I disagree. Windows XP still doesn't have these features by default: - Virtual desktops. - Magnetic window snapping. - Multiple panels with applets. - A usable commandline (yes I do use the commandline in Windows for certain things!).
They *are* better than Win95.
And saying that "everybody needs to get together and create one great whatever" is fundamentally flawed. You assume that every human being has the same ideas, the same design philosophies, the same aestetic preferences. One size cannot fit all! Heck, GNOME and KDE have different target groups! GNOME target the simple user who wants simplicity, while KDE targets the advanced user who wants power and configurability. They are both very different target groups.
The solution is not to make one single whatever for everybody, it's to make all implementations compatible. In other words: standardize on interfaces, not implementation. That's what the Freedesktop.org guys are doing.
You may want to check out this patch for the current file dialog: [url=http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewt opic.php? t=3635]http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.ph p?t=3635[/url]
1) CMYK support Do you have any idea how hard it is to implement properly CMYK support in the current Gimp codebase? It's *not* trivial! Remember that most Gimp developers are just volunteers, not commercial developers working full-time!
2) Weather applet The old one was removed due to legal reasons. Or do you want the GNOME project to be sued by weather.com?
3) Wanda And how's this even relevant?
4) Menu editor You never had to restart the panel. Well, not on my box anyway.
5) Hidden preferences Which preferences? Hhow many of those preferences do you change daily? How many of those preferences do normal users care about? Think about that first.
The current GTK+ file dialog *cannot* be changed without breaking compatibility. A new file dialog is under development for GTK+ 2.4, for quite a while now. But GTK+ 2.4 will not make it before the GNOME 2.4 release. If you want a slightly better file dialog (with Back button, Home button, Bookmarks, etc.) but is still compatible with all the current apps, take a look at this patch: http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=363 5
2) Galeon. Galeon never was a part of GNOME 2. At one point they had to choose a browser so they chose Epiphany because it's goals are like GNOME's. There's nothing stopping you from installing Galeon yourself. I'm typing this in Galeon right now.
3) Extract Here I agree with you on this. Email the File Roller author, not Slashdot.
4) Panel size Why click 20 times? Just focus the spinbox and type in whatever number you want using your keyboard. As for the goat logo, how's that a usability issue? Users don't care what logo they see in the about box (if they look at all).
5) Media player GStreamer doesn't "suck", it's just not finished yet. Xine is not "superior", it's different. GStreamer is a very ambitious project, and is like Windows's DirectShow. It's not just for playing files, it's an entire multimedia framework, which includes things like recording and encoding. I don't see Xine doing something like that. What's stopping you from installing MPlayer (not Windows Media Player!) or Xine or whatever? I installed MPlayer, setup some associations and everything works perfectly.
Anyway, I don't know why you say 2.4 isn't as good as 2.2. Except for Extract Here, none of the features in 2.2 are removed, some features just didn't make it to 2.4.
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
1) Not sure about memory usage, but it has never bothered me. I never look at the memory usage. If it feels fast enough, then that's good enough for me. Besides, no tool reports the right memory usage.
2) The current MIME system is severely broken in many ways. This is more of a gnome-vfs problem. They are currently still working with KDE on a new shared MIME system that's better than the current GNOME and KDE ones.
3) That's a RedHat thing. It doesn't happen on my GNOME desktop. But anyway... but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".
4) Don't look at the output of top, it's not reliable. And this is a kernel issue, not a Nautilus issue.
No, you're supposed to trust commercial software. Remember that Slashdotters always brag about how commercial software is usually higher quality? With much better GUIs because they have UI designers? And much more stability and features and security because they supposely have to listen to their customers? Well, that's what many Slashdotters always brag about anyway.
No you're not. You're not supposed to trust the FSF, you're supposed to trust commercial distributors like RedHat. The FSF is the Free Software Foundation. They don't exist to help your business, they exist to provide... well... Free Software.
Whatever happens to FSF's own servers is completely irrelevant. Your distributor is the only thing that matters.
"But, my dad did install windows XP on it himself without any hitches at all"
Then he must be extremely lucky. None of the computers that I've reinstalled Windows on worked out of the box. I always had to fiddle with drivers and other stuff after install.
"One final point, my original post has now been modded offtopic."
You should have already known by now that Slashdot moderation is completely random and that moderators are smoking some serious crack.;) Pro-MS comments that say they will get modded down get modded up, while posts like this get modded down. Trolls that flame down GNOME in favor of KDE get modded up, while people who complain that Slashdot is full of anti-KDE trolls get modded up *too*. Don't try to understand it or blame it on the Linux community, it's just the randomness and illogic that's Slashdot.
And as I've stated in another post: if you're looking for support you're better off in a support forum. I don't know any English ones but Dutch forums such as ComputerTotaal->Linux and NedLinux are extremely helpful to newbies.
Judging from your respond on my post and this post, it seems that you think Slashdot is some kind of support forum. It's not. This is a comment section for debates, not support. So it's pointless to say " Well thats the sort of response I was hoping I wouldnt get". If you want people to help you with setting up Linux then I suggest you to go to a support forum instead of a debate forum.
"Want to change your window button order to a mac style,GCONF-EDIT!"
Well of course. How many times would normal users use this option? People like my parents certainly don't care. 99% of all users don't need this option, so what point is there in bloating the UI with this option? If you are part of that 1% that do care, then you are a geek or guru. You should have no problem using gconf-editor.
"Want to enable gtk1 style "tear-off" menus, which are very useful in so many applications."
And confuses the hell out of new users. That's why they disabled it by default.
"Want to Drag and drop files from your digital camera to your freinds computer via ssh? Nope, nautilus won't let you do that because that would be "too compex". So you would have to do cut&paste your files to a tempory folder, then open a terminal and do a scp *.jpg."
This has got nothing to do with being "too complex". This is only because the feature hasn't been written yet. There is currently no scp backend for gnome-vfs. Either submit a polite (notice the word polite!) feature request, or contribute code.
"Screensavers, yes there are plenty of screensavers, but what is with the password dialog. My mum screamed you ****ing caught the computer on fire when she first seen the BURNING MONITOR logo on it. Please change that."
This is xscreensaver, not GNOME. And yes it does need change.
"The gnome desktop seriously need some real configuration options and less "HIG" propoganda."
And then other Slashdotters will flame them down for not having a HIG like MacOS does. What is it that you people want? Damned if you do, damned if you don't?
I was not a flame. I said that because I disagree. Don't act as if any normal sane person can't possibly disagree with you.
As for your "recommending Linux to dad"-example: it's wrong. You're still comparing a preinstalled Windows to an installed-from-scratch Linux. Your dad wouldn't have been able to install Windows XP from scratch either since it won't detect all your hardware out-of-the-box (or install the proper drivers). This is what you should have done: ask a friend that has used Linux for quite a while to install Linux for your dad!
That's what I've done for my parents. I've completely setup a Linux box for them, ready to use. They just turn on their computer, click on their login name and they can surf the web. Just like when you've bought a computer from the store. And they have no complaints whatsoever, everything just works.
And another thing about hardware recognition: most video cards and other stuff *are* autodetected. Some people just happen to be unlucky and using unsupported hardware. But hey: do you really expect Linux developers to develop drivers for every single piece of hardware out there? Especially for hardware without open specifications? This isn't the Mac market and Linux doen't have a monopoly. It's simply impossible to autodetect *all* hardware, there will always be unsupported hardware. This is a circular problem. Hardware manufactures don't support Linux because it's userbase is small, and the userbase doesn't grow fast enough because of unsupported hardware. This problem haunts every OS except Windows. You can't really blame it on Linux: it's a logical result of not having a large market share.
"I want an OS that works, out of the box, with MY system. Windows does this for me. Linux (so far as I have tried) does not."
Windows does this for you because it's *preconfigured and preinstalled*! It doesn't seem fair to me to compare a preconfigured and preinstalled OS to one that you install from scratch without help. Try installing Windows XP from scratch. I've had better experience with installing Linux from scratch than XP from scratch.
"Suse, RedHat, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, Gnoppix??? Which one, and why should I use it? Ive seen enough flame wars out there to simply confuse me for life."
If you've informed a bit more, you'll no doubt at least find these facts: - The most popular *desktop* distributions are RedHat, Mandrake and Suse. - FreeBSD is not Linux so you can ignore this. - Debian and Slackware are oriented towards gurus who hate wizards and GUI stuff.
So what do you do? 1) You pick out all the desktop distros. 2) You pick out the most popular ones among those distros. 3) From that list, just pick out one at random.
There, how hard was that? If you don't know what to do, just pick out a random one from the most popular distros. It's not like you can't try out another distro.
"KDE or Gnome? I dont know?! Bluecurve? What the hell?"
If this confuses you then use whatever desktop was set as default. How hard is that?
Why do you ask for help on Slashdot? Slashdot is not a support forum! I'll warn you in advance: if you get flamed down here, it's not because of "the Linux community is full of elitism" or whatever people come up with, it's simply because you're asking at the wrong place.
Not only that. The Win2k installer starts in text mode. First it has to spend 5 minutes loading all kinds of stuff and drivers from CD to memory. Then it presents you with a text mode screen about what to do with partitions. Then it copies all kinds of stuff to your Windows partition, reboot, and *then* you get a graphical installer. That is much, much worse than any modern Linux installer.
The Autopackage project is working on a framework for developing distribution-neutral packages, with a fully decentralized network for solving dependancies. This saves a lot of resources since not every distro has to maintain it's own APT repository. There's still a lot of work to be done, so feel free to join the project. We're currently working on a GUI frontend. After that, we'll concentrate on the network.
There's a difference between an individual posting a comment as individual, and an individual posting a story only to provoke the rest of the community.
I am a GNOME user, but I do not think GNOME is "superior" to KDE. It's just different, not inferior. As for QT: it's duelicensed GPL/QPL. The GPL is a Free Software/Open Source license.
Really, the fact that so many people think bad of the GNOME community is because of people like you who mindlessly flame down KDE. You're not helping the GNOME community, you're just making us look bad.
""Slashdot"? This is the comment of one individual, not the entire site management or readership."
The editors allowed that comment to be posted as story. A lot of readers just assume that GNOME is slamming Karamba without reading the article or even thinking. That makes them just as guilty.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Windows XP still doesn't have these features by default:
- Virtual desktops.
- Magnetic window snapping.
- Multiple panels with applets.
- A usable commandline (yes I do use the commandline in Windows for certain things!).
They *are* better than Win95.
And saying that "everybody needs to get together and create one great whatever" is fundamentally flawed. You assume that every human being has the same ideas, the same design philosophies, the same aestetic preferences. One size cannot fit all!
Heck, GNOME and KDE have different target groups! GNOME target the simple user who wants simplicity, while KDE targets the advanced user who wants power and configurability. They are both very different target groups.
The solution is not to make one single whatever for everybody, it's to make all implementations compatible. In other words: standardize on interfaces, not implementation. That's what the Freedesktop.org guys are doing.
You're mostly correct. They've added some new features to Metacity though. Like a Stay On Top menu item.
Oops, I messed up the link. http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=363 5
I just resize my browser window. Nothing to it.
You may want to check out this patch for the current file dialog:t opic.php? t=3635]http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.ph p?t=3635[/url]
[url=http://gnomesupport.org/forums/view
Urgh, forgot to reply to some things.
1) CMYK support
Do you have any idea how hard it is to implement properly CMYK support in the current Gimp codebase? It's *not* trivial! Remember that most Gimp developers are just volunteers, not commercial developers working full-time!
2) Weather applet
The old one was removed due to legal reasons. Or do you want the GNOME project to be sued by weather.com?
3) Wanda
And how's this even relevant?
4) Menu editor
You never had to restart the panel. Well, not on my box anyway.
5) Hidden preferences
Which preferences? Hhow many of those preferences do you change daily? How many of those preferences do normal users care about?
Think about that first.
1) File dialog.
3 5
The current GTK+ file dialog *cannot* be changed without breaking compatibility. A new file dialog is under development for GTK+ 2.4, for quite a while now. But GTK+ 2.4 will not make it before the GNOME 2.4 release.
If you want a slightly better file dialog (with Back button, Home button, Bookmarks, etc.) but is still compatible with all the current apps, take a look at this patch:
http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36
2) Galeon.
Galeon never was a part of GNOME 2. At one point they had to choose a browser so they chose Epiphany because it's goals are like GNOME's. There's nothing stopping you from installing Galeon yourself. I'm typing this in Galeon right now.
3) Extract Here
I agree with you on this. Email the File Roller author, not Slashdot.
4) Panel size
Why click 20 times? Just focus the spinbox and type in whatever number you want using your keyboard. As for the goat logo, how's that a usability issue? Users don't care what logo they see in the about box (if they look at all).
5) Media player
GStreamer doesn't "suck", it's just not finished yet. Xine is not "superior", it's different. GStreamer is a very ambitious project, and is like Windows's DirectShow. It's not just for playing files, it's an entire multimedia framework, which includes things like recording and encoding. I don't see Xine doing something like that.
What's stopping you from installing MPlayer (not Windows Media Player!) or Xine or whatever? I installed MPlayer, setup some associations and everything works perfectly.
Anyway, I don't know why you say 2.4 isn't as good as 2.2. Except for Extract Here, none of the features in 2.2 are removed, some features just didn't make it to 2.4.
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
1) Not sure about memory usage, but it has never bothered me. I never look at the memory usage. If it feels fast enough, then that's good enough for me. Besides, no tool reports the right memory usage.
2) The current MIME system is severely broken in many ways. This is more of a gnome-vfs problem. They are currently still working with KDE on a new shared MIME system that's better than the current GNOME and KDE ones.
3) That's a RedHat thing. It doesn't happen on my GNOME desktop. But anyway... but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".
4) Don't look at the output of top, it's not reliable. And this is a kernel issue, not a Nautilus issue.
No, you're supposed to trust commercial software. Remember that Slashdotters always brag about how commercial software is usually higher quality? With much better GUIs because they have UI designers? And much more stability and features and security because they supposely have to listen to their customers?
Well, that's what many Slashdotters always brag about anyway.
At least they fixed it rather quickly. With closed source programs however, there's no telling when it will get fixed, if at all.
No you're not. You're not supposed to trust the FSF, you're supposed to trust commercial distributors like RedHat.
The FSF is the Free Software Foundation. They don't exist to help your business, they exist to provide... well... Free Software.
Whatever happens to FSF's own servers is completely irrelevant. Your distributor is the only thing that matters.
"But, my dad did install windows XP on it himself without any hitches at all"
;)
Then he must be extremely lucky. None of the computers that I've reinstalled Windows on worked out of the box. I always had to fiddle with drivers and other stuff after install.
"One final point, my original post has now been modded offtopic."
You should have already known by now that Slashdot moderation is completely random and that moderators are smoking some serious crack.
Pro-MS comments that say they will get modded down get modded up, while posts like this get modded down. Trolls that flame down GNOME in favor of KDE get modded up, while people who complain that Slashdot is full of anti-KDE trolls get modded up *too*.
Don't try to understand it or blame it on the Linux community, it's just the randomness and illogic that's Slashdot.
And as I've stated in another post: if you're looking for support you're better off in a support forum. I don't know any English ones but Dutch forums such as ComputerTotaal->Linux and NedLinux are extremely helpful to newbies.
Judging from your respond on my post and this post, it seems that you think Slashdot is some kind of support forum. It's not. This is a comment section for debates, not support. So it's pointless to say " Well thats the sort of response I was hoping I wouldnt get". If you want people to help you with setting up Linux then I suggest you to go to a support forum instead of a debate forum.
"Want to change your window button order to a mac style,GCONF-EDIT!"
Well of course. How many times would normal users use this option? People like my parents certainly don't care. 99% of all users don't need this option, so what point is there in bloating the UI with this option?
If you are part of that 1% that do care, then you are a geek or guru. You should have no problem using gconf-editor.
"Want to enable gtk1 style "tear-off" menus, which are very useful in so many applications."
And confuses the hell out of new users. That's why they disabled it by default.
"Want to Drag and drop files from your digital camera to your freinds computer via ssh? Nope, nautilus won't let you do that because that would be "too compex". So you would have to do cut&paste your files to a tempory folder, then open a terminal and do a scp *.jpg."
This has got nothing to do with being "too complex". This is only because the feature hasn't been written yet. There is currently no scp backend for gnome-vfs.
Either submit a polite (notice the word polite!) feature request, or contribute code.
"Screensavers, yes there are plenty of screensavers, but what is with the password dialog. My mum screamed you ****ing caught the computer on fire when she first seen the BURNING MONITOR logo on it. Please change that."
This is xscreensaver, not GNOME. And yes it does need change.
"The gnome desktop seriously need some real configuration options and less "HIG" propoganda."
And then other Slashdotters will flame them down for not having a HIG like MacOS does. What is it that you people want? Damned if you do, damned if you don't?
I was not a flame. I said that because I disagree. Don't act as if any normal sane person can't possibly disagree with you.
As for your "recommending Linux to dad"-example: it's wrong. You're still comparing a preinstalled Windows to an installed-from-scratch Linux. Your dad wouldn't have been able to install Windows XP from scratch either since it won't detect all your hardware out-of-the-box (or install the proper drivers).
This is what you should have done: ask a friend that has used Linux for quite a while to install Linux for your dad!
That's what I've done for my parents. I've completely setup a Linux box for them, ready to use. They just turn on their computer, click on their login name and they can surf the web. Just like when you've bought a computer from the store. And they have no complaints whatsoever, everything just works.
And another thing about hardware recognition: most video cards and other stuff *are* autodetected. Some people just happen to be unlucky and using unsupported hardware. But hey: do you really expect Linux developers to develop drivers for every single piece of hardware out there? Especially for hardware without open specifications? This isn't the Mac market and Linux doen't have a monopoly. It's simply impossible to autodetect *all* hardware, there will always be unsupported hardware.
This is a circular problem. Hardware manufactures don't support Linux because it's userbase is small, and the userbase doesn't grow fast enough because of unsupported hardware. This problem haunts every OS except Windows. You can't really blame it on Linux: it's a logical result of not having a large market share.
"I want an OS that works, out of the box, with MY system. Windows does this for me. Linux (so far as I have tried) does not."
Windows does this for you because it's *preconfigured and preinstalled*! It doesn't seem fair to me to compare a preconfigured and preinstalled OS to one that you install from scratch without help.
Try installing Windows XP from scratch. I've had better experience with installing Linux from scratch than XP from scratch.
"Suse, RedHat, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, Gnoppix??? Which one, and why should I use it? Ive seen enough flame wars out there to simply confuse me for life."
If you've informed a bit more, you'll no doubt at least find these facts:
- The most popular *desktop* distributions are RedHat, Mandrake and Suse.
- FreeBSD is not Linux so you can ignore this.
- Debian and Slackware are oriented towards gurus who hate wizards and GUI stuff.
So what do you do?
1) You pick out all the desktop distros.
2) You pick out the most popular ones among those distros.
3) From that list, just pick out one at random.
There, how hard was that? If you don't know what to do, just pick out a random one from the most popular distros. It's not like you can't try out another distro.
"KDE or Gnome? I dont know?! Bluecurve? What the hell?"
If this confuses you then use whatever desktop was set as default. How hard is that?
Why do you ask for help on Slashdot? Slashdot is not a support forum!
I'll warn you in advance: if you get flamed down here, it's not because of "the Linux community is full of elitism" or whatever people come up with, it's simply because you're asking at the wrong place.
Not only that. The Win2k installer starts in text mode. First it has to spend 5 minutes loading all kinds of stuff and drivers from CD to memory. Then it presents you with a text mode screen about what to do with partitions. Then it copies all kinds of stuff to your Windows partition, reboot, and *then* you get a graphical installer.
That is much, much worse than any modern Linux installer.
The Autopackage project is working on a framework for developing distribution-neutral packages, with a fully decentralized network for solving dependancies. This saves a lot of resources since not every distro has to maintain it's own APT repository. There's still a lot of work to be done, so feel free to join the project. We're currently working on a GUI frontend. After that, we'll concentrate on the network.
"because in all honestly, on any platform other than Linux most of these toolkit libraries have no simple install mechanism and tend to be buggy."
./configure && make install won't work out-of-the-box for some reason?
You mean
There's a difference between an individual posting a comment as individual, and an individual posting a story only to provoke the rest of the community.
1) Dashboard is written in C#. gDesklets is written in Python.
2) Dashboard is just a fun experiment by Nat Friedman, not an official product.
I am a GNOME user, but I do not think GNOME is "superior" to KDE. It's just different, not inferior.
As for QT: it's duelicensed GPL/QPL. The GPL is a Free Software/Open Source license.
Really, the fact that so many people think bad of the GNOME community is because of people like you who mindlessly flame down KDE. You're not helping the GNOME community, you're just making us look bad.
""Slashdot"? This is the comment of one individual, not the entire site management or readership."
The editors allowed that comment to be posted as story. A lot of readers just assume that GNOME is slamming Karamba without reading the article or even thinking. That makes them just as guilty.