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GNOME: Staring Into the Abyss
New submitter zixxt writes "GTK+ Developer Benjamin Otte talks about the stagnation and decline of the Gnome Project. He describes how core developers are leaving GNOME development, how GNOME is understaffed, why GNOME is a Red Hat project and why GNOME is losing market and mind share. Is the Gnome project on its deathbed? Quoting: 'I first noticed this in 2005 when Jeff Waugh gave his 10×10 talk. Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project. In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places.'"
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything. The warning signs were there for years before. The attitude of a few dictating what was 'best' for the users, even when the users were screaming NO! NO! NO! started with the GNOME2 rewrite. They finally listened to some of the loudest arguments that time and restored enough functionality that it could become the standard Free Desktop.
GNOME3 turned that stupid up to eleven though, putting it a whole different category. It is explicitly declared it OK if any/all existing users leave, a pure "my way to the highway" deal. It is pretty much accepted that it is unusable on a standard desktop with a mouse and this isn't debatable as an issue in need of repair. The only rational explanation is that somehow, someone in that project assumes they are going to get an OEM preload deal on tablets somewhere. But GNOME's hardware requirements are higher than Android so it won't be some low end creep into the market through the back door deal, it will have to be on somebody's mid to top end hardware. Maybe RedHat has struck the deal in secret already and we are all going to be in awe of their mad negotiating skills. But it isn't the way to bet.
Or perhaps they assume that Win8 will force everyone to accept touchscreens and everything running maximized... even on 27" displays... so they just want to be there first, like how Compiz was doing the Vista eye candy a year or so before Vista shipped. Doubtful. If Win8 doesn't quickly get a recognizable default desktop on desktop class hardware users will just insist on Win7. Everything doesn't benefit from a touchscreen, keyboards and mice still have a place and aren't likely to go the way of the dodo anytime soon.
Guess if the article is right about the number of active devs left it really doesn't matter anymore because there doesn't appear to be enough left to rewrite their way out the the GNOME Shell disaster. Several of the alternates have similar manpower except KDE which has much more. It was a good desktop, it will be missed.
Democrat delenda est
"Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2."
GNOME 3 is *worse* than GNOME 2. By far. Plus more.
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything.
Mod up. The purpose of a DE is to enable the user to get his work done as fast and as efficiently as possible. Not eye-candy bullshit. If you can imlement eye candy that doesn't hinder or get in the way, I'm all for that, but never forget: **Enable the user to get work done fast**
The big issue with many modern desktops including Gnome and Win8 is they are hell bent on chasing the "dumb it down! dumb it all down! moaarrr dumber!!" crowd. Ripping out power user functionality, removing configurability, and generally making it about as annoying to use for proficient users as possible.
There aren't many "real" desktops left. KDE is left. Some like it, some don't, but at least it hasn't dumbed itself down to placate the LCD who think computers shouldn't be any more complex than operating a toaster. Win7 is alright. Most of the others have gone off the deep end in their quest to satisfy people who need the most simplistic interface possible at the expense of power features and customization.
I switched from GNOME to KDE because of GNOME 3.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
People love complaining about Gnome Shell. I'm sure that the number of people that have been converted to Linux because of Gnome Shell greatly outnumber the gnome/start menu diehards from the 1990. What is actually preventing you from using Gnome Shell with a mouse? I do it everyday on 2 computers and 4 screens. Controls are logical and the default settings customise the desktop to you - virtual desktops are created automatically, you can drag and drop windows between desktops in the windows screen, and so on. Animations are smooth and the whole design works around the lack of support for minimized composite windows in X.
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...until Netcraft confirms it.
Yeah... MATE is GNOME now, far as I'm concerned.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
...and I like it.
TFA seems to be describing a mature software project that has entered maintenance mode. Why would this be a bad thing?
TFA says, "Distros are dropping GNOME for other environments instead of working with GNOME," with "other" and "environments" hyperlinked to Unity and Cinnamon. Actually, aren't these projects that share a ton of code with GNOME? So what's the problem? Users have a bunch of different choices. The developers offering these choices are sharing code. Users who prefer something outside this family of choices, such as KDE or Fluxbox or XFCE, can also do their own thing. This is also good. All the same apps run just fine in all these different environments. This is also good.
TFA says, "The claimed target users for GNOME are leaving desktop computers behind for types of devices GNOME doesn't work on," with hyperlinks referring to smartphones and tablet computers. Again, I don't see the problem. Users have other choices besides keyboard-and-mouse computers. I kind of doubt that anyone is choosing to use a smartphone to write their novel, so maybe users are actually using the correct tool for the correct job: desktops for the jobs that desktops are good for, smartphones for the jobs that smartphones are good for. Once again, what's the problem?
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I recently deployed a Debian Testing system and I didn't like GNOME 3. (it reminded me of KDE 4.0's initial release several years ago when everything was glitchy and barely functional) GNOME3 might eventually develop into something usable like KDE 4 did, but it just needs more time and a lot more polish.
If you want to keep using GNOME2, I suggest using MATE. It's basically a renamed GNOME2 fork.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
GNOME 3 missed the point of being a desktop environment which is to act like its supposed to and not get in the way of the user. The users of GNOME don't like GNOME 3, but the developers think that they somehow know better than the users of their product, naturally this lead to many users abandoning GNOME and forking it in projects like MATE.
GNOME was badly managed for years, but it was tolerable until GNOME 3.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well I use something calle Unity, not this "GNOME" of which you speak. Desktops have always been on shifting sands, but I'm pretty sure we're not about to plunge back into Winidows 3.x.
I switched to Xfce (on Fedora) without even trying Gnome 3. Just the description of what it was going to be like was enough to drive me away. My sister uses Ubuntu. After about a year trying to learn how to like Unity (Ubuntu's version of Gnome 3) she asked me to help her migrate to Xfce because it doesn't keep getting in her way and making it hard for her to do things.
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KDE not for me i am afraid. It just looks nice and that's about it. I am experimenting with Cinnamon and at this moment in time it is functioning well. I hope that by version 2 it should have have gotten rid of some of its frailties.
Because it tried to fix something that wasn't broken. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Gnome Panel for mouse and keyboard. Sure, GNOME shell might be nice if you've got a 10 inch touchscreen, but it gets in the way if you use a keyboard or mouse.
Don't "fix" what is broken, especially when it is a basic part of the system.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project"
What's wrong with the old goals? as in "Make a working Free desktop environment work better and better".
Nobody questions what the goals of GCC project are: make better compilers which work better with new hardware. It's at least 20 years old.
My opinion unburdened with empirical fact: The new GNOME developers were young and they really wanted to do something New Kewl Different because they needed a sexy project to put in their portfolio so they can get a better job.
I'll second MATE.
Gnome3 sux!
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything. The warning signs were there for years before. The attitude of a few dictating what was 'best' for the users, even when the users were screaming NO! NO! NO! started with the GNOME2 rewrite.
First thing I do when I install a new system is try to get my desktop working like I had it under GNOME-1. (Usually gets harder every time, too.)
I mostly use the old applications, though I finally abandoned Galeon when Firefox finally got add-ons that let me put the tabs on the side. Still use Sawfish for my WM, too.
I think the only visible thing I'm using GNOME for these days is the panel.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Fact is... on Unity or Cinnamon or KDE, I can just switch to a new windows with one step -- move my mouse over to the window & click to bring the focus to it. On Gnome 3, I have to move my mouse up to the top left corner and click on a word, then move my mouse back down to click on the window I want to do something in. That's a convoluted way to just go to another window. It's akin to go to the bathroom by walking in the opposite direction, and touching the wall, then walking over to the bathroom. How could that be a better workflow than just going straight from point A to point B? And this is just the simplest of annoyances about Gnome 3's insanity. The basic stuff should never be a process to do.
How about the number of users who state "this is shit" repeatedly?
How's that for a recognized metric?
-AC
off-topic, but your signature is truncated. looks like this:
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suggestion: try using something like goo.gl to shrink the URL down, then you might be able to fit it. It's limited by the length of the data, not the apparent length after rendering the HTML. Also those symbols at the beginning are just eating space.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I actually like Gnome 3 better than Gnome 2. I have 2 at work and three at home and thus use both of them most days. Neither really get in my way and I don't have any trouble going from one to the other. However, I find myself more often trying to do Gnome 3 things on Gnome 2 than the reverse.
It's mostly just getting used to the different flow of things in Gnome 3. Also, a few judicious extensions smooth things out as well. Personally, I just don't get all the griping. Try it long enough to make an informed opinion, then use it or don't. Bitching is just silly.
It's the utter other direction than it's been going, but it'd be interesting to see an interface shell/environment that's natively easily customizable and changable in appearance, behavior, etc and able to be easily taken from one machine to the next.
But that's going the other way entirely, and saying 'the user is the one who decides what's best for the user'. win 8, unity, and gnome3 all seem to be going 'no, THIS is what you want, so shut up and eat your cheese sandwich!' ....and everyone's lactose intolerant.
I'm feeding a troll, but here are the few no go's I have personally ran in to. The lack of configuration options are enough by themself but these are functionality that is lost. Over and under dual monitors doesn't work, such as a laptop panel as the primary lower and secondary monitor above. No go.. can't move apps through the ENFORCED top bar. Static IP addresses can't be done with the gui with default software. When trying to add Network printers from the gui, it doesn't allow you to see properties for each printer until AFTER it has been added, so no way from the gui to tell which printer is which in the list if you have multiple printers of the same model on the same network. You have to use the CUPS web interface. The old gnome 2 printer additions dialogs and wizards were just fine. The programmers are idiot control freaks..... their way or the highway.. at least cinnamon restores some level of sanity to the gnome 3 desktop.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I'll second your post, I'm sticking with 10.04 until I can find a distro that looks like gnome 2
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I guess there's something for everyone. I really like Gnome 3. It just stays out of the way lets me get my work done.
The amount of howling that was done about changes to the GNOME interface between GNOME2 and GNOME3 is on one hand quite comical and on the other hand quite pathetic. When I started using Linux, I had to choose between GNOME and KDE. At that time KDE was clearly better, but there was also the notion that GNOME was freer (not dependent on QT) or more true to our beliefs/culture (written in C, not that weird C++ language). I remember when KDE2 was released, and how for me it was something really remarkable compared to the kludgey and disparate pile steaming software called GNOME. It was elegant, integrated, functional, efficient, and so on. It even had its own window manager, whereas major Linux distributions were packaging GNOME with a bizarre assortment of different WM's.
GNOME2 changed everything. I didn't care at all for KDE3, and GNOME2 did away with everything bad I had recognized in GNOME and replaced it with pure awesomeness that I used to associate with KDE. I ended up using GNOME2 religiously for several years--it was probably the most time I had ever spent with a single desktop environement. Of course, I had gone through phases of using every other GUI I could find, such as WindowMaker, XFCE, Fluxbox, Englightenment, etc. Using GNOME2 is second nature for me.
Right now it's 2012--GNOME2 is showing its age. It started showing its age like 5 years ago. It's a desktop that resembles Windows XP in a Windows 7 (soon to be 8) world. GNOME2 is still definitely usable, but as the OP mentioned, the project achieved what it set out to do. If GNOME3 were not to be a radical departure from the design of GNOME2, then there is basically really nothing for the GNOME project to be doing anymore.
GNOME3 is not really that radically different from GNOME2, and it's also not worse than GNOME2. It's just different, and I have used it and think it's quite alright. Listening to people whining about how much they hate the design changes is like listening to the whiners who come out every time Facebook makes a design change. Don't get mad because you have to learn to do things differently and are too lazy or incompetent to do that.
I never quite understood the attraction. What exactly is this whole GNOME or KDE package for? Granted, there are some decent programs that came with them, but do they really require all the extra baggage of 10 layers of crappy libraries with fancy names? Both KDE and GNOME are just pointless empire building exercises by bunch of people who want to force their way of computer interaction on everyone else.
The OS should do one thing, provide services to programs. On UI level that includes managing windows and provide some way of task switching. Widget library is nice too since it saves some time for programmers, but it doesn't really have to be part of OS. On Windows this functionality is pretty much built in to the point of being (almost) non replaceable. Thankfully on Unix one has a choice of window manager, task switchers/panels, widget libraries etc. The users should be able to mix and match them to fulfill their needs. Some distros like Ubuntu may make these choices for the users that do not care much what they use. Where do mega projects "we gonna takeover your computer and make you do things our way" like GNOME and KDE fit? Nowhere, and finally people realize that.
The only thing that can be done with these projects is to salvage any good apps they have created and make them into independent projects. There is less and less to salvage though because GNOME managed to create dumber and dumber versions of the same things (like image viewers or browsers or file managers etc).
For instance, why would anyone ever use web browsers that GNOME has created (is the latest one Epiphany or something?) when there is Firefox, Chrome or Seamonkey made by people who know what they are doing?
There are some nice projects like LXDE, and to lesser degree XFCE which are actually helpful, they put together bunch of tools, most of them optional, and give you quite a lot of choice. Although XFCE is getting fatter and fatter.
Everybody was all up in arms with Ubuntu went with Unity. It was a head scratcher for a lot of folks unless you think about it from their point of view. The desktop is arguably the most important part - if users don't like it, that's it baby game over. Now imagine putting your whole product's future in the hands of Gnome or KDE. Those teams are like herds of ADHD children running amok with knives. KDE and Gnome had a decade to get their act together, they missed the boat on a Windows CE epic scale.
When some of my classmates who have never touched another OS ask me for a recommendation on a Linux distro, I've always recommended Xubuntu ever since Unity came. XFCE is just very useable and customize.
The one thing I like on gnome 3 is pushing the mouse cursor up in the upper left and getting a choice of windows. But other than that, it makes things harder.
I tried for a while to find a way to have a CPU and Network monitor like you could have it docked on a panel in gnome 2 but finally gave up.
I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open.
For vitual desktops, I personally prefer a fixed layout... email and web browser in upper left, work vitrual computer in lower left, etc. The ever-changing dynamic list doesn't work well for me.
The worst is that I can't get it to behave right with my laptop and external monitor. Laptops today come with shitty short screens, so when I work at home, I keep the lid closed and just use my external monitor. Gnome3 can't seem to grasp this and always assumes the laptop's monitor is the primary monitor, so I can't reach the widgets, menus, etc. Sure, I can muck with the display settings to fix it during a session, but I have to do it all over again if I reboot or need to open the lid for some reason.
For me, it just has an illogical way of doing things and completely breaks my work flow.
I've used a lot of linux variants over the years, but I don't really enjoy having to keep figuring out all the obscure ways to get it work right again... over and over.
>>>Win 8...everything running maximized even on 27" displays...
Say what? You can't layer tiny windows overlapping each other??
I use LXDE (lubuntu). I want a fast responsive desktop and Gnome is not that.
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What's this one step? Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and click on the window list, then move your mouse back to the application?
On gnome-shell you don't have to click on the activities button to bring up the windows menu, just use the windows/super key and you can keep your mouse in the centre of the screen.
Gnome 1.4 was pretty good.
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Most of GNOME2's history was a slow, almost agonizing crawl up from a crash-prone and feature-truncated state.
I haven't looked at KDE recently, but I enjoyed v3.x until it was left behind for 4.x which was so bad that I had to leave it.
Maybe DE projects by themselves have outlived their usefulness. Ubuntu is pressing ahead with Unity, I think with the idea that a DE should be native to a particular OS. If that is so, then they are moving closer to Windows and OS X architecturally and organizationally; they would be able to achieve levels of vertical integration that a typical PC user expects.
I am quite liking Mate and can say it's a helluva lot better than Gnome3; it's basically Gnome2, which is why I'm using it. Maybe the Gnome3 crowd would have been more successful in North Korea, or some Japanese underground fetish club, with Unity wiggling about on stage. If Gnome3 had a voice, it would sound like an angry high-pitched Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anyway, suicide is almost always depressing to witness, but in this case, I wish them expedience and success.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
You know, I felt the same way a year ago. I still wish it was more tweakable, but the extensions are helping. I am much faster at getting around my desktop in Gnome-Shell than I am with Gnome2. Reason being is I can do more with just the keyboard.
I was a big Gnome-Do user. That's pretty much built-in now. I don't have to touch my mouse to move around apps. Their Alt+Tab feature is pretty slick. It shows Chromium and Alt+~ moves through the multiple instances I have open (OK so I don't usually have more than one thanks to tabs, but as an example...)
It's a bigger resource hog, but I have 12GB of RAM in the box I run it on. It doesn't feel that polished, but I really have few serious problems.
What they should be doing is focusing on the extensions paradigm. Let people create extensions to turn it into whatever type of system they want. If you want a traditional taskbar, get an extension. Distros could apply whatever extensions they want to create varying types of "Gnome". That would give them some direction that they say the project has lost.
No sig for you!!
The day that Miguel abandoned it and handed the reins to Havoc was the day the music died. That was the start of a downward spiral that never ended. What was the users' DE became Czar Havoc's DE. Shortly thereafter I switched to XFCE and never looked back.
In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2
Prrrrrrrrretty sure your users are telling you everything you need to know. They're saying 'Gnome 3 SUCKS, we want things back the way they used to be in Gnome 2'.
Mayyyyyyybe you should try listening to them for direction and goals, hmmm? Just a thought.
Gnome is one of those things where everybody can clearly point at the exact moment it became a fucking mess.
Gnome 3 turned me into a KDE user. KDE has it's own problems, but not like Gnome.
The end users can say if gnome3 is better or worse than gnome2 (and have!). I'm using xfce until gnome and kde get their acts together (if ever).
GNOME 3 represents the kind of "I'm not going to listen to the users" once displayed by XFree86. But there are other problems as well. Recently I have come to realize that there is a problem that few have noticed.
Imagine an application and an OS sharing the same libraries... not unusual in some instances, but I have come to realize that I can't run GiMP 2.8.0 on CentOS 6.x because the GTK and related libraries and dependencies are so connected with GNOME that all of GNOME needs to be upgraded in order to be able to run the application! While that's not 100% true in that I was able to compile all the needed libraries in /opt/gnome-2.8, the resulting compiled code doesn't integrate well with my existing GNOME 2.x desktop. It's frustrating and annoying. The operating environment shouldn't be such that it conflicts with applications. Someone wasn't paying attention to certain unexpected consequences. So here I sit with Windows having better support for GiMP than a current Linux distribution. Sad and pathetic.
GNOME is breaking my heart with all of this. I was quite loyal to its use but damn... GNOME3, then Unity? People have made it clear they don't want this. They keep going as if by forcing it down our thoats, we will learn to accept it. The missing ingredient here is CRITICAL MASS. Critical mass is the main ingredient in Microsoft's disgusting recipe. We all hate it but we eat it because there's nothing else. GNOME doesn't have that ingredient. Whatever they are trying to do isn't going to work and will result in their becoming another failed project... another lesson learned in failed Linux projects.
I've pretty much always used KDE (or fluxbox / i3 depending on what I'm doing), and have never liked Gnome. However the prospect of Gnome's death troubles me. We can't say for sure the software we use now isn't going to go in some assinine direction. If KDE completely screws up next, then where do us KDE users go for an equivalent desktop? Xfce and other options exist, but it's always been KDE and Gnome as the full featured options.I think the real health of either project depends on the strength of the other, and not having all the eggs in one basket is a good thing in open source.
I'm hopeful Gnome won't die, but if it gets to that point I hope it'll be forked so we can move on. And I hope it'll be so awesome that I'll switch from KDE :)
I have two suggestions for people when it come to those. Lower level people get LXDE and higher level get Xfce. Personally, I flip between which I like more. LXDE has more windows-like UI features, which makes going between the two easier; Xfce always seems to follow what I want, rather than fighting it or figuring out how it wants me to do it.
I use Gnome 3.4 every day and would never go back to the old ways. Extension are a terrific idea and there is plenty of development in that area. The future of the desktop is as a seamless connection to the Internet, so that local apps and online apps are both available as if they are all installed locally. Queue the naysayers who will go on about what happens when you do not have a connection. That is why Gnome can be a mixture of local and remote. You can stay stuck in the past with Mate, or move into the future. It does not bother me if you stay stuck in the past, but I look forward to the next generation of Gnome, and the one after that. Lastly, there would not be a Unity or a Cinnamon without Gnome. Both are merely alternate shells to Gnome 3.x. But that is the strength of the new Gnome, you can make alternate shells.
The issue isn't Gnome 3 vs. Gnome 2 at all. The issue is DE's are boring. Remember when Compiz was first being developed? There were crazy plugins to make the windows dissolve into flames and wobble and all that. Gimmicks. Fun for a second but they're gimmicks. What ended up happening was DE's merging the compositing effects into the DE and sticking to keeping out of the way of the user. BOOORRING. All the DE needs to do is provide a way to launch apps and manage settings and that's not fun to work on if there's no new ground to cover. Windows 8, Mac OS, IOS, Unity are all going the same direction: big button toolbar for touch and search. Gnome 3 did the same thing and you can't fault the devs for that.
As for the Gnome 3 sucks, use Cinnamon or MATE crowd, let me ask this: what makes more sense to you? Use that.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
I use it, most of my coworkers use it. Sure, the linux desktop is in crisis, but actually, it always was if you wanted something more than a simple xfce. KDE 1.x was a PITA for over a year too long with KDE 2's delays. GNOME 2.x always seemed like taking Apple's idea of designing for minimal user choice, just without having Apple's designers. But for some time KDE3 and GNOME2 provided stable work environments, yet always lacking some (less or more) usability, design and ergonomics. Unfortunately I have never managed to set up a KDE4 environment that would not barf after several logins. Something similar happens with Unity, works works works, and then gradually some things stop working.
And GNOME3 is different, it is probably the only stable desktop environment that is more sophisticated than xfce.
Gnome 3 rocks...
Try the latest with:
* Extensions for the stuff that really should be changed and also for some really cool enhancements https://extensions.gnome.org/
* The Activities menu. I love that the launcher is full screen. I am attempting to launch a new program. I don't care what I currently have open and certainly don't want transparency to fuzzily show it.
* Accessibility as close to a first class citizen as I've seen. I always want to increase font size, they make it easy. Button in top right.
There are negatives of course.. (pressing alt to shutdown, that's just stupid) but I really miss the launcher when I use LXDE.
No we don't, or at least, I certainly don't! I have Xfce configured to use one panel, on the bottom because I find two to be a waste of screen real estate. Yes, I have ample room on my monitor, especially with four workspaces, but I'm old-school enough to believe that the old maxim "wast not, want not" still applies.
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What's this one step? Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and click on the window list, then move your mouse back to the application?
As GP plainly stated: move your mouse to the window desired and click it. You can be forgiven for thinking that GUIs can only show one program window at a time if the abomination that is Unity is your only GUI experience.
Worst is Firefox and Thunderbird. Why cannot they obey X session? Why cannot they start up in the desktop I would like them to (Ileft them when I restarted).
WHY CANNOT LINUX DESTOP STARTUP AUTOMATICALLY AS I WANT IT? Why is everything randomly placed? I used quite a lot of time putting certain programs to certain desktops. But no, some asshole thinks s/he "knows better".
Gnome 3.0 had me trying out various tiling window managers to get rid of the horrible Shell.
Gnome 3.2 came out and I went back to the Shell. I needed a ton of extensions to get a usable desktop.
Now, with 3.4, all I need to add is a direct shortcut to each desktop. Alas, the GUI offers me shortcuts only for the first four desktops, but at least it is possible to set shortcuts for all of them on the command line. I no longer have any extensions installed. Super + typing part of the application name is wonderful.
All in all, 3.4 is IMHO nicer than Gnome 2. The road to get there has been horrendous and it may have cost too many users and developers for Gnome to be viable in the future. I hope Gnome will survive, because it is the best desktop I have tried so far.
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Try Crunchbang for OpenBox as a WM, or the little known WattOS, also using OpenBox. If you want something more, try Lubuntu or any of the other distros which roll a LXDE/Open Box setup.
Linux Mint 12 LXDE Edition may or may not be updated to a version 13 or higher, but for now, it has almost anything you'd need and it's slim and fast with LXDE!
Honestly, when you start trying more distros featured on Distrowatch, (some aren't visible at right in rankings but are available from the top/left drop down box, just select and go!) the more you really wonder why Ubuntu, as well known as it is, had to have someone take a massive dump on it with Unity, as if the previous brown desktop schemes weren't bad enough.
If you're not happy with anything you try, even BSD, try grabbing a mini install of your favorite distro and build from there. I really do encourage everyone to try out Crunchbang and any other distro using LXDE/Open Box, it screams and performs well, even better than XFCE on older systems.
I know that I "unfriended" you a while ago but I have to say that I would give this rant +5000 insightful. Maybe I need to get off your lawn.
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Gnome 2 was a great DE. Unfortunately, whoever made the user interface for Gnome 3 made an epic fail. It's just not usable, to me. It changes a lot of stuff in an effort to be innovative, but some of the changes just make the system harder to use. I highly recommend people switch to MATE (a fork of Gnome2) or try out XFCE. Either one is better than Gnome 3.
Ya know, I thought so too.
I wrote a couple of major apps under Gnome/Gtk 1 and put them up on Sourceforge. I packaged them for RH7 and Ubuntu 6.
Gnome 2 came out, breaking both binary AND source compatibility. The new interfaces were baroque and I just didn't have the time to learn them.
Ubuntu 8 renamed a key package and now my Ubuntu 6 .deb files no longer installed.
Ubuntu 9 dropped support for Gnome/Gtk 1 completely.
The only question that remains now is: port to QT or go the whole nine yards and port the app to Java/Swing?
Need a new goal? efficiency! I gave-up on Linux when it's major distributions became more(much) bloat than Windows XP, and have remained with XP sP2 while bloat in both MS and Linux products exploded. If linux distributions would reverse their direction and become lean and fast like it once was(vs windows) then it might have something IMO.
I log in, I click firefox. Sometimes I click the OpenOffice button. Frequently I click the I don't know what the thing's named button, type the name of the program I want to use, and click the icon.
Very infrequently do I need to do anything else. 90% of my usage is provided with an easy button. The program starts.
I'm frankly happy. I only have 2gb of RAM, everything works fine for me.
What's all the complaining about? It works. Dual monitor works. Everything is easy to find. Occasionally I get miffed at all the crud in the "Ubuntu Software Center", but that's not Unity's fault.... :D
/Shrug. Non issue to me.
I did the same... Thanks but no thanks to GNOME3.
I'm using MATE (which you're probably tired of hearing about at this point) in place of GNOME2, on both my Fedora and Ubuntu boxes (aside from the really old laptop, that's running WindowMaker).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I hate Unity. I hate Gnome3. I hate that Gnome3 classic isn't quite the same as Gnome2. KDE is decent, but has (had?) several annoying things about it.
So I ditched Ubuntu and went with CentOS 6.
I like tweaking my UI to perfection. Some don't, that's cool, I do. Gnome2 + compiz + other gtk trickery, has always resulted in the perfect desktop.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
PREACH IT BROTHER!
I was a 4 year user of linux (RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Centos, Mandriva, and Yellow Dog off the top of my head) until Gnome 3 came along. Then the configuration became a chore every time I wanted to use my home computer. Then I switched jobs into a position which forces Win7 use. Then I wanted to play Borderlands with a few friends of mine. Then I was/am writing a dissertation across the library/home/work/school/travel computers and need EndNote and Word to work.
My computer still dual-boots, but it has been over 9 months since I've booted to Linux.
I was using Linux when it easy, and wasn't getting in the way. Now I use Windows 7 for the same reason. I will happily switch in the event that things reverse themselves again.
Sadly, Unity is even more frustrating and XFCE is still very rudimentary.
CAN I PLEASE HAVE KDE2 or GNOME2 back??
KDE, or Kwin to be more accurate, would allow you to do that and more. It's their killer feature for me.
Reason being is I can do more with just the keyboard.
So why use a GUI?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
if there's one group most likely to be stuck living in the past, it's geeks.
Don't feed the troll. They feed on your sense of outrage. And that one isn't even very skilled... doing it as an AC is so lame. That guy would have to study and try a lot harder just to make it up to the GNAA's low standards.
At least when I decide to go atrolling I try to at least launch some good threads with it. After all, karma doesn't accumulate much beyond excellent and I can bounce from terrible back to excellent in short enough order. :) Why not be a prankster once in a while?
Democrat delenda est
While Gnome flounders, KDE went through its identity crisis years ago and is back to being stable, fast, complete and nicer than ever before.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Gnome3 is good for the people who replace their PC with a tablet because it's easier. Some sources would have it that there's lots of those people. Getting them to contribute code could be a challenge, though.
Linux Mint Mate Edition or Linux Mint Cinnamon
Well I run Gnome 3 on my Fedora 17 box and Cinnamon 1.4 on my Mint 13 box. Both desktops are new and there are a few rough edges, but I enjoy using both. Remember, we are Linux guys (and gals), we are supposed to work around the edges, tweak stuff, and stuff, goes with the territory ..:P
My two bits
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
Because GNOME has always been about being against something rather than for something. That kind of unfocused institutional angst is difficult to sustain.
Here is a hint. It is one of the strengths of Linux from a certain way of looking at it.
Attaching and detaching a display from a laptop is something no DE is ever going to make 'just work' for everyone. You use case might sometimes be just what the developer was thinking, others you will lose. On the 'other' platforms you just live with it, we have options. On my laptop the F7 key is silkscreened with display/panel in blue, meaning Fn+F7 is the approved way and what would work on the 'other' OS. So to make it easy to remember I bound CTRL-F7 to a script.
It examines the state of the dock and doesn't try to 'do the right thing' for anyone and everyone, it does exactly what [I] want for either state. With only a little more work (when I get a spare round tuit) I'll extend it to look at the VGA port and deal with the presence of a projector automagically. Yes I means I have to hit a hot key when the automatics do the wrong thing (almost every time) but it means I always get what I want and it beats filing bug reports that get closed WONTFIX when the distro goes out of support and just bitching about it being broken.
#!/bin/bash
BUSDOCK=/sys/bus/platform/devices/dock.0/
DOCKED=`cat ${BUSDOCK}/docked`
if [ "$DOCKED" == 1 ] ; then
echo "Docked"
xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --mode 1024x768 --rotate normal --pos 0x0 --primary --output VGA1 --off
sleep 2
xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --rotate normal --pos 0x0 --primary \
--output LVDS1 --auto --right-of HDMI2 --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect"
fi
if [ "$DOCKED" == 0 ] ; then
echo "Undocked"
xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --mode 1024x768 --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect" \
--primary --output HDMI2 --off --output VGA1 --off
sleep 2
xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect" --primary
fi
Democrat delenda est
It's less than that. You can just swing the mouse towards the upper-left corner and everything just shows up with your larger previews. No intermediate clicking.
You can find a program to launch just like you used to, by category, or negotiate a much larger collection of programs than before with the filter, much like windows 7. Notifications are more-or-less the same, and you've regained the screen space used by the second bar.
It's just different so people flip. It was going to happen, and the buggy precursor in Ubuntu didn't help warm people up to the real thing. Now I prefer it.
Yup. Except I went with Xfce. Nice, lightweight, does what I need it to do. So in love...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
WHY CANNOT LINUX DESTOP STARTUP AUTOMATICALLY AS I WANT IT?
KDE does that. I can't remember if it's by default or if you have to click a checkbox somewhere to restore the old session. But it's there.
Also, you can define any program to start up on any desktop. It's under the window menu / "Advanced" / "Special Window Settings" / "Geometry".
KDE really is very highly customizable, and most of it very easily through the GUI.
Extensions now fix the network/cpu monitor (I really missed if as well), the open new vs. brig old window up, and lots of other things. I think they've fixed the multiple monitor support as well, but I haven't done that for a while. It is kind of sad that all these changes do is bring back things we had with Gnome/Gnome-Do for ages without adding much that is good. I'm still trying to get Evolution or Thunderbird to display *visible* persistent notifications. How could they think that I want to hover my mouse over the bottom panel to see if I have any new messages ... why not just bring up the damn application? Even Unity gets that certain notifications should be in you face as their things you are immediately interested in at a glance. Of course, Unity with their 'global menu' silliness and poor performance has even more serious problems.
Well, I never try to fix anything. ;)
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
...is that all of these defecting developers head over to www.reactos.org so they can get that accomplished before Windows 20 hits the market.
With Unity or Cinnamon, you are still using Gnome3, just Gnome-Shell is out. I try all, and perhaps Unity and Cinnamon are more usable interface. Gnome3 system has horrible changes. First of all. They make keyboard settings a clone of Windows, and worst they remove the settings for the model of keyboard. Keyboard settings in Gnome2 was evolving in time and become concise and clear. Since for a long time, I did support Windows Users for a long time and keyboard settings was even a problem. They never know where to go, because keyboard settings that they need was not in ControlPanel Keyboard, :-/ ???
But, I guess that someone in GnomeTeam, wakeup after sleeping with his Windows Laptop, and decide
to copy the crappy windows behavior.
I try to told me vision to they, but they are not really receptive.
I simple, does not use Gnome3 and any of many Linux Desktop of my work.
I choose for most Linux-Mint-Mate, and some Ubuntu with Gnome-fallback with many may tweaks, like install "system.printer" ...
They need to hear people
I like the gnome shell (and I was previously a gnome 2 user). It was originally (years ago) very buggy and flaky, but now it works quite well, and is actually very nice ... nicer, I think, than the er, "classic" style panel. It keeps out of my way more, and is easier and quicker to use when I need it.
People are often quite conservative when it comes to a familiar environment, and will react negatively to any change, and I think regardless of any merits, it was inevitable that there would be a lot of moaning about a change as drastic as you see in gnome 3. On the other hand, it's really quite nice to see somebody actually trying out new ideas instead of just blindly sticking with the same creaky old stuff, which was hardly perfect, even if it had the benefit of familiarity.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
If you feel you have to ask, especially with that comment, you're too childish for her.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Name ONE project Miguel has seen through to the end. ONE. Miguel is a charlatan and always has been since his long forgotten NETBSD days.
Informative?
I can't for the life of me figure out how you must be using Gnome 3.
You certainly can you move your cursor to other windows to click on them, give them focus and raise them. Heck you can even do focus follows mouse, and autoraise, getting rid of the click.
Secondly, you don't have to click the word "Activities" at all. It's a hot corner. You're supposed shoot your mouse to it quickly. And the beauty of the hot corner is, you don't have to look for it or locate it on the screen, you don't have to aim for it or click it - you just whip your cursor up to it in a fast, imprecise motion - and voila - you have the overview. The targets there are also large, so you can don't have to be precise.
Or you can leave your left hand on the keyboard to hit the super-key...
What's funny is, the behavior your describe about terminal windows is *exactly* how OSX behaves. Yet most of the world thinks its the best gui ever. In any case, all you have to do is put your left finger on the ctrl button as you click the terminal, and viola - new window. Not hard.
New stuff is find. New stuff is great. New stuff is not the problem.
Throwing away or breaking the old stuff is the problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I switched from KDE to Xmonad.. found all the DEs to be bloatware.
if i were gnome id talk to valve and see if they can help for a lil aid in game desktoping for the future....
On one hand, I'm inclined to agree. Not that it's just Gnome, it's the general trend of UI devolution these days. There's not a single platform that hasn't been touched by it.
On the other hand, I also vividly remember how people wrote hateful diatribes about Gnome 2 back during the 1.x -> 2.x transition. And they had valid points also, but it all settled down eventually to produce a really good DE. So perhaps this is the same thing?
Gnome unity is a horrible mistake, period.
Get over it. Undo your changes like you would a bad patch and get on with life. Every damn user of linux I have heard from hates the piece of shit, so revert it and lets get on with making a nice solid desktop manager!
There's an even easier swtich: LXDE with Lubuntu.
It's the closest thing we have to KDE/GNOME 2.x now. Unlike other 'lighweights', Lubuntu is fully populated with dialog boxes. You never get sent to CLI for daily items or config. They got "GUI" right.
And it's Canonical, so just fire up Synaptic and install the apps you're already used to, instead of the default lightweight apps. Shazam, you're back in business. No conversion headaches.
Utter conjecture that is probably wrong: Back when GNOME 3 was announced, Shuttleworth announced the Lubuntu project. It sure looked like he noticed the complete trainwreck KDE 4 was at the time, and decided to hedge his bets. I'm glad he did.
Not hard... but not obvious. In everything else I've run, if you click the terminal icon in the panel 4 times, you get 4 terminals. Imagine one for vi to edit a program, another to compile the program, a 3rd to run it, and a 4th with another vi session for keeping notes.
I don't use OSX... I've never been a big fan of macs and I really don't like Apple's business philosophy, so I wouldn't have known or thought to try its way of doing things to get 2 terminal windows.
Every now and then, I download the latest version of the major distros and give them a spin. I have to admit, gnome 3 looks cool and I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't make it fit with my style of working on a computer. I'll try again with Fedora 18 or 19.
At this point, I've settled on kubuntu for my main laptop (usually docked - though it has annoyances too... like trying to put file progress indicators in the task bar rather than in separate windows I can monitor) and tried Mint 13 on my new acer netbook, and I'm particularly pleased with it. From my point of view, they seem to be doing things right.
Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project.
Well, they've certainly been setting goals. Those goals resulted in Gnome 3.
The problem is that those goals were not aligned with what we wanted.
Here's what we really wanted:
* Make it faster.
* Make it use less RAM.
* Make each release less buggy.
* Fix the annoyances.
* Don't add or change features if it would compromise any of the above.
* Make it easier for novices to learn.
* Make it more flexible for power users to use.
* Fire everyone on your staff who thinks that the above two goals are mutually incompatible.
And nothing of value was lost.
GNOME3 turned that stupid up to eleven though, putting it a whole different category. It is explicitly declared it OK if any/all existing users leave, a pure "my way to the highway" deal
This seems to be contagious, too. The GIMP team appears to have adopted the same attitude. They seem to be laboring under the delusion that they're going to take on Photoshop for the "pro graphic developer" userbase. It would be amusing if it didn't make 2.8 an unusable pile of crap (and no, trolls. I have no problem with the single/multiple document interface, since it's an option.)
Thank you.
I haven't written a bash script in ages and just with all the things I have going on, I haven't had time to come up with a script like yours. I did a simple one that uses xrandr to force back to a 1920x1080 mode, but I had no idea how to check to see if it's docked (though my laptop isn't docked to a docking station - I just keep the lid closed with a usb keyboard and mouse). I'll give your script a try.
I agree, the strength of linux is its flexibility -- if you know where to tweak. But sometimes figuring that out is non-trivial and I just don't have the free time I used to have.
Thank you, again, for sharing your script. I've been settling for systems that mostly work the way I want... this gives me the ability to force the ones that I might like better to work for me.
It was Gnome that convinced me to jump over to Linux once I'd decided to abandon Windows completely. I'd looked at OS/X but I couldn't make head nor tail of it, everything was awkward on the Mac. Gnome 2 with all the eye candy working was a thing of beauty and everythiing either just worked or could be got to work with a quick web search - I can't believe I'm writing that about Linux but there it is.
It was Unity that pushed me away from Ubuntu, and Gnome 3 that pushed me away from Gnome. KDE is not easy and it's not logical but I've come to love it and it has grown up. Yesterday I plugged two monitors of different resolutions into a KDE machine and they just worked with no dead zone and wallpapers all fixed up for the new resolutions. That would not have happened even a year ago.
I'm installing Linux on a computer for a newbie this weekend and where once I would have put Gnome on it I am now putting Lubuntu onto it instead. If Gnome is staring into the abyss it is because it chose to - a lemming intent on its own demise. Ave atque vale, Gnome.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
Or one of the minmalist WMs like ratpoison, any of the dwm derivatives, fluxbox, notion, etc.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I too am in a world where I there are things I HAVE to do in Windows, but I really prefer working in a Linux environment (especially when I find one I really like).
I used to dual-boot as well, but after a harddrive crash a couple years ago, I re-evaluated my set up and discovered VirtualBox. Virtualization had come a long way since I had last checked. So now I run strictly in Linux and have VBox virtual computers to run Windows XP and Windows 7 in as needed. I even managed to take an old work laptop and virtualized an image of its harddrive so I no longer have to carry a computer back and forth for work.
The nice thing with the virtual computing is you can easily back up the whole computer by just copying the virtual hard disk somewhere. You can also set up your windows working environment on another computer by just coping the virtual harddrive file and making a new virtual computer there.
VirtualBox also has pretty decent integration with the host computer (you can map directories on the host as drives on the guest) so it makes things pretty seamless. It's also the only way I can use my canon scanner, since there are no Linux drivers that work for it... and the same with my old Creative Zen mp3 player and iPod.
It might be worth looking into when you get a break from your dissertation.
I'm going back to grad school as well and since I'll be taking transit and biking, I got a netbook for my work at school. I tried Linux Mint on it and it's been a real pleasure to use... very few complaints, and I think those are more of an Acer issue than a Linux one. I don't dual boot on my home computer, but I did set up the netbook to dual boot into Windows 7... in case I really needed a native Windows 7, but I haven't needed it so far.
I just not as young and carefree as I used to be. Like you, I don't have as much time to trick-out my computer to get it just so... I just want it to work reliably.
Here is my opinion on the matter. That this is a specific group:
Ubuntu brought in a huge group of people who learned Linux from Ubuntu. Their only real experience was Gnome 2.
Ubuntu goes after the netbook and then tablet market.
At this point they would be ready to switch to another distribution but Gnome 3 is a major change.
So for the first time they are becoming Linux users, with no desktop or distribution home. In then end some will go KDE, some Gnome 3, some LXDE or XFCE, who know some might decide they like a BSD or even AIX better. But the Gnome switch and the Unity switch is what is forcing the whole deal and they are none too happy.
I guess I've missed that slick glossy ad campaign for Gnome3 that have surely been placed to catch all those new users. Who brings in all those hypothetical new users right now? As one of those "diehards from the 1990." I started dozens of people over the last 20 years on Linux but stopped trying when Gnome3 came out. I suddenly found my workflow disrupted and the usual open source philosophy of customization is gone -- at this point I'm not sure *I* am a good match for Linux anymore. So, since Gnome3 came out I've been watching my friends, associates and family buy Macs. If things go as Gnome3 is planned, I will be switching away from Fedora (after starting with RedHat 4.2) and to something else in the next year. Yes, I could do spins but when the trends are moving away from your usage model in the default OS it's just a matter of time till something critical will break for you. Best to transition before it becomes a crisis.
I just got a netbook and installed Linux Mint on it - and it does things the way I like them, nearly out of the box. Though it also has the problem of non-persistent messages from Thunderbird.
I'll give gnome3 another look when I'm itching to change distros again.
If you aren't using a dock you just need to find something else that does change. For example you might have luck looking in /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID. Failing that just look for the presence of your external keyboard, pointer (lsusb) or display (xrandr). Once you can detect the states you need to react to the rest is pretty easy.
Notice I have the extra flip to 1024x768 for two seconds, that was trial and error when I found some versions of GNOME had problems in the past resizing from the internal to the external display under certain conditions I never bothered fully understanding. The panel at the bottom would get lost and that going really small and back up made it work. It is just a workaround, you can probably drop those two lines.
Democrat delenda est
Have you seen autorandr (https://github.com/wertarbyte/autorandr/) ? You run " autorandr --save mobile" to save the current configuration to the profile "mobile". Plug in your external monitor and run "autorandr --save docked". Running "autorandr --change" will load the saved configuration for the current hardware. I have it running in the background every 10 seconds, so when I dock / undock my display configuration changes automatically.
Awesome, thank you!
For mine, it's here: /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state
cat
but that give me an "open" or "closed" to work with.
I really appreciate your help!
It was a good thing but not finished. I don't understand why they could not have set some goals of optimisation, untangling the gconf mess and fixing the problems with windows from remote displays instead of their new goal of "a desktop like nobody else".
If Win8 doesn't quickly get a recognizable default desktop on desktop class hardware users will just insist on Win7.
I just reread what you posted and my agreement keeps going up. Win 8's Metro is going to be a damn disaster. Really, no kidding. This ham-handed rush to push tablet interfaces onto desktop computers is crazy. Even Gartner is saying W8 will fail. Businesses will stick with XP (or 7) and even consheepmers will scratch their heads and go, "WTF" after 10/26.
All this seems to be driven by the success over the past few years of the iPhone/iPad. But lemme axe you all a qwestium: If it was all so hellfire necessary to make desktops into tablets, then why doesn't OS X do it?
Was chased to OS X by GNOME 3.
No intention to go back, ever.
That after switching to Linux from SunOS in 1993.
The Linux community never quite pulled it together. It's not about Open Source. There are many other voluntaristic efforts that manage to organize, create by-laws, charters, etc., set and achieve goals, and so on.
Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter to me. I'm very satisfied with OS X and that, as they say, is that. Got a well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable UNIX desktop. That's all I ever wanted, from the beginning.
(I know that I'm not alone in this path. Many others have taken the same one over the last several years.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Of course you can. Win 8 does everything Win 7 can do AND MORE.
Slashdot and the rest of the internet are spreading constant FUD about Win 8, claiming that it's a tablet OS, that you run everything fullscreen, that the desktop is gone, etc.
I used and liked and was deeply invested in GNOME 2. And I was active in submitting bug reports, etc. (The same for KDE 3 before that, until they tossed it all for KDE 4).
If they had just fixed the bugs (or even if they hadn't) I'd still be using either KDE 3 or GNOME 2.
But tossing everything out, pressing rewind, and then starting over?
In 2010, I expected more from my computer system than "cool hacks are being pieced together to someday lead to a fully integrated desktop environment and maybe even an environment API!"
By 2000, ten years earlier, we were already well into the era of "if you want me to use it, it had better not be beta or experimental and bad for my workflow."
Full-on GUI experimentation and beta-level stability in a production desktop system is so 1991 it's laughable. I felt like I was back in the days of people circulating TWM patches.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I have been using Gnome 3 for a few months now, and with the extension tools available it can be made almost useable.
The two things that really need to change are the dynamic workspaces and the launcher.
The idea of dynamic workspaces is great for the casual user, but for the more experienced user we would like a set of named static workspaces. I have been able to kludge this by having a terminal session on each workspace - and making sure I never close them. This keeps the workspaces alive and fixed. GConf still has the ability to name workspaces so I use the workspace menu to switch when using the mouse (I am a developer, but I use the mouse a LOT).
The idea of always jumping to the running program when you hit a launcher is really annoying. I can see that it might be useful for some large programs, like Eclipse, but for terminal sessions or a calculator I want to stay on the current workspace and open a new instance. This needs to be made into a configuable option since different users will have different requirements for this.
Those two changes and it would be a viable DE.
Gnome started off as a kitchen sink full of random bullshit priven by politics, but once the politics was no longer so exciting a lot of people got bored and left leaving behind people with a real developers mindset who could turn it into something that worked. Exciting things like being able to run anything placed on the desktop and screw those unix permissions, were thankfully abandoned for something less stupid but less exciting.
Oh goodness. For a second I thought that would turn into a MyCleanPC ad.
Got a well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable, damned near bug-free UNIX desktop in OS X.
Take that, GNOME and KDE.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The problems at Gnome are common across much of GNU/Linux these days. I tried as hard as I could, yet failed to get Gnome GTK+ guys to accept (or offer an alternative) an accessibility patch fairly critical to the blind community (allowing icons to have verbal descriptions). It's possible to work with the Debian guys, but unless one of their inner circle is interested in your specific project, you've got no way to reach all the Debian users who want to use what you have to offer. This is partly why Google has 600K apps and Debian has 30K packages. If I want to reach Android geeks, I can be published by next week, and the only real challenge is being noticed among those other 600K apps.
What Linux needs is a rewrite of dpkg, just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion. This concept of upstream golden source is BS. What we need is distributed git-style repositories, where users can easily point their machines to the upstream branch/fork of their choice. That way, if I'm in my favorite distro and I hate this new desktop manager, I just point to the branch/fork maintained by people I consider more sensible. Machines shouldn't be GNU/Linux boxes. They should be bare metal Linux boxes, and groups like Ubuntu should just be famous repository managers who get so much right for most users, that lazy geeks like me put them first in my list of distributed repositories. But when Fedora has a better package, or a better version, I should be free to pull that specific part from them, and have it work with all the stuff I pull from Ubuntu.
NOT impossible. Only pie in the sky because of the lack of will to move forward in the calcified GNU/Linux community.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
just what I want, random applications that may or may not function because of the state of my wifi
the cloud is a fad, we use it at work, and its great till the internet connection goes down or gets dog slow, then its the worst thing ever. Its nice to know that you can stop an entire companies production with a car wreck on the other side of town
I'm in the same boat. I've been using Gnome3 full time for about a year now as well and I'm very happy with it. Want to open something? Press the Win key, type a name, press enter. Viola - I now have (Insert application here) looking at me. Alt-Tab and Alt-~ are mainstays. Switching between virtual desktops is just a Ctrl-Alt-Up or Ctrl-Alt-Down away. I understand the complaints about the lack of customizabilty, as it's sorely lacking; the few extensions I've used have tended to be somewhat buggy as well.But if you're a keyboard user you should feel right at home with Gnome3.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
Umm, that's all already the case.
You just run your own PPA or apt repository if you don't want to play by the distro's rules about getting into their repos. Then if people want your software they can add it. And it is incredibly easy through the various frontends or by editing sources.list directly.
Google do this for chrome, debian-multimedia for this for their extra codec offerings, skype have a debian repo.
It's not pie in the sky, the only barrier to this is your own incompetence and ignorance, which you seem quite intent on displaying here.
Opera has been spearheading a lot of innovations in browsers. Likewise, one can notice that Apple's OSX Lion may have taken some inspiration from Gnome-Shell. Most notably the idea of a flexible number of workspaces. Of course, no one knows whether this is really where they got inspired, but hey, at least some of us saw it first in Gnome and then in OSX. So I think being the spearhead of innovation in desktop environments and leading the way in innovation, would be a great new goal (or mission) for GNOME. It is well set up for that too, because it doesn't have nearly as much at risk as Apple or Windows have. This is a typical benefit of being small: more agility. Also, I'd like to point out that GNOME has, in my view, achieved more than what they said out to do. A *working* free desktop environment? Gee, this is more than just working! I personally prefer it over the OSX Lion desktop environment I use at work -- and Windows currently isn't really a player. GNOME has worked hard to make it to the top: now go and lead the way, at least for a while!
I guess my suggestion that the current system is screwed up didn't make you happy. Well, it's screwed up, and I'm sorry about hurting feelings.
The PPA system is great. I used it extensively. It's a bandaid, not a solution. If I want to pull my upstream Gnome packages from a fork of Gnome, good luck making that work with existing pre-compiled Ubuntu binaries. It's simply not possible, not with a custom PPA and a month of compiling 100 custom packages (which no one will be crazy enough to use, because they just want your Gnome hacks, not a new distro), and certainly not with editing your sources.list. The problems are fundamental design decisions made in the early 90's, which were made well for the time, but now are destroying the GNU/Linux community.
The reason this is pie in the sky is guys like you will bury the message, and most people will never understand the problem, or the potential solution. Dpkg is subversion. We need git.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Windows 7 also requires you to right-click the icon if you want to open multiple terminal windows -- it's the "standard behavior" nowdays.
You'd be wrong.
I've been playing with linux since the mid 90s, using it seriously since about 2000 and as my primary working environment for about 6 years.
In this time I have seen the UI go from old X11 style stuff, through the early days of gnome and kde when they were finding their feet, through the period when it all came together as a better (IMHO) UI than windows or Mac, and now I'm watching a group of deluded designers try to ruin it.
I used Gnome 2 on linux and solaris for 6 years. To suddenly be told that it's going to be thrown away, that Gnome 3/shell is the new direction, and that no, your input as the user is not only unwanted but you're wrong as well, and stupid for even thinking you like anything about the existing setup.... It's just really really sad.
Still, it looks like xfce is gaining ground rapidly as a result.
That's pretty much exactly what the debian-multimedia project do right now.
You can already do all of this
XFCE.
You'll need to spend ~5 minutes playing with the position of the bars and menus when you first log in, after that it looks and feels pretty much like gnome 2.
Not if you tell it never to group icons, because you like the taskbar metaphor better without that 'feature'
I've pretty much always used KDE (or fluxbox / i3 depending on what I'm doing), and have never liked Gnome.
I've pretty much always despised KDE (too MS Windows-ish). I'm not a fan of Gnome* either (I prefer fluxbox, or anything else).
But aren't these all GUIs of some sort laid on top of functional OSs? FVWM and TWM work, if you know how to use them.
The results speak for themselves. The people who like gnome shell obviously aren't capable of contributing to the project, and so it dies. Having 10 million users is of no benefit to an open source project if none of them can code.
Nietzsche said that when you stares the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
But you know your're screwed when you look the abyss, and it turns its face away.
Gnome is fading.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
It is pretty much accepted that it is unusable on a standard desktop with a mouse
When I watch new users use Gnome Shell, I often see them moving their mouse slowly over to the "Activities" menu, clicking it, then slowly move their mouse back and clicking a window in the overview. I can see how some people might think that this is slow.
However all you have to do is learn how to flick your mouse over to the top-left hot corner and back. You don't need to click, and so you don't need to pause. It's a very simple motion and once you realize this, it makes changing windows really really fast.
That's why I like Gnome Shell - changing windows using the overview is very fast, as is starting apps by pressing super and typing the first few characters. I don't think there are any other desktops that are faster than Gnome Shell in the hands of a power user. Not Windows, not Gnome 2, not even Mac OS X.
The problem is that Gnome Shell was shoved down the throats of a lot of unsuspecting Gnome 2 users. When people switch from Windows to a Mac, they often do it by choice and so they accept that things will be different and make an effort to keep an open mind. But the way Gnome 3 was released made all the Gnome 2 users get really defensive about the status quo, and elicited a knee-jerk reaction in most users. It's sad that this might mean that people refuse to consider what is a really innovative desktop environment.
What you seem to want really isn't posible. You can't just mix and match in one part of a major subsystem and you certainly can't mix Debian and Fedora packages beyond the very end user applications that have no connections into the different plumbing that seperates the two trees of development and that basically static link everything.
You seem enamoured with the Android package system without undertanding it. Android packages work because they are very restricted in what they can do. For example, they must be Java; that means they cannot alter any of the system level components. So replacing part of GNOME would be like replacing the native binary parts of Android, which an .apk can't attempt. They also work because there is only one Android line and it is carefully kept backward compatible. While Linux distros can upgrade from one major version to another entirely via the package system you could never upgrade from Android 2.2 to 2.3 via the Play Store. The OS components involved simply aren't part of the package manager on Android. The kernel on most devices isn't even in a file.
Every few weeks some kid shows up on a Linux forum demanding that we rebuild everything to support a binary only cross distro 'app' model. Usually with notes about how much more successful Windows or OS X is and attributing that success to this binary model. Not happening. The reason we have different distros is because they aren't all alike except for the package manager, each is trying new things. If a consensus emerges that one has really done something right the others of course adopt it but there is no central planner and we don't want one. Good luck convincing a Gentoo ricer to adopt binary packaging and a strict binary API. Systemd or sysV init? PulseAudio, ALSA, ESD, ARTS or OSS?
Feel free to create yet another distro and show us all how it should be done, that is of course where the existing ones came from. And maybe you will succeed in attracting a following and eventually some of your ideas will migrate.
Democrat delenda est
So why use a GUI?
Because, like GUIs, non sequiturs can be informative, right up 'till when the goldfish die.
I switched to Xfce (on Fedora) without even trying Gnome 3.
I switched to a fork of Gnome 3 that works and looks beautiful. Isn't it great when open source helps us users the way it's supposed to?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
In gnome 2:
Alt+F2: allows to open an application.
The Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Was a metacity shortcut since ever, and the Ctrl+shift+Alt+Arrow to move between Desktops.
If you were a keyboard user, and you are not in gnome because of the pretty effects, You'd be in fluxbox, or a tiled window manager.
Windows 7 also requires you to right-click the icon if you want to open multiple terminal windows -- it's the "standard behavior" nowdays.
Or you could use middle-click (which might be left-click + right-click on a touch-pad). Same deal with Ubuntu Unity.
It is a tablet OS. Yes on x86 (at least) you can still get to a mostly functional desktop sans start button but Metro is a tablet interface moreso than GNOME3. Metro is the future of Windows and the cornerstone of their Marketplace. How long do you expect them to keep putting effort into maintaining the legacy interface?
Democrat delenda est
Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere
False. GNOME 2 was most certainly better than GNOME 3, and the metric used to measure quality is number of "what the fuck"s, "how the fuck"s, and "why the fuck"s per hour (lower is better).
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
If Gnome died now, MATE could gain more traction, which would be a good thing. I'd mourn the loss of Cinnamon, though - it's a genuine step forward from Gnome 2.3 and depends on Gnome 3. Something would eventually pick up the slack, though. KDE, MATE, XFCE, LXDE, E17... there's a lot of options, and with the userbase migrating from Gnome, those DEs would gain a greater userbase and, therefore, more resources and developers.
just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion
Git was never intended as a replacement for Subversion. From the way that Torvalds talked about Subversion, I doubt he ever even used it. Git was a replacement for BitKeeper - which worked on a distributed-repository model, just like Git.
Nope, I just tried it in my VM and left-click brings the window to the front. (I suppose you could turn back on the quicklaunch bar though.)
This slashdot thread is about a major problem which by itself is a major blow to Linux. Obviously, you think everything is just fine, and always will be. If my tone sounds harsh, it's not you, its just the hordes of clones like you that in the end will insure no real change happens that saddens me.
GNU/Linux true believers are incapable of seeing that GNU/Linux is dying, so we should probably not try to talk rationally about it. I've put an insane number of hours into open source GNU/Linux stuff, so seeing it failing hurts me personally. Debian-multimedia? Really? So... you're going to switch your Gnome desktop like Linus wants to, perhaps you will use debian-multimedia to install the latest and greatest Gnome fork, Cinnamon? No, you wont, because it's not possible, but I wont be able to convince you that you couldn't trivially use debian-multimedia to do it. Math like Android's 600K packages vs Debian's 30K packages mean nothing to you. 590K of them are total crap, right? One week to publish to millions of users in Windows or Android versus years in Debian are a mere annoyance, and you prefer the exceptional quality control in Debian on those 30K packages, to any 600K repository of crap. If software authors object to having to rewrite every package for every distro, and having to negotiate with each distro separately for a package to be accepted, it's their problem, right? The top games aren't available on Linux because of the stupidity of the game industry, right?
GNU/Linux is dying, and as much as I'd like to help fix that, true believers in the ancient ways vastly outnumber those of us with enough software design sense to see that GNU/Linux has to change. The year of Linux on the desktop is 2013! Ignore the nay-sayers like me. We're ignorant morons. A million lines of production code I wrote currently in use by customers around the world contributed nothing to my understanding of anything. Hacking Vinux, speech DSP algorithms, and text-to-speech are child's play (the stuff I do for free to benefit GNU/Linx). It's only for the stupid. 26 years of building software, 22 patents, tech lead at one company that went IPO, early contributor to another IPO, and founder of yet another company I sold last year just means I have no clue. Guys like us are simply ignorant, and will be ignored by the vast majority of true believers. That's why Linux is dying.
With a redesign of the package managers to work as a peer-to-peer distributed repository system built on a web of trust, with the pre-compiled binaries you need to run your system the way you want to, GNU/Linux could be the next big thing (or at least bigger than now). It's actually quite involved and given how well you're picking up the whole "git" rewrite of "dpkg", I'll just assume you're not getting it. Actually, you're probably super smart, but simply refuse to believe that the existing GNU/Linux system is not already delivering anything I could possibly be talking about.
This fracturing of the tiny Linux market into Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc and Gnome2/Gnome3/Unity/Cinnamon is just healthy growing pains, right? All this choice is a good thing, and your switching to KDE is just part of what makes GNU/Linxu so great! Gosh I'm glad I get good quality packages from this vibrant innovative community!
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
http://0install.net ?
"I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open."
try alt-tab then still holding alt-~ (the key above tab)
it is true, there atre new things to lern, but if you know how, its really fast and efficient. you know, like for example vim: if you use it like nano, with cursor keys and always in i-mode, you will not have a lot of fun... but check ou a cheat sheet or two...
Fuduntu still uses GNOME 2.
Want to open something? Press the Win key, type a name, press enter. Viola - I now have (Insert application here) looking at me.
Well, we're all very happy for you that you either use so few applications or have a steel-trap memory enabling you to remember the names of all the programs you've installed.
There's something to be said for discoverability. But hey, we wouldn't want to clutter your dedicated clock bar.
Make it easier. Period.
Your response is exhibit A in why the Linux userbase on the desktop is slipping away.
I know my way around Linux. I wrote a bunch of books on it back in the day. I contributed patches, was active in a lot of areas of the "community" early on.
Do you know who wants to dick around with lots of Googling just to get their desktop and applications working the way they want? NOBODY.
Or, apparently, you.
The rest of us want it available to us in 30 seconds, without having to "learn something new." Longer than that is an epic fail. This is 2012. We are done "learning how to use a desktop computer." We just want to use what we already have learned to do to GET WORK DONE. Get with the program.
If someone makes a suggestion or a complaint, you have a UI and/or infrastructure problem for that user. PERIOD. If lots of users make suggestions and complaints, you have UI and/or infrastructure problem in general. PERIOD.
Oh wait, don't tell me: good riddance and Linux doesn't need users like me or the parent poster.
Works for me, Linux no longer has users like me. Enjoy your OS choice. The rest of us will enjoy ours. I suspect, however, that you'll find that a diminishing labor and testing pool does not do OS codebases much good over the long run.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
People are often quite conservative when it comes to a familiar environment, and will react negatively to any change
But ESPECIALLY change for the sake of change. Which is what GNOME 3 delivered.
It's the answer to a question no one was asking.
dictating what was 'best' for the user
The user is a myth.
Does anyone really use so many applications they can't remember the names of all of them? I mean, how could you even have enough time in the day for that to be possible?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Imagine one for vi to edit a program, another to compile the program, a 3rd to run it, and a 4th with another vi session for keeping notes.
Or you could open one terminal and type "tmux". This also has the advantages that your session continues even if X dies or you disconnected from the host.
So... fat it is.
Yes. I'm not artificially restricted to one day. If I use a program once every six months, but can't remember that it changed its name from gaim to pidgin, a nice graphical program menu where communications programs are grouped helps me remember. Or what if I want to use a new program? Should I be restricted to only the programs I happen to know the names of?
Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2.
That's not true, and I'll prove it: GNOME 2 worked and was okay, and GNOME 3 is a huge pile of stinky crap. Gnome 3 is worse than GNOME 2. I feel I am qualified to answer this because I try every new DE I can find time for and put them through their paces on multiple hardware setups. GNOME 2 was tops on my list because I liked that it worked reliably and predictably and mae sense in how it operates. KDE still looks nicer but is a pain to use, for me, though it is mostly okay. XFCE, Enlightenment, and LXDE have all had decent versions as well. It pains me to say it, but GNOME 3 is not just a big change, but is very, very bad as well.
Between GNOME 3 being a stinker and the GNOME Project struggling for direction, I don't know which is the cause and which is the effect, but the two facts seem to be tightly linked.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Okay, thanksl the Mint people have finally convinced me. Linux Mint is going on at least one desktop this week.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
This.
I think that the various free GUI guys need to go to something like BDD so that they can at least understand what they are breaking.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Regardless of any merits? They broke multimonitor support ( I have four monitors and only two work, but I got four task bars in the first monitor). They broke all the useful widgets. And their response to legitimate criticisms was "you're holding it wrong".
Nice to hear a well informed reply. I wont try to convince you that there's something wrong in GNU/Linux land. However, you are wrong when you say, "What you seem to want really isn't possible." It's good that you know something of how Android works. It sounds like you know a bit about how the package manager works. So, I assume I'm not wasting time describing solutions to your impossible list of problems.
You said, "You can't just mix and match in one part of a major subsystem and you certainly can't mix Debian and Fedora packages beyond the very end user applications that have no connections into the different plumbing that seperates the two trees of development and that basically static link everything."
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure). Now doing that would be bad in general, but if you instead run chrooted in a jail, like recently has been done in Ubuntu, and use hard-links to share the various .so files, you can get disk utilization under control. In my experience, .so files don't fill up much disk anyway, so if I have 2 or 3 versions of most .so files, shared across the various apps that use them, it should not be a big problem. My stupid Android phone forces every app to have it's own copy of every .so file, and my 32G of space doesn't seem to be filling up. Now, I'm not saying that getting all of this working, with the various sound drivers and incompatible binary interfaces is easy. However, it is doable, and not rocket science.
You said, "Android packages work because they are very restricted in what they can do. For example, they must be Java; that means they cannot alter any of the system level components." I wrote a few C applications for Android, so no, you're not restricted to Java. Android secures applications at the linux/libc API level, not just at the Java level. We can, and in some cases in Linux land already do this. It's immature technology, so part of the challenge is fleshing it out.
You said, "So replacing part of GNOME would be like replacing the native binary parts of Android, which an .apk can't attempt. They also work because there is only one Android line and it is carefully kept backward compatible." I agree Android locks stuff down, but that's no excuse for Linux. I can run KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and a number of others, all on the same machine, all at the same time, though not on the same display, though there are even some packages which want to help me do that. The problem is that Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu and other binary compiled package distros assume certain .so files will be there, and if they aren't or if they're the wrong version, nothing works. The problem is also that we have a 1960's architecture for where to put files, and that causes my program's .so file to want to be in the same location as your's and all hell breaks loose. Debian want's to compile all the .so files and have one golden, verified version of each, and make all the other packages upgrade to use it. This guarantees that binary packages are not portable between Linux distros. However, there's no good reason to do this other than that we've always done it this way!
Consider our no-so-hypothetical case of a user who wants to run an actual fork of Gnome Shell. In Debian, that will mean compiling from source, unless the fork maintainers do it for you, and even if they do, you'll be stuck recompiling a vast collection of packages that require specific binary interfaces from the specific Gnome Shell version they were tested with. In reality, we're simpl
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The hot corner doesn't work if you use Synergy to connect multiple systems; the cursor will move to the next screen if there's one on the left.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
And I agree with you but there are still things that suck about how Gnome 3 does things (and I'm using it right now).
In Gnome-Do, as well as Launchy, Kupfer and every other Quicksilver clone, you can navigate search results with the down key. And so it is in Gnome 3, except the results are displayed horizontally.
This means that you use the down key to move rightward and the up key to move leftward.
I like Gnome 3, I don't think it is as bad as many people have claimed. I see a lot of potential. But GODS IT IS BONE HEADED about so many things. So many things implemented so wrong.
But... the future refused to change.
Uhh... then click on the applications tab and hunt around for your application - just like a normal menu. I really don't understand what makes a drop down menu so appealing to you unless you're just complaining because you don't want to try something new.
Admittedly, it would be nice to have applications grouped by their uses/have the ability to type in 'text' and have every program on your computer that handles text come up - they should have had that down a while ago. But seriously. It's not rocket science to use Gnome 3. It's actually really easy and launching programs is about 10 times faster for me now that i can do it with my keyboard only. I also find myself missing the upper left hand corner mouse flick to get an overview of running applications whenever I'm stuck on windows - I keep subconsciously doing it because it's easier than mucking around with a traditional task manager.
Jesus Christ man! I thought MY dope was good...
I hear you.
I did the opposite and used Linux in a virtualbox. I like aero and play SWTOR occasionally and need real graphics for photoshop or other graphics work for a site I am designing. Hardware acceleration sucked on Linux the last time I looked. I left it in March 2011 so maybe things improved since then?
Chrome and FF update too often for Linux which is frustrating. If all you need is server power and scripts then you do not need to use it as a host as the desktop with eye candy stuff should be the host while the other is the guest.
I do miss things about Linux. Windows is well kind of like a bla office all boring and corporate with eye piercing flourscent lights compared to Linux. But Mate does not have the resources nor support that Gnome 2 once did. I find that unacceptable as a gui and gnome 3 as well as Firefox 4 pushed me back to Windows.
But hey it works and does that much easier for desktop usage.What a shame
http://saveie6.com/
Still what, does it have to do with "desktop environment". It should be a core OS library with plugins that every application can use.
Gnome 2 was fine. It really needed very little work beyond bug fixing. The problem was that the Gnome developers wanted something to do and continue to make a name for themselves, and so they tried to come up with the next great thing. Microsoft has been doing the same thing, although for different reasons. The attempt at forcing a switch to a new desktop by fiat is exactly the kind of b.s. we are getting from commercial companies.
My suggestion? Make Gnome Classic the default, split Gnome 3 into a separate project and give it a different name, and make it crystal clear that it is users, not developers, who decide which one they want to use and which one will win in the market.
While you are at it, also make Gnome less monolithic and more respectful of standards (same for other desktops). Right now, running any Linux desktop is more of an all-or-nothing proposition, where any one application starts up a whole lot of infrastructure in the background. Fixing that should be high priority so that users can pick and choose what components they want to built their desktop out of.
>>> What is actually preventing you from using Gnome Shell with a mouse? >>>
I want my rightclick back...
I've been quietly working on a system you have similarly envisioned since 2003 when I noticed Linux was dying due to FSF fanatics. It has all the features you want and many more.
Don't let these GPL nutters get you down. You're the rational one, bro.
This is the reason why I switched to KDE from Gnome back around '05.
Gnome and its related applications presume to know how best to use an application, regardless of peoples' varying workflows and, by extension, their preferred configuration.
To sum up my experiences with Gnome:
1) Find something that doesn't act how you want it to
2) Open configuration menu for that particular application / OS function
3) Find out that the configuration menu only has one checkbox, and it's not for the feature you want to change.
4) Ragequit
Conversely, of course, KDE is more along the lines of:
1) Find something that doesn't act how you want it to
2) Open configuration menu for that particular application / OS function
3) Tab through multiple pages of options until you find what you want
4) Celebrate
Honestly, I'd rather have to wade through 100 pages of configuration options to find what i want than to not be able to find it at all. That said, there are some Gnome apps that have 100,000 options, and some equivalent KDE apps that have 1 or 2; however, I'm speaking more to the overall design ideology of the Gnome system.
On a side note, I'm amazed that there is actual honest discourse going on in this thread. Why, even just a few years ago, one couldn't shout "Gnome!" or "KDE!" without starting an all-out flamewar. This thread seems, in comparison, fairly civil.
GNU/Linux true believers are incapable of seeing that GNU/Linux is dying,
So why do people not mod this "Troll"?
Debian-multimedia? Really?
As an Archlinux User I don't see your problem. It's extremely easy to get a PKGBUILD from ABS/AUR, modify it, compile it and create a mirror from it. I was curious about how complicated it would be and my bash script running a repository of several packages on a dropbox public directory is 12 lines long.
I just don't know why you (and Nursie) are fixated on Debian.
perhaps you will use debian-multimedia to install the latest and greatest Gnome fork, Cinnamon? No, you wont, because it's not possible, but I wont be able to convince you that you couldn't trivially use debian-multimedia to do it.
I don't know why it is supposed to be impossible but on Archlinux I type yaourt -S cinnamon-git and that's all I have to do...
If software authors object to having to rewrite every package for every distro, and having to negotiate with each distro separately for a package to be accepted, it's their problem, right? The top games aren't available on Linux because of the stupidity of the game industry, right?
I don't know what you mean. I can play all of the Humble Indie Bundle games on Archlinux without a problem (as long as every special libraries needed are in the package.). Valve will release Steam for Ubuntu first but I would bet it will not take one day until there is a working AUR package for Archlinux.
I really don't get it. Software authors should write for standards, then it will work on almostall Linux distributions.
GNU/Linux is dying, and as much as I'd like to help fix that, true believers in the ancient ways vastly outnumber those of us with enough software design sense
You should repeat that a few more times.
to see that GNU/Linux has to change.
It is changing all the time.
Fedora for example is working on its package manager: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF
Where exactly do you get your idea of linux not changing?
A million lines of production code I wrote currently in use by customers around the world contributed nothing to my understanding of anything. Hacking Vinux, speech DSP algorithms, and text-to-speech are child's play (the stuff I do for free to benefit GNU/Linx). It's only for the stupid. 26 years of building software, 22 patents, tech lead at one company that went IPO, early contributor to another IPO, and founder of yet another company I sold last year just means I have no clue.
Look at all the stuff I have done. That ought to make my point valid!
With a redesign of the package managers to work as a peer-to-peer distributed repository system built on a web of trust, with the pre-compiled binaries you need to run your system the way you want to,
Sure, redesign. Why not build it on top of the existing package managers?
Gosh I'm glad I get good quality packages from this vibrant innovative community!
Troll. -1
This is partly why Google has 600K apps and Debian has 30K packages.
600K apps mostly written by boiler shops and a high percentage largely the same? I'll take the 30K packages, mostly excellent, thanks.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
This slashdot thread is about a major problem which by itself is a major blow to Linux.
Actually, getting free of the Gnome mafia so great projects like KDE can prosper will be a major boost for Linux. Gnome is so awful I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft isn't funding it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I don't even click, I use fallback mode or whatever (I wish it was easy to just keep using Gnome 2) and I am still using focus-follows-mouse. I just bump the mouse so the pointer is over the right window, and start typing! It is nice, I can shift focus without raising a window, but I can still just click if I want it raised.
I can say this, I already had the window semantics I wanted by the year 2000. I'm really happy for the kids that they have new features, but I really don't want them thinking it is okay to break the old features. That is anti-social behavior, and it is sure to kill the grass.
I have seen using people gnome 3 with a laptop below a screen. Is something wrong with setting the above screen to be the primary screen?
You get the complete network manager gui including IP settings if you go through the gnome-control-center. Also gnome-nettool, but I don't know if this is part of the default.
Have you reported that usability bug with the printers? They may be unaware of that use case (of course they shouldn't be).
For me, I have enough space but I don't have extra vertical space, I have extra horizontal space... screens have gotten wider/shorter. Top and bottom bars, that is just silly. If they were doing left and right bars, I'd at least think they had different tastes instead of just being stupid.
$ ps ax | grep -c xterm
16
Yep, need more than one terminal... :)
I tried for a while to find a way to have a CPU and Network monitor like you could have it docked on a panel in gnome 2 but finally gave up.
There are several extensions that are supposed to do that. If it doesn't work then it's because of bugs, not because it is supposed to not work.
I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open.
You are supposed to middle-click or right-click and chose "new window". If you often use more than one terminal window I strongly suggest a dropdown terminal like yakuake/guake/tilda. At least yakuake can tile the terminals to display several at the same time and you only have to press a shortcut to get a new terminal that won't even clutter your screen.
For the rest: Fair enaugh. You could reportt hem as usability bugs.
i think you are right in many aspects. sorry to see, that slashdotters don't even seem to try to think out of the box anymore.
I used to work at a university computer lab and my boss prided himself in writing one-line scripts that would do a complete task.
He'd then invoke something that opened up an xterm in each of the 20 of the old sun sparc stations we had in the lab, then he'd proceed to right-click (to paste) the commands in all 20 of them.
It was fun to watch him work.
You can open a new terminal by middle clicking or by pressing ctrl-leftclick.
The following CPU-monitor is quite good https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/
Regarding fixed layout I would like to have an extension that allowed me to press a button, and have gnome-shell rearrange all the windows for me.
I personally never liked the upper left corner, so I use the axe menu. My only problem is that the axe menu does not allow me to arrange desktops. (I miss the old gnome 2 desktop applet) https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/327/axe-menu/
But my biggest problem is that gnome-shell is unstable. These days it freezes daily, so I have to open a terminal and write "gnome-shell --display=:0 --replace &". In the past I have had problems with extensions that suddenly caused everything to freeze after an update, but this time I cannot guess what is wrong.
This! I always had my bar on the right. But at the same time my new laptop came with an even lower screen Gnome removed that functionality! Why remove features? I use my laptop for work and not for play or gossiping. This sillyness is costing me money!
I'm gonna try to lay it out as simply as possible:
1. I want to choose where any panels/docks/whatevers go. That means I can put them on the top, bottom, left, right, middle, corners, anywhere I can think of to put it. All right, I admit, maybe the middle or corners are not such a great idea, but how else am I supposed to be hyperbolic in this case?
2. I want to be able to hide those panels/docks/whatevers whenever I deem them to be unnecessary. This means file menus can be integrated into them or not, a simple checkbox in appearance settings would probably do the trick for each of those.
3. I want to be able also to control where the file menus and title bars for my windows appear, for example, being able to put them on the left, right, or bottom if I wish, I'm sick of this title bar on top crap that persists into my (mostly) widescreen world. Vertical space is expensive, horizontal space is cheap!
4. I should be able to decide where the close/maximize/minimize buttons appear as well; if I choose to have my title bars on the left (for example) I should be able to put those buttons on the top or bottom of the bar. The middle of the bar would probably be silly, but I'll be damned if there aren't times I feel like being silly.
5. Effects like transparency should always be available. I want things to hide even when they're in plain sight.
6. I would like to see non-linear menus/panels/docks/whatevers (why are they always like a box? why not a circle, or a triangle or any of the other myriad shapes that can easily be produced with today's graphics cards?) because I am sick of looking at boxes all day. This would be especially awesome for corner panels/docks/whatevers, where menus and whatnot could sort of bubble out.
Is all of that really so much to ask? Are those things available already in some great DM that I haven't tried yet? I just want a desktop where I can control the things that I consider basic, and let's face it, nothing on my list is really all that complex (except maybe the last one?).
That's one of the really neat things actually -- it doesn't just search the application name, it searches other things too. I am not sure precisely which ones, but if I search for "photo" I get Eye of Gnome and GIMP. Well the stupid thing is that I don't, I have to search for "foto" because I have chosen my locale to be Danish. It ought to search in English as well as in the local language. Other than that it works really well.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Gnome 2 seems very slow. Is it just me?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
If you look at your response honestly, you'll see that it's a fanboyish response.
A better response would have been "You're right, there's no hierarchical menu. It would have been nice if there had been. I hope they add one in the future".
By the way, Cardapio offers a traditional hierarchical for Unity (there's PPA on Launchpad). I don't know if it's available for Gnome3.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
... but it gets in the way if you use a keyboard or mouse
Ah, it was GNOME3 that Microsoft copied/inspired to make Windows 8?
You don't need Endnote as much as you think.
In my previous job I migrated both Endnote and Reference Manager users to Zotero (both web and standalone).
These types of software are "inherited" from authority in academia. Refman, for instance, is pervasive through the medical sector.
You are fooling yourself. Don't blame Linux for it.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Making Gnome look better is OK - but function is much more important! I use my laptop for work and not gossiping online!
Why force the user to use an inch of the height of the already too low 16:9 screens for toolbars? On Gnome2 I had a vertical bar on the right. Me beeing able to see more lines of my documents must surely be more important than having a toolbar with a clock on all the time?
Why do I have to Ctrl+Click to open a new terminal when another is open? I do not know anyone who has just one terminal open?
When copying files the filetransfer window does not appear in the window list so I cannot quick peek to check how much is left.
Why no menu? Having all apps in one big list is messy! Menus make it easy to find an app you do not remember the name of but you know it is in accessories somewhere.
Nautilus have trouble opening my home catalog. No matter what strange or buggy files you have an important tool like Nautilus should not hang! These are just a few off the top of my head. I have many more...
Ah, so start menu is so old, we should probably get something fresh even if it is unusable? I've tried GNOME3 and I found it awful beyond description, and NOT for the lack of start menu, which can be very easily added with a simple extension. The whole idea is an unholy mess as Linus said. If they wanted to make a UI more suitable for tablets, they should begin a new project, not damage a good existing one.
Gnome has pretty much given up on storing session state, unfortunately. It annoys me a lot too.
You can somewhat work around it with extensions that put specific applications on specific desktops, unless you specific windows from the same application to be on specific desktops.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Try Alt-F2 ;)
Hint =2+3 starts a calculator that knows units and other extras
I was promised that this was going to be the decade of linux on the desktop, precisely because that wasn't necessary anymore, and Stuff Just Worked, getting out of our way to let us be productive.
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure). Now doing that would be bad in general, but if you instead run chrooted in a jail, like recently has been done in Ubuntu, and use hard-links to share the various .so files, you can get disk utilization under control. In my experience, .so files don't fill up much disk anyway, so if I have 2 or 3 versions of most .so files, shared across the various apps that use them, it should not be a big problem.
You, sir, are an idiot.
$100K software is distributed that way because developers can't allow external maintainers touch their source code, and are unwilling to do distribution-specific builds themselves. Their "special" libraries crowd up memory because they are not shared with the rest of the system -- you end up with two copies Qt, two copies of MySQL client, two JREs, and dreaded two libstdc++'es that caused so much grief in 90's. They often use obsolete protocols and don't work properly with other components -- what is usually just fine for EDA or CAD program, but stupid for anything else.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
because they are stuck in the old paradigm, and frown upon anything kind of inovation that results in something more logical usable and less geeky... it's draws a pretty pretentious picture of some linux users unfortunately. "I can't use that it looks too simple easy and basic, i need all my uber customizes shiz that makes me who i am". They will grow out of it eventually i guess.
No, that's your client, Microsoft.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It seems that people still miss the MyCleanPC ads so that they can reply something snarky to them.
If it's not for you then STFU, i kinda wish the developers chose a completely different name to cut all ties with gnome 2 users expectations to live in the past. every time i hear "gnome 3 epic fail" i'ts allways a whiny gnome 2 user. It's a different DE, view it that way, stick with the old gnome or find somethings else.
Spoken by someone who has never used Gnome-Shell, obviously.
There's a huge, highly visible 'Applications' tab on the Activities screen, right next to the 'Windows' tab that's highlighted by default. Hit that, and you have all the discoverability you want.
I like Gnome-Shell. I had a few minor usability complaints, but they've been either addressed by the core team or an extension developer, and given that extendibility is a core goal for Gnome3, I count that extensions as solving a problem on an equal footing as the core team solving it.
The only complaint I have left is the way they've twice gratuitously broke the userland tools to set configuration, that, amongst others, lead to the 3.4 upgrade killing my custom window-manager config and replacing it with a default. The fix was easy, and the devs were helpful in pointing out what had changed, but it's still a sign of a developer-centric culture, not a user-centric one.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
They're actually not all that bone-headed. Version 3.4 fixed your complaint.
Since I had never used this style of launching much before, I was hit fairly hard by that change, because I had already retrained myself to use up/down instead of left-right in 3.0 and 3.2.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
I have 12G of ram too - the thing is, I bought that 12G so I could run a few VM's for testing app installs and do other useful stuff - not to feed a ravenously hungry bloated piece of crappy eye candy. I hate the attitude that "oh users have heaps of memory now, so it doesn't matter if we write really ludicrously inefficient code and bloaty software".
I'm not saying you should have to hand optimize everything in assembler, but there definitely should be more attention paid to keeping on top of bloat - or we will never reap the benefits of faster and more power efficient CPU's - we will just be using a lot more machine cycles and ram do do stuff in the same time and using the same amount of power.
Some moderator with an obvious Gnome-hate hardon needs to be smacked hard for modding this up.
Gnome-Shell is not Ubuntu Unity. Gnome-Shell does not maximize windows by default, and works perfectly fine with multiple windows open.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
New stuff is find. New stuff is great. New stuff is not the problem.
Throwing away or breaking the old stuff is the problem.
Looking back, an interesting choice would have been just to keep on polishing GNOME2 and KDE3. We might not have the latest whizbang desktop metaphor, but a very fast and solid basic desktop experience. Something like that might be much better showcase for desktop Linux rather than some slow, broken crap no one wants to use.
Now, of the current options, Unity and KDE4 look the most sane ones. A good general desktop and a good swiss army knife desktop. As you said, let's just not flush all this work down the toilet too soon, ok?
Have you even tried Gnome3 and Gnome Shell? It is not slow, nor broken.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
>Or perhaps they assume that Win8 will force everyone to accept touchscreens and everything running maximized
I love how Slashdot is pretending Windows 8 will not include the old desktop at all. Keep drinking that kool-aid, guys!
Actually the start bar/gnome menu metaphor was really showing its age. It took me a while to get used to but the Gnome 3 layout is so natural. It tries to help you along with the small task - like managing virtual desktops, open windows, etc. I find that I do a lot less time messing around with fining the right applets for my bar, messing around with where to place it, setting the right number of virtual desktops etc.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
I might have a solution for you. While I agree with many of the responses you've received that it is not an easy problem to solve, I too have similar desire: to keep the benefits of my favorite distro without being restricted to them (for example, being restricted to only the desktop environments/window managers they have available).
I've been working on my own Linux distribution tentatively called "Bedrock Linux" which, in some sense of the word, allows me to pull packages from different Linux distributions. Your request here: "But when Fedora has a better package, or a better version, I should be free to pull that specific part from them, and have it work with all the stuff I pull from Ubuntu" - is quite possible with my Linux distribution.
I'm cheating to achieve this by heavily utilizing chroots and PATH management so that the core of Bedrock Linux will know when and how to run what program from which distribution without having all of the incompatibilities get in the way of each other. I expect most of the people who have responded to you claiming your desire is impossible either didn't think outside the box enough for my solution to the problem, or do not consider it a legitimate solution.
While I would like to emphasize that this entirely works and that I have been using pre-release builds myself for over a year now, I have to admit that sadly the project isn't quite ready for public release yet. The most I have to show for it at the moment are the slides from a presentation I gave on it not too terribly long ago:
http://opensource.osu.edu/sp12/bedrock
If you are interested, feel free to search for "Bedrock Linux" on your preferred internet search engine on a regular basis until the website is up. I am currently working with others on an internal alpha, and hope to have the first public release within a few months, but as I'm sure you understand, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if it slips past that deadline.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
You can get some speedup by speeding up the animations https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/
But I agree that it feels slow. Part of the problem is that all the functionality is hidden inside the activities menu.
Then you just have to click it.
You can already do all of this
You can't even install a stable package on an unstable distri without running into major version conflicts. Debian right now has no way to handle mixing and matching packages from random sources. PPA don't change that, as they still have to be build against specific versions of specific distributions and can't just be mixed willy nilly without running into tons of conflicts.
The simple truth is: The way software is bundled right now is not hacker friendly. It's ugly, slow and complicated and just flat out doesn't allow a lot of stuff without weeks of extra work. Remember when people complained about Gnome3 in Ubuntu? Why did they do that? Because there was no easy way to get Gnome2 back. How the heck is that acceptable behavior for a package manger in 2012? Handling situations like that should be a non-issue, just keep the old stuff around and call it a day, but you can't do that, as name and version conflicts will give you all kinds of nightmares.
You can't just mix and match in one part of a major subsystem and you certainly can't mix Debian and Fedora packages beyond the very end user applications that have no connections into the different plumbing that seperates the two trees of development and that basically static link everything.
That's a symptom not a cause. Of course when every packages just barfs all over /usr/ and spreads itself everywhere you can't just install another package of the same name and not expect things to explode. But that's a problem of inflexible namespace management and nothing else.
Every few weeks some kid shows up on a Linux forum demanding that we rebuild everything to support a binary only cross distro 'app' model.
Yeah, and guess what, that kid is right, maybe not in the way it should be implemented, but in the features the system should provide.
The reason we have different distros is because they aren't all alike except for the package manager,
Distros are like 99% alike, because they all run all the same software, just in slightly different incompatible ways. It's an idiotic duplication of work that we should get rid of, not celebrate.
This is soooo not insightful. The reason people complain about Gnome Shell (justifieably) have nothing to do with eye candy. They have to do with design decisions that were intended to make it easier for users to **get work done fast**, but broke existing behaviours and habits to such an extend that no graceful migration was possible.
Rather than allowing both designs to coexist and convince people of the quality of the new way to get things done, they forced it on people and alienated them en mass. That doesn't mean their way is bad (see other comentators who find it to be very effective), nor that they went for eye candy over usability. It means simply that: They broke existing patterns and habits to an extreme extend. And that's just bad design.
Android needs a centralized package repository where someone spends time checking the packages before I install them. They could never survive with the peer to peer model that you propose. The same is true for linux-distributions.
Oh, really? The ecosystem of multiple distros has existed from around 1993, and I am sure that it is pretty damn stable. There are a few distros which have the most coverage (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, maybe Mageia), ones that are always ignored, but live on their own (Slackware, Arch, Gentoo), and endless clones of those more useful (Mint, Fedora respins, ROSA, etc...). The system is fine, everyone chooses what they please to. Debian is slow, Fedora is bleeding-edge, Ubuntu is non-upstream, news at eleven. Leave dpkg alone. It's a good tool. You can say that apt needs rewriting to accompany your vision, or synaptic, or that repositories need to be organised that way like Github is. Fine, I agree with it, but it is not the biggest thing to do in the community. (And look at Gentoo's portage system, it looks similar.) The top games (or any major games outside FOSS or indie-bundles) are not available for Linux NOT for the reason of fragmentation. They are not available because there are too few users, and, until Steam's Linux release, no easy way to reach them. Again, regarding your passages about Deb's sluggishness: it is very, very much known that Debian is slow. You simply can't expect them to pick up the latest and greatest, that's how they work. And yet, Linux Mint made Cinnamon for Deb-testing available, and you are free to download it. Maybe you are content with not looking?
Yeah, and the hierarchical menu is replaced by a quite ugly-looking clustertrick. Yes, on Fedora too. Yeah, you can get a semblance of it if you go to the right and click the categories, but let's be honest, there's a big problem with it, it's less parsable by eyes, and most of all - Shell is an interface for touch users without those touch users existing.
I thought the ranting/trolling posts were over some time ago but no, another one from someone who can't live with or without Gnome (sight). Come on! Get over it!
Gnome went to hell when it was decided to go with the new session management scheme, with no backwards compatibility, and no requirement that core things to gnome, like gnome-terminal, actually used it. This was straightened out a couple iterations later, but ceased to provide reliable placement and sizing of windows whose session is saved.
On the bright side, it led me to xfce.
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything.
Absolutely. I just couldn't understand why they took no notice when on Gnome 3 betas people were saying "this is so bad it will be a decision on whether to stick with gnome 2 for now or move on to something else". It was like accelerating when you see the "accident ahead, slow down" sign. Really I think the "why it happened" question is one for psychologists now, not the IT industry.
...But I love Gnome 3! Shell is awesome :)
GNOME 3 makes some sense. We can leave KDE out of this - as it's a shambling zombie project and has been ever since KDE 3.
You have to start with facts and figures. The Linux desktop share is negligible. GNOME made a decision to forget about desktops and work towards tablets (the big growth area, and with little/no legacy baggage like Microsoft and the desktop). GNOME 3 is designed for that environment. Their design decisions work in that context - and make a lot of sense.
Like Microsoft and Metro. The result is horrible for desktop PC users. Unlike Microsoft, GNOME has, at least in market share, little to lose. GNOME made a sensible choice. Microsoft have gone fucking nutso.
Anyway... somethine that the GNOME project hasn't considered: it's desktop users who develop software... not tablet owners. Their decision to gut the desktop in favour of tablet may indeed result in the project starving itself of developers. Another thing: GNOME has also lost to Android on tablets - that much is obvious. So really... they should be looking at ditching GNOME shell or merging it with Android's interface.
We shall see.
I see what you did there. And no, I did not click.
I think Gnome is the best desktop, better than Windows 7 because the virtual desktops. Better than Unity because Unity is optimized for tablets. Better than OS/X because uses the windows standards, that are more natural for most people because are what know better.
Because lots of details like this, Gnome is the best desktop.
Just now desktops are tryiing the tablet thing, with Unity and Windows 8, but is a fad. Desktops are going to return to maximizing productivity, and then there will be some convergence, the more advanced a desktop will be, the more like Gnome will look. And perhaps this is the problem, Gnome is "done", theres not much else to do.
-Woof woof woof!
I suppose you could wire it in /etc/acpi/lid.sh (or similar).
How is discoverability hampered? It has the same hierarchy as GNOME 2 (ie: Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, etc.) and the search system allows you to search by the function of the program as well as the name.
Ignoring the fact that you can still discover applications at least as well as GNOME 2, why should a DE emphasize discoverability over what you are going to do every time you use the computer (launch an application you are familiar with)?
Left and right work for navigating left and right in the search results. I don't think this was added until 3.2 or 3.4, though.
meanwhile a /. story about how cool new QML support in KDE is gets 25 comments, while this one about how shit GNOME is gets several hundred.
I guess we're all into complaining way more than doing something about it. Try the KDE article, you might be pleasantly surprised how good Qt Quick is.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: GNOME is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered GNOME community when IDC confirmed that GNOME market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all desktops. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that GNOME has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. GNOME is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Linux user comprehensive web browsing test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict GNOME's future. The hand writing is on the wall: GNOME faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for GNOME because GNOME is dying. Things are looking very bad for GNOME. As many of us are already aware, GNOME continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Ubuntu is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core end-users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Ubuntu developers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Ubuntu is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Fedora leader Hugh Shelton states that there are 7000 users of Fedora. How many users of Debian are there? Let's see. The number of Fedora versus Debian posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Debian users. OpenSuse posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Debian posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of OpenSuse. A recent article put Ubuntu at about 80 percent of the GNOME market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Ubuntu users. This is consistent with the number of Ubuntu Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles in the Isle of Man, abysmal sales and so on, Ubuntu went out of business and was taken over by Canonical who sell another troubled Desktop Environment. Now Unity is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that GNOME has steadily declined in market share. GNOME is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If GNOME is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. GNOME continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, GNOME is dead.
Want to open something? Press the Win key, type a name, press enter. Viola - I now have (Insert application here) looking at me.
Well, we're all very happy for you that you either use so few applications or have a steel-trap memory enabling you to remember the names of all the programs you've installed.
There's something to be said for discoverability. But hey, we wouldn't want to clutter your dedicated clock bar.
What ever did people do before lists of icons were available that we could double click? Use a terminal? With remembering of application names? Gasp!
> You can stay stuck in the past with Mate, or move into the future. It does not bother me if you stay stuck in the past
who ever modded up the troll has just lost real-life karma.
> The future of the desktop is as a seamless connection to the Internet,
yeah right. Too bad if you live on an island in the South Pacific or anywhere outside of a major city. You suffer from myopia, only you can't see it from where you're standing.
(IAASPI)
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure). Now doing that would be bad in general, but if you instead run chrooted in a jail, like recently has been done in Ubuntu, and use hard-links to share the various .so files, you can get disk utilization under control. In my experience, .so files don't fill up much disk anyway, so if I have 2 or 3 versions of most .so files, shared across the various apps that use them, it should not be a big problem. My stupid Android phone forces every app to have it's own copy of every .so file, and my 32G of space doesn't seem to be filling up. Now, I'm not saying that getting all of this working, with the various sound drivers and incompatible binary interfaces is easy. However, it is doable, and not rocket science.
It's not only matter of disk space. Sharing .so files also allows distros to update them without touching all of the apps that use them. That's the reason why those techniques can only be auxiliary. Managing a set of .so files for each app independently can get very annoying and is the reason separate packages for libraries exist in the first place.
Zotero. I have never used EndNote, so I can't compare, but I have used Zotero for a while now. It works really well. It is also cross-platform compatible, and so works on Mac, Linux and Windows. I use it with Firefox, but there is a standalone version as well. It works with Word, Open/Libre Office, and anything else (if you are willing to not have the automated keeps track of references bit). It will also import your EndNote database.
Have a look, and give it a go.
>It's a bigger resource hog,
It's a HUGE resource hog. With my 2GBytes memory I am unable to get anything done, I had to switch back to gnome classic.
And one big problem, it appears, is that it is not accelerated.
... you don't have to click the word "Activities" at all. It's a hot corner. You're supposed shoot your mouse to it quickly. And the beauty of the hot corner is, you don't have to look for it or locate it on the screen, you don't have to aim for it or click it - you just whip your cursor up to it in a fast, imprecise motion - and voila - you have the overview. The targets there are also large, so you can don't have to be precise.
Precisely. Or, in my case, homing in on one of the various decorartions and hotsports (size corners, scrollbars, etc.) will overshoot and bring up the flaming navigator, losing track of the window you were actually working in.
I switched to Cinnamon because in addition to all the fast-access icons on my toolbar, I had lost all of the status displays. Seeing as how Social Networking wasn't one of the things I needed at-a-glance info on.
I switched off Cinnamon's hot corners after I determined that no corner of my screen is safe from having focus yanked from a work window.
Besides, I've always navigated with hot-keys. Less strain on my shoulder tendons than a mouse.
and they are even leaving for unity, only to avoid gnome 3. And non-ubuntu Users use cinnamon, XFCE or even KDE. So long and thanks for all the fish, gnome.
One of the things I like about Cinnamon is that apparently it's much easier to create your own applets than it ever was in Gnome, even when Gnome supported applets.
Not workbench, not laboratory, not supercomputer.
Apple is not trying to be all things to all people (read: current GNOME issues), but has rather done a very small number of things almost perfectly.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Ever try to setup wireless in gnome without first having wired connectivity? A relatively simple and essential task for almost all new users today. Not so simple in gnome.
Are you using a different Gnome? It's ridiculously simple to set up wifi.
Not me. GNOME 3 doesn't work AT ALL with my 4 monitor, 2 video cards setup.
Well it will sort of display some stuff on half the screens but it's corrupted and crappy. The mouse doesn't work at all, can't click anything.
GNOME 3 (and Unity too) simply DO NOT WORK.
When you perpetrate a debacle like Gnome 3, you fail hard. Period.
Angry former Gnome user here... Gnome 3 is a usability disaster. I have ten virtual desktops on my screen. Each of the 10 has a specific purpose, and they keep me straight about which computer I've logged into, which virtual machine I'm using, etc. I've worked this way for years. Suddenly, Gnome 3 does not allow me to have fixed virtual desktops. Huh? Virtual desktops come and go randomly. I could not work in Gnome 3, because I never knew where anything was. How could anyone break such a simple and essential feature? What were they thinking? Even when I downgraded to Gnome 2 mode on Fedora, I still couldn't get fixed virtual desktops. So I switched to KDE, where I have my 5x2 set of virtual desktops as usual.
Hint: I am a professional who uses a computer to make money. My way of working works for me, and I use it to earn a living. If your broken disaster of a desktop can't preserve a simple feature that's been part of Gnome for years and years, then you're going to fail.
I'm not sure if I follow your line of thinking. You seem to think that, because we use Linux, we should tinker with it. I disagree with that. It's a plus that we can tinker with it, but it shouldn't be necessary.
I, for one, just want to get my work done. I care not for shiny desktop effects. I have work to do, and that's what I need to focus on, that is what I need to tinker with. The desktop environment should be non-obtrusive, in the background, invisible.
Gnome 2 did that. It was just enough to enable me to work efficiently without too much bloat. Gnome 3 is, well, not up that task. Maybe it will get there in a later version. Maybe it will be even better than Gnome 2. But right now, no, it isn't.
Then again, I'm very grateful that many very talented people have done a lot of work to give us all this free software. Without it, my life would be very different. So, thanks guys, for sharing your hard work, it's appreciated. But if I had any say in it (I don't), then I'd rather have you polishing the bugs and inefficiencies out of Gnome 2 than adding features to Gnome 3...
GNOME was a good thing until version 3
there is a problem with gnome, it's gnome 3!!! if you break existing stuff people will leave, it's not the lack of goals or organization
I think what you need for this to really work is two fundamental changes. First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.
Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages. The Perl community has CPAN ( Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and the command line tool 'cpan' that facilitates downloading and installing a CPAN Perl module and all of its dependencies. Ruby and Python have something similar with Ruby gems and Python easy_install. Java does the same with Maven or with Ant + Ivy or SBT. Haskell has the 'cabal' tool to install Haskell modules with automatic dependency resolution from their Hackage repositories. What I presume would really help is if some people made dpkg (the Debian and Debian offspring package manager), rpm (the Red Hat package manager), or newer package managers like Conary or Nix to be fully aware of the various programming language package management tools.
I'll have it finished Tuesday.
all "Linux" is GNU/Linux. bare metal Linux would be just a kernel. GNU is the Operating System that runs on the Linux Kernel. you can swap the kernel out and get other combos, like Debians GNU/FreeBSD distro. I do agree that Linux should be a bit more genericised, but then the main distros loose the manageability they provide now. the compatibility checks that they all do on their internal code bases. as for patches and updates, most of them will float the changes all the way to the root of the application they are fixing, but have the ability to patch it in their spin of it faster.
The solution here is to only auto-update .so files if there's a serious security problem. This would make packages 10X more stable, reliable, and compatible with future versions of a distro. The disk space is really not an issue.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Dear remaining GNOME devs,
You guys said “If you don’t like GNOME 3, don’t use it.”
So we took you at your word.
The CADT development model remains predominant in GNOME: throwing everything away and writing something new is always much more fun (and better for the resume) than just fixing the remaining bugs in something that basically works.
I'm a Unix sysadmin for a living. I just reinstalled my work box with Xubuntu 12.04. It's amazingly responsive and the interface doesn't make me want to set it on fucking fire. I can GET SHIT DONE AT WORK.
I didn’t leave GNOME, it left me.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
but never forget: **Enable the user to get work done fast**
Yes but also there is a dose of "Enable the use to *think* they get work done fast". Win7 may be more efficient than XP but it takes some unlearning and relearning to get to that point, and many users would prefer not to go through that exercise. GUI developers may come up with better ways to do things but if it isnt fairly intuitive and obvious to user of the prior version, they generally wont like it. There is an old saying that you cant make people climb stairs two steps at a time.
Easier said than done. You could as well say "cast a library updating spell". Besides, security isn't the only reason to update, but could also be needed for fixing corner cases (which happen to actually affect you) and sometimes enabling new feature of a library(which you happen to require) is needed too. The disk space hardly ever was an issue for distros, definitely not a most important one.
Funny. I learned about Alt+~ from your post and went to try it. It crashed gnome hard. For some reason Gnome isn't able to restart and leave the running windows alone like restarting a window manager should - it forces you to log out and kill everything if something's gone wrong.
You kept talking about "UNIX". People choose UNIX to get specific jobs done: big problems in science, engineering, databases, multimedia, web development. People choose UNIX because stuff keeps working decade after decade, with extremely high backwards compatibility in APIs and commands (but also continuing bug fixes and improvements in their implementation).
OS X is a decent desktop environment, but it isn't a "well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable *UNIX* desktop", because it fails to satisfy the requirements of a professional UNIX environment, starting with the fact that there are no high-end machines running OS X and that Apple keeps discontinuing and neglecting more and more of the things that UNIX users demand.
If your requirements from UNIX are modest, OS X may work for you. But for most people who actually need UNIX, OS X is not a solution because it doesn't get the job done.
I had used KDE for a very long time before being exposed to Gnome. And that was only because Ubuntu chose to go with it.
From the linked bugs it becomes crystal clear. As other major software projects, Gnome became infected with "UX" idiots who are on a quest to remove everything useful because "options confuse people", and "it doesn't work well on touchscreens", and huge icons with lots of white space between them are supposedly nicer than text (information). The problem with that approach, apart from alienating the current userbase, is that fat-fingered fatphone users who want as few options as possible are not the kind of people who will try Linux.
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything.
Mod up.
The purpose of a DE....
You seem to assume GNOME is a DE :)
gnome3 is more like the beginning of a OS controlled by gnome in a similar way OS X and IOS is controlled by Apple (okay, not entirely, but they way that they control all layers).
Now if you disagree fork gnome2, do it yourself, stop bitching and get to work. GNOME devs decided this path for their project, if you're not an active contributor, use a DE! Gnome is probably not aimed at power users anymore!
That said, I recently had a chat (IRL) with a gnome board member, who expressed that gnome developers had chosen this path because gnome devs already was involved in all layers of the OS, so why not integrate them, why not do an OS?
He had a valid point, because this is the only way they can compete with Apple and MS.
At the end of the day, gnome3 took gnome too far in the user-friendly way for me, too little focus on performance and productivity. But I'm not a gnome contributor, so I won't bitch about it. I'll just use something else, and wish the gnome developers the best of luck with their path, project and visions.
MATE is the only hope. It just needs an Ubuntu-like theme to be the definitive upgrade path for Ubuntu users.
Why:
In order to get a decent desktop one needs to:
Install Ubuntu 12.04
Install gnome-session-fallback
Select Gnome Legacy on the login screen
Add the Indicator Applet
Edit the GTK registry to get the clock to display the date again
And after doing all that, their still is no way to get the quick-launch icons back.
Before Ubuntu went the Unity / Gnome3 route it was easy enough for grandparents to use, without any training, (I have first hand experience at this.)
Now, absolutely no one I know likes it. I person I know is suffering through using Unity, and everyone else has ditched Ubuntu.
Their "special" libraries crowd up memory because they are not shared with the rest of the system -- you end up with two copies Qt, two copies of MySQL client, two JREs, and dreaded two libstdc++'es that caused so much grief in 90's
So you're assuming every single executable should load the same version of the shared library. What a ridiculous assumption. Also the kernel never loads entire libraries. The bits are page faulted in as necessary. Even otherwise data is almost always the largest part of what consumes physical memory. Code is always tiny.
You, sir, are an idiot.
You should just stick to conspiracy theories and calling people "microsoft employees" since its obvious you have little to no technical knowledge whatsoever.
Go to extensions.gnome.org, and there is an extension to add network and CPU monitoring on the bar. Most of the capabilities you are missing are there.
Thin Clients. Welcome to the Future (read: Past).
That's a rather interesting point that I hadn't thought of before...but not in the way you mean.
Look into genetics, specifically how genes emerge. Mammalian color vision (varies slightly between species that have it) if created by genes that doubles, and then evolved differently. I'm not sure that two copies of MySQL are useful. That's more like doubling a chromosome. But two copies of libstdc++ might, over time, evolve to handle different jobs. The key part, of course, is over time. Most such mutations are a loss, and so disappear over time, but some are the very stuff out of which evolution happens (well, strictly speaking the disappearance of the versions that don't work is also evolution in action).
Now if you look at bacteria, they usually have only one variant of any particular gene, even though they have a poor (compared to mammals) copying-fidelity when the DNA is duplicated. They is because in their lifestyle they MUST be efficient. These may be compared to embedded systems. So what should desktops be compared with? Nematodes? Plants? Each way of life imposes certain constraints on what will be successful. Similarly each systems environment imposes particular constraints. Often these days it isn't minimal amount of code, but closer to optimal performance, which can be quite different. Mobile platforms have another set of constraints.
Don't expect code to have evolved into anything approaching optimal in the short period of time it's been being built. And don't expect the same code to be optimal for wildly different environments. Sometimes it happens, and that's very good. Quicksort is hard to improve on no matter what your environment. But such things aren't to be expected, though they are, of course, to be hoped for. But consider the way hash-tables have been moving in on the space originally occupied by AVL-trees. The replacement can look radically different (and because of that difference, there can be places where the original maintains dominance, say if you want to retreive a sorted list of keys).
OTOH, Gnome appears to me to be dying. I wish they same thing weren't happening to KDE. For my purposes KDE3 was the best desktop Linux ever came up with. Gnome2 was a reasonable replacement. But neither KDE4 nor Gnome3 is even usable. (So I'm disagreeing with the original blurb. I *can* say that Gnome3 is worse.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I did computer support for a university department (Chemistry). I used to cringe every time a student would come to me with problems in Microsoft Word (2003 or 2007 typically) and their 100 page dissertation. Word just isn't designed for that kind of thing, and it's just a disaster waiting to happen, especially since Word's default is not to make headings having any information the auto table of contents generator or index generator can use. Corrupt documents, pagination problems (changing default printers can change pagination). And Endnote... sigh. Sadly asking most students to learn LaTex and Bibtex is probably out of the question since we can't even teach Word users how to use master documents, proper headings, etc.
Some people have found Zotero and LibreOffice to work quite nicely for dissertations. LO/OO's use of styles to define document structure makes it very easy to go back through and simultaneously apply a style and define a logical unit of the document after the fact, or on the fly. More sensible than Word's typewriter mode that it seems to default to. If all you care about is the PDF output for publishing, then any MS Word incompatibilities are non-issues.
I "assume" (actually know) that the less crap ends up in memory, and the less is the number of components that are not updated automatically with the rest of the system, the more efficient and secure is the resulting system. There are excuses for not following that principle, however it's monumentally stupid not to follow them when there is a choice.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
/thread
I am absolutely serious -- GNOME3 UI is worse than goatse.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If KDE4 weren't so terrible, I'd agree with you. Fortunately there are other choices. Unfortunately, they think the problem with Gnome and KDE is that they aren't lightweight. That's NOT the major problem. Not in my environment. The problem is that they are nigh unusable. KDE3 was the best desktop for usability that I've ever seen. It's not particularly lightweight. But I'll pick fwvm over KDE4 *or* Gnome3. It may be lightweight, but at least is't sort of usable. (Actually I'd probably pick something else, but I haven't decided on what, because I can still run Gnome2.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Would you want code typed on a tablet?
Next question: why the hell do we still have to use hideous bash scripting? I've always found it exceedingly difficult to grasp and avoid it like the plague when I can. Some comments just from your code you gave:
if / fi is ugly as hell. Give me "end if" or curcly brackets.
square brackets for an if is ugly as hell.
I believe whitespace is important, and that if you don't separate the if statement out with whitespace, it errors. This sucks.
if requires a semicolon after it. Why???
Variables need to have doublequotes around them. Why???
When setting a variable, you DON'T need to quote its contents. Why???
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
However, you are not only polluting RAM with duplicate versions of code. You are also polluting L2 (and instruction L1, but that will probably be flushed anyway). No reason to make those context switches more expensive than what is really needed. And a large statically linked executable is in no way trivial to ignore, you can easily reach 10s of MBs.
Fallback mode is better than default by a mile.
I was doing some side work for a professor I worked with that was a traffic manual for our state Department of Transportation. I turned out being about 450 pages, with tons of pictures, charts, tables, etc, you name it... and we were required to do it in MS Word.
The thing is, if you do it right, you can make Word work for all that. But you have to have the discipline to use the styles correctly and you have to especially diligent when pasting material from another document. I found it was much safer to paste as text, then reapply formatting - even if it was from a document with the same style structure.
With carefully labeling and stylizing things, I was able to get the table of contents, table of figures, table of tables and table of something else to work.
The problem is, Word makes it really easy to make it look like you've used styles when all you've really done is apply formatting to a chunk of text. It just looks like Heading2, but is really normal text you've made bold and larger - and like you said, it won't show up in the auto-generated Table of Contents.
And if you have to collaborate with other writers... ouch!
I wanted to try Latex, but since we had to turn in a word document in the end, I wasn't sure there was any way to easily make that conversion.
I tried for a while to find a way to have a CPU and Network monitor like you could have it docked on a panel in gnome 2 but finally gave up.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/9/systemmonitor/
I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open.
I use GNU screen for multiple terminals. Very handy, especially with Tilda.
Probably. The developers are that arrogant (and clueless).
But KDE 4.0 was crap, too. And with 4.2 they got it usable, with 4.4 or something like this it was better than 3.x. Why aren't the gnome guys achieving the same? Nothing against a clean restart, but then they need to recover from the total loss of features.
I agree. That's why I ended up loving Gnome 3. I screamed and bitched as much as the next guy when it was introduced. But I decided to give it a trial time of 2 weeks befroe moving on. It turns out, productivity was significantly increased with the new workflow. It's hard to break old habits. But it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done once in a while. Unity is terrible, taking the worst aspects of GNOME 3 without its really revolutionary aspects. I love the dynamic allocation of desktops. I cannot go back to a desktop that doesn't have it anymore. Managine multiple tasks is much easier.
I do miss the custom shortcuts, but again, probably with the size of computer and available applications, the search instead of categorize approach might be faster. And it's still easy to add shortcuts to favourites. And the fact that you just move the mouse to the corner to get the menu makes it fast and easy to reach even on a desktop. No need to think hard. The reflex comes quickly. The main pet peeve Ihave left is "why do I need to press ALT to be able to poweroff". That does seem like a gratuitous limitation, and not intuitively figured out, and therefore it's bad. Everything else in the new layout is intuitive, once you accept that your old habits are useless.
While it was easier to customize everything before, there is blessedly little left to customize now. Anyways, I did find my productivity increasing pretty fast after the initial decline. Now I wouldn't go back to earlier types of desktops. They feel like more work to get most things done.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure).
I'm afraid you're incorrect.
I have the Cadence binaries at hand and they're all dynamically linked against a large set of libraries.
What they (and most developers like they do) is to specifically target a reasonable set of distributions, RHEL4 and 5 in particular.
Running on other distributions mostly works, but they provide no guarantees and no support.
In fact, I can't launch 64 bit Virtuoso because of an incompatible Qt library.
By the same token, we should do away with menus like File/Edit/Tools and just dump all the functions in one long-ass alphabetical list.
When I install StepMania, it refueses to run until I add:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libavutil.so.50 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49
This fools the binary into thinking that it is using a lower revision of a library than the one that is installed. Typically it works just fine, but it is not a solution that the average user would know how to implement.
I have run into similar problems with many other programs. When the latest distro comes out, suddenly a previously compiled binary fails. In the case of proprietary programs, we can't just recompile. We have to beg a company to release a version of their software that is compiled for something greater than Ubuntu 6.06 or our hardware is useless:
http://smarttech.com/Support/Browse+Support/Download+Software/Software/Actalyst+Interactive+Overlay+software/Actalyst+Interactive+Overlay+software/Actalyst+Interactive+Overlay+software+for+Linux
In this case, installing gcc 3.4.2 fixed the issue up to Ubuntu 10.4.
When I look at the packaging systems (both Yum and DPKG), I notice that dependencies often look like glibc 2.3.3 or greater. Why is the " or greater" part so often broken? Why, if the API is perfectly backwards compatible, don't we link our libraries to a fixed set of names and check version numbers with a switch? Why do binaries have to be recompiled for every version of every distro?
This is insane, and no better than having every program bring in its own libraries. This situation creates an undue burden on developers and results in fragmentation and incompatibility. We need a practical solution and we need it yesterday.
All I really want is a straight forward classic desktop environment. I wouldn't call myself extremely techie, but I can figure out how to tweek the usability part myself, given the right tools. I felt gnome 2 gave me that, while gnome 3 just left me annoyed and confused. If I want a DE that just pisses me off every time I log on, I can just go get a copy of Windows Vista.
For now I spend most of my time on Windows 7, because it's not completely hopeless. Have been looking at Cinnamon lately though. I've always loved what the Linux Mint team has brought to the table, so it doesn't come as a surprise to me that it looks good and is easy to use. Only problem there is that my ATI card isn't completely happy with it, so I get a 2-3 sec freeze once in a while. As I'm not super techie (as mentioned above), I currently don't know how to solve that. If anyone knows a fix (like turning something on or off) please leave a comment.
Why don't you try ratpoison?
What Linux needs is a rewrite of dpkg, just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion.
Sounds like what we need is to convince Torvalds to rewrite dpkg. After all, he made the kernel, and now it's taken over everything; then he made git, and that's one of the most popular revision control systems now used (probably the most popular in OSS), so now he just needs to go for a hat trick and make a successor to dpkg/rpm.
Gnome is so awful I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft isn't funding it.
It's a fun conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's true, because Red Hat of all companies really is funding it and employing a bunch of their primary developers. So this really seems to be a good case for Napoleon's old adage, "never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".
How exactly is KDE4 unusable? Yes, the early versions really were unusable, but the recent versions (anything after 4.6) have been pretty decent. 4.8 is looking pretty good in fact.
First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.
This has been the case for ages, really since the very beginning. Go look at /usr/lib; all the libraries are versioned, and there's symlinks pointing to the latest version, but if a package needs an older version, it can specifically link to it if it's present.
Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages.
apt-get does handle dependencies, and has for ages. zypper and others do the same.
If command line scares you, you should try Linux or any other UNIX at first place. Linux and any UNIX-related system except OSX is not for desktop use of the average person. Now stop bitching, if network administrators are fine using Apache or BIND or mysql, your opinion is redundant. And... really... you need a GUI for GRUB? You can't type 4 lines? If they are not already cared by the distro.
As for the last: printer configuration is available at your browser at localhost:631 (for cups). Screen-resolution settings is available in most DEs. For example at Xfce is at Menu -> Settings -> Display. For network parameters, use wicd or network manager which both have GUI applets. For volume control there should be an icon at your system tray. If not, at Xfce is Menu->Multimedia->Mixer.
You can do the same thing with basically any DE. dmenu isn't exactly distro specific.
Personally, I stick with openbox or pek-wm, with conky as my clock/system info/music info manager. I also have kde installed for the handful of times in a year I get the urge to use a more hefty DE.
Please stop arguing and make KDE 5.0 better for everyone. Gnome lost the plot. Who still uses Gnome anyway? Pedo's?
Come one drop the dead dog and support KDE.
I've been Linux only on all my desktops and laptops since 2002. Dual booted before that starting in 1998. Been a big fan of GNOME for a long time but now I find 2 less usable than GNOME 3 (only have 2 because of a server I use at work). I love GNOME 3 on Mint Linux with Cinnamon panels removed and some extensions added. I have the same setup on my two laptops and home desktop. I wish work would let me replace Windows XP on my workstation. Posting just to have one positive voice in a sea of haters because there are plenty of us who enjoy GNOME Shell.
Yep, wading through 100 pages of configuration options can be a bit of a pain, but it's only something you do once in most cases. Once you've set it the way you like, you never go back to all those configuration options; you just leave it that way and you're happy.
Unity is convenient, easy and fun to use. And it saves screen space.
Here is a hint. It is one of the strengths of Linux from a certain way of looking at it.
In some twisted world of denial, sure.
Attaching and detaching a display from a laptop is something no DE is ever going to make 'just work' for everyone.
Works perfectly fine in Win7. You can tell it which monitor is the primary monitor when docked, and it remembers and adapts appropriately when docking/undocking after that. In other words, it works.
Here is a hint. It is one of the strengths of Linux from a certain way of looking at it.
Attaching and detaching a display from a laptop is something no DE is ever going to make 'just work' for everyone. You use case might sometimes be just what the developer was thinking, others you will lose. On the 'other' platforms you just live with it, we have options. On my laptop the F7 key is silkscreened with display/panel in blue, meaning Fn+F7 is the approved way and what would work on the 'other' OS. So to make it easy to remember I bound CTRL-F7 to a script.
It examines the state of the dock and doesn't try to 'do the right thing' for anyone and everyone, it does exactly what [I] want for either state. With only a little more work (when I get a spare round tuit) I'll extend it to look at the VGA port and deal with the presence of a projector automagically. Yes I means I have to hit a hot key when the automatics do the wrong thing (almost every time) but it means I always get what I want and it beats filing bug reports that get closed WONTFIX when the distro goes out of support and just bitching about it being broken.
Seriously, WTF are you talking about? What is there to "live with" on other platforms? You connect an external display, it gets auto-detected, you choose the settings _you_ want to apply to that display, and you're done. Those settings get remembered and applied whenever you connect that display. In my experience this works fine on both Windows (at least Windows 7) and OS X. I fail to see how you can consider it a "strength" that the most modern Linux desktop environment can't even handle remembering your external display settings across reboots. That's nuts.
I gave up on being a full time desktop Linux user about a decade ago because of BS like this that I was constantly having to fight with. I had this funny idea that I could come back in five or ten years once Linux "matured" and simple things like this were worked out and standardized, and I would then have access to a true desktop nirvana experience. Ten years later I am sorely disappointed at the crap desktop Linux users are still putting up with, and amazed at the way major flaws are rationalized into strengths. Still writing and exchanging bash scripts to make your desktop work the way you want? Are you kidding me? Nothing seems to have actually advanced in the desktop Linux world in TEN YEARS, besides some surface eye candy. That's just sad. I was hoping for so much more from desktop Linux.
Oh well. At least Android is successful and Linux is still doing well on the server side of things.
Troll? Really? Anyone with a different view of the world to you is a troll? There is a simple retort to your silly jibe. If you live in the third world or in the middle of a desert then do not use Internet connected services. Xfce4 will serve you fine. But do not suggest that the rest of us should be reduced to the lowest common denominator. Those of us who live in big cities in the developed world and who have an Internet connection everywhere would very much like to move forward and use the applications of the 21st C. Anyone with an Android phone or an iPhone can configure that phone to be a mobile WiFi hotspot. If your provider does not allow this then change providers. Your own connection, locked down, everywhere. If you have a phone you are always connected. 3G accounts keep coming down in price. At home my ADSL 2+ never fails. Years and years of up time.
GNOME 3 and cinnamon are stupidly slow.
You forgot Google Chrome OS, based on SUSE.
But if you that great your self, join the Chrome OS team and make it kick but.
Maybe , google would port the ADK to run inside Chrome OS, with ARM emu like Mac PPC emu, and then have all Android Apps in Chrome OS. I mean its feasable, even others have prototyped this. But in combination with a proper OS, and 100% google, it could just be the killer OS. Imagine the majority of the linux config (besides desktop), being done in ADK. Android already supports true KB input + mouse. And true tablet apps would run great under linux too. With intel cpus being that much faster, it would rock even if its doing Arm EMU for native libraries, but Android apps would run in the VM and be fast.
Though Chrome OS is a funny one, I dont see why google is doing it, why not just make 'desktop extensions' to normal Android 4.1, then make it all run in x64.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Oh and dont get me started on OPENSSL, and how they removed SSLV2, thus breaking all apps / code made before the removal. Thus breaking lots of things from compiling, let alone binary running. And then lots of people who keep on using it without knowing, thus breaking inside new distros. ARgggg!!
Linux guys, aim for zero breakage, or have the guts and balls to email all 100,000 users of XYZ lib, and personally get them to fix the code.
Even MS keeps old bad apis in place, so all old code, even DOS 1985 binaries still run. ( though I did just read about some crap in WM8 breaking all WM7 code, good one MS)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The warning signs were there for years before.
this. I went over to KDE when the GNOME people started doing their tango with mono. I think that fad has passed now, but it was a clear sign to me that the project had fundamental problems.
It's a shame - there's a bunch of useful stuff to work on over at freedesktop that would have great user benefit, but not much of it is very sexy. Well, at least for those who don't find plumbers sexy.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The answer to most of your questions is that all those lines are actually executable on the command line; they're not compiled like C. So they have to be just like regular bash commands (which are use bourne shell syntax, which goes very far back). Don't like it? Use a different script language. Even perl would work here, but bash is generally faster for small jobs.
Just measure how much code lines you have spent. The less code a project needed, giving a certain set of features, the better it is.
The closest you'll get is a distro that re-compiles by tefault such as Gentoo. Even there, you will likely have some problems if you try to mix and match arbitrary versions of things.
Variables need to have doublequotes around them. Why???
You don't always, but if there's a risk that the variable will be empty, it's the shell that does the expansion for you, resulting in an invalid command:
if [ $blah == "Something" ]
becomes
if [ == "Something" ]
So quoting the variable covers that case and ensures you're always comparing something.
Most of the original decisions probably had a good reason behind them (for the programmer at least, if not the user), but they're probably not necessary now... except for backwards compatibility. Time for an Atheist shell :)
I tried for a while to find a way to have a CPU and Network monitor like you could have it docked on a panel in gnome 2 but finally gave up.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/
I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open.
Ctrl-Shift-n from terminal opens a new window. Ctrl-Shift-t opens a new tab, which I prefer.
For vitual desktops, I personally prefer a fixed layout... email and web browser in upper left, work vitrual computer in lower left, etc. The ever-changing dynamic list doesn't work well for me.
There ought to be an extension for this... (One thing that bugs me about Gnome is there is so much potential in the extensions, but no one is writing them!)
The worst is that I can't get it to behave right with my laptop and external monitor. Laptops today come with shitty short screens, so when I work at home, I keep the lid closed and just use my external monitor. Gnome3 can't seem to grasp this and always assumes the laptop's monitor is the primary monitor, so I can't reach the widgets, menus, etc. Sure, I can muck with the display settings to fix it during a session, but I have to do it all over again if I reboot or need to open the lid for some reason.
From http://rainhilltrials.blogspot.ca/2011/09/changing-primary-display-in-gnome-3.html:
"GNOME 3 is much worse than GNOME 2" .
A lot of people who do actual work on their computers (as apposed to using it like a smartphone for browsing, web email, and youtube mostly) and have tried both will agree and will have a long list of good reasons for saying that too.
Most of them are using XFCE for now and won't shed a tear if GNOME becomes history.
It was the hybris of "UI Designers" knowing better than anyone else what is good for us.
You are right: "A UI is a type of interface, which is a "contract" for consistent interaction" /dev/null and start over.
The problem is that GNOME3 broke that contract more than any other UI until then, and in ways that made it harder and harder for professional Linux users to get their work done. GNOME 3 broke the contract of being useful for being cool or for being like some "UI designer" though everyone has to interact now.
I hope they just send the whole failed effort to
Press the Win key, type a name, press enter. Viola - I now have (Insert application here) looking at me.
Let's see...
"Press the Win key" - that's the one with the little Microsoft Windows logo on it, isn't it? OK. (presses key)
"type a name" - OK, hmmm, type a name ... (looks at Windows key) ... I know! "Bill Gates"
"press enter" - OK (presses Enter key)
" I now have (Insert application here) looking at me" - Aaaargh! Bill Gates is looking at me! You've called up the Borg!
See? Gnome is broke. (Well, I use XFCE. What would I know about Gnome?)
I am anarch of all I survey.
This is the reason I switched to LXDE. Never been happier.
HP-UX had Context-Sensitive Directories. *sigh*
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Nope, can't agree here. The magic library updating spell is called "pkg-manager update" (or whatever you call the new thingy). The updates you get by default are the ones proposed by your repository lists, in order from highest priority to lowest. It should sound pretty familiar.
The difference is repos should only override the .so files a particular particular package uses in extreme cases (almost never), where they're willing to do the testing, and for some reason upstream reason isn't doing their job. The difference between "stable" and "experimental" versions of a distro should just be a flag the user provides the update tool, to guide it in how aggressively to update, not a whole separate version of a distro. This doesn't work today, simply because the various packages share the same .so files, and we can't afford to test all the combinations.
The usual case, for example with openssh or apache, would be that your upstream simply updates from their upstream, who are most likely the actual code maintainers. The first place (usually) any critical openssh bug gets fixed is right in the original openssh source. A critical openssh update should ripple through the various distros automatically, with little required testing by the distro maintainers. This would improve overall security and reduce painful testing and delay. If this would mostly just magically work, because packages use the versions of .so they were tested with. Users would be far more willing to update, improving security and stability at the same time.
A major problem with the current system is that it's very difficult for distro maintainers to update core packages. You're simply not going to see Firefox updated to 4.0 from 3.X in any given version of any distro once it's shipped. Further, users wanting to test 4.0 are likely to find bugs if they update it themselves. In Ubuntu, I always found that the best thing was to compile the latest from source. As if by magic, the bugs that were making Firefox difficult to use would go away. I'm fearing updating this fall, because stuff mostly works now, and after every LTE release, Ubuntu breaks half the stuff I use in their next release. It's a major PITA, enough to almost make me bail on Ubuntu, except the other distros are worse!
Ideally, you could run Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 on the same Ubuntu install, and if you don't like PulseAudio, you just remove it and use ALSA. Nope. It doesn't work that way. All the major applications are linked to PulseAudio, and if you remove it, there goes your movie player music player, etc. In Ubuntu, it even removes "ubuntu-desktop". Good grief! So, what's wrong with letting users have the various packages recompiled for ALSA, and have an "Ubuntu-ALSLA" repo? The problem is it becomes an unrealistic nightmare of package management, simply because you can't have two versions of any .so file at the same time without renaming them. Not only that, but it takes a packaging guru to make this work, and packaging gurus are rare, and have better things to do than worry about a bunch of blind people who hate PulseAudio.
Switching to a more modern distributed package manager would make the distro's jobs far easier. Ubuntu has a whole team doing nothing but Firefox integration. A better package system would dramatically reduce the load on the package maintainers, enabling Canonical to focus on making Ubuntu rock, rather than continuously fighting all the instability that occurs in every non-LTE release. Most Ubuntu devs spend most of their time fighting fires rather than creating new stuff for us to play with. The reason is our ancient package manager.
A modern package manager would make it easier on code developers. While write-once run-anywhere is a bit of a dream, but it partly works in many computer languages, including Java, C, and Python. If my application can compile on Windows, Mac OS X, every version of Linux and even BSD, why is it so hard to packa
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
If you have the cred for this, as u claim, are you talking to the fedora/redhat people? they are not fools. If your idea has value they have the room. I f you can work in a flat structure where your idea will morph and change in a natural way that can solve problems that arise-- in other words if you can work well with others (and it sounds like you can) then go to people who know their stuff. And maybe something good will come out of it.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
"Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere."
That is the biggest load of BS I've ever read in my life. EVERYONE can see that Gnome 3 is worse than Gnome 2. Anyone that says otherwise is either in denial or being paid. Period.
I never had any interest in gnome, or any other "desktop", as the desktop metaphor is a kind of child's play that I was happy to leave behind in the windows world.
However, as a developer who has to make software work on multiple *nix platforms, I have an interest in GTK2.
So I hope there will be renewed effort to improve GTK2. I don't see any advantage or reason for GTK3.
A couple problems to solve in GTK2:
1) default performance of GtkTreeStore / GtkListStore is horrifying. The cost of adding an element is proportional to the number of existing elements in the model. This is a slap in the face to Computer Science everywhere.
This is caused mainly by the underlying data structure (GNode) being used for something it was not meant to. A simple fix is to use a version of GNode (call it whatever you like) that stores a pointer to the last child.
Another problem is the cost of determining whether to trigger a signal or not. This is the result of broken API entry points and implementations, where conversions from paths to iterators cause unjustified performance drains.
Another problem is the lack of an API to add multiple elements, which would mitigate the problem above.
Another related problem is the poor default performance of GtkTreeView, which can be improved programmatically from the user code with butt-ugly workarounds.
These problems have been pointed out to you on your mailing lists and bug trackers for years and years, there are simple suggestions and patches flowing around, with no real action on your part.
2) Stop deprecating /removing/undocumenting APIs because you don't like them. People rely on them.
You have been really terrible with this. Entire functionality completely deprecated, undocumented, abandoned.
Just an example: GtkRuler is very much needed, and is really practical: the problem of displaying a ruler and reporting the current position to the user is a problem that presents itself so very often. It just needed some love to make it more general.
Instead you labeled it as "too specialized" and abandoned it. It just needed a callback for printing the values on the ruler and a more general and accessible way to set the metrics.
Yes, one can write his own widgets, but why putting together GTK at all then? One can write directly to the X client library himself, no? Are you going to provide those abstractions or not?
Keep the widgets you have done, and bear responsibility for your API problems, working on backward-compatible or alternative APIs instead of every few months deprecating / abandoning / removing a whole API.
Treat your developers better, and they will stay with GTK. Otherwise, don't be surprised that we migrate to QT, FLTK, wxwidgets.
There ought to be an extension for this... (One thing that bugs me about Gnome is there is so much potential in the extensions, but no one is writing them!)
This may be useful:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/12/static-workspaces/
I have to say I am very upset with the gnome devlopers for turning gnome 3 into some sort of personal project for one of the devlopers to have his tablet exactly the way he wanted.
I do not own a tablet, I will never own a tablet. I think they are stupid and pointless.
I thought gnome 2.x was literaly the greatest window manager ever created. I could do things sooo much faster and easier with gnome 2 then I could on any other user interface ive ever used.
Gnome 2 was truely the epitome of window managers.
It saddens me that I have been forced to switching between kde4 and mate.
Mate is pretty much gnome2 but the kdm window manager I am running rather then GDM makes some of the menu's screwy.
I feel gnome 3 and unity will fragment the linux userbase further and force many back to windows. (If windows had a better command line I would have switched back).
I hope it was worth it to whoever at gnome decided the project needed to be ruined and made to only be useable on tablets.
KDE4 *LOOKS* quite nice. It even "sort of" works. But it slows the use of the system to a crawl.
N.B.: I'm not talking about reaction time or bugs or anything of that nature. I'm talking about the DESIGN of the GUI. I'm talking about the number of steps involved in selecting a commonly used application (though I'll admit the speed of the steps are also a problem, but I think this is a matter of my reaction time rather than KDEs). I'm talking about the effort to locate an alternative in the case that the most commonly used application of a particular type isn't the one I want for this particular job. Doing everything takes longer than it did, and I don't see ANY advantages over Gnome2, much less over KDE3.
I'm sure it was fun to design that "sideways sliding menu", but it's a real pain to use.
I've got other complaints, too. Because of them KDE4 would not only need to be as good as the alternatives (currently Gnome2) it would need to be a lot better. Applications that don't work properly in that environment, etc. Nothing really important, but lots of little things add up.
O, yes. And I *don't* like a noisy background to my work. Every piece of flash that you put in is a detriment. Even static icons that are designed to be eye-catching are a nuisance. (I always prefer to disable most desktop animation, with the single exception of resizing windows.)
Simply put, LXDE is better than KDE4, and that other one whose name I can never remember but which starts with "x" ("xfce"?) is even better. I suspect that fvwm is better than KDE4, but I haven't used it in awhile, so I can't be sure. And NONE of these, not one, are as good as KDE2.x, much less KDE3.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
the start bar/gnome menu metaphor was really showing its age.
In what way? WinXP (at work) and GNOME fallback (at home) still work perfectly well.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
were very easy to port and run on Mac OS.
This would not have been true of Windows, and it was less and less true of Linux, ironically.
Meanwhile, you spout off about Apple lacking at the high end above, then contradict yourself by saying that the today's desktops are the high end below. Either Apple can't do real UNIX because it doesn't to high-end computing today, or desktops are the equivalent of your archetypal high-end UNIX systems from the '80s.
You can't have it both ways. (Or rather, I'm perfectly willing to let you, but it looks foolish.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The reason people are leaving GNOME and Linux in droves is because they already have learned to use it—only to find that revision N+1 makes all of the learning they already did useless.
Linux and the open source community re-invent every wheel over and over again, each time with a completely new man page (or info page, or GNOME help page, or KDE help page—Q.E.D.).
They are moving to platforms where they can learn it once and move on to the things they wanted a computer for in the first place, rather than spending a large chunk of their life essentially stuck in the ever-changing Linux user manual (which must be collected from multiple sources, all of which also change on a regular and ongoing basis).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Using gnome-fallback in Ubuntu 12.04 with their indicator package - I find it has all of the features I loved from gnome 2 - a 'places' menu (a proper one, not the cut-down extension in gnome-shell), and proper workspaces with proper drag-and-drop functionality etc etc. It obviously lacks some of the new and good features of gnome-shell - the type-to-search for applications and windows overview.
It seems to run on gtk3 and gnome3 - so is it a viable alternative to unity/gnome-shell/kde etc?
You, sir, are an idiot.
$100K software is distributed that way because developers can't allow external maintainers touch their source code, and are unwilling to do distribution-specific builds themselves.
Wrong. We do it because our programs are architected by software engineers who understand the negative performance implications of shared libraries. Even if that weren't true we don't hate our users so we don't force them to track down dependency issues.
Their "special" libraries crowd up memory because they are not shared with the rest of the system -- you end up with two copies Qt, two copies of MySQL client, two JREs, and dreaded two libstdc++'es that caused so much grief in 90's.
Wrong again. Do you know how inline functions work? By your logic they simply waste memory. It's very clear you've never done any performance analysis regarding this.
On one word, no. You don't understand how software works.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I really don't think I know what you're getting at as far as the number of steps involved.
If you're complaining about the multi-part K-menu, this is easily fixed: just revert to the KDE3-style menu. It's easy: all you have to do is right-click on the K-menu icon, select "Switch to Classic Menu Style", and you now have your KDE3 menu back.
As for as a "noisy background", no one's forcing you to put any "plasmoids" on your desktop. You can remove them all easily, and just make it blank. And it's pretty easy to disable all animations too.
However, you are not only polluting RAM with duplicate versions of code.
What are you comparing? Every single executing process using the same piece of code from different libraries VS using the same piece of code from a single shared library? How often does that happen? In theory anything can happen. So anyone can say anything.
No reason to make those context switches more expensive than what is really needed
Yes, there is no reason to purposely waste it. But during a TLB flush how many global PTEs do you think will be needed for this specific concern to even show up on a benchmark? My anecdotal experience shows that this is not even a minor bottleneck for desktop class applications. Ofcource while creating any application, you have to consider where and how it is going to be used and then decide how you have to ship it. There are legitimate reasons to ship an app which is statically compiled.
And a large statically linked executable is in no way trivial to ignore, you can easily reach 10s of MBs.
You are conflating the size of the binary with resident memory pages.
Nope, can't agree here. The magic library updating spell is called "pkg-manager update" (or whatever you call the new thingy). The updates you get by default are the ones proposed by your repository lists, in order from highest priority to lowest. It should sound pretty familiar.
The difference is repos should only override the .so files a particular particular package uses in extreme cases (almost never), where they're willing to do the testing, and for some reason upstream reason isn't doing their job. The difference between "stable" and "experimental" versions of a distro should just be a flag the user provides the update tool, to guide it in how aggressively to update, not a whole separate version of a distro. This doesn't work today, simply because the various packages share the same .so files, and we can't afford to test all the combinations.
The thing is, I don't know of such a thing existing, so I'm not sure whether it's actually possible and whether there are some killer disadvantages of it. Sometimes an improvement in one place can make your life extremely hard in some other places.
Ideally, you could run Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 on the same Ubuntu install, and if you don't like PulseAudio, you just remove it and use ALSA. Nope. It doesn't work that way. All the major applications are linked to PulseAudio, and if you remove it, there goes your movie player music player, etc. In Ubuntu, it even removes "ubuntu-desktop". Good grief! So, what's wrong with letting users have the various packages recompiled for ALSA, and have an "Ubuntu-ALSLA" repo? The problem is it becomes an unrealistic nightmare of package management, simply because you can't have two versions of any .so file at the same time without renaming them. Not only that, but it takes a packaging guru to make this work, and packaging gurus are rare, and have better things to do than worry about a bunch of blind people who hate PulseAudio.
That can only be handled with source-based distro such as gentoo. There's no way you could provide .so files of all possible configurations that could be wanted by users on a binary distro. Sticking to some baseline is the only sane solution, no matter whether there is "pkg-manager update" or no. In fact I don't even have PA on my gentoo system though I could enable it if necessary and rebuild necessary packages with emerge --newuse ...
However, none of this will happen. If it did, some web site would become the mains source for buying Linux commercial software like games, and the whole free software community that drives the broken GNU/Linux system of today would revolt. GNU/Linux is hostile towards binary compatibility on purpose.
I wouldn't say so. They just use whatever works. There are efforts such as this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
Thank you.
Me too - fallback mode seems to have all the advantages of gnome 2 for me.
Glad to see your showing some flexibility in viewpoint. It's rare, and I've often been guilty of digging in for far too long before changing my point of view (like coming around on gay marriage). I'll just address this statement: "That can only be handled with source-based distro such as gentoo. There's no way you could provide .so files of all possible configurations that could be wanted by users on a binary distro."
You already have a solution that seems to work in Gentoo. You're right, in that no single repository will have all the binaries for all the possible combinations, as it grows exponentially with the number of options. When a user needs a new configuration, it will have to be compiled from source. Therefore, a build system for packages has to be part of the package manager. When done building the new package, the user should publish that binary with his signature so that others in the future who might want it can download it from him. This should all be automatic, under the hood.
I think most common configurations users will want will be ones the author's have tested. Going out on your own is asking for trouble. In reality, I'd probably wind up with a mix of PulseAudio and ALSA apps. In the pie-in-the-sky scenario where such a system is in widespread use, I would expect most such binaries to already exist, and in fact be available from the original authors. They'd download faster than from Ubuntu or Debian, because I'd typically have multiple friends downloading to me in parallel, overcoming the asymmetry in upload/download speed.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
So... you installed Ubuntu 12.04, and downgraded to Gnome 2.0 with a simple apt command with no problems? The mechanism to make all this work exists. All it requires is for every author of every package to do extra work for every distro and get it right. No problem, right? And, of course, even if you get it to install OK, you'll be running combinations of .so libraries that no author has ever tested. Good luck with that.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
OK, I haven't run Cadence on many machines, so I believe you are correct. The Mentor binaries, OTOH, link in just about everything, including their own Java libraries. The benefit is it just works, pretty much everywhere.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I think I'm noticing a dividing line between the die-hard "it's perfect the way it is" crowd and those who seem to think distributing software in Linux could be improved: I'm guessing you write software, rather than package software for your particular favorite distro. It's authors who are getting screwed.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Thank God there are a few sensible people left in Linux land... Unfortunately, they out-number and out-moderate us.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I've had even a bit more wine, so this idea is even dumber, but here's the brain fart... guys like you who get it, probably because of real experience as a developer, could form a new e-mail group. I suspect there are enough of us out there to make a difference for GNU/Linux.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Actually, I live in Chapel Hill, NC, quite close to RedHat HQ. I've never met anyone in person who works for RedHat. If you know someone I should talk to, I'm just crazy enough to call/e-mail them. Not that I'm looking for a new job... I have significant responsibilities in helping my current one succeed. However, I'd be interested in meeting people living near me who are as you describe.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Unless you have unusual needs, you will find life just fine with the existing packaging managers. Porn, BitTorrent downloads, music, you name it. It's all there for a horny 20-year-old.
I'm not blind, and never will be, which makes me somewhat hesitant to complain. I'm simply suffering from central vision loss, which is very much preferable to real blindness. Now, if you were losing sight, and had to depend on future Linux distros to make their shit accessible, you'd be all good about that, right? Because every single system out there is so accessible to the blind! I'll mention Gnewsense, just because you might have heard of them. They would love to support people with vision disorders, but they can't. It's not their fault. RMS is all for Gnewsense, and all for accessibility, but it doesn't fucking work!
The reason it does not work is the stupidity in our current packaging managers.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Throwing away or breaking the old stuff is the problem.
You're getting warmer. The reason the old stuff is breaking is due to lack of planning. The lack of planning is due to lack of leadership. Lack of leadership, unfortunately, is a longstanding trait of the Gnome developers.
captcha: pitiable (lol)
I'm sorry I was not more clear. apt-get handles dependencies from other packages packaged by Debian maintainers. It has a database where it tracks what is installed, what is available but not installed, and what the dependencies are. But apt-get does not know anything about software modules you install on your machine using Perl cpan, Python easy_install, Haskell cabal, or Java maven. So if you install something on your machine using 'cpan', even if the exact same Perl module is in the Debian package repository, your apt cache will not know the package was installed.
/usr/lib directory and how library dependencies are managed more closely. Thank you for the information.
I did not know that the library versioning worked that way, I guess I should have examined my
You are sure? Based on what statistics?
Yes, Gnome3 is very difficult to use. Default printer setting is horrible, nautilus is difficult. I try Gnome3, Fallback, and Unity, but all has the same gnome3 basic applications. nautilus, user and printer settings. User and Printer, you can solve installing the old default. My users cant find the icon to change the file view, you need to use menu or keyboard shortcuts. Common users don't like shortcuts period.!! Now, I'm using LinuxMint Mate Edition, and I am in peace. Maybe someone port Mate to GTK3, which will be cool. But, for now MATE is ok. LinuxMint MATE works out the box, and I can use the tons of themes. Unity has a great future I think, but theres many thing to solve. Dash flexibility is one. But what I really complain is horrible changes in some gnome3 settings and nautilus. Binary settings (Dconf) is more one bad thing that they copy from windows. WHY???
To get another Terminal you can:
a) press Ctrl+Shift+T and get a new tab,
b) go to Overview (by hot corner or super key), right click on Terminal icon and select "New Window" from options.
Yes, sir, it's really that simple. And yes, I am a Gnome Shell fan.
For lack of config options - you may not have a good GUI but you have the command line. There is no reason not to use it - sometimes it's even easier.
For fixed number of desktops - there's an extension to add this functionality ( https://extensions.gnome.org/ ).
If you want a fixed number of desktops, here's your extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/12/static-workspaces/
My little brother does some coding for them (he's in Durham and does chip design for qualcomm) but, a few years ago i wrote to Jesse.... forget his last name, he was one of the honchos for the live distro at the time and has moved on up since then.... and suggested that they set a time of day for the live iso release so that people in the rest of the world would know when it was available for download. He wrote back the next day saying thanks and the change was on the website a few days later. They've been doing it ever since (10:00AM Eastern time).
They have a bunch of ways to get involved with them from bugzappers to ambassadors to working your way up the dev ranks. It is a hierachy, but a meritocracy as well. Changing their leadership on a regular basis keeps them nimble as well, something that I can see through the changes in the product and its focus from version to version.
but I am a fanboy, so keep the salt handy
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
It sounds somewhat similar to Debian and Ubuntu that way. You definitely work your way up. I was a long time RedHat and then a Fedora fan. RedHat's doing well and making money from open source, so I consider them a huge success story. On the other hand, they are strongly invested in keeping business as usual. They are the number 1 solution for business Linux needs. As such, they're the platform that gets the most testing from commercial Linux software vendors. The (unfortunately major) changes I'm talking about would enable software vendors to run on all the Linux distros, eliminating a major market barrier, and likely cutting into RedHat profits. Just about any distro would be more stable, and new features added to one distro could easily be installed to another, again reducing market barriers. I admire the RedHat guys, but I think leveling the playing field in Linux would be against their best interest.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Operation systems aren't that modular. They require integrations and dependencies to work. There are real choices that need to be made. You should try Gentoo which comes closest to that model.
GNU/Linux true believers are incapable of seeing that GNU/Linux is dying
BS. Linux owns
-- a huge chunk of the server market
-- essentially all of the super computing market
-- a huge chunk of the embedded market
-- is becoming a major guest OS for new development on mainframe
-- 2 families of cell phone operating systems including the most popular one.
We are either close or at the point that there are more linux kernels than NT kernels running on any given day. Linux is doing great.
And frankly as a desktop OS with the Windows 8 strategy likely driving up hardware costs it is not unreasonable that Windows may create a sizable window for Linux to exploit at the bottom of the market. Late 2013 approx may be the best opportunity Linux has had since netbooks.
If you don't have vision that's not a problem that has anything to do with mainstream distributions.
But an excellent distribution is: http://knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html
I'm having a tough time seeing the stupidity
Why did they do that? Because there was no easy way to get Gnome2 back. How the heck is that acceptable behavior for a package manger in 2012?
That's not the fault of the package manager. Gnome is designed for integration. You want a Gnome 2 system you have it from a fairly low level or not integrate. But Linux Mint exists for people who liked Ubuntu's approach and want Gnome 2 with 2 well respected variants of Gnome 2.
That's not the fault of the package manager. Gnome is designed for integration.
And what the fuck is "designed for integration" supposed to mean? Throwing buzzwords around isn't an argument. Give me some examples of where there would be insurmountable hurdles to allowing Gnome2 and Gnome3 to exist in parallel. I have all the RAM and HDD space I need for that. So why can't I do it? Why do I have to switch the whole distribution to get that, when the distribution doesn't really care about the DE I am using (i.e. I can replace Gnome3 with XFCE just fine)?
At the source level it is completely trivial to install software of different versions in parallel, you just configure it with a different install prefix. Relocatable binaries require a tiny bit of extra work, as most software doesn't support relocation and relies and hard compiled path, so one would need to fix that. At worst you might also need to adjust some Dbus names in case the Gnome people broke the API. But there is really no magic to it, just fix the naming conflicts and call it a day. The only reason we don't have that is because nobody bothered to implement it and instead continues to do things the way they have always been done on Linux, barf all over /usr/, shut your eyes and hope for the best.
Just wait til they pull a Microsoft and start trying to push a crappy new UI on their customers which their customers hate. Businesses make big blunders all the time, and past performance is not a guarantee of success.
Well they've already pushed Gnome 3 out. Their customers are fine with it.
Citation needed. Last I heard, RHEL was still using Gnome2, and it was going to be a bit before Gnome3 came out.
And what the fuck is "designed for integration" supposed to mean? Throwing buzzwords around isn't an argument. Give me some examples of where there would be insurmountable hurdles to allowing Gnome2 and Gnome3 to exist in parallel
First off, calm down. Nothing is insurmountable. It is however annoying, and labor intensive. I'd say take a look at the Slackware decision to drop Gnome. You could look at the forums at: droplinegnome.org which has lots of discussions about the integration challenges faced for the most minimal Gnome. To do 2 and 3 together would require having apps that have Gnome dependencies compile twice. An app just drops functionality when it goes from Gnome3 to XFCE but it expects things to be setup a certain way for Gnome2. So for example with dbus you need to let it know at compile time whether to compile in KDE support and that means you need kdelibs and QT. For gnome you need the associated GTK already in place (1,2 or 3). Etc... And this holds true for most packages.
At a certain point its just easier to switch distributions when it comes to a vertical package like this. Distributions either have variants like Linux Mint or they they just pick one option and move on. If you want a different option, go with a different distribution. Which has always been the case. Even during the early days there were KDE focused distributions and Gnome focused distributions.
I think you are right on that one. I'm shocked I'd have figured they switched already.
No way; RHEL, like any "enterprise" distro, is always way behind the times on everything, in the name of stability. The bleeding-edge stuff is what Fedora is for, to try it out before putting into the distro that giant corporate customers are paying tons of money for support for.
At a certain point its just easier to switch distributions when it comes to a vertical package like this.
Yes, and that's exactly why I say the package managers we have today are crap. There is nothing in principle that would prevent you from stuffing everything that depends on Gnome2 in one namespace and everything that wants Gnome3 in another. But our current package managers don't support any kind of clean namespace separation, everything goes into one tree and when there are two packages with the same name, only one can continue to exist, the other gets overwritten or needs to be manually renamed by the package maintainer. "Switch the distribution" should simply never be the answer to a Linux problem.
It is however annoying, and labor intensive.
Compared to all the time and effort that gets wasted on the users side, it's pretty minimal.
I think you are failing to get a basic principle. The idea of a distribution after the initial layer has always been to offer a collection of packages designed to work together. In other words to make choice. So for example Suse used to be KDE only. Ubuntu used to be a Gnome based distribution. If you don't agree with the distribution handling of a big vertical that was always seen as pretty good reason to just leave. That's not the package managers being crap, that's just you asking for a degree of flexibility that they never had any intention of offering.
There are distributions and package managers that do what you want. They are designed for people who want control. Gentoo will allow you to do exactly that. Things like Gentoo's use allow you to reconfigure how the distribution is going to work and you can emerge several times and then just swap filesystems a symlink to determine how your system is configured. Puppy certainly allows you to easily build configurations though that's much more directed at portable. I've never played with Arch Linux but it might very well do what you want.
Linux does do this. Most distributions don't because most distributions understand their job as making the right choices not, not making choices.
The idea of a distribution after the initial layer has always been to offer a collection of packages designed to work together. In other words to make choice.
Um, no. The idea of distributions was never to make a choice and force it on it's user, it was simply to provide easy installable binaries for Linux software and most distributions try to offer as much software as they can with the man power they have available. Thus you don't just get KDE or Gnome, but XFCE, FVWM, TWM, WindowMaker and dozens of other window manager or desktop environments all at the same time. Distributions might pick what they install by default and what they throw most of their money at to fine tune it, but that's about it, you are always free to install something else if you don't like the default.
In a perfect world a distribution would simply be a meta-package, a collection of software for a given task or taste, that you could freely mix and match with other distributions. But right now, that's not the case, instead each distribution has to repackage all the software you ever might want to use again and there is no cross-distribution compatibility due to the inflexibilities of the package manager (i.e. install Xubuntu on Ubuntu works, installing Ubuntu on Debian does not, as the package manager wouldn't be able to handle the conflicts). You can't even install old Ubuntu packages on a new Ubuntu system without running into all kinds of trouble.
And no, there is no distribution that does what I want, even Gentoo's SLOT system is little more then a glorified way to avoid renaming packages, it still doesn't allow free mixing and matching of different versions.
The closest thing to what I want is actually outside of the Linux world: Fink and MacPorts. They still fail at all the advanced handling of namespaces as they use the same tools distributions on Linux do, but thanks to them being an "add-on" to the system, not the core, they don't try to take control over "/" instead they go to "/fink" or "/macports" and one can simply install and use both at the same time without conflict. That small change of not polluting the global namespace, but keeping things in a separate directory adds a lot of flexibility, a proper system for handling namespaces could of course go much further.
e idea of distributions was never to make a choice and force it on it's user,
Well they can't force anything on the user but yeah that was the idea. The very first Linux distributions like MCC focused on backup. Yggdrasil Linux came configured, the goal was a bootable Linux not choice. Caldera's aim was to create a system for Novell there was no configuration. Then later to create a desktop and they most certainly did pick software in that desktop. Then a unified platform for VARs and embedded system.
There are distributions like Debian which just try and act like a large collection of packages.
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The closest thing to what I want is actually outside of the Linux world: Fink and MacPorts.
Well Fink's interface is taken from Debian source. You can do what you do with Fink with Debian source.
MacPorts is based on the BSD ports system, which is what Gentoo is based on.
And that's been my point, what you want exists in Linux.
btw fink defaults to /sw and macports to /opt/local
And that's been my point, what you want exists in Linux.
You don't get it. What should be there is the ability to "apt-get install debian" on a Ubuntu system. That's not the case. That does not exist. Yes, you could build it, but nobody has done so.
What should be there is the ability to "apt-get install debian" on a Ubuntu system.
Well first off neither Fink nor Macports does anything remotely like that. Both of them require OSX to install their own initial layers and then only have a selection of packages. They don't offer guest OSes virtualized. Far less do they offer running alien software not virtualized. I think what you are asking for now is simply impossible. But even if I'm wrong what you are now demanding more and easier virtualization than even MVS (IBM Z-series) mainframes offer. So I'm going to start by saying, Linux package management doesn't suck because it fails to provide a system that no one has ever successfully implemented on any operating system ever designed.
Second since you want to repoint it you would be using dpkg not apt. dpkg does do a lot of what you want, but you do need to learn to use the Linux package management tools that exist.
Third Unix has never really offered this functionality at all The only system I know that's still sold that does a good job at this is IBM's System-Z. But even here Linux is on par with most Unixes and for example Red Hat Linux Advanced Server makes some attempt to offer basics. Canonical's desktop is not going to offer this sort of functionality.
Linux package management doesn't offer teleportation as a standard feature either.
I think what you are asking for now is simply impossible.
Yes, that's the point. As said, it's not a hard problem, just adding relocation support to binaries would solve 99% of the problems. Current binary packaging infrastructure simply doesn't do that, manually compiling from source does. That's why it's trivial to keep as many different versions of Gimp around when I compile manually from source, while it's impossible to do the same with binary packages. That's why the current way to package binaries in Linux sucks.
Well first off supporting gimp and supporting "apt install debian" are two totally totally different things in terms of complexity.
Linux source package management does multiple locations for gimp. Linux binary package management can't do it because where files are located needs to be known at link time. That's an issue with how Linux, and for that matter Unixes in general, link files. Something like app for Windows, where you can have more complex link structures wouldn't have that problem. Linux package managers don't support this because Unix style kernels don't support it.
But mainly they don't support it, because if you want multiple versions of gimp you want a degree of control beyond what the distribution has any intention of supporting.
The purpose of a package manager is to maintain a consistent set of binaries easily. The purpose of a distribution is to produce a consist set of binaries.
What package manager for what operating system does what you are asking for?
sorry but that is not their profit-making structure. RedHat makes money as a service provider, the software they prepare is prepared to make their service provision more profitable, so they are focused on stability and consistancy and all the things that you see as being the result of what you propose. I won't argue about why it is not happening, but I seem to remember that their were similar proposals many years ago about the YUM/Yast/Apt-get/etc. divisions being a detriment to development, and the result was just another fuss banquet. There seem to have been some reasons at the time, probably are now too, i dunno.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.