too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I wanted to fork the Gnome too, but I was a Dwarf, and we all know that only a Gully Dwarf would be the result.

Re:i want to fork Gnome too...

[rubycodez]

but that has steep inhuman resource requirements. when you need a video card with more RAM than the slightly aged hardware has for main memory, it's time to look for a new desktop manager. fuck KDE

Awesome.

[Improv]

The components of GNOME3 are mostly great, but the overall experience is terrible; the thing feels like it's designed for tablets, or as part of a blue-sky interface experiment. They took out most of the options that would've let people make it usable again, and have showed hostility to existing apps and user priorities (screensavers are so 90s? Really?). Compatibility with apps written against GNOME3 libraries is great, especially if we can get most of the good stuff from GNOME2 back.

If the GNOME Foundation doesn't want to deal with this, they should get rid of a lot of the people who made the poor decisions that led them to release a terrible, constraining product.

Re:Awesome.

[couchslug]

"the thing feels like it's designed for tablets,"

YOU WILL WORSHIP TABLETS DAMMIT and YOU WILL WANT A TABLETACEOUS INTERFACE on everything which is not a tablet!!!!

Yours in Unity,
                                            The GNOME Foundation.

Re:Awesome.

[Lisias]

Thanks I'm not moderating now.

I would be stuck in an eternal indecision trying to figure out if I would moderate parent as "Funny", "Insightful" or the old & faithful "Troll". :-)

Re:Awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

but the overall experience is terrible

That's an extreme understatement. The Gnome 3 shell is complete fecal matter. It is absolute and complete shit. User interfaces THIRTY YEARS AGO are literally better. That's not hyperbole either.

If the GNOME Foundation doesn't want to deal with this, they should get rid of a lot of the people who made the poor decisions that led them to release a terrible, constraining product.

I completely agree. The Gnome Foundation needs to tell them to either make good shit, of high quality, which actually meets the demands of their users or to go fuck off. Sadly, I strongly suspect the Gnome Foundation would become seriously injured if that came true.

The fact is, since day one these developers have been told what they are doing is fucking retarded, horrible, and completely unsatisfactory. These developers have shown nothing but contempt. They knowingly ignored usability studies citing they better than everyone else in the world simply because they are demigods. And anyone who has a contrary view go go fuck themselves. The contempt they have for people who actually want to use their computer properly, efficiently, and speedily, is literally jaw dropping. Next comes the fucking retard fanboyz who dumbly parrot the party line, "you don't understand". These people are clearly the garbage of humanity and humanity would be best served if they were removed from the gene pool as they are literally a waste of flesh.

Right now I'm running MATE. Its not bad but not great.

Understand, there isn't a Gnome Shell DEVELOPER show isn't telling each and every one of you to go FUCK YOURSELVES. And they do so with a very proud smile on their face.

I sincerely hope the gnome shell fork becomes the defacto, effectively usurping authority and control away from the fucktards who created this entire cluster fuck. And if you're human, you do too.

Re:Awesome.

[rubycodez]

it's worse than that, GNOME 3 makes a tablet seem like a cheap cell phone. fuck GNOME 3. the highest and best use of a GNOME 3 developer is to cut them up for chum

I don't care any more

[rrohbeck]

I have converted all of my systems to XFCE. It feels like an older, simpler and leaner Gnome to me and some of the applets even have better functionality.

Re:I don't care any more

[Anonymous Coward]

I converted all my systems to OSX. It feels like Unix done right.
 
Maybe someday you'll be able to afford a real computer.

Re:I don't care any more

[Anonymous Coward]

XFCE is great

Re:I don't care any more

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't converted any of mine yet (and nor do I use XFCE on a daily basis), but I have used it in the past for a long period of time and really liked it. I'm still using default Ubuntu 11.10 on all my systems, but mainly because it works and I don't have to change anything. I certainly don't like the style of it at all, I much preferred the older Gnome 2 style to the current Unity style.

Gnome has really been destroyed, since (in my opinion) reaching it's epitome with Gnome 2, they ignored the community's disgust of Gnome 3 and tried to force feed us but now they must realize nobody likes it at all.

If I've said this once I've said it a hundred times: NEW IS NOT NECESSARILY BETTER.

Android Ice-cream shit sandwich is a prime example, Gnome 3, Unity, Windows Vista, Windows 8, ETC ETC ETC.

Re:I don't care any more

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm saving my pennies. Yes sir, I is.

Me thinks that all this things real hard like. So me save up real good. My brain work to hard, golly gee, too many choices. What is I to do, I done seen how pretty it is. I like me some shiny things, oh lord yes I do.

Re:I don't care any more

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should switch to Windows 7, it retails at four times the cost of OSX, therefore it's four times better.

Re:I don't care any more

[laffer1]

XFCE is good, but i'd prefer an environment that's cross platform. They've gotten linux centric in the last few releases.

Re:I don't care any more

[oakgrove]

What the hell is wrong with Android 4? I'm posting with it now on a Nexus S and it's a pretty fantastic mobile OS imho.

Re:I don't care any more

[Arker]

E, *box, and even the venerable WindowMaker are viable alternatives as well.

Re:I don't care any more

[crhylove]

Yeah, unlike Microsoft, Google slips up (Honeycomb) and fixes it (ICS). Where as Microsoft just keeps whipping the lame horse (Vista, 7, 8) without the full rewrite they really needed.

OSX is far from Unix done right. I can't stand working on Macs, and I have to all the time.

Re:I don't care any more

[shutdown -p now]

There are a couple of lame changes in ICS. E.g. the battery icon, which used to be green-yellow-orange-red depending on the charge level, thus providing quick indication, is now always cyan, turning red only when it's almost dead. Or the way on-screen replacements for hardware buttons (on Galaxy Nexus; you won't see it on Nexus S) "minimize" to dots in some apps like Google Books - no idea what this is supposed to be for, since they take exactly the same amount of space, you just don't see which is which anymore. Or the non-removable Google search field on top of the home screen. I also don't understand why they replaced smooth vertical scrolling in the app launcher (which was so convenient to scroll with the thumb) with discrete left/right swipes, iOS-style - and with that lame "card swipe out" effect to boot.

But it is all minor stuff, really. I wouldn't want to go back to a 2.x phone now.

Re:I don't care any more

[shutdown -p now]

Yeah, unlike Microsoft, Google slips up (Honeycomb) and fixes it (ICS). Where as Microsoft just keeps whipping the lame horse (Vista, 7, 8) without the full rewrite they really needed.

You do realize that ICS is not a full rewrite of Honeycomb, right?

Re:I don't care any more

[lister king of smeg]

windows has cost? i thought pirate bay was free?

Re:I don't care any more

[oakgrove]

Yeah, there are a few things that will take some getting used to and I do prefer my buttons over my friends Galaxy Nexus on screen ones. Other than that, I am thoroughly impressed with ics on my phone. It is so much smoother and more elegant than gingerbread, I could never go back. I'm particularly liking the new design language with the menus at the top carried over from honeycomb. Android has desperately needed a coherent look andfeel that app designers could adopt. Still a way to go but it's coming together.

Re:I don't care any more

[dbcad7]

I dual booted XFCE and Ubuntu for probably close to the last 2 years, with the majority of my time spent in XFCE.. Years back I used to swap distros like changing socks and stay on top of upgrading to the "latest" release.. I don't see much need for doing all that as long as I am getting security updates.. although I had some minor annoyance issues with a Mint distro many moons ago, I decided to give it a try recently and am running Mint 11 Katya (wiping out an earlier Ubuntu).. In all the hubub, I ended up redoing my drive and figured I would also try the latest Ubuntu (replacing my XFCE).. Still like XFCE a lot, and it will probably go back over the Ubuntu.. Still have to say Mint is growing on me.. It worried me that they might blindly follow Ubuntu, so this story is good to hear.. Still nothing is forcing me into the upgrade path if they in go an unpleasant direction.. I'll have this, and of course it's always easy to get XFCE back on.

Re:I don't care any more

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'm thinking of moving to Razor-qt. Looks very promising.

Re:I don't care any more

[Rich0]

Ugh - you can't get rid of the search field? What is the point in having a search button if the interface it triggers is displayed 24x7 anyway?

Hopefully cyanogenmod will clean that up...

Re:I don't care any more

[shutdown -p now]

There's no dedicated search button in ICS-only phones like Galaxy Nexus anymore.

Will this be coming to Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please gawd tell me this is going to be coming to Debian in the future.

Re:Will this be coming to Debian?

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Yes, it is. Sorry, bud. It is coming.

SWEET!

[lord3nd3r]

I am so happy that they did this, KDE and gnome are both going way overboard with the simplistic/minimilistic desktops. I always thought gnome2 was great and was pissed when they changed over to 3 and said fuck the ui in gnome2. thats what I think anyway.

Re:SWEET!

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, despite the evisceration of features, they're still slow and bloated, right?

Re:SWEET!

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way is KDE minimalistic?

Re:SWEET!

[Dan93]

Agreed. They were with 4.0, which was still better than Gnome 3, but they've made long strides since then.

THIS is why open source is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why open source will forever win.

It doesn't matter if anyone thinks anything is wrong or right. In fact that is a feature, and kinda the point.
Fork, unite, cross-patch, octopus-merge... you only maintain your parts, and everybody is free to make it how he likes it.

This is why I don't consider Wikipedia as open as it should be. The part that's missing is the "de-centralized" part. Where you can just make a copy-on-write fork with any other instance, automatically merge-in patch sets, etc.
In a way, Wikipedia is a cathedral.

Whatever, I digress. Where was I again?
Oh yeah: Open source is awesome! We are awesome!

thank goodness

[GarretSidzaka]

SEriously thank you lafabre

Look at ubuntu its gone to hell recently. Mint was so godlike and perfect, mint 11 that is. Gnome 3 looks like ubuntu horseshit, and I'm not installing it anymore. Its confusing, ugly and looks like same mobile phone "style" bullshit that is stillbirthing win8. So please fork gnome to look likemint11. It really is far better to use andeven prettier than windows 7

Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Modularity is a good thing. It's not cutting up things into a lot of small modules (aka "libraries") that's the problem.
It's doing it wrong.

Look at the typical bash shell and GNU utilities we all use every day. They are hundreds of small executables, libraries, etc. But they are not a mess. They all do one thing, and do it well. That's part of the UNIX philosophy, and for a reason.

And about KDE: A monoculture is never good. Even two are not enough for a healthy ecosystem. And what's the problem with forking anyway? It doesn't hurt anyone,and nearly has no overhead. (If you use git and know how to use it.) The fear over "fragmentation" is entirely delusional and pointless. We are not one of those idiotic "everybody must follow his party line, no matter what" systems. We are not a US two party system.
In fact, I think every user should have his own fork by default. Where "fork" can mean anything from an empty patch set to fundamental major changes. And everybody should just be able to "subscribe" to whoever else's personal fork, implicitly making that someone else a "distributor" without having to do anything special. So that natural leader/follower structures can arise, and nobody can force anything on anyone.
(Sorry for sounding so angry. I don't mean to say this in a attacking way. I'm just a bit beside myself right now for completely unrelated reasons, and can't switch it off. Your post is still 95% in harmony with my opinions. :)

Also, there is one additional thing you missed: The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency. And all for the sake of Joe Sixpack, who is a retarded dick anyway, please please loving you... but not really loving you, since you deformed yourself until you talked like a Windows/OSX and walked like a Windows/OSX, and he really only loves you when you have become more Windows/OSX and Windows/OSX itself. In other words: He still won't love you. So quit lying and be yourself! Same as the typical problem geeks have with women, interestingly.)

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can actually, try tab-completing around in qdbus

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[arth1]

There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2.

There's Gnome Virtual File System (gvfs), which IMHO is the second worst decision the Gnome people ever did (the Gnome Shell iPad fanboi UI being the worst).
When the superuser can't access all files on a system, something is worng. Backup programs and automated root "find" commands fail because of ~loggedinuser/.gvfs which they can't access. Good job. And no, it's not all the other well established tools that should change to accommodate gnome. It's gnome being stupid and breaking things.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Modularity is a good thing. It's not cutting up things into a lot of small modules (aka "libraries") that's the problem.
It's doing it wrong.

Look at the typical bash shell and GNU utilities we all use every day. They are hundreds of small executables, libraries, etc. But they are not a mess. They all do one thing, and do it well. That's part of the UNIX philosophy, and for a reason.

Are you joking? They absolutely are a mess, and I say that as someone who uses them every day. I'm just not fooling myself into thinking they're not a mess. UNIX shells and utils have had a chaotic development history and are chock full of bad design. Most of the good utils do a lot more than one thing, and they are usually far less than excellent, just good enough to suffice if you fight them long enough to get them to do what you want. And don't get me started on the gaping abyss of existential Lovecraftian horror that is shell code, or (shudder) Perl. (and I even like perl! But it's also an eldritch tool of the Many-Angled Ones.)

The only reason the entire lot hasn't been incinerated and replaced by saner tools with better and more consistent design is that there's far too much legacy code out there which depends on the behavior of existing UNIX shells, tools, and scripting languages. Just look Plan 9. Even though it was very much a UNIX-philosophy OS, only more so, and better designed than the original, by the same people who designed UNIX in the first place, it failed to gain any traction because it came far too late. UNIX already had unstoppable critical mass.

You're falling into the trap of believing that the ideal is the practice. UNIX started out as a very hacky OS because squeezing advanced features into a PDP-7 was Hard. The subsequent 40 years of continuous and divergent development, little of it done by people primarily concerned with "do-one-thing-and-do-it-well", have left that ethos in tatters.

You're also falling into the trap of believing without rational reason that one philosophy of software design is best for everything. One-thing-and-do-it-well is a fine idea for a software environment intended to filter text through independently written programs, but it might not work so great for easy to learn and use GUIs.

In fact, I think every user should have his own fork by default. Where "fork" can mean anything from an empty patch set to fundamental major changes. And everybody should just be able to "subscribe" to whoever else's personal fork, implicitly making that someone else a "distributor" without having to do anything special. So that natural leader/follower structures can arise, and nobody can force anything on anyone.

Okay, so you're a crazy guy.

Also, there is one additional thing you missed: The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency.

This is not even on the same planet as right and wrong.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[lennier]

The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency./p>

YES. THIS. EXACTLY THIS.

I really, really want a Unix desktop which actually implements the Unix philosophy, and very much want my windowspace to be exposed as a file system (or rather, as a VERY loosely / completely untyped object system. And no, sadly JSON objects don't quite cut it, which is a problem since we're baking JSON into the Web. Lua objects would probably work though; they're pretty nice, and it interoperates well with C.)

I want the ability to, just as you say, reuse objects and components from one "application" inside another. In fact, I want to completely erase the concept of "application"; I just want a robust store of data, as a set of fine-grained untyped objects/collections, and then various views or functions over that data. And then yes, publish any part of my data/function/object hierarchy in a safe, standard way to a net-wide repository as a sort of mini-distribution, and safely import subsets of other people's stuff into mine.

See, there's a whole lot of nonsense busywork we're currently doing in the system administration space which duplicates and triplicates stuff we've almost solved in the programming space - only badly, and without interoperability. For example, what is a zipfile but an untyped object containing other files? What's a directory but an almost-but-not-quite-the-same object? What's a filesystem but again, an almost-but-not-quite-the-same thing? What's a version control "commit" but the same thing as an RPM/DEB patch, except implemented differently? What's a "distribution" but something that ought to just be an RPM of RPMs? And what are SQL "databases" and "tables" but again, objects containing sets of data, and why do I need multiple different incompatible formats for each one?

So we have, at the OS/system level, these various different implementations of the idea of "structured object", but not really done sensibly; for one thing, there's this very archaic concept of a single shared filesystem which is very much like the old pre-1960s (FORTRAN and COBOL) programming concept of global variables. In programming languages, we moved past global variables toward structured sets of local variables when C came along; but we didn't at the filesystem level. This leads inevitably to easy corruption of a system: run one installer with root priviledges, and it has access to your entire root namespace on your hard drive. Our systems shouldn't really, in 2011, be structured in such an old-fashioned way.

So at the OS layer we have "files and directories as objects". Then we have a process-management layer over the top: libraries, processes, threads. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" AGAIN (but in a non-interoperable way) as various "software component" frameworks (which of course install into a global per-system namespace, stomping all over each other to create DLL hell): COM objects, XPCOM objects (Mozilla), UNO objects (OpenOffice), CORBA objects, COM objects, KParts objects, GObject objects, .NET assemblies, Java namespaces. And a "registry", which reimplements the filesystem, to handle invocation of the software componentry. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" a fifth time as non-persistent programming-language objects which only exist in a single running process space : C++ objects, PHP objects, JSON/Javascript objects, .NET objects, Java

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[lennier]

There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2.

There's Gnome Virtual File System (gvfs), which IMHO is the second worst decision the Gnome people ever did (the Gnome Shell iPad fanboi UI being the worst)

Yep, that's pretty bad. Windows 7's "Libraries" are up there too: suddenly, there's a whole new filesystem-level directory-like abstraction which doesn't exist at the filesystem level, but is only a fiction created by Explorer.exe. And can't be addressed by any kind of path. How am I supposed to point a user to their library? "Go to C:\... oh bugger. Um, point at the... clicky thing... no the other... um.... well, I can't see your screen over the phone, so, er... good luck!"

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that backup scripts fail? I have seen the other problem, where the backup didn't fail but it started trying to copy the contents of .gvfs recursively, and it copied dozens of gigabytes of data before I stopped it.

I wish they had put the mount points in /tmp/gvfs/loggedinuser instead. Or /var/gvfs/loggedinuser.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[shutdown -p now]

It's not really new in Win7 - there were always "virtual folders" offered by the Shell, they just weren't as obvious. However...

And can't be addressed by any kind of path. How am I supposed to point a user to their library?

You can just copy/paste the path from Explorer while the library in question is open, and it'll work. I.e. to open your documents library, just type "Libraries\Documents" in the path textbox. I think the only catch there is that it's not locale-independent.

The problem from power user's perspective is that it only works with Shell APIs (and the programs that use them), not on raw filesystem level - so you can't e.g. dir the above.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[rev0lt]

The philosophy of "everything is a file" is a naive one. It worked well in the 70's, where you either had text files or binary files (and a folder is a special binary file), and most storage units didn't have more than 10 000 files. Today, you have multiple different kind of containers with multiple types of information. As an example, think of a video file. Should the metadata properties also be accessed as a file? Should the sound and video be accessed as different files/streams? And how about when both streams are interleaved? And the keyframe index, should it be accessed as a file also? Should JPEG extensions (such as thumbnailing) be scanned and exposed as a file? And how about metadata referring to non-available applications, such as Photoshop Exif entries? And even if everything was a file, how would that help you to find that 300x700 portrait you have of your mom, taken somewhere last year?
We are moving away from container-based storage units to metadata-based storage, precisely because the notion that everything is a file is quite limited. And these limitations aren't even new - symbolic links are in some ways a hack that breaks that base approach - you can refer to the same object from multiple different container, which - by itelf, is a rudimentary relation mechanism. I won't even mention ACLs - you access a file, but the system actually opens (at least) 2 files in many implementations, because the "file" notion doesn't comprehend accountability or complex ownership.
The big players (Apple and Microsoft) have been moving away from file-based storage for years, and on to metadata-based stored approach. And no, afaik this isn't something you can easily slap over an existing filesystem.

Also, the same concept you praise is contrary to the integration you preach - each vendor should implement the funcionality they need over the archaic "file" concept, as there is no "one size fits all" when it becomes to content decoding, and for the base libraries to actually be useful, they would have to be generic (think of the file api right now).
We have huge bloated frameworks because different people has different needs, and processing power is cheap - cheaper than development time. That's what having a programmable device is all about - being able to write your own bloat how you think it should be implemented, instead of eating the other person's bloat.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's not done that way because performance would suck, and simple things such as a slashdot post turn into enormously long rants.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[mangobrain]

What would the API for this "single persistent, networked, yet not completely shared-global" object concept look like? If nothing is typed, how - for example - does an image manipulation program know which objects represent data, which objects represent manipulations, and how to actually fit the two together? What if I come up with a new and useful way of manipulating data which doesn't fit into the existing API? If what used to be a large database in an optimised binary format is now a millions of individual objects inside collections, all untyped and limited to whatever metadata satisfies the lowest common denominator of code written for this object concept, how do I access and manipulate that data with anything approaching decent performance? How do I create an attractive UI for my application when it has no prior knowledge of what settings, properties or operations may be exposed by the components it uses, or even what components exist? If I invent a new or improved type of formatting for word processors, and there isn't already a property or set of properties in the object format which can express the data easily, do I just scrap the idea, or implement an object where the "real" data lives in an opaque blob in a non-standard property, defeating the whole point of generic objects?

Specialisation is a necessary evil when it comes to actually getting things done. Frameworks and APIs for implementing pluggable, re-usable components exist, but in the interests of being realistic, useful and performant, they are always specialised. Some examples:

* Gstreamer implements a wonderful pluggable framework for playing media, be it audio, video, streaming, stored, compressed, whatever. There are plug-ins for input types (file/network), codecs, multiplexing, de-multiplexing, filtering, rendering (e.g. displaying on screen/sending to sound card), and they can be plumbed together in any way that makes sense. To this end, plug-ins use a domain specific method for describing what they can consume, and what they can produce. It even manages to export UI information and accept user input, for things like DVD menus, though I have no idea how they managed to fit that in to the model. It can't be used to edit a Word document or interact with a web page, but web browsers can and do make use of it for displaying video data embedded in HTML5 documents. For performance, all operations beyond data loading/retrieval are performed on the local machine, in the address space of a single process, unless you specifically create a plug-in chain with the disk or the network as its output.

* D-Bus implements a simple, persistent message bus, where anything connected to the bus can send messages either to specific numbered entities, or to named interfaces. Anything which implements a given named interface can respond to these latter messages, and as long as the data is returned in the correct format for that interface, the sender will understand it. However, it's only as useful as the interfaces themselves; it can't magically connect anything to anything else, applications have to be written in advance to expect/implement specific, designed interfaces. I'm not sure how it would hold up performance-wise if you tried to connect up something like Gstreamer plug-ins over it - that would be a lot of messages, and an awful lot of data copying.

I would love for what you propose to be possible, but something tells me it's not grounded in reality.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[DrXym]

I think the thing Unix got right was to ship a bunch of tiny tools that could be strung together via pipes and redirections to construct something useful. It's a mind bogglingly useful approach, and the tools are powerful especially compared to the half assed tools that plague DOS derivatives to this day.

That said there is no denying how "organic" some tools are. There is no consistent syntax between tools, and some tools are arcane or implement arcane default settings. I also have a love / hate relationship between bash, gawk and perl and constantly have to relearn these bastards when I need to write a script because they're almost write-only languages and virtually unmaintainable once they grow beyond a certain size. I once had to port a 5000 line cgi perl script which could generate 6 disparate web pages into Java. It took six months to unpick and reimplement.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[TuringTest]

Hear, hear! It would be great having an unified generic API that can handle all kinds of data, like the UNIX filesystem did; but the file abstraction is no longer valid as that universal API.

I have my hopes on RDF, the simplest possible representation for semantic information. It is fully open source and has lots of support, libraries and research backing it.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[GameboyRMH]

The way I see it Win7's Libraries are no different from Nautilus' bookmarks.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[GameboyRMH]

I've never seen that happen but neither situation is good. Mounting somewhere under /media or /mnt (although I think /mnt has been unofficially deprecated for some time) would have been better, that's what they're for, that's the convention we've been following since the graybeard's beards weren't gray and backup solutions are already made with them in mind.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[jcdr]

GVFS is mainly for accessing *remote* filesystem, so it's logic that the root of the local system cannot access them: it's not files on this system.

I actually like GVFS + FUSE because it permit to mount a remote filesystem like an ordinary one. You can then use your standard tools to manage it, even if this is on a remote host that don't have a proper file transfer protocol.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[marcosdumay]

That's near the answer I'd give the GP. But since you said almost it all, I'm repying to you.

You are completely right. But yet, you are somewhat wrong. Everything is a file is certainly not fit for a modern system (not even a CLI based one), but "Everything is X" can be fit for some values of X. The UNIX philosophy was less that "X = file" than it was "keep X simple, and pay atention to that everything part".

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh! That was the sound of the concept you were trying to describe, flying right over your head. You totally missed "everything is a file" concepts. Your whole comment is gibberish. Metadata is part of a file. It is not exposed as a file. Have you ever seen every single word in a file being exposed as tree in a file system? No? Why would you expect something that is part of a file to be exposed as a file system? I think you took the concept and ran too far with it.

I want to know what UI development is mandated to search metadata. Because, to me, it would be very easy to implement a Unix like command that can search metadata, much like how whereis, find, and locate currently work.

The everything is a file is not limiting because it breaks it down into a small enough concept to be manageable by people. That's like saying Microsoft's everything is an application concept is too limiting, or Apple's everything is a 1:1 analogy is too limiting. I would love to know what is not too limiting.

No you sir are totally missing the point.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

The kicker? It's ironic that with PowerShell, Windows now has a far more Unixy command-line interface to its internals than any Unix does. I wonder if any Linux hackers are paying attention?

It's not just on the command-line that Windows wins for integration. COM, which is nearly two decades old, provides seamless integration between components written in almost any language on Windows. Linux has nothing like it. Almost all Linux developers seem to think COM is solely (or mainly) for embedding visual widgets (hint: it's not). A couple of years ago I asked on stackoverflow about Linux equivalents and got retarded answers like "use d-bus!", "use sockets!". FFS. If you want to make a Linux application scriptable, the only realistic approach is to embed a scripting language and then you're stuck with that choice of language. Windows does this better and has for a very long time.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[improfane]

I think you would find Loper OS interesting:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=4

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

That said there is no denying how "organic" some tools are. There is no consistent syntax between tools, and some tools are arcane or implement arcane default settings. I also have a love / hate relationship between bash, gawk and perl and constantly have to relearn these bastards when I need to write a script because they're almost write-only languages and virtually unmaintainable once they grow beyond a certain size. I once had to port a 5000 line cgi perl script which could generate 6 disparate web pages into Java. It took six months to unpick and reimplement.

Thank you sir, this is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of when I wrote my rant. It's very much love/hate for me. If you don't live and breathe shell/awk/perl every day, you forget all the arcana quickly, and the arcana are needed for any significant program. Also, some of them are just incredibly dumb languages (bash/csh both have horrible syntax and frustrating limitations).

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[Anonymous Coward]

beos did it right, however.

it's not the system that needs to adapt to the tool, it's the other way around. sadly it's to late and stupid tools decision made in the '80 have become the 'industry standards'

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[arth1]

GVFS is mainly for accessing *remote* filesystem, so it's logic that the root of the local system cannot access them: it's not files on this system.

No, that isn't logical. Root can "su - username" and then access them, so this doesn't add anything except complications. Place mounts under /mnt or other excluded directories, and don't artificially try to block the superuser from accessing anything. That's not how Unix like systems behave - doing so is sheer ignorance by the Gnome devs, only surpassed by their arrogance. Which they haven't earned the right to.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[jcdr]

Sorry but I disagree: "su -username" was never intended to provides root access to private filed on a *OTHER* system. For local files, ok, but this not the case here.

Now, if you really wants to let root access our private remote files, you can just change the FUSE mount settings. Maybe the only problem is the default FUSE mount options with GVFS, not the whole concept.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[arth1]

Sorry but I disagree: "su -username" was never intended to provides root access to private filed on a *OTHER* system.

You can't "disagree" with facts.
"su - username" causes the superuser to become a user, with all privileges and limitations of that user. That's its intent, and that's what it's done for decades. Gnome-VFS can't change that, and trying to block the superuser from doing anything is agains the very design of Unix, and futile - it only creates problems.

Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one...

[jcdr]

Oups. Yes you are right on that.

I was confused by the earlier post that pointed out the problem while using tools with the root privilege. This is not same that the user privilege that root can gain by using 'su'.

Anyway, I am pretty certain that this can be fixed into the gvfs-fuse-daemon, witch is only a small and optional part of GVFS.

GP's right, and you're not.

[Anonymous Coward]

The GP's supposed "unsupported assertions" become very well supported and completely correct if you've used Gnome for more than a day, and they become blatantly obvious if you've ever tried to develop Gnome apps.

You missed the GP's point when it comes to the horrible build system that Gnome has. It's not about the impact on the users, it's about the impact on the developers! Even using jhbuild is a bad experience when compared to using cmake with KDE. It's trivial to build KDE, which makes it much easier for developers to improve it. It takes ages just to set up a Gnome development environment, if you ever want to hack on it.

For a project like Gnome, C++ and Objective-C are just as portable as C is, and were just as portable back when Gnome was first started. Besides, have you ever actually tried the non-C bindings for Gtk+ and Gnome? Only the Python and C++ ones aren't complete rubbish. The rest are crap. But guess what? Qt doesn't need C++ bindings in the first place, and the PyQt bindings are amazing. So it's not like Gtk+ and Gnome are any better off. And don't even start with Vala. It's just Gnome stealing C#, for the most part.

The GP is right, and you're wrong. Gnome's a failure and everything they do is a mistake. They never make the right choice. Never!

Re:GP's right, and you're not.

[Noitatsidem]

I'd imagine you posted Anonymously because you knew you'd be modded down to all hell for being a blatant KDE fanboy. I'm not going to deny the fact that the gnome developers are complete retards. They are. As for the build systems, you may or may not be right, I wouldn't know. Languages/toolkits? It's preference, plain and simple. Arguing "X" is better than "Y" is just plain retarded, what works for one person may be hell for another. That's a rule you can apply to most anything, including this (that isn't to say that I'd exactly want a DE written in slow-ass Java, but it could be done).

As for KDE from an end user point of view, I'd argue that while heading in a better direction than Gnome; it's still bullshit. If I want to bloat up my desktop, it'd be with something I could play [a large number of good] games on (see windows for more details).
Simply put: KDE looks pretty, just like GNOME. There's nothing an end-user can't do with KDE that they can't do with something as simple openbox.

My point being, functionality should come before eye-candy. The code behind it doesn't really matter to the end-user, and it never will. The brains (or lack there of) the developers matter much more than anything else.
Personally, I'm dualbooting Arch running XFCE, and Windows 8 (I'm a gamer, what can I say?)

Meh

[andydread]

I like both Gnome3 and Unity. Sure they are both experiencing teething problems at the moment very similar to KDE4.0 but they will get better. Honestly I and tired of the old Windows95 interface and when I was using Gnome2 I did away with the bottom taskbar/panel in favor of AWN anyways. When I see so many people clinging to the 17year old Windows95 interface of Gnome2

Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[walterbyrd]

The community has beating Gnome over the head for months now. But Gnome stubbornly refuses to go back to their less FUBAR interface.

What the hell is wrong with them?

Oh well, at least there's forking.

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[lennier]

Oh well, at least there's forking.

Forking is the answer to borking.

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[supersloshy]

"The Community" isn't full of haters. There are a lot of people, namely GNOME designers and people like me, who love it. The most vocal people are always the negative ones, you know, because the people enjoying GNOME are too busy enjoying it to share their experiences.

Also, these forks ALWAYS happen. They happened with GNOME 2, KDE 4, and nearly every other popular open source project that changed around a lot. In the end they always end up maturing and people get used to them... Then when another new version comes out people complain and moan about how the version they complained about is suddenly the "last version with any sense left". This GNOME 3 hate is really old and I'm starting to feel like people only post articles about it on here just to watch the flaming.

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[g2devi]

I'm on Ubuntu and I postponed upgrading to the current Ubuntu with Unity or until a month ago, because it finally has some polish.

First I tried Unity. It worked okay, but the GUI was heavy. Fortunately there was a lighter Unity2D, but ultimately I left it because it's really made for one app on the screen at one time.

I tried XFCE (my old favourite). I worked and was my fallback desktop, but I agree with Linus, it is a step down from GNOME 2. I tried LXDE and quickly left. I tried KDE4, and quickly longed for Unity 2D...or death...whichever came first.

Finally, I tried GNOME Shell. I was like Unity with different tradeoffs....then I discovered GNOME Shell extensions. This made GNOME Shell close enough GNOME 2. There are still things that bug me....I'd like to arrange the toolbar items and kill or the "Activities" hotspot which I accidentally hit too often due to Fitts Law. I'd like to be able to lock my screen via a toolbar button as I could in GNOME 2. Finally, I'd like to be able to close apps via right clock from the task bar as I could in GNOME 2.

But overall, GNOME Shell is now usable and I believe only a version or two before they gain the power I desire.

What's wrong with the GNOME team? I've experienced GNOME 2.0, which was in much worse shape than the current GNOME Shell is. I believe the GNOME 2.x GUI didn't start being a step up from GNOME 1.0 GUI until GNOME 2.8 or so. I guess, this is just the way the GNOME team operates....strip away functionality 'til GNOME is almost unusable, then slowly add it over several versions until GNOME becomes the best environment out there. I think GNOME Shell will eventually be a winner, but if you're still on GNOME 2 and in no hurry to upgrade, you might want to wait 'til the next version of GNOME when GNOME extensions will be more polished.

As for the Linux Mint fork, I hope they try to have a minimal backwards compatible fork of the extensions rather than a deep rewrite of GNOME Shell, since extensions actually do come pretty close to what GNOME 2 provided and we don't need yet another XFCE-wannabe desktop environment or yet another one-distro desktop. If the extensions fork is good enough, it can be folded back into GNOME 3.

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[perryizgr8]

classic denial...

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

and porking is the answer to everything

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, as long as gnome-shell is application centric by default, I'm out. Extensions or not.

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[rdnetto]

I tried KDE4, and quickly longed for Unity 2D...or death...whichever came first.

What's so bad about KDE? I tried it after seeing Gnome3, and I honestly prefer it to Gnome2.

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[rubycodez]

haha, if you identify with GNOME designers you are truly a fringe whackjob. Yes, I believe you and them truly love GNOME 3. Meanwhile, normal people with work to do absolutely HATE it. All my Linux and BSD desktop friends hate it (yes, I have more than a dozen of those)

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[Sri Ramkrishna]

And then came extensions.gnome.org, and suddenly, you can get most of your functionality back thanks to various people out there wanting to put features they missed back into the desktop.

Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it?

[Sri Ramkrishna]

I wrote an extension to put a lock button on the top bar. Try using that.

No Im not!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your a LOOSER, so their!

Re:No Im not!

[mcneely.mike]

And YOU are a loser. so there.

Re:No Im not!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing you corrected him. There's no possible way those three errors were intentional, like, you know, a joke.

Re:No Im not!

[mcneely.mike]

Gee... ya think?
STUPID AC! A joke that has NOTHING to do with any part of the entire field of comments, though, is just (again) STUPID!

In an update on this story...

[aklinux]

The Mint developers have removed the engines from their cars and attached teams of mules. The next release to be known as Borax.

...but seriously, while the Gnome developers could have done more on getting the configuration tools out there for the desktop, once you begin getting a handle on the configuration, it's not bad. Just different.

Ubuntu's Unity is the one I have a problem with. It feels like I'm running a netbook even though I don't own one.

Re:In an update on this story...

[emilper]

The Mint developers have removed the engines from their cars and attached teams of mules. The next release to be known as Borax.

yeah, and the Gnome designers designed a car that has only one stick, nothing else, no weel, no pedals, no buttons no nothing, but a single stick ... then you to take it to the freeway, and everything is fine until you get in an intersection and it starts to rain, and you need to steer, change gears and start the windshield wipers in the same time ...

C is good.

[MrEricSir]

GObject has features C++ doesn't include natively, like type introspection.

Besides, what's wrong with C for a low-level API? You can connect just about any C-based API to a higher level language.

Re: C is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

GObject does not compete with C++, but with Qt's toolchain, which does offer introspection, and has done already so for many years before GIR came along in the Gnome world.

Looking forward to it

[cbope]

I wish them the best and look forward to it. I recently discovered, or more accurately installed, Linux Mint. I have been using ubuntu since 6.06 or so, and I don't like the direction they are going. I have tried and failed to like Unity. I dived into xubuntu a bit which is not bad, before deciding to give LM a good try. I have to say, I like their attitude and their "political" position... if something works and is good, use it. Nevermind the OSS politics, closed source is OK for some libraries and drivers, if that's what is available. Just make it work. This is a refreshing change from the purist OSS view, which in my opinion is harming the movement more than helping it. Take for example the sad state of open source wireless drivers. I can't even begin to mention how many times I have installed or upgraded a Linux distro, and lost all wireless functionality for sometimes _days_ at a time. Searching for a solution that works "with this specific version of this distro" is a load of bullshit. Most of the so-called solutions are nothing more than hacks anyway. Oh, and somewhere down the line some obscure library or driver binary gets automatically updated and breaks the whole fucking thing again. I'm really tired of it. LM seems to focus on getting things to work, and that's the way it should be. There will always be Gentoo or Debian or other roll-your-own distros for those that want that level of control or purism, but I want an OS that works and is not a fragile house of cards waiting to collapse. At the moment, it seems LM is closest to that ideal. I still have several machines running various flavors and versions of ubuntu, but that may change in the near future.

MOD parent UP

[Anonymous Coward]

And make sure it gets copied to bash.org or whatever. This is a new classic!

captcha: patched

Why should I have to change how I work?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. Why should I have to change the way I've worked for a decade because some UI designer rearranged the rooms in a blind man's house? I have made a living for a long time as a software developer, and have a productive system that works for me. Why should I have to change everything on the whim of someone who isn't helping me earn a living? Much easier to switch to KDE than learn Gnome 3.

Misleading title and body

[Anonymous Coward]

They've forked GNOME Shell not the entire GNOME library. Thus GNOME compatibility fears expressed in the comments are unfounded.

I think someone with the power to change the title and body should do so. Else Slashdot could turn into a media for spreading misinformation and half-truths.

Re:Misleading title and body

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to explain my 'misinformation and half-truth' claim, just like how a slight twist of the wording changed the scope of what was forked, other news can also experience the same twists. This is exactly what happens in the game where a message is passed along in a group one-by-one. The end result is completely different from what the game was begun with. Internet is the same.

Gnome3 only lacks configurability ui's

[Anonymous Coward]

If no `shell-extentions` and the `gnome-tweaks-tool`, Gnome3 is only useless and ugly as hell. I know some javascript but what the hell? Why am I obliged to transform my wife as a JavaScript programmer just to change the ugly too big fonts and Gtk3 themes ? That's the main stupid ommisions from the Gnome3 devs. They should have put the basic preferences ui from the start. With Mint12 MSGE, Clement Lefebvre included `tweaked` external dependency tools out of the box - at least!

Re:Gnome3 only lacks configurability ui's

[Sri Ramkrishna]

use tweak tool and you can change the large fonts. Also 3.2 fixes some of the complaints about that. Please try to use a more up to date GNOME 3 distro.

Re:You're... Old UIs

[lsatenstein]

I am an old geezer, having started with Unix in the early 90's and migrated to Linux in 2005. We are creatures of habit, and we get accustomed to where to find things when things go wrong, and what to do to get around limitations in some commands.

If I were to create a new UI, (heaven forbid), I would not take the Gnome or Unity model. Here are my thoughts.

With wide screens, I would like to have two desktops, one on each left-right half of the screen, as if I had two monitors, with each desktop protected from the other. "Code on one, and documentation on the other", or "Emails on one and something else on the other" are two examples.

I have become accustomed to the Microsoft Ribbon concept as it applies to MS office, and am thinking how it could be applied to a GUI interface as a top, side or bottom panel. These are thoughts, nothing more. In a way, the ribbon concept is just the same old gnome2 menu, with some tweaks.

What I do like in the new incarnations of some gui interfaces is the popback facility. That is, I like to not have to thread through the top of the tree through some level of menus to choose the appropriate utility if I clicked inappropriately.

     

Gnome will die by the hands of Cinnamon

[jlbprof]

I think it is a great idea, and to the points about the Gnome 3 and Cinnamon diverging, yes they will diverge. But I bet Gnome will die and most linux platforms will adopt Cinnamon. Good work guys. Stick something in there eye :)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

better in some ways

[OrangeTide]

GObject is better in some ways than C++. And it's flat out better than X toolkit intrinsics (Xt, the thing used to make Xaw and Motif and a few others) in all ways I can imagine.

gtk+ has bindings for one more popular language than Qt. so chew on that.

Make an OS-X interface fork of Gnome3

[unixisc]

There is a distro called PearOS that has done precisely that. It's an Ubuntu derivative, has taken Gnome3, made it look & feel identical to OS-X and has run w/ it.

That one is a complete distro, and that too, the Pear App Store is largely in French, but my suggestion here - do what the Pear guys have done, and fork Gnome3 not to make a Gnome2 UI, but rather, make a complete OS-X lookalike, and put it out there, alongside KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, GNUSTEP and others. It would be a good target for people who like OS-X but can't afford Apples. In fact, combine such a distro w/ PC-BSD, and you have the perfect way of having OS-X on your non-Apple PCs, w/o invoking any Apple lawsuits.

Re:Make an OS-X interface fork of Gnome3

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Kind of shows how flexible GNOME 3 is, doesn't it? Using CSS for gui, and javascript for changing the behavior of GNOME 3 desktop, you're able to make all kind of interesting forks.

Re:Make an OS-X interface fork of Gnome3

[unixisc]

Only problem - this flexibility doesn't show @ user level - one has to be a programmer in order to write CSS or Javascript code in order to alter its behavior. In KDE, otoh, one can do anything from the Kontrol Panel (or whatever it's now called - I'm used to what it was called in 3.5)

Re:Make an OS-X interface fork of Gnome3

[Sri Ramkrishna]

To some extent, that was true about Unix for quite some time. I could argue that it's just a continuous of it. It's not completely believable of course because the desktop is geared for everyone. That said, the kind of things you get in extensions is radically different than trying to build all those into the core and then have preferences exposing them. Extensions can change behaviour completely and override those hated gui designers ideas and you can turn those on and off as you want them. The problem with flexibility is that is that causes bloating and then you have people who just leave because it's just too heavy for them. There are always people who believe there is some magical place where you get all the options you want and your desktop will be light, efficient, and fluffy. It doesn't work that way. Every decision point is a lot more code to handle. More code, more change of human error etc etc. In the end, the same people who want the options will bitch on here about how bloated GNOME is and how it's taking 80Ms of precious memory out of the 6 gigs they have or it can't handle their 512M Pentium II computer.

Parallel with GPL?

[PetiePooo]

Does anyone else see a parallel with GPL versions?

GPL v2 was decent and widely used, but the arrogant overseers decided to overstep their bounds when updating to a new point release, ignoring community feedback and concerns. While some people followed willingly to GPL v3, many simply jumped ship to licenses with less onerous terms, such as MIT, ASL, etc.

I wish someone would fork GPL v2 and keep the legal strength improvements while jettisoning the forced patent licensing and "de-Tivoising" provisions. I'm fed up with RMS's proselytizing.

It's not only the dumb Gnome developers

[Anonymous Coward]

As the title says: It's not only the dumb Gnome developers. There are others as well and they are just as much to blame as those arrogant Gnome people. When Gnome showed Gnome 3, the major Linux distributions had to sit together and come with a statement towards Gnome that they did not want this. This way Gnome could either go on in their own stubborn way, or decide to not do it and keep working on Gnome 2. Either way, we wouldn't have had Gnome 3.
Do you all notice what has been going on for the last half year or so? Gnome released the Hell they call Gnome 3 and the distribution developers work night and day to come up with something they can put on top of it to make it at least a little usable: Ubuntu invented Unity, which to me is about the same as the Gnome Shell, Mint comes with MGSE (a bunch of extensions to try to bring back the old interface which Gnome killed), Mate (a Gnome 2 fork which is not stable yet and which also doesn't bring back the old feeling) and now Cinnamon (the latest idea to return to what was). Look at all the effort put into these attempts, the time and money this has cost already. And why? To clean up the mess Gnome made. And Gnome? They are laughing out loud because they get support without having to do anything, although they are the ones to blame for this mess.
People, stop using Gnome completely. Let them feel what they came up with is not what we want. Only by a massive refusal to use it will turn the tide. But it means we all have to do it, otherwise it won't work.
Be wise, be sensible and choose another DE than the hell Gnome is giving us.

Re:It's not only the dumb Gnome developers

[DeMus2000]

Sorry for writing this before acquiring an account. It was me who wrote the story, and I am NOT an Anonymous Coward.