A User's First Look at GNOME 2.0 550
Gentu writes: "OSNews has just published a review of the Gnome 2.0 desktop environment and its verdict is not so positive. The author feels that the new version is limited in many ways and with a UI not well designed."
first try: (Score:2, Interesting)
Bad UI.... not a suprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
Gnome has a large bunch of talented developers, BUT there is a massive difference between that and being a talented HCI person. There are two key phrases that come to mind
WILI and KISS
The latter is the word famous Keep It Simple Stupid which isn't being obeyed by Gnome (or KDE IMO) and they are tending more towards WILI which is the Well I Like It approach to design. This is normal with a bunch of developers who knock up a GUI and whose response to critisism is the phrase mentioned above and the intemation that anyone who doesn't agree is wrong.
It is hard to see how a talented HCI person could actually get involved in an open source project as HCI is not at all about writing the code, its about the approach and ethos, and most importantly telling other people what to do and what not to do. Open Source is about individual expression, good HCI is actually the exact opposite, the best interfaces are those that you don't notice, they just do the job and you are never wowed by the pretty colours and never annoyed by anything.
Now as to why MS can't manage it I don't know, but for an Open Source GUI to be a good one it would require a non-developer to be the lead.
Is it possible to Cut'N'Paste yet ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Menu choices (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm also less than keen on what I have experienced of Nautilus so far and hearing that turning it off presents a naked desktop doesn't do much for my confidence in this product.
*sigh* I guess I'll be waiting for the next release before upgrading.
Some valid things, and a lot of not-so valid (Score:5, Interesting)
First, for me, Gnome2 is far faster than Gnome1.4. This goes for most individual applications, as well as the desktop overall.
Lack of options: Well, yes and no. There has been a serious attempt at providing sensible defaults for a lot of stuff, and hide away rare and/or strange options into the gconf system. While some people like being able to tweak their desktops to hell and back, for many users it is just plain confusing to have as ridiculously many options everywhere as Gnome1 had. Note that for those serious about tweaking, gconf is there for your time-wasting pleasure.
Gedit: I've tried repeatedly, but I am unable to duplicate the marking thing he talks about.
Galeon has continued to work flawlessly for me, as have all other Gnome1 apps I have. he mentions that he does not have a Gnome1 installation; that may be an explanation as to why Gnome1 apps do not work...
As for 'scattered settings' - huh? I get all settings neatly in the 'Desktop Preferences' menu. That certainly includes things like xscreensaver settings and pretty much everything else he gripes about in this area. I do not have a 'Desktop theme', as he seems to have, but just the 'theme' option - as it should be.
I get the feeling there is something rather wrong with the reviewers setup; something like an incomplete install, or a mix of older and newer packages or something like it.
/Janne
Depends on the person. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're like me and you like try things for yourself, then you're probably already downloading it, and you probably already know that you're more different from the average person than you think, and you already know that you are constantly surprised by how much you disagree with reviews of this kind.
Seriously, I would recommend that everyone tries gnome 2.0 if you have time.
Talk about laugh (Score:2, Interesting)
Windowmaker loads in a fraction of a second on my 300mhz uniprocessor box.
TWW
Err, Well, mostly on topic (Score:3, Interesting)
How well does Gnome2.0 work without Nautilus? I've never been a big fan of Nautilus and so always removed as much dependence of Nautilus as I feel safe removing from my instalations of Gnome. I've noticed that as I've updated Gnome, that Nautilus has been more and more integrated. For instance Gnome tries to get you to use nautilus to navigate to different control panels, Fortunately I was able to dig up the Gnome Control Center utility last time I updated. Anyways, with Gnome now using a new and incompatible GTK do we lose the gnome control center in favor of the not so nice Nautilus interface?
It's a shame if we have to use Nautilus. One of the reasons I liked Gnome so much was that you weren't really forced to use much of anything. You didn't have to use Sawfish(or now metacity) for your window manager and you didn't have to use GMC or Nautilus(I prefer an XTerm window for the most part)
Thanks for any light you may shed on my questions. And excuse me for being a lazy ass and not doing to much research b4 asking;-)
Steve
Re:Bad UI.... not a suprise... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, GNOME 2 took some drastic UI steps which in fact did come from the actual usability testing. For example, the gnome control center has been eviscerated and turned into something that's actually navigable. And something that the author doesn't like (quote: 'The menu settings now only have 3 options'. Duh!)
Basically, I just strongly disagree with both the tone and the content of the review.
--
Re:Gnome and KDE are more or less the same these d (Score:3, Interesting)
a stable desktop
easy to configure, out of the box solutions for multimedia
applications with fast response times
So far gnome seems to implement only the latter, while KDE scores points in the first two departments. KDE is becoming faster though. And yes, win2K (and possibly MacOSX) seems to own all these points, but is not
free, open source. as gnome and KDE are.
Ah, memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing coherent about the UI design, hunting around to find configuration panels, getting messages that tell the user to download this package or that package (which leads directly to Dependency Hell).
These days, I use Mac OS X. Sure, it's UI isn't perfect. And I know, it's an apples to oranges comparison, Free Software to commercial. But man, do I ever enjoy using a coherent desktop with one place to change settings (System Preferences). No fuss! No muss! I'm far more productive.
And my Linux server continues to hum away in the basement, quietly powering my website.
Life is good.
Re:Gnome and KDE are more or less the same these d (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bad UI.... not a suprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
Before doing such criticism you should take a look at what Gnome is currently doing in the user interface and usability realms. I would say the whole point of Gnome 2 is eliminating a lot of the creaping featurism that had acumulated along the time in the user interface. The new Gnome 2 user interface is *much* simpler, and has been designed with the KISS principle as one of its main driving forces.
Taking a look at the GNOME Usability Project [gnome.org] may give you a better idea of how things are being done right now in Gnome. The mailing list archives may be specially useful to see the change in mentality. Enjoy!
Much different experience (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Gnome and KDE are more or less the same these d (Score:3, Interesting)
Regards,
Tobias
Re:first try: (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, I still:
1) Cannot get AA fonts working (wasn't that supposed to be a big selling point of G2?)
2) Cannot switch window managers
3) Cannot even run the Sawfish WM config utilities (some LISP error; thanks)
4) Cannot get GTK themes to change properly on all gtk apps (and the metatheme configurator just screws things up even worse)
I was a huge fan of Gnome until this 2.0 release. It really is sloppy. Unfortunately, I think the main culprit is the over-use of "themes". For example, ion my desktop right now I have about 5 different themable things that just don't look good together: GTK, Sawfish, GKrellm, Xmms, and Mozilla.
I really want a coherent look. Even Windows'll give you that.
Re:Talk about laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
FVWM ~4.0 seconds
Gnome 2.0 ~25 seconds
KDE 3.0 ~1 minute
hell, all i usez it for it to open mozilla anyway. I'll take waimea.
Quick Analysis (Score:4, Interesting)
KDE3.x: Slow... very slow. Too many virtual functions need to have code relocated at runtime. Luckilly This site [sf.net] is addressing some fundamental linking issues with C++ [among other things] on GNU tools. In fact the GNU tools are starting to be built with some of these optimizations now as was evident on my RedHat box at work. FreeBSD needs to try to do the same since its my main development platform [luckilly its a dual Athlon MP 1600 so *nothing* seems slow there
I spend most of my time on Mac OS X. The concept of being able to run the Microsoft Office Suite [which I actually don't yet on my Mac] on a Unix environment with 75% or more of my favorite tools either in place or on their way is very attractive. Let's face it nothing does DOC like Word [thank god!] and for compatibility purposes with all of my coworkers there just isn't a real substitute for everything it does. We use the revision control built into Word and other things so please don't offer Abiword, StarOffice, OpenOffice or KWord as alternatives. You can suggest till your blue in the face but you can't make my company change its stance on what tools must be used.... Its a fight not worth fighting based on my experiences with the alternatives out there. [I write a lot of stuff in LaTeX now... then I cut n' paste to Word when I have to... Time consuming and stupid yes but I don't have Word for OS X yet...
I never got around to experiencing BeOS first hand but I heard it was a thing of beauty... There has been a fair amount of talk about adding the BeOS file system to OpenDarwin's CVS but I don't think anyone has committed the time to it yet.
Advice to KDE: Please please please don't get too bloaty... [application duplication seems to be a bit of a problem there... Why does the standard source distribution have to include these things anyway?] I love IOSlaves and KParts and think they are uber-cool but the end user doesn't give a shit about any of that because it doesn't directly enhance their experience... just gives the developer a woody.
Advice to GNOME: As a developer I do not agree with C as the tool for doing Object Oriented Code... especially when the manner in which things are being wrapped up is very C++ like. GTKmm has a long way to go before it can do what Qt can last I checked so I think that if you code for GNOME and want full access you must use C [correct me if I am wrong please... its been a while and I want to be as fair as possible]. I have to agree with some of the Author's UI comments if his experience was authentic and correctly reflects the actual situation. I still think GNOME is prettier than the KDE defaults but there are very good things coming in that respect it seems from what I have been able to follow on the mailing lists. [again I am unfortunately biased due to my KDE involvement].
Advice for OS X... yes.. sometimes you just have to realize that indeed your shit can also stink. The only major boo-boo I remember was the iTunes installer clobbering some linux partitions... That was naughty but obviously not a test case for Apple 'in-house' or it would have been caught. Live and learn! I understand some people have trouble with the lookupd for OS X dropping out on them from time to time [though I haven't seen this myself yet.] but that's not really a UI comment is it? Hmm, I guess keep doing what you're doing and maybe think about allowing users to pick schemes other than Aqua or Graphite in the appearances menu. Don't rush it though... I love the quality thus far and can deal with a minimal set of choices when it keeps the UI simple and straighforward [yes I still use the single button mouse on OS X because its actually possible to do so due to a good UI design around simplicity.]
I'd invite comments and criticism if I didn't know already that I was in for it.... so go ahead and get your shot in... I don't care - its only slashdot
Dave
Cohesive Interface design (Score:1, Interesting)
We are 100% legal with no stolen software or Copyright infringement in any way, not an easy task, I am sure you will appreciate. The trick for us is to have and interface that my visually impaired wife can use easily. Our first problem was the cursor, we have an nVidia based card and it insists on using a hardware accellerated cursor and we cannot get it to go larger. I know about the "Option "SWcursor" "on"" setting, it's broken, hangs my box.
The second problem is that the cummunity points us to "screen magnifiers" which are useless because we still cannot find the cursor in the first place. On the plus side our use of KDE has allowed us to integrate Ctrl++ shortcut everywhere to enlarge the font on any window, including the same shortcut on Mozilla completes the feel.
Our abortive attempt at Gnome did not give us the same feeling of completeness as KDE, whilst the shortcuts are not as all pervasive as we would like, it is at least a step in the right direction. Gnome, for us, has some way to go.
However, the good news is, we know that every few months the rules change and something new appears, sometimes the purpose of a journey is not to arrive.
Re:configurability (Score:2, Interesting)
I like to have choices, but I like to to have the choice, not to make decisions (esp. about trivialities), at least sometimes, too.
Would a big "reset-to-default-desktop"-button help?
Re:Gnome and KDE are more or less the same these d (Score:5, Interesting)
Aqua's keyboard navigability: It's well known that keyboard shortcuts will improve your efficiency when using a GUI. Every single part of a GUI should be accessible via the keyboard, so that experienced users can be as effective as possible, using these. These shortcuts must act consistently throughout the entire GUI, and properly marked (like underlining the character that is part of a shortcut in menu items). Moving from one widget to the next, scrolling, opening menus, starting applications et.c. should all be possible via the keyboard. Text widgets would also benefit from having more shortcut keys, like ^U for "kill line", ^W for "erase word" et.c. In many of the applications of MacOS X, most of this functionality is non-existant.
Multiple desktops: it's obviousely an advantage to be able to have multiple workspaces running at once. Users not wanting this feature can easily refrain from using it or disable it (or not enable it). Aqua does not provide this feature at all.
Configurable look (themes): if you for some reason can't stand the default look of Aqua, or want any other color than blue or gray, you are out of luck. As far as I've been able to tell, there's no way to change the appearance of GUI widgets (beyond the colors blue and gray), as opposed to virtually all open source widget sets I've seen. You might argue that themeability slows down the GUI, but that can easily be resolved by providing a binary interface (i.e. styles are dynamically loadable libraries) like KDE does (and Mosfet Liquid and Keramik use).
Scriptability: You mention AppleScript, and claims it is like having shellscript for GUI. No it isn't: you are bound to use that specific language. They could easily have supplied a network protocol (like KDE's DCOP) or any other more generic interface. Since they didn't, everything has to go to this dreadful language. Any experienced programmer would instantly fear "an easy-to-use, approachable, English-like language".
Stupid messages: "You need to click here to continue" (why not just friggin' do whatever needs to be done, instead of requiring user interaction at every possible step?), "An error has occured" (did you ever hear about strerror()?) and similar. While many of these aren't severly obstructive, they are nevertheless very annoying signs of sloppy programming and interface design.
Widget usefulness: in certain applications (most notably the QuickTime player), completely untraditional widgets are used for the sake of visual appearance. Many of these widgets seem like they're designed to be handled with a physical hand, and not with a pointing device and keyboard (like knobs and switches).
Re:Bad UI.... not a suprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
That may have been true in the past, but it certainly isn't know, and you'll notice it when you use GNOME 2.0. One of the most important goals of GNOME 2.0 was to improve usability and keeping things simple. Most, if not all, of GNOME should now follow the Human Interface Guidelines [gnome.org] and avoid redundant and confusing ways of configuring exotic options that clutter the interface.
Pardon me for saying this, but it seems that you are not basing anything you say on GNOME 2.0 or what the current state of affairs is.
(And yes, what the review says in this case is basically pointless as it is based on a broken install [slashdot.org] with lots of cruft that isn't there in vanilla GNOME 2.0, and lots of pieces from vanilla 2.0 missing).
Re:the usual whining (Score:2, Interesting)
From the review:
From the previous post:
And a more perfect example of the kind of geek-superiority that people accuse the Linux community of I don't think I've seen in a long time.
Here's a newsflash for you: people don't care about technical quibbles like this. Imagine going to a new car dealership and finding out that the car you're looking at doesn't come with a Stereo. Upon commenting on this fact, people tell you, "Its still a good car, that's a packaging issue -- check out the engine timing! Besides, look at the huge hole in the dash into which you could install your own stereo (or even two or three of them) -- most of the wiring is even there for you!"
This review spent a lot of time talking about usability. If somebody does the "normal" things when obtaining a package, especially one designed (as a desktop is) to hide complexity and produce a more usable system than before it was installed, and it doesn't work as it could be reasonably expected to -- then there is a problem.
Sure, the internal code may be fine. But from a user's perspective, Gnome is Gnome. You could have the best algorithms on the planet, but if they're not enabled, or not included until you do some steps that only the developers know about, nobody will care. Okay, this is a packaging issue. You know what? This was a review of the whole package -- code, help, defaults, et ceteara. Including packaging.
Then again, far be it for anyone to offer a rational objection to a favored OSS project... That might lead to open discourse or, worse yet, improvements. Shame on all reviewers.
-RichardUn less you *use* your computer (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't anybody actually *use* their computers? When I start (kde) I leave it up for days (on a laptop, no less) and I *use* it. I write code, lot's of it. I write mail. Etc etc.
However, I can't help but wonder, what do you types do? Do you just grab a stopwatch and repeatedly time how long it takes to start different WMs? Is the whole goal of modern computing to provide the most obscure functionality as fast as possible? As nice as fluxbox and windowmaker are, I'll take KDEs rock solid APIs and frameworks any day, even if they take ~30 seconds to start on my little thinkpad. But of course, *using* my computer isn't very l33t of me, is it?
sawfish 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
The panels work ok, but there are some serious quirks. If you make a panel with no menu, and you remove the hide buttons... you can no longer configure that panel. Only way I found to fix it is to add a menu to another panel, drag it to the menuless panel, then you can use the menu for configuring the panel. A pretty large oversight if you ask me.
The other extremely annoying panel problem is... on logout/login, the panel completely forgets the order of the launchers on it! If that's not a huge oversight, I don't know what is.
Now for my biggest gripe. Sawfish 2.0. Someone was smoking some serious crack. I don't mean to be mean, but it has absolutely been destroyed. It is completely useless. It plain sucks, terribly. First of all, it's crashy, very crashy. See the bugzilla database on gnome.org, serious crash bugs in sawfish 2.0, definately NOT release material. Second, sawfish was designed with extreme configurability in mind, every aspect of sawfish is meant to be configurable, but now they have completely removed 90% of the configuration options. They supposedly tried to choose sane defaults, but with something as configurable as sawfish, that's simply not going to happen. There are some serious problems with the default settings. The new sawfish control panel... what can I say, it plain sucks. The tabs are across the top now, and you have to use the dumb little arrow buttons to scroll across the stupid things. This makes it an extreme pain to search for settings.
No favorites menu. I always found this very useful, I always put all the little utilities I often use in there. It's gone, and there is no equivalent replacement. Now your stuck browsing through the damn apps menu. A very poor decision in my opinion.
Now those problems are all extremely annoying, time draining, and basically make gnome 2.0, simply put, not ready for prime time. It's simply not release quality at this point, not even close.
There are some positive aspects though, quite positive actually. Fonts, gnome2.0's font rendering is really, really great. Fonts are rendered very cleanly, not blurry looking, and not jaggy, they look very good. Speed, despite what the reviewer was saying, gnome 2.0 is pretty speedy, speedier than 1.4. It loads up really quick, probably 4 or 5 seconds on a reasonably fast machine. The menus are much less cluttered by default, a plus in my book, they were simply full of junk before. GTK+ 2.x is much better. The default theme actually looks pretty good, file selectors work better, save dialogs don't wack the filename when you change directories(!).
All in all, I have to say that I'm pretty disapointed. It's not a lost cause, but it seems to me that gnome may be heading in the wrong direction.
And that's all I have to say about that.
And this is a surprise how? (Score:4, Interesting)
GNOME 2.0 has been rushed out of the door, just like GNOME 1.0 was.
The 1.4->2.0 development cycle has been a lot longer than originally anticipated, due to a big influx of developers (Thanks Sun!) and lots of core systems changing quite radically, coupled with some pretty piss-poor project management (now where have I heard THAT before?). In the mean time, KDE has been gaining a very large amount of traction as the most popular Linux desktop, and Sun has been wanting to push Solaris 9 out the door ASAP.
So GNOME had to release now, really, if they had any hope of keeping the users they have and for Sun to get Solaris 9 out approximately on schedule.
KDE underwent a similar change about 2 years ago, in the 1.1.2->2.0 transition, and not everyone was convinced then that KDE would survive, but it did, and look where they are now. Of course, KDE had the advantage of doing it first - although KDE 2.0 was far from perfect UI-wise, it had a considerable lead on GNOME in changing to a component-based architecture, so there was a very big Unique Selling Point for it at the time which GNOME 2.0 does not now have.
It took KDE 2 further major releases to turn the framework they built into a really nice desktop, and I suspect it will be similar for GNOME. The big question is whether the framework that was built for GNOME 2.0 will be good enough for their future plans... time will tell.
Personally I'm sticking with KDE3 for now. There are certainly issues with KDE, mostly in terms of speed and size, which themselves mostly stem from the choice of C++ rather than C, but these are being fixed one by one. KDE3 is now quite snappy, actually quite a bit faster than GNOME 2.0 on my Debian machine once you've got past logging in (all those double-buffered GTK+ 2.0 widgets are smooth and dandy, but they sure as hell ain't fast). Also, right now, KDE absolutely has the edge on both functionality and usability. Konqueror in particular is way out in front - indeed, for me at least, it's the best file manager on ANY platform. Nautilus is good, don't get me wrong, but Konq is breathtaking.
I'll reassess the situation when GNOME 2.2 is out. 2.2 should be the first mature release of the new framework, then we'll really get to see whether it's good enough to compete. I'm hopeful, a lot of the new framework looks good but either needs loose ends tidying up or needs someone to use it properly. Let's keep our fingers crossed. KDE is a class act to go up against though - they crank out the releases on time every 6 months, they seem to have a consistent vision of where they're going, they know where their flaws are, and they have yet to make a serious error. GNOME can't afford any more releases like this one if it wants to stay in the game.
Re:Gnome and KDE are more or less the same these d (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh?
I use OS X. I use it because i like the functionality, i like the power it gives me, and i like the stability. I hate the interface. I hate it. And the only reason i hate it is that the animations and gooeyness can't be turned off.
Kindly explain to me how i can turn off real-time window resizing? Or even better, make it so that it's only realtime with a modifier key? That's the most sluggish, useless animation of all. It's useful sometimes, but the rest of the time it gets in the way and makes a basic UI task clumsy.
I have sight problems. I have *REAL ISSUES* trying to use an interface in which everything is blurry and antialiased and soft fuzzy gray. I get headaches, and my eyes start unfocusing uncontrollably, when i use Aqua for too long. It helps a lot that there are (technically illegal) third-party themes that i can download and install. Once i do that, 99% of my problems go away. However, i still have wierd, semi-dislexic moments where my eyes tend to go very slightly unfocused after a long time in an os x window, because of the borders between windows. The window borders in os x are very very faint gray lines with shadows. You can turn the shadows off, but there is no way to make the window borders thicker or darker. By any themeing method. At all. How can i turn that off? How can i get thicker, darkgray/black borders? OS9-style draggable borders would be best of all.
I like the transparent menus. But they just take too long to open. I want to be able to click on a menu and see it immediately. How can i turn off the menu transparency and windows, and make it so that they are a simple overlay rather than being rendered as seperate windows within quartz?
I access my computer over VNC a lot. VNC has this bug that causes it to screw up hardcore with some viewers when exposed to the throbbing OK button animations. How do i turn this OK button animation off, for my benefit when i am in VNC?
If i could just click a button and go back to the system 7 visual interface with OS X's power&stability, i would. But apple doesn't give me that option. Themeing may not be "useful" to most people, but for me it's NECESSARY to be able to turn off those omnipresent horizontal gray lines with text on top. It makes me angry that Apple takes such a paternalistic attitude toward this. No, people don't "need" complete interface control (though i need some). But when you get down to it, people don't "need" computers. We use computers because it's more enjoyable than using typewriters, pen&paper, etc. Apple is making that experience painful for some people by choosing to use an interface where whether you like it or not is a matter of opinion, and then not giving people the power of choice, when they have a perfectly good themeing architecture they refuse to release the specs to. At least with WinXP, you can go back to the non-bubbly interface style..
Re:no kidding. (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel that experienced users will have fewer problems with Gnome. E.g., to extract a tar file on KDE one right clicks on it and chooses: extract here. Under Gnome one opens a text window, cds to the appropriate place, and issues `tar -zxvf some.name
(OK, that was a compressed tar file.)
Gnome doesn't seem to be any less powerful, but it's a bit less obvious in how to use it. (I rate myself intermediate.)
KDE concentrates more on ease of use. Gnome concentrates more on conceptual elegance. I think that they are very important to each other, and each should strive to learn from the other's strong points.
It feels as if Gnome should be more adapted to use on less powerful computers, but I haven't really tried. To the extent that it have tried, this seems to be accurate. (Of course, really limited computers don't even hav X Window.)
IS GNOME 2.0 WORTH THE UPGRADE (Score:1, Interesting)
Please explain why...