Gnome 2.4 Release(d) 566
chendo writes "Gnome 2.4 will be released today. Here is the link to the article on Ars Technica. GNOME 2.4 is the result of quite a bit of work toward complying with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which mainly focus on user interface consistency and predictability. This release has also undergone some general polish, and it can finally be said that the GNOME 2 platform has achieved maturity with this release. The Epiphany web browser, a major new component of GNOME, also makes its debut with this release. (From Footnotes)"
hopefully (Score:0, Interesting)
That's great! Accessibility? (Score:1, Interesting)
Browsers... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure an integrated browser is handy, but wouldnt it be worth putting the same effort into an existing browser like Mozilla Firebird instead?
Re:That's great! Accessibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, GNOME has already won awards [gnomedesktop.org] for its accessibility work, and it has a mature framework for dealing with this (disclaimer: I've never tried it, just heard people praising it).
The article itself points this out in two [arstechnica.com] places [arstechnica.com].
Re:Still major usability issues... (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't insert them at random. It inserts them beside similar buttons. At least, Debian testing's Gnome (version 2.2) does.
If you open a Galeon window, then a terminal window, then a FreeCell window, then open a second Galeon window, the button for the second Galeon window will appear in the taskbar beside the first Galeon button. That way, you don't have to go searching through 14 buttons to find the similar ones.
Windows XP does this, too, if I remember rightly. Of course, every time I see a default Windows XP install, I want to gouge my eyes out in horror.....
current gnome 2.x issues (any devels listening?). (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus no d'n'd windows across desktops. Pager sucks for this at 16x12.
Gnome-panel regularly poops out at shutdown.
Metacity? Feh. Bring back sawfish (and I mean updated!). The introduction of predictability has led to a sharp decrease in customisability.
I have on average 20 terminals open. If one dies (e.g. because it's a shell window on a machine not available from my current location at start-up), down go the others. This is wholly unacceptable. Because of this, I almost switched to KDE - but it only supports 16 desktops which is Fucking Lame. Excuse me.
Other than those few issues, Gnome (2.x) is very stable, reliable, and well-featured. Keep up the good work (and please attend to that terminal problem).
Not Really (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe if the WM's would design some sort of common application interface so things would look right on all the WM's that confirmed to the standard then we'd see a lot more x-compatibility in those applications.
And why does each WM have a seperate browser/file explorer? Just keep the explorer seperate from web browsing (Besides it's a MicroSoft idiocy) and we can all use Mozilla/Opera or whatever else.
GNOME section icon (Score:5, Interesting)
GNOME: Armageddon (Score:1, Interesting)
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com] [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org] [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org] [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are dir
Worst problems of Gnome (Score:2, Interesting)
There still is no common compound document model between kde and gnome.
Besides that, Gnome has become excellent. Congratulations to the developers.
Re:Still major usability issues... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the great thing about multiple desktops. It took me a little while to get used to, but I can't stand going to a Win* machine and having only one desktop now after using "Linux" for 5 or 6 years.
I usually use 4 desktops. 1 and 2 are my "working" desktops (work, web browsing, games, etc.). Desktop 3 I leave my mail app open (kmail). Desktop 4 I usually have Pan open or minimized, and also keep a few network monitoring apps open (etherape, ethereal, tailing
One thing I'd love to see in KDE that was added... (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll be surprised how much cleaner your home dir stays if it's your desktop!
Right now I have three folders on my desktop that I don't want to see: evolution, mail and News. Short of recompiling evolution to use
Re:GNOME 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
That may be applicable to your example of setting the system time, but the behavior of fundamental interface elements should be consistent across installations. The problem with flexibility and customization on that level is that everybody who uses that installation for the first time has to climb a new learning curve... and everyone who gets used to that installation has to reclimb the learning curve any time they go to a different setup.
For a long time, I preferred the "X" method of window activation: move the mouse over it, it's active. But since I had to use Windows professionally, I grew more comfortable with the click-to-activate method. My instinctive predictions of the computer's behavior have only so much real estate for conflicting behavior, so the less common one (X) became less comfortable. Eventually, I changed the FVWM setting so that they were no longer in conflict.
So yes, TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it) is a good philosophy for high-level functionality, but ideally, all of the different ways to do it need to be independent of the user's settings.
Now we're innovating..! (Score:3, Interesting)
I have Windows XP, and quite a few of the things in the latest Gnome are better than Windows XP. For instance, the fantastic way Pango deals with multilingual issues. And scalable desktop icons are a great addition. Some of the desktop accessability stuff is great too.
I bet that Microsoft keeps a close eye on the OSS community, and I'm sure it is starting to be the case that - internally within Microsoft - they're actually starting to have to catch up with stuff that is coming out of the OSS community. The next stage in the process - Microsoft realise that OSS solutions are actually moving faster than they can keep up with.
hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Any comments on RAM usage? I have to use fvwm because KDE and GNOME are so damn HUGE these days..
my one quirk with GNOME (Score:2, Interesting)
The one thing keeping me from using GNOME (and for which I now use a more minimalistic window manager/desktop environment) is the fact that it is difficult to move one window into a different virtual desktop. You have to make it visible on all panels first then go to the desktop you want it to appear on and click show on just this desktop. Is there a way around this? Has GNOME 2.4 fixed this?
Besides that, it's good to see this project improve. Hope it gets faster and easier to use.
Re:my one quirk with GNOME (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:GNOME: Armageddon (Score:1, Interesting)
And, I'd like to point out that just because someone's a power user that it doesn't mean they wouldn't like a simple desktop with sane defaults that JUST WORKS. For me, at least, GNOME is just that - an elegant and simple desktop that helps me get work done.
I can't help but get the impression that you're just being reactionary. The GNOME project isn't trying to do more of the same - they're exploring new paths and new ideas (Mono, Dashboard, Storage). If something turns out to be a huge mistake, there's nothing stopping them from removing it. KDE tends to play it safe from what I've seen, by giving you more of the same, just better - but ultimately, I wonder if this won't be a problem in the future for them.
In other words, speak for yourself: this geek likes the way the GNOME project is moving. Don't try to imply that the majority does not, because I don't think you've got proof of that.
-Erwos
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, I was a major lightweight system zealot. I used Ratpoison or Ion at work (if you though fvwm was lightweight, you ain't seen nothing yet). Then I realised that saving 0.5 seconds on launching a terminal window didn't make me any more productive, but having excellent integrated apps like kmail and konqueror did.
Re:That's great! Accessibility? (Score:2, Interesting)
movement keys, only with the keypad, but I find it necessary to
remap the keypad to emulate the regular cursor keys, on the grounds
that otherwise most X apps don't support the keypad properly for
cursor movement (which is *way* more important to me than mouse
movement). (Just using the non-pad cursor keys is unacceptable
because they're arranged bady.)
I suppose I could map things so that the regular arrows emulate
the pad arrows... I never had a reason before (having no use
for the non-cursor functionality of the pad), but this might be
a good enough reason.
Do the pad home/end/pgup/pgdn keys do anything meaningful with
the shift+numlock keyboard-mouse mode turned on?
Re:Great discussion of GUIs (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, that's iffy, but the last time I claimed outright that GNOME was not object-oriented, I got burninated.
Re:current gnome 2.x issues (any devels listening? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to think the same way as you did, hated the lack of features, bitched on the lists, etc. But at some point I forgot to switch from Metacity to sawfish and grudgingly used it, and after a while, found I didn't miss the features I fought so hard to have. Pageflip is nice, but do I use it? Nope. Maybe it's just me as a user adapting to the lack of features, or maybe it's the fact that as a user I didn't really use that feature enough.
Try this: Make a list of all the things that MC is missing vs sawfish (or The Ultimate Window Manager) and then work as you do normally and tick the times you miss each feature. I'd be willing to bet that in an honest test you'll find that you don't use them nearly as often as you think you do.
I'm no fan of the HIG and the cutting and slashing of features in the latest GNOME, but I'm also finding that a lot of it's not all that bad, because a lot of times It Just Works.
Re:Great discussion of GUIs (Score:2, Interesting)
Take off your blinders and actually LOOK at Windows. Does Quicktime look like Media Player? Does they have even the remotely similarity in UI? Of course not! This isn't just non-MS applications.
Then take a look at the Macintosh. Funny how Apple can't make up their minds whether they want an Aquafresh toothpaste look or a scratched brassplate look. But I don't see people bailing on the platform because of it.
Gnome 2.4 has some *serious* usabillity problems (Score:2, Interesting)
I won't be stating the obvious, I will be stating more deep and serious issues.
1) File-roller is harder to use.
In gnome 2.2, when you right-click a
2) Gnome Panel is now harder to use.
Although the simplified panel structure is easier to use, the configuartion dialog isn't. They have removed the Dropbox which has the sizes from X-small to XX-large (which is very intuitve, as it creates a metafor for sizes) with more confusing spinbox with the confusing "pixels" size (newbies don't know that their monitor is made of little dots, and may not get what a "pixel" is. The visual positioning box was removed by a more confusing drop box! The Foot icon (which is a violation of the HIG [gnome.org], Section 9.10, which says NOT to use body parts as icons (the picture is a G shaped monkey foot). They should allow easy configuation of the menu icon (as it used to in 1.4, and use a non offensive icon by default). The workspace switcher now has a limit of just 36 workspaces, compared to the 100 in gnome 2 and the infinty of gnome 2.0! You may argue people don't need that many, but when users are doing advanced work, and need to think in GRIDs and heirachies, very essential when working on large graphics and admistering multiple machines. I know some developers that use around 50-500(!) desktops when doing some SERIOUS work. I only use around 8-12, so this dosen't effect me, but others will.
3) Gnome harder to configure
More features, which EVEN NORMAL USERS USE, have misteriously dissappered. Either forcing them to use the atrious gconf-editor or flee to other CONFIGUREABLE desktops like Windows and KDE. Not to mention that "auto apply" is very dangerous, I've been burnt by it too many times already!
4) Epiphany is not ready for primetime.
The ability to add subtopics in bookmarks have been removed (not even AOL users are this dumb), its still VERY unreliable, and its not the mozilla engine's fault, its epiphanies. The documentation is only half written, and the download dialog needs a lot of usabillity work. Idealy, this should of been 0.9.4, but it seems obviously rushed.
I have other problems, but other people have already complained about that. The gnome team really need to have another usabilty test, and ask ALL types of users, from newbies, experts, designers, developers, architects, secitaries, managers and children to get the best of all worlds, not some Hypothetical "Joe Aol" (and aols got more features than epiphany anyway).
I have a lot of experiance in designing GUIS, with experiance in Visual Basic, Curses and Qt, but I'm only new to GTK, and the developers still have a lot to learn about good gui design.