JanneM writes
"Gnome 2.4 is arriving early september. Sayamindu Dasgupta has installed the 2.3.5 development release to see what's in store, and has written a very nice overview of the upcoming release." Update: 08/14 16:06 GMT by
M : The author has provided a
mirror.
Re:GNOME vs KDE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:KDE is WAY ahead! (Score:3, Insightful)
If that was the case, is Windows 3.1 more advanced software that a Linux box with kernel 2.6.0-test3?
It is a well known trend that competing software vendors may increase their version increments to appear current with their competitors.
For example, Netscape 6 (as opposed to Netscape 5) was released because MSIE was already at version 6. RedHat 9 came out after RedHat 8 (there was no 8.1) presumably to keep abreast with Mandrake 9.
GNOME is a mature desktop environment. Their software is good enough - their is no need to resort to such version jumping. It suits some people, but not others. My (Red) Hat goes off to them for not needing to keep their versions in sync with KDE.
Mike
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GNOME vs KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
Example: File Dialog. The Gnome file dialog is the most hideous and counter-intuitive piece of software I've ever seen. With the KDE file dialog, not only can I navigate easier, it's tied to their IO slaves, so I can save to FTP sites, SMB shares, etc. Pretty much anything.
With the GTK/Gnome dialog, I'm usually cursing and grumbling as I clumsily navigate around. And the programs that constantly reset the dialog to your home directory, even after you've called the dialog and navigated a few levels in, are way annoying.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)
No, "full screen" mode is not an option in most cases as the scaling usually makes the image look, well, wrong. Also, not all players provide such an option, especially embedded players in browsers (some don't even allow double size).
Re:CTRL ALT +/- anyone ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless I'm missing something, this shortcuts just change the resolution of the viewport, not the size of the desktop (eg, I have this configured at home to switch between 1280x1024,1024x768,800x600). It works fine, but the desktop is always 1280x1024, and scrolls around when I use other resolutions). Still pretty neat, since I use this to use movies/activate the tv-out in the geforce4.
But changing the desktop size on-the-fly would be cool, at least for windoz users, which are used to it.
Dunno if it changed in XFree 4.3, since I have it installed only in the laptop, and this fscking TFT does not allow me to change the resolution (vsync goes haywire).
cheers.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
If you have over a 100 gnome desktops in your department, you don't want to field "can you please change my resolution" requests from your users, trust me.
why are they bothering (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, folks, isn't this why we moved to Linux in the first place? To get away from bloat in the name of userfriendliness? What happened to K.I.S.S.? What happened to having one program do one thing? What happened to the Unix Philosophy? Nowadays we have all these Explorer wannabe programs that purport to do everything you want and more all in one program -- and I've tried them all -- and I've never found them to be anything but clumsy, compared to the elegant tools of the old school.
A GUI browser, I can understand completely. Ditto word processor, spreadsheets, etc. But for a filemanager? If you're going to insist on a GUI for that, please don't complain about bloat.
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta) (Score:4, Insightful)
How many of all those preferences actually make sense?
For example, the preferences in the Pager applet that lets you tweak for a certain window manager make no sense. They're the "unbreak me" type of preferences. Things like that should be handled automatically.
Another one is startup notification. Why would anyone not want it? Why should it be disable-able?
And there's the Nautilus desktop preferences. A lot of users got confused by the sudden disappearence of their desktop and don't know how to get them back. Besides, this is a preference that only power users with old hardward would want to use, and is only set once.
And most people who complain about the lack of preferences are geeks and power users who are used to lots of preferences. Well sorry to say this to you, but you are not GNOME's target group anymore. GNOME is now targeting normal users that want simplicity and don't want to be flooded with config options.
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta) (Score:3, Insightful)
Warning: small rant follows
This double standard about compatibility really gets to me. On one hand, you have projects like Gnome which use the same convention as a previous version to insure backward compatability. Then, when a company like Microsoft keeps DOS in its Win95,98,ME line, everyone bitches about the relic, and how they should remove it. Either we want projects to maintain backward compatability, or we don't. Which is it?
Re:GNOME vs KDE (Score:1, Insightful)
This is so much fun. Really, my post != sarcasm. For me, Linux has brought fun alive again in my computers. Linux is like getting birthday presents inside of birthday presents every single day. Keep the Open/Free/Libre model alive, everyone. There were many factors which made me want to switch away from Windows, but the most unexpected one which I didn't truly discover until I started using Linux all the time is that all this choice is intoxicating, is so much pleasure.
A year ago, in a computer users group I belong to people were discussing Linux and someone said, "I don't know why anyone would want to use Linux, it's so much work". No one really disagreed with him. A year later, now that I have my Linux sea legs, during a similar discussion I was able to say, "If you like computers...if you like tweaking...if you're an explorer and you like new things...Linux isn't "hard work". Not at all - this is *play*, people! This stuff is FUN"
So go at it with your Gnome vs. KDE, or your "I used to be able to do this with Gnome 2.2, but not with 2.4. To some of us out here, this plethora of choices is what makes this all so enjoyable. I LOVE LINUX!
Re:Nautilus? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing inherently wrong with managing files graphically. The ROX-Filer does an excellent job of combining shell-like globbing with click-and-drag ease and is particularly handy for managing images. ROX-Filer is small, doesn't eat up gobs of memory, runs fast and does one job (file managing) well. Nautilus might be prettier, but it needs a lot of improvement in both bloat and actual file managing before I'd use it full-time.
Of course, for any serious heavy-duty data management (e.g. take all the PNGs in directory A, shrink them by 50%, despeckle, convert to JPEGs and move to directory B) a shell will always beat a graphical pointy clicky tool. But I see no reason not to use both and do so on a regular basis.
Re: why are they bothering (Score:3, Insightful)
> Gnome's gone downhill since 1.4 in the area of user customizations. The ability to customize behavior is almost non existant compared to what we had in 1.4. I could tweak and adjust 1.4 to create a very cool environment for myself. With the 2.x series, almost all of the capability is gone. It's now just a mindless environment for dummies. Gnome's stated that they're aiming low and catering for the dumber computer users. There was soo much potential for it to develop into a really powerful environment and then those silly studies were conducted and the rest is history..... Oh well.
My feelings exactly. After a lot of work I finally got a GARNOME-based GNOME 2.something working mostly to my liking, but I had to use not-latest-releases for some components because they're still taking features out.
I've been a GNOMER since 0.4, but I expect to have to drop them if they don't start putting some features back in. Sure wish I had the time to fork off a power-users' desktop. (Hmmm, "PUD". I guess priority #1 would be to find a better acronym.)
Another option might be to start a movement to vote certain doctrinaire individuals off the board next time they have elections.
Re:Nautilus? (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows has had the concept of "mount" and "umount" since the first day it support CDROMs. But no one ever knew it because the hid the automounting from you. But it was there.
Then came along USB storage devices. Suddenly Microsoft had to bite the bullet and introduce the concept to the user. Plug in a USB disk and it automounts, no problem. Pull it out and you've got problems. Twenty minutes and ten miles later, you realize that your memory stick doesn't have all of the data on it that you copied over. You forgot to umount the device! Which is why Microsoft puts a little icon on the tray and tells you that you have to explicitly unmount it.
And don't even get me started on automatically executing applications on the CDROM! Automatically playing audio CD's is annoying enough, but automatically running software off of foreign media is a security nightmare.
UI design (Score:3, Insightful)
<rant>
What the hell kind of user interface is that? It should either say "No" and "Yes", or it should say "Cancel" and "Ok". Mixing the two paradigms just looks confusing.
It's consistency problems like this that start giving Linux and other open source projects a bad name.
</rant>
(Not to say that commercial apps are immune - they certainly have their own fair share of usability issues.)
gui == bloat? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can install Windows. Even Windows 2000. And I can have a GUI file-manager that does damn near everything.
And get this. I can do it all on less that 100MB of RAM. Unlike nautilus, which, according to my system, requires 180 - 220 MB RAM at all times. This sucks, because I'm on an old box with 256 Physical. That means that I am constantly swapping. a lot.
and yes, the idea is to remove bloat in the name of userfriendliness. Not eliminate userfriendlyness. There is a way to have friendly apps that dont take a gig of RAM to run.
-- Stop sending me HTML mail. telnet is my POP client and I am not an HTML/4.0-compatible rendering engine