GNOME 3.16 Released

kthreadd writes Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released. Some major new features in this release include a overhauled notification system, an updated design of the calendar drop down and support for overlay scrollbars. Also, the grid view in Files has been improved with bigger thumbnail icons, making the appearance more attractive and the rows easier to read. A video is available which demonstrates the new version.

Comments

agreed (as is Ximian and Red Carpet)

[Anonymous Coward]

installed it. Gnome, or rather Ximian's piece of shit installer (Red Carpet?). It uninstalled PAM from my linux box. UNINSTALLED! No accounts were valid for login.

After copying the RPM to a floppy (thanks you Ximian morons) and getting back in to log in, I was unable to un-install.

fdisk.

Thanks you Ximian morons. Do you even test this stuff before you distribute it? And my only option is KDE?

Re:agreed (as is Ximian and Red Carpet)

[ChazeFroy]

Look into some lightweight window managers, such as Afterstep. It's fully customizable and it doesn't take oogles of drive space. Unfortunately their web page has been down for the past week or so, but I'm sure you can find mirrors on google.

Re:agreed (as is Ximian and Red Carpet)

[Anonymous Coward]

Works fine here, dimwit.

Perhaps you should actually *read* the uninstall list that Red Carpet provides you before proceding, instead of blindly hitting the 'next' button.
Red-carpet occasionally asks to uninstall certain fundamental programs from your system. If you install RPMS from outside the Ximian fork, Red Carpet may want to uninstall those RPMS & install it's own version (Or sometimes, not install a replacement). These are bugs. Bugs happen.

Vanilla RPMs sometimes have the same problem. I want to install RPM xxx, but this will break a dependancy on RPM yyy. That's always been an issue with RPMs.

Re:agreed (as is Ximian and Red Carpet)

[Jagasian]

Might I suggest distinguishing between your needs, with desktop environment in one group and package management in another? I suggest choosing Gnome or KDE for the first group and Debian and apt-get for the second group. That way you won't be messing with figuring out dependencies and install/uninstall ordering on your own. *ouch* Not sure what that Red Carpet and Ximian crap is doing for you that Gnome ontop of Debian hasn't been doing for the couple of years.

Re:agreed (as is Ximian and Red Carpet)

[MrDBCooper]

Debian won't let you remove essential packages easily.

Afterstep is lightweight?

[Frothy Walrus]

boy, i must be getting old. i remember being psyched when i finally got a machine fast enough to run it.

my favorite lightweight wm: tvtwm

Re:Afterstep is lightweight?

[Anonymous Coward]

tvtwm? Ouch. All those virtual desktops are going to swamp all your memory banks.. ;)

9wm or wmx.. any lighter than that is hard to come by!

Re:WOW The GTK+ People have finally figured out...

[Cheesy Fool]

Windows has only just been made stable with Windows 2000, 15+ years to get stability right.

NewB Question

[SuperBusTerror]

Pardon my ignorance, I'm not a Linux GUI user or developer. (But would like to be!)

Is it true that Gnome, KDE, Ximian, etc, are all based on the basic X-Windows system? Isn't that system supposed to be very inefficient?

Re:NewB Question

[jasonv118]

Gnome, KDE, Ximian Gnome are all basically programs that run on top of X. X is inefficient in some areas, but very useful in others. I personally don't like it, but some do. It doesn't support cool stuff like alpha transparency (but KDE is getting around that) and does support useful stuff like network transparency.

Re:NewB Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you are not a GUI developer.
X is perfectly capable of delivering the appropriate hooks for a GUI in an efficient way.

All the bogus about framebuffers being better than X is nothing you should listen to. The X protocol does NOT specify how you implement the server. If you are running X applications locally, then the server may optimize appropriately. And in the same time, you may use the *builtin* remoting possibilities in a snap.

Transparency rules. Most people which are arguing for framebuffers just want the extra 5 frames per second in Quake, which is of little value when the frame rate already way beyond what you can detect anyway.

X was king when it was invented, and it still is.

Re:NewB Question

[cthulhubob]

ah, but it does support alpha transparency!

the XRender extension supports alpha-blending, useful for transparency effects and anti-aliasing fonts.

If you're running X11R6.5+ (Xfree86 4.0+) then you've got XRender installed already :)

Re:NewB Question

[njdj]

...the basic X-Windows system? Isn't that system supposed to be very inefficient?

Ignore the people who tell you that X is "very inefficient". In short, they don't know what they're talking about. If you compare speeds of a range of similar applications on the same hardware running Linux (all Linux GUIs use X) vs running Windows XP, you will find a lot of differences for all sorts of reasons, some things Linux does faster and other things Windows XP does faster. In so far as there is any pattern at all, most people seem to agree that Linux is faster (though I'm sure somebody will flame me for saying that). So whatever causes the differences, it can't be the use of X.

When you move beyond using a single computer and want to access applications on different machines on a LAN from a single workstation, the tremendous power of X comes into play. You can run graphical apps on any machine on your LAN, and interact with their GUIs on your screen, just as if they were running locally. Once you've gotten used to this, you'll never want to give it up.

Re:NewB Question

[pclminion]

You're right in the general case, but there are a few areas where X has difficulty:

• The protocol is unavoidable overhead: even if client and server are running on the same host, a call to, for example, XPutPixel() still has to pack a protocol request and send it over a UNIX socket, where it is then unpacked, validated, and executed. This is tremendous overhead for something as simple as drawing a single pixel on the screen. If you're in the business of drawing pixels at a time, you probably want to use your own drawing routines, an X image, and a double-buffered window. However, doing this is a pain:
• Double-buffering is tricky to implement, and can be slow. Unless your server supports shared-memory pixmaps, in order to do double buffering you must:
  1. Allocate an X image of the appropriate size and depth.
  2. Draw the contents of the back-buffer onto the image using your own routines.
  3. Translate the image into a pixmap.
  4. Blit the pixmap to the window.
  5. Repeat from step 2.
  This process can be very slow.

Basically, X is great for usual GUI applications, but if you want to do something like, for example, an xmms plugin, you are incurring much overhead as opposed to direct access to some type of framebuffer device.

Re:NewB Question

[abigor]

Speed is very driver dependent. On identical hardware, RedHat 7.2 ran Quake 3 significantly faster than Windows XP using a GeForce 2 and the latest NVidia drivers.

I don't remember where I read this, incidentally. It was in a review of a dual-boot AMD machine (RH 7.2 and XP).

Anyway, my point is that the "X is slow!" laments are just FUD.

Re:NewB Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense..X uses unix domain sockets which are much faster than regular ones.

But yeah, there is still overhead. For anything high-performance, you *should* be doing your own rendering to bitmaps anyway!

Re:NewB Question

[johnnyb]

Usually X-Windows runs slower because most distributions have it running as a low priority (why is this, especially desktop versions?). Anyway, if you find the PID of X Windows, and do

renice -20 PUTTHEPIDHERE

You will be happy. You might also do the same for sawfish & panel.

Re:NewB Question

[pthisis]

Double-buffering is tricky to implement, and can be slow. Unless your server supports shared-memory pixmaps, in order to do double buffering you must

Moot point, every serious X server (including XFree86, which most Slashdot users have) _does_ implement shared-memory pixmaps. Indeed, this has been true for better than 7 years now, when I started running XFree in 1994 both MIT-SHM and XShm were certainly supported.

Basically, X is great for usual GUI applications, but if you want to do something like, for example, an xmms plugin, you are incurring much overhead as opposed to direct access to some type of framebuffer

Not at all, there are plenty of ways to bang on the framebuffer without the round-trip to the server. One of the most prevalent is GLX, the OpenGL X extension which is supported on many card for XFree these days. It's been around on other platforms for over a decade.

Remember, SGI ruled the graphics performance world for a long time _using_ X11. X was designed to be very flexible through the use of extensions. My bet is that in 1-2 years GLX will be standard on pretty much all new Linux desktop installations, combined with DRM that can give darned good performance. Of course, good drivers are a prerequisite to good performance.

And yes, GLX works great for high-performance 2D graphics as well as 3d.

Couple of other points:
The protocol is unavoidable overhead: even if client and server are running on the same host, a call to, for example, XPutPixel() still has to pack a protocol request

Not true in the general case. Xlib is quite good at buffering many Xlib calls into far fewer X protocol requests.

and send it over a UNIX socket

Even on my old PPro 200 we're talking order 5*10^-4 seconds for a server round-trip over a Unix socket. That's pretty quick. And there's work being done on X servers that don't use UNIX sockets but rather SHM or other transports for protocol submissions. Jim Gettys had a very nice post on the subject that I'll try to dig up and link here.

Sumner

Re:NewB Question

[pclminion]

Thanks for your reply. I was under the impression that MITSHM supported shared memory images, but that shared memory pixmaps were something different. Thanks for clarifying, I'll have to look into that!

As for GLX... Haven't played with it, now I will.

Finally, I must disagree about the UNIX socket. 5*10^-4 seconds seems short, but if that is the time it takes to draw several pixels (assuming the draw requests are buffered in Xlib), then you are in trouble. In that amount of time, a 500 MHz CPU goes through 250,000 cycles. Imagine how many pixels you could draw into a framebuffer in that amount of time...

Re:NewB Question

[pthisis]

I was under the impression that MITSHM supported shared memory images, but that shared memory pixmaps were something different

Yeah, I mentioned Xshm as well. Forgot to mention Xvideo, which is also worth looking at for video applications.

Finally, I must disagree about the UNIX socket. 5*10^-4 seconds seems short, but if that is the time it takes to draw several pixels (assuming the draw requests are buffered in Xlib), then you are in trouble. In that amount of time, a 500 MHz CPU goes through 250,000 cycles. Imagine how many pixels you could draw into a framebuffer in that amount of time

Not nearly that many. Going over the PCI or AGP bus is not going to run anywhere near that 500 MHz CPU, not to mention that drawing a pixel is more than one cycle _and_ you're going to be limited by memory bandwidth to get at your render data, _and_ most importantly if you update faster than the refresh rate of your display then you're just doing work that'll never be displayed. 85-90 Hz is about as fast as most displays are set.

Moreover, you're generally doing actual work to determine what pixel to display. If you're just blitting images as fast as possible to the screen, then either Xshm or or Xvideo or GLX extensions are probably what you want (XFree has them all).

Sumner

Ximain installed fine

[OS24Ever]

I've installed Ximian using their red-carpet installer on Red Hat 7.1 and 7.2 five times (five machines) now and it's worked great every time. PAM wasn't touched, only the Gnome stuff

There are a few dependancy annoyances on RH 7.1 and the new Up2date/RHN from RedHat that I've not figured out, but the 7.2 RH machines are humming along just fine.

Re:WOW The GTK+ People have finally figured out...

[Anonymous Coward]

And how long will it take Gnome to become stable?

Re:Why does everyone get their panties in a knot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Concentrate on where linux has a future servers.

Of course, based on what you say afterward, Linux is pretty much beaten by Windows 2000, which already does all of that, and more, maintaining stability all the way through.

Time to drop the toy OS and move up to what the professionals use to get real work done - Microsoft.

What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Bowie J. Poag]

rant_mode(on);

Ummm, something tells me the GNOME guys would be better off spending their time making the desktop more marketplace-friendly and user-friendly versus adding yet more and more crap no one will ever use into the API. It pains me to think of how much time is spent by the developers building what amounts to a waste of time, when the same effort could be diverted toward:

o Making the GUI easier for first-time Linux users, which was the whole point of GNOME in the first place, wasnt it?

o Building stronger interoperability between Windows apps and Linux apps. WINE is a good start, but its bloated, and even when it works, its clumsy and never works the way anyone wants it to. Modal emulation has been the established standard for years. People are smart enough to know when they should use an "emulator" versus using their native environments.

o Establishing "bounty rewards" for the things we don't yet have. Why not set up a collection plate where people can donate, and award its contents to the first person who can deliver a Microsoft Word 2002 format .doc loader for AbiWord? Set up another collection plate, and award its contents to the first person who can provide a true, full-breadth gaming SDK? People, companies, upstarts, college students and the like can build them, compete against eachother, and actually get PAID for open-source work.

Look, guys. I'm not trying to bash GNOME, but you guys need to STOP TRYING TO BUILD A DESKTOP FOR PROGRAMMERS. Its a mistake to try and make a damn desktop aimed at programmers. Why? The rest of the world isn't made up of people like us. You need to aim your work at people like your dad, and NOT aim to impress people like your friend "31337b0y" on IRC. Youre gonna have to accept this idea if you want your work to go anywhere. You don't go building an GUI for programmers because the programmer is ultimately going to fashion his own environment by and for himself, not thru GNOME, or KDE, or any other environment. Sit down, look at the damn road ahead of you. The world is waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a solid, usable GUI for Linux, something we can be identified by, and we're busy pissing in the wind. Pretty soon they're going to give up, and write Linux off along with the dot-com duds. Look, you're at point A, you wanna get to point B. B is total worldwide acceptance of your desktop as the universal standard for Linux. Do what you have to do to get to B. Here, i'll even give you a hint: It doesn't involve anyone saying "I just spent 4 weeks optimizing your patch for gtk that allows nonorthoganal crossreferences to referential database templates in Python!!!!". Start by getting rid of the foot. Its not cute. Feet stink, and using a "foot" for an emblem opens the door wide open to any number of foot-related jokes about your work when it bombs. Think!

rant_mode(off);

Cheers,

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[jallen02]

So there we have it, the foot bothers you ;)

Couldn't you have just said, "The foot bothers me?" :)

Jeremy

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Skeezix]

Ummm, something tells me the GNOME guys would be better off spending their time making the desktop more marketplace-friendly and user-friendly versus adding yet more and more crap no one will ever use into the API.

People are using the API's. Much of the improvements to Gtk+ and GNOME for version 2 involve making the platform and desktop accessible to more users. This includes better internationalization and rendering of text, accessibility (a major project being headed up by Sun Microsystems). This has been a very important emphasis of this release. Other improvement in the configuration system, component model, etc. allow developers to write more powerful applications quicker. And these are being used.

Making the GUI easier for first-time Linux users, which was the whole point of GNOME in the first place, wasnt it?

This has been a major focus of the GNOME Project for GNOME 2 and beyond. Check out the GNOME Usability Project and the GNOME Usability mailing list.

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Personally, I don't use a desktop environment (GNOME/KDE) at all. I use blackbox, a few xterms, mutt, vim, etc.. I think the GNOME developers are targetting a wrong group. They should target everyday users like KDE is doing. GNOME is usuable by very technical people, who'd rather not use a desktop environment for various reasons anyways (I don't because they are fairly bloated, imho).

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, how did a rant about telling people what they can and cannot do with their spare time get to +5?

Gnome doesn't need to be widely adopted to be a sucess. No free software project is a failure, because if even one person is using it, then the goal has been met. Most of the developers who are working on gnome are probably not working on it in some sort of attempt to crush windows or impress girls. They're probably working on it because they think it's neat-o and that they might actually use it. Don't fault the programmers for writing a system aimed at people like themselves (which I dont think is necessarily the case anyway, Gnome is still simple enough to use for my sister who knows nothing about computers, and still well designed and customizable enough for me to get in and muck it all up).

If Gnome doesn't have the functionality you want, then just don't use it. No one is holding a gun to your head, and you didn't shell out $150 for a system that isn't what you wanted. If you want an easy to use desktop that isn't aimed at programmers, Microsoft or Apple would be more than happy to sell you one. If you want something exactly as you want it, for free, and done yesterday, well, I'm sorry, but that's just too damn bad. The gnome developers are putting a lot of effort into it, to make a system that they and hopefully others will find useful. This whole "linux has to crush windows" mentality really has to go.

Oh, and I like the foot.

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>"No free software project is a failure, because if even one person is using it, then the goal has been met."

Thank you Mr. Authoritarian. I am sure there is no such natural law that describes the goal of every free software project. I am sure each project has their own goals. I believe KDE and Gnome strive to make Unix ready for the desktop, and if only one person uses it, this goal has definitely not been met.

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[yugami]

Wow, how did a rant about telling people what they can and cannot do with their spare time get to +5?

because his opinions are interesting while yours are not.

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Pussy Is Money]

And another. The problem here isn't GNOME or KDE or Linux or the foot. It's users who really do not belong on the platform trying at every twist in the road to tell the drivers where the car should be going.

One word of advice: get out while you still can. Take the bus or something. Linux will never be for you. Thanks. Bye.

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[Brian Feldman]

Start by getting rid of the {apple,bridge,window}. It's not cute. {Apples rot,Bridges grow unstable,Windows break}, and using an "{apple,bridge,window}" for an emblem opens the door wide open to any number of {apple,bridge,window}-related jokes about your work when it bombs. Think!

Re:What good is it, if nobody adopts it?

[johnnyb]

The developer API has a lot to do with ease-of-use. If the API makes it easy to write easy-to-use applications, people will.

Think about old X applications. They were difficult to use, because Xlib is impossible to program in. A better API brings better applications.

Also, haven't you been looking at the recent announcements? Evolution 1.0, Galeon 1.0, and Gnumeric 1.0. These are all programs that are extremely easy-to-use while being powerful.

another newbie X question

[djcdplaya]

is there anything to compete with Xfree?

Re:another newbie X question

[drewness]

Well, if you mean in an overall sense (you don't want X at all), then there is Berlin, but I don't think it is very far along. If you don't like XFree86 there are some commercial X versions like MetroX. I'm sure there are more, but their name popped into my head.

I did read the screen

[Anonymous Coward]

PAM was not listed as one of the modules that it demanded to un-install before it could proceed.

Several of the things it wanted to un-install were just competing products, or were not products that Ximian was offering any sort of replacement for.

Nor was there any way of saying, "yes, do that, but don't @#!!-ing un-install PAM."

An all or nothing approach. VERY Microsoft of them.

Re:I did read the screen

[Anonymous Coward]

PAM was not listed as one of the modules that it demanded to un-install before it could proceed.

Then you are full of shit. Thanks, bye,

Re:Why does everyone get their panties in a knot?

[I_redwolf]

Use what works for you, if Microsoft works then so be it. They've never worked properly for me even windows 2000 would crash every month or so which isn't acceptable for me. However they do get the desktop right but it will never look as nice as gnome. Plus gnome is functional for me even though I hate some of the ways things are done as of late..

YES!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes more bloatware!!!!! this will go great with nautilis and evoulation!!! bring my computer to a crawl yeah thats the way to go!!! LMAO really gnome looks good and is easy to use but it's never going to convince windows peeps to switch. I'll keep my light wm thank you! oh ya kde is even worse!!

Ximian is not meant to be used with other installe

[pudge_lightyear]

Ximian is supposed to be (and is very good at) being an all encompassing installer. When it is used along side...say kpackage...it really won't perform as they intended it too. Red Carpet is intended for this purpose:
Average Joe - start up computer (thinks to himself...hmm...I haven't clicked this icon in a while)
Average Joe - clicks icon
RedCarpet - you NEED x new software (don't worry...it's free and will make your system better).
Average Joe - ok...
RedCarpet - now go play while I upgrade your computer.

If you don't want to go through this each and every time you upgrade your software, then Red Carpet isn't for you. If you like this way of maintaining your software (which i do because i don't have to think about dependancies and all of the junk i don't care about), then Red Carpet is perfect for you.

The big thing is...Red Carpet uses Ximian's database of what should be installed and should not be installed for your system to work properly. They have to have some standard to judge that by. It is sometimes out of date, but that's the price you pay for ease of use and stability.

There...

Re:Why does everyone get their panties in a knot?

[abigor]

Funny, I'm a "professional" -- C++ and Java programmer -- and guess what! I use Linux/KDE as my dev box!

Linux is the best thing for development, period. Windows is great for marketers, sales types, and managers, who make light demands on their systems. I suspect you fall into this category, no?

Re:Jisms in the face of Migual

[Anonymous Coward]

What is troll about this comment? CMD_TACO ...when one speaks the truth....I am sure that the author intends that Gnome has had some major flaws to it. I pretty much think that the author is correct

KDE surpasses GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

For quite a while, development on the GNOME desktop side was flurishing. Now it seems like KDE is way ahead. I used to be a very faithful GNOME user, but development on the desktop is sluggish at best. GNOME has remained pretty much the same since 1.0 (with the exception of Nautilus.)
There seems to be little excitement surrounding the release of GNOME 2.0 and many key features have been bumped to GNOME 2.2 that would have put GNOME ahead of KDE is many areas.

However, the applications for GNOME are awesome (in my opinion) and surpass several in KDE. The awesome applications (Evolution, Gnumeric, AbiWord) are holding me to GNOME though. I know you can run GNOME applications in KDE, but it just doesn't seem the same....

I think KDE apps are going to continue to evolve and by the time KDE 3.0 is released thay will probably be as good as their GNOME counterparts...

It disappoints me to see GNOME falling so far behind and doing little to get caught up....

Re:Why does everyone get their panties in a knot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yes, windows 2000 is a better desktop than linux. Big surprise.

But as I said linux does have a future in servers. Considering how little marketing linux gets, on the server front its doing quite well.

SuSE 7.3

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried the http://go-gnome.com/ install, and the error message said something like this:

Sorry, but your operating system of `' is not supported.

My operating system of `' (left apostrophe right apostrophe)? Interesting.

we need gnome to be a graphics server too

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great except for the fact that X is not up to par graphically, look at how many times Enlightenment has pushed X. Gnome is doing the same, we need a new GNU graphics server damnit.

Re:WOW The GTK+ People have finally figured out...

[cout]

Too bad Windows 2000 is just VMS in disguise.

Re:Ximian is not meant to be used with other insta

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, how is red-carpet good at being an installer? It has fucked up my debian box 3 times already. After the third, I swear I won't use buggy Ximian software again.

Re:Ximian is not meant to be used with other insta

[Anonymous Coward]

So...you're saying that you screwed up your box...rebuilt it....did the same thing again (screwed up your box)....rebuilt it....did the same thing again (screwed up your box)....rebuilt it....and then figured out that you shouldn't be using it? Boy that's dumb.

Hey PAM. PAM? PAM?! Oh PAM!

[fm6]

Actually, I made the same mistake, and I wasn't even using any of Ximian's auto-install technology. (Can't get it to work on my box.) Was just trying to resolve all the conflicts that came up when I installed all those packages using command-line RPM. I saw that Ximian wanted to replace one bit of encryption software with another, and I though, OK, fine. Had to reboot off CD to put the right library back.

Look, Ximian's stated goal is to provide "simple, intuitive set-up tools for first time users". Failure to anticipate such a conflict on a widely-used Linux distro is pretty serious. Yeah, we all make mistakes, but this was a biggie.

Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

blah, blah, Systemd, blah, blah, KDE, blah, blah...

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[walterbyrd]

To be fair, Gnome 3.x sucked before the systemd abomination.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[morgauxo]

Of course it did. It was built on Gnome 2. Garbage in, Garbage out!

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[caseih]

FUD FUD FUD. Systemd is not a hard requirement of Gnome. Gnome developers have chosen to focus on using systemd-logind at this moment, but there's no reason why ConsoleKit couldn't be updated and maintained for use on other platforms. Gnome developers with their finite resources have chosen not to work on ConsoleKit, but you certainly could.

From the Linux Voice interview:

Some people donâ(TM)t realise that when Gnome started making use of Logind, I actually wrote the patch for that. I ported GDM onto Logind. But when it did that, I was very careful to make sure it would still run on ConsoleKit. I didnâ(TM)t want to have those fights â" if people want to continue running ConsoleKit, they can. Those patches made it in, but some people saw that Gnome now works with Logind, hence it must not work with ConsoleKit any more!

But thatâ(TM)s actually not true. And to my knowledge the code is still in there â" the compatibility for ConsoleKit. The Gnome team has the general problem though, that nobodyâ(TM)s willing to maintain it. People who want to stick to the old stuff, they actually need to do some work on it. If they donâ(TM)t, then it will bit-rot and go away.

And just to be clear, logind is not some part of a bloated init system. It is a service that is developed and shipped with the systemd project but it is not part of init, and is a completely optional part of systemd.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[bluefoxlucid]

I dunno, Gnome 2 and KDE feel like Windows 3.1 when you've used Gnome 3. A blunt desktop, some virtual desktops to move around, menus or start menus... the usual.

Then you pull out Gnome 3, and suddenly you can tap Winkey or point the mouse at the top left corner, and you get a view of all the windows on your current desktop. You can start typing "DVD burner" or "Images" or "Firefox", and it brings up Thoggin or Gimp or some Web browsers, that you then click on. You can drag your windows to other desktops; you can drag your windows between desktops to spawn new desktops. You have infinite desktops just by opening a window on the empty desktop at the end.

I hold complaints about Gnome 3's alt-tab behavior. Beyond that, it's thrown out all this navigation through bullshit menus and cluttered windows scattered across a dozen desktops in favor of straight out opening the applications you want and scanning through your open windows across all desktops. It gets out of your way and lets you use the computer, instead of fucking around with the UI.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[RabidReindeer]

Yeah, but Gnome 2 was usable. Gnome 3 switched me to Cinnamon.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, Gnome sucked before the systemd abomination.

There, fixed it for you.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

At least on Debian the GVFS has a hard requirement on systemd. And Gnome requires GVFS to function. So is this just a situation created by Debian? I am rhonestly askin, as then it could be fixed without forking the Gnome, just by configuring and compiling it by myself.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[rleesBSD]

The cell phone drones can only remember three levels of tap, and Gnome 3 takes this into account. You're only supposed to use authorized apps anyway.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[caseih]

So far as I know, gvfs is dependent on udev, not systemd. There are versions of udev still available out there that are not part of the systemd. On systems running systemd, udev is going to be provided by systemd-udev.

So if you could rebuild your packages with a different udev implementation like udevil, gvfs could be build against it possibly.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[bluefoxlucid]

I don't tap my screen; I remember what application I want, and go directly to it. Rather than Applications:Graphics:Krita, I just type "Kri" and click the Krita icon. I can also drag the Krita icon to a space between desktops, spawning the window there. I can also type "image" and have all the image viewing and editing software appear in front of me.

Rather than a single view of a hierarchical database of applications and operations, I have the ability to declare what I want and have it given to me in the same way that an SQL SELECT statement declares what data I want and how to organize it. This is an improvement, and it is what obsoleted the old Deskbar applet everyone was raving about when Beagle and Tracker were going head-to-head.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

So, now it's "flamebait" to say that Gnome 3 is pretty good. Hahaha.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

At least on Debian the GVFS has a hard requirement on systemd.

R U Sure?

$ apt-cache show gvfs | grep Depends
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.43.2), libudev1 (>= 183), gvfs-daemons (>= 1.23.92-1), gvfs-daemons (<< 1.23.92-1.1~), gvfs-libs (= 1.23.92-1), gvfs-common (= 1.23.92-1)

Nope, no depenancy on systemd.

I get tired of saying this, but it's true. The only Debian package that depends on systemd is gummiboot.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

So far as I know, gvfs is dependent on udev, not systemd.

It depends on libudev1. libudev1 doesn't even depend on udev.

libudev1 and udev come from the same source package as systemd. Maybe people think they can catch cooties from it?

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

libudev1 and udev come from the same source package as systemd.

Renaming something doesn't take away the fact that it is systemd.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you pull out Gnome 3, and suddenly you can tap Winkey or point the mouse at the top left corner, and you get a view of all the windows on your current desktop. You can start typing "DVD burner" or "Images" or "Firefox", and it brings up Thoggin or Gimp or some Web browsers, that you then click on. You can drag your windows to other desktops; you can drag your windows between desktops to spawn new desktops. You have infinite desktops just by opening a window on the empty desktop at the end.

Great, infinite desktops. So what? I can drag application windows between workspaces on many old desktops. Why do I want to type in a f****** command when I can go to menu? In short: this is all designer-driven horsesh*t and adds not one iota of useability value to a simple ye olde desktop.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[ralphsiegler]

You spew nonsense, you claim it's not a requirement but then say work would have to be done to change things. That's fine though, plenty of us have left the GNOME rubbish and systemd-tards behind.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

What has been renamed? udev is still called udev.

udev doesn't depend on systemd.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[ralphsiegler]

libudev1 is a systemd library and maintained by the systemd maintainers.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Blaskowicz]

Funny that, Gnome 3 is kind of an improved Windows 3.1. Afterall, you manage windows (mostly full screen but sometimes not) and there's no task bar. But instead of minimizing windows to icons, you hide them somehow and you find them back by zooming out. Program Manager is replaced by going top left to open the Dash menu or whatever it's called. Top bar is a bit useless but I suppose it's here so that people do not get lost (you need a bar anyway if only to display a handful tray icons)

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

PACKAGE=gvfs

debtree --show-rdeps --no-recommends ${PACKAGE} > ${PACKAGE}.dot
dot -Tpng -o ${PACKAGE}.png ${PACKAGE}.dot

gvfs -> gvfs-daemons -> libsystemd0

Naturally they say that libsystemd0 is not systemd just an interface to it, but still try getting rid of it.

Clueless or disingenuous, you decide.

What ever debian is now, its not what it was.

A do-ocracy became a paid-to-do-ocracy and those involved seem to think that that is the same thing. The result is another platform that we have to move away from. But don't worry in 5 years time the paid-to-doers will catch up with us again and screw it all up again.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't tap my screen; I remember what application I want, and go directly to it. Rather than Applications:Graphics:Krita, I just type "Kri" and click the Krita icon. I can also drag the Krita icon to a space between desktops, spawning the window there. I can also type "image" and have all the image viewing and editing software appear in front of me.

Great, so you mean I can put both hands on my keyboard to type "Kri", and then switch one of my hands to the mouse to click and icon on my screen... rather than, say, typing "krita" and hitting enter, all on the keyboard, at the 80wpm I type on a keyboard. That's amazing, I can actually make myself slow down with your new and improved methods!! Even better, you can type "image" and have all your image viewing/editing software in front of you, rather than perhaps having those icons in a folder marked "image software" that you could just open with one double click and no keyboard interaction!

Damn, this new stuff sounds like a huge improvement!

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

Naturally they say that libsystemd0 is not systemd just an interface to it,

Naturally they say that because it's true.

but still try getting rid of it.

Try getting rid of libselinux1 (and that was written by the NSA!)

Just what exactly do you think libsystemd0 does if systemd is not pid 1?

A do-ocracy became a paid-to-do-ocracy and those involved seem to think that that is the same thing.

Who do you think is paid to work on Debian? (LTS aside)

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[greg1104]

The Debian package for libudev1 is built from the systemd source code. Says it right on the page: "Download Source Package systemd".

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

libudev1 is a systemd library and maintained by the systemd maintainers.

libsystemd1 is a no-op if systemd is not installed. What is your problem? Do you think you'll catch systemd cooties if the name of any package on your system contains the letters d, e, m, s, t or y?

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[ralphsiegler]

My problem is having anything written by a bunch of hacks who don't understand proper engineering principles, unix philosphy, and systems administration. They are dangerous, their code is dangerous. Already in my testing all manner of issues and problems and lack of ability to troubleshoot has been discovered with that bloated pile of rubbish that is systemd. I've decades of experience in systems admin, systems programming; from various mainframe and supercomputer OS to OS/2 and Unix and VMS. Systemd is by far the worst of the lot for a boot and daemon management system.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[bluefoxlucid]

Sometimes, to go forward, you go back. Thing is, the Program Manager was a modal dialogue containing all windows, and could be minimized; you selected program by opening windows containing icons of programs to select. The Gnome Shell eliminates that modal dialogue and moves the icons to an interface off to the side; the current desktop shrinks into the shell's entire display area, allowing you to move to another desktop containing other windows.

In short, windows are brought inside, rather than moved outside, the working space; nothing is behind the working space, but rather, the UI tools move behind the working space when not in use. Instead of icons of windows, Gnome Shell scales the windows down and displays them in a tiled fashion, providing a broad overview of the current working space.

This contrasts with earlier attempts in which the modal dialogue making up the working space was flattened into the background, creating the desktop. All elements of the modal dialogue were scattered around the screen as decoration, and minimized windows appeared in a task bar as titles rather than icons--just as useless when many windows were opened. The step following that was to make multiple working spaces in the same fashion. Gnome Shell has banished most of this, leaving a clock at the top of the screen, but little else to intrude on the use of the work space.

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's NOT systemd it should NOT be in the same source as systemd.

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Unix philosophy sucked, so we decided long ago not to be limited by it anymore.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[skids]

I actually found during a recent fresh Jessie install that, while there is still plenty of cruft pulled in, it has been easier to peel away some of the crud (byebye avahi, and pulseaudio, may we never meet again) from GNOME than in the past. FWIW. The biggest problem with it right now is that there are no knobs to tune a lot of really retarded crap to "off" or if their are knobs, you have to hunt for them in obscure tweak tools or buried in a theme or in some pathologically treeified config database or in an "oh-there's-an-app-for-that" style "extension." It was much easier back when you had a chance in heck of finding what you were looking for by grepping /etc for keywords. Ponder that last sentence for a while. Currently the config system is actually harder to use than hail-mary's at the cli used to be.

Why anyone would want disappearing scrollbars is a mystery to me. Why do they spend time on crap like that when they can't even let you move/disable the hot corner (which remains lurking in the top left to ambush you when you overshoot yourself on the way to the back button.) Instead you have to go find some extension off a site where you have to create an account to get anything, written by some guy who may or may not have the time to lockstep it with changes in the core, but probably not, so it's just going to break crap later if you install it and then some day in the future the time vampire will come by and drain another quart of your life essence fixing it again. Oh yeah, and the fact that it can't seem to fathom that you just may have more than one non-touch pointing device and just might want them set up differently.

Plus those stupid "toggle" switches are all over on gnome-shell menus where the tried-and-true checkbox would be nicer and more clear.

But at least the controls let you turn on emacs keybindings now without consulting google to find the gsettings variable. Damned if I will remember where a year from now when I get to reinstall, or that it will matter whether I do because by that time it will either have moved, or disappeared entirely.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

So what?

libudev1 doesn't depend on systemd. It installs perfectly well om machines were systemd isn't installed and it runs perfectly well on machines where systemd isn't pid 1.

Why do you care what directory the source code is in?

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

Fuck off you idiot troll.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

I was really, really excited about gobject-introspection, meaning that python and javascript can be used to script literally anything. Then the Gnome guys decided to tie their groundbreaking new technology to quite literally the works "desktop environment" ever. I switched to MATE, which isn't quite GTK3 yet. Hopefully someone shoots whoever is responsible for Gnome 3 and the MATE guys get hired to rename MATE to Gnome 4.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

If you don't want systemd then don't install systemd.

libsystemd isn't systemd. It's a library which is a no-op if systemd isn't installed. In fact one of the main reasons for it's existence is to make sure that packages don't need to depend on systemd.

If you're worried libsystemd will do something bad to you then just review it's code -- it's tiny.

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

Why not?

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does that suck make this suck suck any less?

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we all trust the NSA more than we trust systemd developers. The NSA at least have a track record of high coding standards (or intentionally writing bad code to exploit) and probably know the difference between a depends, a suggests and a recommends and when they take over our systems so far there have been very few impacts on running systems. Most haven't even noticed. Can't say the say for systemd.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[ralphsiegler]

That's right, and proper way to do that is to not install any distro that is foolish enough to include it for the present. Longer term, as the Linux space is taken over by those valuing feature bloat and gee-whiz over stability and simplicity and good engineering, the BSD are looking even better.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 2 was indeed usable, but Gnome 3 turned out to be anything but. Perhaps Gnome 3 is slightly better than MS Windows, which is damning it with very faint praise. Alas, I do not know about Gnome 3, but suffer Windows on my work laptop.

The move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 caused us to move to xfce (2 desktops, 1 laptop). My daughter also switched her laptops to xfce and mate - she has two - to avoid Gnome 3.

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Stating the truth is still stating the truth, even if you find the truth uneasy.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 switched me to Windows Explorer.... :)

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

You still haven't explained what sucks.

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that's what the Unix philosophy says. One tool in one source tree. We could put gedit in systemd too, but that would be stupid*. Things that are not systemd should of course not be put in the same source package as systemd, because we don't want them to blend too much together. That way one can be replaced without interfering with the other, but if you put them together the risk is that they will depend too much on each other and you end up with a disaster.

*Hope I didn't give them any ideas...

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

That is totally untrue -- classic unix had all tools on the same source tree. Not that that had anything to do with philosophy, it was just the way it was done.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[igloo-x]

Why anyone would want disappearing scrollbars is a mystery to me.

Because permanently displayed scroll bars are a waste of screen space, which is incredibly precious on small devices.

Having been using disappearing scroll bars on various devices for (what feels like) years, I can safely say I have never, ever found myself thinking "hmm, I need to know exactly how far I'm scrolled down this page and I absolutely can't just nudge the mouse wheel to make the scroll bar appear briefly so I can check."

And apparently, neither have they.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry,

Everything depends on one thing that may or may not be a net benefit or a risk to security may or may not be bad. (libselinux1 above). Functions may actually be used.

  That many packages are hard depending on an interface to an init/whateverthehellitis that may not be present (all though it takes some trying) is 'bad', is unaffected by the prior statement.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that many packages depend on something else may or may not be bad (libselinux say). Its function may even be used by most. But its good or badness does not affect the position of dependency on libsystemd0 when systemd isn't present and not functions will be used.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't tap my screen; I remember what application I want, and go directly to it. Rather than Applications:Graphics:Krita, I just type "Kri" and click the Krita icon. I can also drag the Krita icon to a space between desktops, spawning the window there. I can also type "image" and have all the image viewing and editing software appear in front of me.

That seems inconvenient when other DEs let you get to the application simply with 100% keyboard or 100% mouse interaction

KDE, keyboard only: Alt+F2 (or any other shortcut, I rebound it to wind+R) to get krunner, type "kri" and Krita is the first option, already selected. Hit enter. No mouse interaction necessary. Tab cycles through other matches if the first one isn't right. It also learns frequently typed words and offers auto-complete.

KDE, mouse only: drop the Krita icon onto a plasma panel (taskbar) and use it as a quick-launch. After that it's one click, done. If you want to do this with a lot of apps, you can add extra panels, make them auto-hide, etc. so you can have entire panels of shortcuts and widgets, including pop-out folders.

Or, if you really want, you can even do it like you suggested, despite being less convenient than using the runner. Click the K menu, type "kri", and click Krita. It's been a thing as long as KDE4 has existed, so you can thank KDE for implementing and testing it for the GNOME devs.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[caseih]

Sorry, that's not udevil. That should be traditional udev, or eudev.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[caseih]

How do you know their code is dangerous? Have you reviewed it and published your results? Systemd is bloated? Have you even looked at the code? You do realize that systemd-init is not much bigger than sysv init was.

Furthermore, I don't think Red Hat would support systemd if their best engineers (and I know several of them; they are very smart people) doubted it. In fact if you read up on systemd you'll find that initially Red Hat was hesitant to pursue systemd. The systemd devs proved their case and won people on technical merit, especially as Linux has been moving into new areas like virtual machines and containers. And other distros are picking it up because it addresses major shortcomings that were starting to really impact Linux.

Interesting you should feel systemd is the worst of the lot when every commercial Unix out there abandoned sysv init years ago. Solaris, HPUX, Apple. You name it. They all did for the same reasons. init scripts are error-prone, clunky, hard to audit, and a maintenance nightmare. You couldn't even move an init script between systems. Have your worked with modern systems that employ containers, storage pools, logical volumes, hotplugged ethernet, storage, etc? I have, and it always was a bit kludgy before. Just consistent naming of ethernet devices is a nice benefit of systemd. Back in the dark days of Linux I would often put in ethernet cards from different manufacturers just to make sure I could map names to them in a consistent way.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[hitmark]

> Hopefully someone shoots whoever is responsible for Gnome 3

Shit storm about death threats in the Linux community in 3.. 2.. 1..

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[hitmark]

Bassi ripping someone a verbal new one in 3.. 2.. 1..

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so you mean I can put both hands on my keyboard to type "Kri", and then switch one of my hands to the mouse to click and icon on my screen... rather than, say, typing "krita" and hitting enter, all on the keyboard, at the 80wpm I type on a keyboard.

You don't have to lift your hands of the keyboard and use the mouse. You can type "krita" and hit enter. Or just type "kri" and hit enter. Or maybe even "k" and hit enter. Whatever you use the most, comes up on top. The more letters you type, the less icons you see. Kind of like tab-completion in bash. But you don't hit tab.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

That many packages are hard depending on an interface to an init/whateverthehellitis that may not be present (all though it takes some trying) is 'bad',

But why is it bad?

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[morgauxo]

Sure... once you install an additional application to access what is basically a knockoff of the Windows registry (Why the F anybody would want to copy that shitty design...)

Then you go in and change pretty much every default setting because the defaults all suck...

You get something that meets a minimum definition of usable.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[ralphsiegler]

Yes I've looked at code, what a mess. Red Hat has jumped the shark, too much non-standard ways of doing things and non-standard locations trying to lock people into the "Red Hat way". I disagree that their engineers know what they're doing other than trying to make their own weirdo OS and having people trained so they can't function on another distro, just lock-in tactics. I also don't appreciate them not allowing public access to repositories, it was hobbyists and experimenters that got them into the corporate environment in the first place, but now that repo restriction gives their former fan base the finger. Then they make Fedora so those people are supposed to be guinea pigs for their random brain farts that might be included someday in RHEL. So to hell with Red Hat, I and many others are done with them. You mention Unix(tm) and a BSD that removed init scripts, but they didn't replace it with systemd so not relevant to my complaints about systemd. Maybe those things are find (I have some issues with both launchd and SMF but that's another discussion) Yes, I work with virtualized systems and storage all day long, without systemd. No problems locking config to specific ethernet device using mac address, and when virtualized they're all going to use the same driver and naming so what's the issue? I write init scripts that work on RedHat, SLES, Ubuntu, Debian..not sure why you think they can't be moved if properly written to be handled by all those.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Eunuchswear]

Please, do elucidate -- how is the code a mess?

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[efitton]

Sometimes you've just gone backwards...

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[Rehdon]

You're not the only one, believe me!

Re: Obligatory Discussions

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends, if it requires build files that are part of the systemd source then it makes sense that it is part of the systemd source package, but then you can't argue that udev isn't part of systemd. If it doesn't need build files from the rest of the package, then it just doesn't make sense, with the "why not?" argument you could just bundle everything together because, why not?

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[efitton]

And those of use with large screens and would like to have vertical scroll bars don't get a choice to use them because GNOME knows best. And small devices always trumps those of use with large screens. Huzzah.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[caseih]

I've read some good criticisms of systemd by another init system developer. He had valid things to say and put them on his blog in a nice point by point way that can be responded to and rebutted.

Rather than bad-mouthing Red Hat on slashdot, why not put up a direct, technical critique of systemd on your own web site (or post it here). I know many people would appreciate having a point by point critique. You say their code is a "mess" but what does that even mean? Please provide examples (such examples can only benefit everyone). Otherwise it's FUD. I know you probably feel like it's not worth your time, yet you post a half dozen or more anti-systemd posts here. So you clearly have the time.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[igloo-x]

And small devices always trumps those of use with large screens.

Consistency trumps both. Auto-hiding scroll bars work for smaller screens because they don't waste space, and they works for larger screens because 99.99% of computer users don't need vertical scroll bars displayed all the time.

Deciding whether or not your scroll bars are always visible based on screen size is technically difficult (not least because lots of devices don't even know how big they are) and introduces needless inconsistency when auto-hiding scroll bars work perfectly well for practically everyone.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[efitton]

What wouldn't be difficult would be a preference box (which I would leave as off, but whatever on the default). Want to wager if that will happen? ;-)

Your claim that auto-hiding scroll bars work perfectly for everyone needs a citation. I don't believe there has been any usability testing.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[igloo-x]

Offering checkboxes for every relatively small UI preference (such as 'always show scroll bars') would be a nightmare for app developers. Every single checkbox option you offer doubles the number of possible ways your app is displayed and potentially behaves, which will make testing anything non-trivial practically impossible.

Do this, and it's guaranteed some idiot "power user" is going to wade in and end up with some special snowflake configuration because they (of course) know better, and when they invariably fuck things up and come asking for help, you're going to waste hours finding out that it's because their dumb preferences broke your app in a way you had absolutely no realistic chance of catching in testing. So no, I'd much rather GNOME not offer these options as preferences.

Your claim that auto-hiding scroll bars work perfectly for everyone needs a citation

I never said they worked perfectly for everyone, but It's how touch screen mobile devices used by millions have worked for years and years, seemingly without outrage. I'd call that a pretty solid validation of the concept.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[efitton]

I don't want my desktop with its two large monitors acting like your touch screen mobile device (which doesn't have scroll bars, so I don't know why you claim they validate auto-hiding). So I think I'll stay with the tried and true desktop metaphor instead of letting you decide what options I should even have to look at. With scroll bars this leaves me... just about everything but GNOME.

And scroll bars aren't the real issue with me. I want alt-tab to work the same way it has worked for me the last 20 years (the mac style drives me crazy, an actual blocker). I want menu bars on the window not at the top. I want quick launch so I can click with a mouse and launch the app. I want a taskbar and I find "overview mode" actively hostile to those of us with any sort of ADHD. Again, not a problem. Windows 7, KDE (finally) and Cinnamon all fit the bill. GNOME seems to find all of those outlandish requests. Scroll bars are just more of the same where GNOME "designers" know better and yet fewer and fewer people use GNOME.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[efitton]

So no user interface testing on auto-hiding scroll bars and will not be an option.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[igloo-x]

[My mobile device] doesn't have scroll bars, so I don't know why you claim they validate auto-hiding

Both Android and iOS do have scroll bars. They validate auto-hiding because millions of people use them without any kind of global outrage - and nobody has felt the need to replace them, so it's pretty safe to conclude they "work".

Scroll bars are just more of the same where GNOME "designers" know better

Evidently so. We're 5 posts in to this back-and-forth and I strongly suspect that if you had an irrefutable use-case for permanently visible scroll bars (other than "because that's how they've always been"), you'd have posted it by now. Right now it just looks more and more like what you're saying is "How I learned to use a desktop environment 20 years ago is perfect, stop improving things!"

And scroll bars aren't the real issue with me

I don't care about any of that. I only took issue with "skids" stating how he couldn't understand why anyone would want disappearing scroll bars, and I explained why.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[efitton]

Because I can quickly without touching anything see the percentage I am in a webpage which I can't with auto-hiding scroll bars. Moreover, scroll bars are at the side of the screen which cost me nothing on a large widescreen monitor as those spots are otherwise dead space.

Moreover, what I'm saying is that the stuff that worked for the last 20 years shouldn't be mucked about with without a good reason. You claim they are improving things, I can claim with as much evidence that they are screwing things up. Given use statistics I can actually make my claim with strong evidence and you have: "cuz Apple does it on a 3 inch screen."

Furthermore, there is no way you can call what is at the side of Safari on iOS a scroll bar. You can't select it, it is hardly visible and you certainly can't jump ahead. Long documents are difficult with such an interface.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[igloo-x]

Because I can quickly without touching anything see the percentage I am in a webpage which I can't with auto-hiding scroll bars

There's a reason I gave this exact use-case as a ridiculous example of the only reason for permanent scroll bars: it's ridiculous. Sorry. I usually know how far I am down a document because I can see the elevator descending the scroll bar as I'm scrolling there. In the rare event I need to know and I forget, I can nudge the mouse wheel. This is never, ever, ever a problem.

stuff that worked for the last 20 years shouldn't be mucked about with without a good reason

There is good reason. Go back and read my posts again.

I can claim with as much evidence that they are screwing things up. Given use statistics I can actually make my claim with strong evidence

Go for it.

cuz Apple does it on a 3 inch screen

lol yeah, what the fuck do Apple know about GUIs, rite? It's not like they've spent decades paying top dollar for psychological scientists to do controlled human-computer-interaction studies or anything. They're just fucking kids who keep changing shit for no good reason.

Furthermore, there is no way you can call what is at the side of Safari on iOS a scroll bar. You can't select it, it is hardly visible and you certainly can't jump ahead. Long documents are difficult with such an interface.

Scrolling in Safari works fine. Compound acceleration on the scroll gesture allows me to scroll to the bottom of massive pages just as quick as on a desktop with a mouse. The elevator is no more difficult to see than the gray-on-gray default colour scheme on most desktops.

If you do need to instantaneously jump to a specific part of a long list (e.g., the phone's contact list), there is another view available that offers a directly manipulatable scroll bar. They don't use this for the browser because (drum roll) it isn't something people usually need to reading web pages.

Re:Obligatory Discussions

[skids]

Actually the reason I find auto-hide scrollbars inane is because I often want to go over to the scrollbar and grab/drag the scroller. And if it's hidden I have to mouse over to it under it appears, then mouse up or down to grab it. FWIW. Super annoying.

Gnome???

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it, but pretty much bloated and clumsy. I stick to Cinnamon.

Re:Gnome???

[walterbyrd]

I use MATE, anything is better than Gnome 3.x. It's a shame, Gnome 2.x was great.

Re:Gnome???

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad everyone hated GNOME 2 back in the day.

There was no end to the anger over these three arguments:

- It is bloated
- The "Application / Places / System" menu structure feels uncomfortable, I want my "Start Menu" back
- All configurability has been trimmed to minimum

Re:Gnome???

[efitton]

I've heard this before and finally looked up old Slashdot threads to confirm or deny.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... and most of the highest rated comments are positive.

What I'm still missing is KDE 3.5 but maybe I'll give Trinity a try.

Re:Gnome???

[Blaskowicz]

Indeed, Gnome 2 / MATE has little advanced configurability, yet it has basic configurability. Want to add an icon, drag'n'drop the icon to where you want it on the bar, how easy can that be.

Most visible part that gets maintained/updated : the file manager.

Applications/Places/System : corresponds to Programs, Favorites and Settings in the classic start menu from Windows 98 (and perhaps 95 + Internet Explorer shell) and XP. It's not convenient to add your own application shortcuts to the app menu though, so they go to the top bar (or bottom bar) or on the desktop.

Biggest pain in the ass is if you changed something with dconf-editor. Or did I change a start up script. I made it so caja doesn't manage the desktop anymore, but I can't manage to get the desktop back. That's customizability.

Moreover, I don't bother customizing/changing the theme! That's the fault of Gnome 3. I won't even bother or attempt anything till GTK3 is stable.

Re:Gnome???

[Anonymous Coward]

By 2.12, people were pretty happy with Gnome. But you've apparently forgotten how much people hated Gnome when 2.0 came out. Instead of everyone bitching about Lennard Pottering, everyone was bitching about Havoc Pennington and how he ruined Gnome and the desktop.

You seem to have forgotten all the hate about how gconf is the "Windows Registry on Linux", and how they removed every single option from all the applications. Nothing is configurable, they took away all my favorite features with the introduction of nautilus, metacity sucks, gnome is too corporate, it's not for real linux users, blah, blah, blah.

It's the same thing anytime a long standing project makes major changes. As a developer you try to innovate, but that brings changes. And certain vocal users don't want change, so they complain.

I personally think gnome 3 is a huge step in the right direction (and has become my favorite desktop) and has been getting better with every release (early 3.x releases were very rough!)

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

And some old stories:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://developers.slashdot.org...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Re:Gnome???

[efitton]

This is GNOME 3.16. Why would I compare a .0 with the 8th release?
Frankly I think a lot of the criticism in 2.0 was justified and it isn't this blink hate of GNOME from slashdot that gets portrayed in the GNOME community, which looking at later releases of GNOME 2 adequately demonstrates.

Personally I find DEs with overview mode hostile to those with ADHD. And some of the bugs with regressions are simply too painful to fathom. I use minimize to change the order of alt-tab. This was impossible in GNOME for well over a year in both Shell and Classic because Jon McCann thought fullscreen was "ugly." People using fullscreen were also more than a bit put out.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho...
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho...
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho...

So while it is nice that you think it is improving, any group that claims to say form follows function and then does crap like that while treating its users and former users with such disdain is certainly not for me. That and I just can't get past the overview mode. I don't need additional flashing.

Re:Gnome???

[juanfgs]

I think it's not the same. Gnome 2 spawned briefly the GoneMe fork, but as soon as Gnome developers started implementing new features this fork dissapeared. Right now you have 2 Gnome forks, Mate and Cinnamon, and both of them are gaining popularity and some developers are even considering switching to another toolkit for their apps.

I don't hate Gnome 3, I used it, and worked for me (until the feature removal thing got ridiculous). The problem seems with the removal of useful features that are NOT coming back, and there were really nicely implemented stuff that got removed:

• - Twin panel Nautilus (never used it, but many people loved it)
• - Nautilus statusbar (no need to right click-> properties to see free space)
• - Decent Theme chooser (The guy at Cinnamon even improved it with a download theme feature much like KDE Does)
• - Being able to change typography settings.
• - Being able to change WM options, and startup applications (not present in .desktop files) , pretty much every configurable thing on the desktop.
• - Even if you were able to choose focus follows mouse, it wouldn't be possible to work with the current way appliations handle it's second menubar (which is a really strange way to hide settings BTW)

Also Gnome 3 it's NOT EASY, and it's NOT INTUITIVE. When presented with both desktops and a list of simple tasks new users simply cannot figure out what to do. Gnome 2 had made a lot of progress to be intuitive, gnome 3 sets those back by: hiding menus, removing descriptive text in favor of monochromatic icons (which might not be meaningful for many users).

The thing is that these criticism is taken as "oh you hate gnome", no I love gnome that's why it makes me sad to go from a very good DE to an experimental shell. This time I think gnome devs should listen a little and just put a decent settings manager with some checkboxes instead of just blindly removing features.

The 'primary' - define and discuss

[Anonymous Coward]

Dispite desparate attempts of the linux user base to move to alternatives and avoid wholesale changes to the linux userspace, distribution leadership and paid developers continue their push toward 'unification and control'.

When gnomish developers develop on macs to produce a desktop centric operating system in the hope of capturing the windows/mac market, where mac users are happy with macs, windows users are happy using windows and all the linux users go anywhere else the question becomes 'who is going to use it?'

As a Former Supporter of Gnome....

[BrendaEM]

I am looking forward to this code to be ported into Cinnamon.

Really, I wish Cinnamon, Gnome, and XFCE could all be merged, each giving meaningful input for Desktop, Tablet, and Lightweight.
It's time to get it together!

Re:As a Former Supporter of Gnome....

[juanfgs]

I could see Mate and XFCE merged, but I think that Cinnamon/Gnome and XFCE are way on the opposite direction. XFCE wants to be lightweight and traditional, Gnome doesn't.

Re:As a Former Supporter of Gnome....

[Anonymous Coward]

I could see Mate and XFCE merged, but I think that Cinnamon/Gnome and XFCE are way on the opposite direction. XFCE wants to be lightweight and traditional, Gnome doesn't.

Gnome is vat-grown to create a huge obese codebase so that corporate lead developers get to hire more developers and increase their span of control ie salaries.

Meh.

[serviscope_minor]

Big far Meh.

So GNOME, unlike even Motif and Athena lacks an arbitrary filter on file selection dialog boxes specified by the user. This makes finding spefic files in a large directory hard. If you have usability regressions compared to Athena and Motif, you have fucked up royally.

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Big far Meh.

So GNOME, unlike even Motif and Athena lacks an arbitrary filter on file selection dialog boxes specified by the user. This makes finding spefic files in a large directory hard. If you have usability regressions compared to Athena and Motif, you have fucked up royally.

Contribute with a patch. :)

Re:Meh.

[morgauxo]

Why bother. Gnome developers have been on the path of removing, not adding functionality since they started version 2. Why would you expect them to accept a patch that adds a good feature?

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

The release notes mention several new features. They are clearly adding stuff.

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

They can have the feature in, feature out -policy, which is a trend on some shops to keep the maintenance burden the same. Usually these entities do not advertise that they also removed features on new releases, they just "streamline the experience."

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off, smilie-faced retard.

Primary desktop environment?

[andy16666]

"the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems"

Well, well, aren't we full of ourselves...

Re:Primary desktop environment?

[RabidReindeer]

Well, it's only until they manage to ensure that it isn't plug-replaceable.

Like the systemd logging system.

Re:Primary desktop environment?

[opus981]

Is this finally The Year of the Command Prompt?

Re:Primary desktop environment?

[markdavis]

Exactly. I was about to post the same thing. I am responsible for no less than 160 Linux desktops, laptops, and servers at work, home, family, etc.. Not a SINGLE one of them is using Gnome desktop. And based on a rough estimate at our Linux/Unix user's group, I would say perhaps less than 10% use Gnome on any of their machine.

Now, if they said "popular" desktop or something, fine. But "primary"??? Give me a break.

Re:The 'primary' - define and discuss

[andy16666]

Mod the hell out of this. This person gets it!

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said that Gnome is "the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux"? Perhaps Poettering? I don't believe that Linus Torvalds has ever made such a statement.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most major distributions ship with GNOME as the default desktop environment. Debian, Fedora, RHEL for example all ship with GNOME by default. Ubuntu did but no longer does.

Re:What?

[Sri Ramkrishna]

opensuse ships KDE by default, but SLES and SLED all have GNOME as default.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people install Debian and accept the default DE? Those sorts of people are more likely to use Ubuntu or Linux Mint. And Fedora and RHEL have it as default because those are Red Hat projects and so is GNOME. RHEL is mostly for servers, so if it has a DE will be whatever the sysadmin prefers, but may well not have one at all, and Fedora is not the most used Desktop distro.

Real numbers of actual DE usage would be interesting to see though, I'd be surprised is GNOME 3 was in the top 3 DE's.

Speak Marketing Much? What hubris!

[Anonymous Coward]

Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released.

The "primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux"? Really? Does the poster just speak Marketing as your primary tongue, or is this a simply characteristic of the arrogance of a project that has loudly shouted down every rational discussion about the merits of its interface design, the merits of requiring systemd to the exclusion of all else (not really true despite what the gnome developers say: Funtoo Linux, a Gentoo derivative manged by drobbins, has gnome3 ebuilds and straightforward patches that allow gnome3 to work flawlessly with openrc instead), and the merits of embedding splashscreen code into an init system?

I suspect the latter, given the broader context, but really. Gnome isn't any more the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux than KDE is, or any number of other desktops. Just because Red Hat's marketing department says so doesn't make it so. In my work at numerous Linux shops (including large banks like Deutsche, and smaller Red Hat shops that will remain nameless to protect the innocent), nearly everywhere a Linux desktop is run the choice has defaulted to KDE, with a small minority of users choosing to run Gnome instead, or other less common desktops (Mate, etc.).

The sheer hubris of a project claiming to be "the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems" in their press release, regurgitated mindlessly by slashdot, boggles the mind.

Gotten better

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to hate GNOME 3!
I tried out 3.14, and I have to say, it has gotten a lot better.

Also you can install GNOME shell extensions, to get it more in line with the classic GNOME 2.
Also you need get a new shell theme. But its possibly to get GNOME 3 pretty nice. :)

Re:Gotten better

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

That's what I use on my Raspberry Pi.

Re:Gotten better

[bluegutang]

So, if you replace basically the whole interface, you can make it relatively usable? As opposed to earlier Gnome 3 releases where you couldn't fix the suck?

Re:Gotten better

[Anonymous Coward]

> replace the whole interface to make it relatively usable

haha, just like Windows 8

too bad it's impossible to make current MacOS usable

Re:Gotten better

[ckatko]

You use version 3.14 on a Pi?

Re:Gotten better

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares what a smilie-face-making retard thinks?

In fact, if someone who can't make a post without a stupid fucking smilie face likes it, it's probably shit.

The Internet DOES NOT NEED A LAUGH TRACK, you fucking degenerate.

Re:Gotten better

[Anonymous Coward]

With the Pi2 having 1GB RAM and a quad-core CPU and a not-bad GPU maybe it is actually usable. I'm actually curious to try it to see if it is usable, though I'll need to find a spare microsd and a bit of free time as I don't want to pollute my current setup with that GNOME crud.

OSX

[danomatika]

Again, new Gnome features match OS X stuff introduced years ago:

3.16 introduces a new style of scrollbar for GNOME 3. Instead of being shown all the time, these new overlay scrollbars are only shown when needed

Re:OSX

[caseih]

And it was a bad idea when OS X did it, and it's still a bad idea. I hope they can be disabled (this is actually a GTK thing, not a Gnome thing). I can see how this is useful on a very small screen with a finger as the pointer. But not a mouse on a desktop. We've really gone backwards in usability on computer desktops generally in the last 5 years. Perhaps this coincides with the rise of the "user experience" field of thought, rather than focusing on intuitive "user interfaces."

Re:OSX

[jandrese]

The scrollbars on Gnome are so obnoxious now. You have to mouse over a tiny 2 pixel strip to get them to appear, then super precisely move your mouse to get to the part where you can interact with it, and one pixel off causes it to disappear and make you hunt for the invisible 2 pixel strip again. I'm sure they're great if you're on a tablet and just mashing your thumb in the general vicinity of the scrollbar, but for mouse users they're just outright terrible and enabled by default. If you have a distro like Ubuntu it's fairly hard to enable sane scrollbars again too, you have to know what esoteric package to install to fix the behavior, it's not installed by default.

Re:OSX

[Blaskowicz]

Didn't Ubuntu introduce that crap years ago too? Ubuntu 11.04, which came with both Unity and Gnome 2 out of the box.

Meanwhile, these days I'm having an always-visible scrollbar but without the up and down button. Which will only suck very slightly if some day I'm stuck without a scrollwheel.

Re:OSX

[loonycyborg]

I don't even remember when I directly interacted with a scrollbar last time. Only when interacting with crappy custom GUIs that don't support mouse scrollwheel maybe.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the same overlay scrollbar that maintains hard-coded list of incompatible applications?

Re:OSX

[jandrese]

Or when you're on an older laptop where gesture navigation doesn't work, which is all the time for me.

Re:OSX

[danomatika]

At least on OSX, you can turn scrollbar hiding off ...

Re:OSX

[0123456]

Yeah, they put that crap into Unity a few years ago. It's one of the reasons I gave up on Ubuntu.

Re:OSX

[iampiti]

Totally agree. At least Linux has no concept of "default UI" and is thus easy to choose the one that fits you best.
Windows, OTOH, is designed with the notion that you will use the UI provided by Microsoft and is not as easy to change. Add that to the fact that I really don't like the direction Win10 is going and I honestly don't know what I'm going to use once Windows 7 is too old, i.e.: Doesn't play nice with new hardware

Re:OSX

[ckatko]

All current large GUI changes are not to make our lives easier, it's to bring in new people who can't be bothered to learn how to use a normal, productive GUI. It's about drawing in new customers, not pleasing their existing ones that are getting more and more aggravated.

It's like when the Wii hit. Lot's of people like it, and hats off to you. But going from the NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube... and then being stuck with "casual" games on the Wii was like a slap to the face. It's like they said "There's no money in you guys who supported us and got is this far, so we're throwing you away for some new people who don't even like games."

Re:OSX

[OutOnARock]

Obviously you have never used a laptop with a trackpad that allows a double finger touch gesture to scroll the current window under the mouse pointer.

Moving to the scroll bar arrows to move the screen...wasting screen real estate.....how quaint....1990 called they want their interface back

Re:OSX

[cynicist]

You install Unity Tweak Tool (unity-tweak-tool is the package name) and go to the 'scrolling' section to make your changes. I get that it's not obvious but I wouldn't call it hard to enable legacy scrollbars.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

You install Unity Tweak Tool (unity-tweak-tool is the package name) and go to the 'scrolling' section to make your changes. I get that it's not obvious but I wouldn't call it hard to enable legacy scrollbars.

But I just don't get why Gnome developers want to make settings and the ability to customize so obscure. Where do you even find the docs to know how to edit some unknown xml files that are buried up the ass of Gnome? Why can't they just have an 'advanced' interface that is hidden for the plebs and those of is that want all our settings back can just expose it?

Re:OSX

[sad_]

What about visual clues? The release notes say 'it unclutters your window and you can focus on the content", but i now no longer get a visual clue the window is actually scrollable.

So the solution is to always use your mousewheel quickly once, just to find out if the window is scrollable or not.

It escapes me on how this is a better solution and impoves my focus on the content.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to see the scrollbars all of the time. Scrollbars show useful information even when I'm not interacting with them.

Re:OSX

[loonycyborg]

I'm not yet familiar with gnome's implementation, but wouldn't you still see scrollbar along with progress indication if you mouse over scrollable area?

Re:OSX

[jandrese]

If that was installed by default and reasonably discoverable I wouldn't complain nearly as much about this, but your average person has virtually no chance of just discovering this without some deep Googling.

Re:OSX

[badkarmadayaccount]

What sort of coal powered laptop doesn't support basic edge-scrolling? I've got a circa 10 y.o. Fujitsu-Siemens 1.4GHz Celeron M 0.5 GB RAM, and the synaptics driver even supports 2 finger scrolling like a champ, when enabled.

Perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need to know about the mirage of "Linux on the Desktop" can be seen in recent GNOME releases. The developers spend far too much time either not adding things people desperately need and want (like a really first-rate file manager, instead of the toy versions various distros leave on users' doorsteps in a flaming paper bag), or screwing up things that do work at least reasonably well.

"Linux on the Desktop" is almost entirely a "solution" that only works for hardcore hobbyists/ideologues and those with very significant in-house technical support.

What an utter waste. I've been experimenting with Linux since the days of buying a book with an attached Slackware floppy disk, and I really believed at one point that Linux would become a serious challenger to Windows and other desktop OSs with at least a 25% market share. I was a naive fool, as is anyone who still thinks Linux has a chance of coming close to that level of success.

Re:Perfect

[Grishnakh]

Linux on the desktop works just great for people who choose KDE instead of hitting their head on a wall and trying to make Gnome work just because they keep reading people mindlessly regurgitate the idea that Gnome is the primary Linux desktop environment.

Gnome is really the worst thing that could have happened to the cause for Linux on the desktop. Somehow they got everyone to buy into this idea that Gnome is just the default and you shouldn't try anything else, they got distros to all adopt it as the standard desktop, and then they made it into a de-featured turd. Well of course that's going to make Linux on the desktop look like an utter failure. Meanwhile, KDE is working just fine, but everyone ignores that elephant in the room. (From what I hear, XCFE works well too, so there's not just one but at least 2 other desktops out there which will probably work well for you, and that's not counting Cinnamon and MATE.)

Re:Perfect

[ckatko]

I wonder how hard it would be to fork a file manager to add the functionality you are looking for. Someone else mentioned various filtering options.

I'm very much a fan of "it's easier to make the tool you need than it is to convince someone to make it for you."--even if it would be easier for someone to modify their own project than you having to learn all specifics, they're normally so resistant to ideas that it's almost impossible to get a dev to care about a feature you do.

Re:Perfect

[hitmark]

In recent years the big backer of one particular variant of "Linux on the desktop" is the US military.

They seem to finally figure out that using Windows for things like cruisers are a no-go, and has adopted Linux as the replacement as they can then still shop around for hardware.

This is why we are getting all kinds of replacement for working subsystems, because they are not "secure" in the eyes of the military. Funny thing is that their enemy may well be their own troops more than anything else, as seen with Manning and Snowden.

Have they fixed the invisible file mgr borders?

[rjforster]

I posted the text below almost as-is for the 3.14 release, only later finding out that no, this bug is still present. So here goes again....
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
It's mainly on the file manager (that I've found) but you can click OUTSIDE the window and still interact with the window. For example if you have two file-managers close to each other with another window below them both and visible in the gap then you can't click the lower window directly even though you can see it and put your mouse over the visible part of it. All you do is focus one or the other of the file manager windows.
You can also hold down the windows key and click outside the file manager window and drag it around the screen just as if you had clicked inside the window (I can't remember if I changed the default key from alt to windows in my settings but the point applies).

Generally I'm OK with Gnome3 (providing you get the right extensions) but these invisible borders are such a fundamental breakage of the basic concept of a graphical windowed user interface.

Re:Have they fixed the invisible file mgr borders?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the Bugzilla number?

Re:Have they fixed the invisible file mgr borders?

[Anonymous Coward]

CSD apps in general are broken as for some reason they decided to make the client draw the shadows instead of the window manager, making the shadows part of the window. And on top of that making the shadows huge. What a stupid idea. Now GNOME apps are completely broken because of the invisible border.

Re:Have they fixed the invisible file mgr borders?

[organgtool]

Slow your roll, cowboy. You expected Gnome3 to handle multiple windows at the same time? What do you think it is, so kind of manager of windows? Full-screen all the way!

Let's be fair!

[rleesBSD]

Let's be fair! Gnome 3 is still better than the command line. Count your blessings.

Re:Let's be fair!

[Anonymous Coward]

So that they can be bigger idiots? You feel lonely?

Re:Let's be fair!

[AntEater]

Better than the command line? I hardly think so. Bash, KSH, and even csh (as much as I hate csh) are heart of the ability to use and administer a Unix host, incredibly flexible and have decades of refinement behind their usability. Gnome is off on a rampage to remove features and force someone else's idea of how you should do your work down the throat of ever gnome user. If I had to make the choice, I'll take a serial console over an X desktop running Gnome.

Re:Let's be fair!

[efitton]

Because Macs suck even more? The Dock isn't fixed position so you can use memory to start the pointer to the correct spot. Can't get normal alt-tab to work. Can't get menu bars on the actual window. Maximize doesn't.

Re:Let's be fair!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dock isn't fixed position so you can use memory to start the pointer to the correct spot.

Not sure what you mean, computer memory or brain memory? I use folder shortcuts on the right-hand side of the dock and set the view to "list." Then I click in the same spot each time and start typing the name of the item I need. Very efficient.

Can't get normal alt-tab to work.

Again, not sure what you mean. I have no difficulty using Command-tab to switch applications and Command-~ to switch windows. I hate using Exposé and trackpad gestures.

Can't get menu bars on the actual window.

On the plus side, the menu bar is always visible and you don't have to zero in on each window's narrow menu bar to click a menu. Fitts' Law and all that.

Maximize doesn't.

That's because it's not a maximize button; it's a 'zoom' button. It switches between the application's default window size and the user's custom size.

Overall, I find the Mac interface much more pleasant to use than the alternatives, but I'm still waiting for someone to invent a GUI that is fully configurable and can load your preferred settings in one step.

Re:Let's be fair!

[efitton]

The Dock isn't fixed position so you can use memory to start the pointer to the correct spot.

Not sure what you mean, computer memory or brain memory? I use folder shortcuts on the right-hand side of the dock and set the view to "list." Then I click in the same spot each time and start typing the name of the item I need. Very efficient.

All I know is that by default the applications change position on the bottom of the doc as you open up files and programs. Dislike.

Can't get normal alt-tab to work.

Again, not sure what you mean. I have no difficulty using Command-tab to switch applications and Command-~ to switch windows. I hate using Exposé and trackpad gestures.

How nice for you. After 20 years using windows and linux systems I can't change my muscle memory to use both command-tab and command~. I want command-tab to cycle through open windows and that apparently isn't configurable. I've tried on and off for a year to adjust to the Mac way and just isn't happening. This is a blocker and I don't know why I even tried to get use to it. Computers should adjust to me, I shouldn't adjust to a computer.

Can't get menu bars on the actual window.

On the plus side, the menu bar is always visible and you don't have to zero in on each window's narrow menu bar to click a menu. Fitts' Law and all that.

I will happily give up the fraction of a fraction of a second to Fitt's Law and look at the right damn spot. I think this is especially hostile to people with any sort of ADHD as we look at a bunch of other tasks and windows as our eyes travel to the top of the screen and away from where we are working. I'd also point out that Tog did all his Fitt's Law testing on the speeds (and I really don't care about such an insignificant time gain) back on a 6" screen.

Maximize doesn't.

That's because it's not a maximize button; it's a 'zoom' button. It switches between the application's default window size and the user's custom size.

I'd rather have a maximize button. A button that will give you a half dozen different sizes when you click it six times in a row is simply broken. And yes, depending on ads in a browser it will happily do that. I'm sceptical about it being a user's custom size when it merrily is any size it feels like every time I hit that tiny little button (where did Fitt's go there?)

Overall, I find the Mac interface much more pleasant to use than the alternatives, but I'm still waiting for someone to invent a GUI that is fully configurable and can load your preferred settings in one step.

I'll agree with wanting a system that would load my settings; I'd happily given $$$ for a system that let me configure it in hours let alone one step. Mac and GNOME won't do either for me. And while it is nice for you that the Apple interface works well for you, I find it about as pleasant as working with a needle in my eye.

Re:Let's be fair!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, obviously your experience will be different from mine. However, I don't think that's any reason to say Macs are "worse" or "suck" just because they're not what you're used to, and you can't easily overcome your old habits.

Personally, I find focus-follows-mouse and window-fixed menus infuriating, but I've learned to live with the Dock even though it's broken in several ways. It shoehorns several functions together into one tool, and breaks the UI rule that things should stay where the user puts them.

I do agree that the computer should adjust to the user, not the other way around. A lot of these behaviors are hard-coded or minimally configurable, but would take very little work for the computer to adapt. Once I set up an interface the way I like it, I should be able to *zap* FTP it up to a server and then use it from *any* computer I sit down at. Click one setting, "user interface: ( ) default (x) custom [enter URI:]" and *boom* it's exactly what I use at home.

Re:Let's be fair!

[efitton]

We agree the dock is fundamentally broken and that Macs don't do what I need them to do because of muscle memory (and surely this impacts others) and I can't say that Macs suck? Of course they suck. Those are all easy preference settings. And Windows should have the same preference settings for Mac refugees so Windows sucks too. But I'd happily pick Windows over Apple or GNOME.

Re:Let's be fair!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you can say Macs suck, I just don't agree with your reasons. I switch between Linux, Mac, and Windows with relative ease, but I guess I'm just gifted. <shrug

Re:Let's be fair!

[Vlijmen Fileer]

This guy deserves the motherload of upvotes.
God I get sick with the lies of apple's so-called usability superiority, based on outright lies, but echoed by so many fanatics that most reasonable people seem to not dare to react anymore.

Notifications in calendar

[Windwraith]

Oh it now displays notification history in...the calendar?

What.

Who thought that was a good idea? what's next? Calendar inside WiFi settings?

Re:Notifications in calendar

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense because notifications are associated with time-- which the calendar displays.

Re:Notifications in calendar

[steveg]

Does that mean you no longer get a pop-up?

Because if that's the case, putting it in the calendar might be better. Not good, but better than a pop-up. What I'd really like to do is disable notifications entirely, or at least selectively be able to disable various functions' abilities to display notifications. Like printing.

You run a script to print out a hundred or so separate files and the side of your desktop fills up with announcements of files that have been printed. Why?

Re:Notifications in calendar

[Blaskowicz]

Add a notification that you've received a notifitcation, and you might have a notification bomb.

Re:Notifications in calendar

[efitton]

Most of my notifications are clearly not associated with time in any way shape or form. You are also locking notifications into a particular calendar program. If you are using a different calendar it seems a bit hostile to force you to use GNOME's.

Re:Notifications in calendar

[Windwraith]

Well, in KDE4 if you do that, you just get a single notification that scrolls messages gradually and doesn't get in the way. I think it's a good (not perfect) system.
You are still notified about...well, notifications, and it doesn't take up much space. Filling the screen with notifications is overdoing it.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME 3.16 Released

...and nobody cared.

Thanks for reminding me of...

[Anonymous Coward]

how much I hate Gnome (and systemd).

Terminal notifications looks nice

[Rhys]

Everyone is all down on it, but the terminal notifications thing looked sweet.

ref: http://fedoramagazine.org/terminal-job-notifications-in-fedora-22-workstation/

Re:Terminal notifications looks nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been doing this with Cinnamon/Mint for years now... just use notify-send.

Contributing is the worst thing to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

When facing badly broken software like GNOME 3, submitting patches is the worst thing you can do.

First it means you have to deal with this broken software's source code. If you aren't a C programmer already, you're out of luck. If you want to become one, it'll take a while before you're proficient enough. Even if you know C, you will have to waste a lot of time learning the code base.

Then you have to waste your time getting a development environment set up, and then you have to waste more time making and testing your change.

If you get the change made, then you'll have to fight just to get it committed into the main source tree. This usually involves a few snobby dickheads "reviewing" your code. They usually lack the context to really understand the change. In some cases, these people are responsible for the problem in the first place, and they fight against the fix because it undermines whatever authority they think they have. Get ready to waste yet more time with political squabbles!

As you can see, any smart person wouldn't put themselves through that hell. Such a person would just do the intelligent thing and switch to KDE or Xfce.

Re:Contributing is the worst thing to do.

[igloo-x]

dickheads "reviewing" your code

Other developers daring to review your changes to their projects?

The very nerve!

Re:Contributing is the worst thing to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

BZ ID or it didn't happen.

Re:Contributing is the worst thing to do.

[Sri Ramkrishna]

You've never had to submit a patch to the kernel have you?

Re: Contributing is the worst thing to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't with the code review, obviously. The problem is with the people performing the review.

If these same people are responsible for the bad design or the bugs in the first place, then they should have no right to be reviewing any related fixes.

When it comes to GNOME 3, which suffers from systemic failures, all of the existing developers are responsible for its sorry state. None of them should be considered eligible to review fixes for the problems that they initially caused.

Re: Contributing is the worst thing to do.

[igloo-x]

Developers shouldn't review fixes to bugs that they introduced.

Right.

Re:Contributing is the worst thing to do.

[juanfgs]

This usually involves a few snobby dickheads "reviewing" your code

Not in my experience, I'm not a gnome contributor, but I sent a patch for a ticket for sound juicer long ago. The guy (I think Ross Burton) was really helpful and forgiving for my errors. I think both parties have to put their egos aside, specially when trying to cooperate.

Re:The 'primary' - define and discuss

[Anonymous Coward]

the question becomes 'who is going to use it?'

The paid developers (you mean Red Hat mainly) are funded by enterprise software sales and service. That's why their bosses want control of the stack. And without radical changes, those developers and designers don't have a way to become king of the mountain. So, change for change's sake, and enterprise users will have to choke all that bloated dick down, while the rest of us either put up with it or move away. Systemd's borg-like spreading is an attempt to make it difficult to get away from this corporate-controlled Linux bloatware.

Re:Sexism in free software

[Grishnakh]

This is an interesting, though rather off-topic conversation starter. I'll toss in my view:

To address the last point first, the consequences of "the community" being accepting of openly misogynistic people is possibly that the FOSS community gains a reputation (which it's already fighting) of being a haven for such people, and that anyone involved with it is like this. This isn't very good for the employment prospects for anyone who is prominently involved in FOSS, or attempts to evangelize its use in their organization. At worst, we could see a schism where FOSS advocates are all seen as misogynistic "neckbeards", and clean-cut "professional software developers" who aren't likely to expose a company to sexual harassment lawsuits are all Microsoft (or other proprietary software) advocates.

The quality of a product really doesn't matter as much as other factors, including public reputation, public image, and inertia. We've seen this over and over with Microsoft software over the years. Even back in the Windows 95/98 days, MS software was seen as "high quality" (even though it blue-screened every 30 minutes). Image is everything. Even outside of computing, there's countless cases of a technically-superior product or standard being sidelined in favor of something inferior, and inside computing cases abound (IE6 for example, being a standard for so long even though it's horrible, largely because of ActiveX even though it's a security nightmare). Most people do not look at technical specs for things; their perspectives involve other variables, especially the people involved in something.

However, the FOSS community has no "gatekeepers" as such, and is not a hierarchal organization. People are free to associate how they will here. But this might be something to think about if you're in charge of a project, and one of your peers is a highly outspoken misogynist or racist: he's going to cast a light on your project by association. There's a good reason companies don't employ people like this; the last thing they need is some news article that goes like this: "John Smith, a vocal advocate of amending the Constitution to make women second-class citizens, and also a lead programmer for XYZ Technologies, on Monday declared that..." Guilt by association and all that.

Now of course, there's a difference between refusing to associate with someone because of their outspoken views, and having a witch-hunt. If you're running some little 5-developer FOSS project on GitHub that no one's heard of, and one of your developers says something slightly misogynistic in an IRC chat, big deal. If you're running a FOSS company with millions in revenue and you hire a CEO who publicly spouts misogynistic views, that's an entirely different thing.

Pronunciation

[ichthus]

Agh! It's even ambiguous in their video. Is it pronounced "Nome", or "G'nome"? The female narrator in the video says g'nome at the beginning, and then makes the 'g' silent toward the end.

I can't take this anymore. And that, my friends, is why I use KDE.

Re:Pronunciation

[juanfgs]

Another problem that Mate solved for me :)

Re:Pronunciation

[phantomfive]

You switched software because of how it's pronounced?? I guess I shouldn't tell you about my GIF collection stored in SQL on a SCSI drive.......

Re:Pronunciation

[sysrammer]

Agh! It's even ambiguous in their video. Is it pronounced "Nome", or "G'nome"? The female narrator in the video says g'nome at the beginning, and then makes the 'g' silent toward the end.

I can't take this anymore. And that, my friends, is why I use KDE.

Errr...is the "K" silent?

Re:Pronunciation

[Anonymous Coward]

Gig could be pronounced jif because there is no correct pronunciation, but SQL can only be pronounced sequel, and SCSI can only be pronounced scuzzy. There is no acceptable alternate pronunciation for SQL and SCSI, and anyone who pronounces them differently is simply ignorant to the correct pronunciation (seriously.)

Re:Pronunciation

[phantomfive]

There is no acceptable alternate pronunciation for SQL and SCSI,

Usage is what matters (thus I'm calling you ignorant), and beyond that, Wikipedia has two pronunciations for SQL.

SCSI was regionally pronounced as "sexy" which frankly is a fine pronunciation and anyone who disagrees is a G8r.

Re:Pronunciation

[baka_toroi]

You mean your Jeef collection stored in Sequel on a Scuzzy drive?

Re: Pronunciation

[Anonymous Coward]

M'ate or Ma'tte?

Re: Pronunciation

[juanfgs]

Mate like in my own language (I'm argentinian so I'm cheating on this one hehe)

Re:Pronunciation

[phantomfive]

You mean your Jeef collection stored in Sequel on a Scuzzy drive?

Heretic, burn his pronunciation!

Re: Pronunciation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still an English word, so it should be pronounced in English.

Re:Pronunciation

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked with Havoc Pennington for several years (yes, I know, don't say anything). It is supposed to be pronounced "Gah-nome" with a hard G.

Re: Pronunciation

[juanfgs]

No it's not :)

From mate's site:

Where does the name come from? The name "MATE", pronounced Ma-Tay, comes from yerba maté, a species of holly native to subtropical South America. Its leaves contain caffeine and are used to make infusions and a beverage called mate.

Re: Pronunciation

[messymerry]

i switched from Latte to M'ate and now considering LXLE. Any comments on LXLE would be greatly appreciated...

primary desktop?

[ralphsiegler]

Last I checked another Ubuntu based disto which has team that made two fine alternatives to GNOME was the dominant desktop. And others are using KDE. I'm in the Linux architecture/admin biz and don't know anyone who uses GNOME any more.

Well, GNOME is the GNU project's primary desktop

[ciaran2014]

The GNU project has two desktop environments: GNUstep and GNOME. Of the two, GNOME is the primary one.

For the history: in the late 90s, the KDE desktop was getting popular but it required people to install non-free Qt libraries. Two GNU projects were launched to counter this problem. One was Harmony, which aimed to be a Qt replacement, to allow KDE be run without installing non-free software. The other was GNOME.

Years later, when GNOME was successful, the Qt libraries were released as free software.

There was a third GNU project which aimed to make a graphical desktop, but they decided to first focus on a Scheme scripting engine. This effort produced GNU Guile, but no graphical desktop got made.

I think there was even a fourth project, but I can't think of it right now.

Re:The 'primary' - define and discuss

[Anonymous Coward]

Strangely on the the RH training courses turning of much of the 'end user features' is and important part of getting things done.

If eating their own dog food results in competitive disadvantage how long can it last.

Re:The 'primary' - define and discuss

[ckatko]

In other words, stupidity like the Metro interface (aka "Change for the sake of change because CHANGE MUST BE BETTER") is not reserved to just Microsoft, but is a symptom of a much bigger problem that permeates many projects and companies across the technological landscape.

Change is fine IF AND ONLY IF it can actually outperform the incumbent. Being different doesn't automatically make it better. Nobody complains that we should completely redesign current bicycles merely because they're old. They haven't changed drastically because they already went through a huge amount of experimentation. They're already a great fit for the problem they solve.

I vaguely remember some business proverb along the lines of: Ask your customers to change once, and they'll let you. Twice, and they'll hate you. Three times and they'll leave you.

If they want to force everyone to change user interfaces, they better be damn well sure that they've tested it and it clearly improves are ability to do real work. Because if it doesn't, we're leaving for more stable pastures.

New Customers

[efitton]

How's that working for GNOME? Year of Linux on the Desktop? *sigh*

please, just don't ruin KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome is useless. I switched to KDE years ago. Please, just don't ruin KDE. Put all the people who want to ruin the desktop on the Gnome and Unity projects and let them turn them into a dumpster fire. People who need to get real work done have KDE.

Re:please, just don't ruin KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

You never used KDE 4.0 did you?

Am I the only one using this besides GNOME devs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Each time I read some news about GNOME, I keep wondering that, based on the number of negative comments. I've always liked how uncluttered GNOME 3 is, it keeps out of the way and allows you to focus on the applications you need, the ones you do your actual work on. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty great, I rarely even touch the mouse, the multi monitor works fine. The only thing I need is the Dash to Dock extension to get a nice overview of the open apps at the left of my screen.

It's also 99.9% stable. :) I think many of the negative opinions come from the first 3.x versions which were really bad.

Just for the record, I am using GNU/Linux since 1999, Slackware, Debian and now Arch.

Primary?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way GNOME is still the most used GNU/Linux desktop, right?

Re:The 'primary' - define and discuss

[hitmark]

It comes down to people not wanting to do janitorial stuff, but want the glitz and fame of making something new.

This is further compounded by the tech press fawning over changes and "new", resulting in the mentality that a project that is not introducing massive changes or new features constantly is a dead project.

This seems to be a offshot of the eternal growth mentality of Wall Street, where the moment a market segment (say Laptop computers) are not showing some quarterly growth it is all doom, gloom, and rats leaving sinking ships.

GNOME Terminal cursor still BLINKING?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME people thought to remove GUI Setting to turn off cursor BLINKING, but have font, color, transparency settings still be in place.
The only way to turn off blinking of cursor is . . . gconftool-2 --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode --type string off

CAN I NOW TURN IT OFF IN THE GUI AGAIN? This is the only thing I wonder with GNOME update. And yes, a lot of people requested this "feature" getting back, going back 4 years as wish . . . and still waiting. Is the waiting over?

Re:Well, GNOME is the GNU project's primary deskto

[Anonymous Coward]

It's okay if you don't care for GNU's relevance. The purpose of GNU is simply to exist; GNU exists so that people can go to to escape the world of proprietary software. It's up to you to decide if you want to take GNU or leave it, there are plenty of other operating systems out there that could use your attention.

Re:Speak Marketing Much? What hubris!

[Anonymous Coward]

The GNU project has two desktop environments: GNUstep and GNOME. Of the two, GNOME is the primary one.

Re:The 'primary' - define and discuss

[Rehdon]

1k upvotes. And yet, if you pointed GNOME devs to this simple reality you were either labeled as a 5 minute tester guy ("try it for a month, accept the new model of doing stuff and you'll be fine!" yeah, sure) or dismissed as a "hater" ("no point in discussing this with you, I'm picking up my marbles and going away" by all means!).

Still not up to par

[chris_clay]

I've been fighting with Gnome3 since it came out. Even in the later versions, it STILL isn't as stable and easy to use as was Gnome2 on a desktop PC. The Nautilus file manager has been absolutely destroyed and stripped of its useful features. I've learned to live with it, but it's just not the same, even with "classic mode". When I have to jump on legacy systems that still have Gnome2, it's noticeably faster and just better and easier to navigate, not to mention full featured. The new scrollbars in Gnome3 are extremely annoying as well.. some scroll the old way and some the new way. Overall it's messed up and causes users confusion and frustration.