Release Team Proposes Gnome 3.0 Plans 306
benuski writes "Today at GUADEC, the Gnome User and Developer European Conference, the gtk+ team announced their plans for gtk+ 3.0; immediately after, the Gnome release team announced their plans for Gnome 2.30 to be changed into Gnome 3.0. This would mean a release date a year and a half to a year in the future. Details are short at the moment, but the Gnome team seems to be following in KDE's footsteps, but hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."
Content free article (Score:5, Informative)
let's wait and see (Score:5, Informative)
"but hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."
instead they're gonna have all sorts of their own problems. it happened before, it'll happen again.
all major projects have this kind of stuff when major releases come out the door. examples ?
MacOS X 10.0
Windows Vista
Gnome 2.0
Netscape 4.0
.
.
.
maybe it'll be a set of completely diferent problems. but they'll be there. murphy is unforgiven.
Re:Background (Score:5, Informative)
Problems with KDE4? What problems?.. (Score:5, Informative)
I made the folly of installing KDE-4 on my mom's new computer (she had KDE-3.5.x before). There were no "problems". There was a total disaster.
The amount of features available in KDE-3 for years, that did not make it into KDE-4 is staggering... Add bugs to that.
And I was not entirely unprepared — I knew better, than to try KDE-4.0, when it came out with the enormous (and Google-sponsored [kde.org]) hoopla. I waited for 4.0.2... You can't even move widgets around on your task-bar yet — that's "scheduled" for version 4.1!
The all-new "plasma"-desktop can't show you the contents of files in ~/Desktop/ — that's still "in the works". Showing the list of files themselves is buggy — every time you login, a new set of icons (one for each of your files) is added to the desktop.
And to think, that I was getting impatient with FreeBSD KDE-team [kde.org] for not upgrading the KDE-ports! These guys were simply protecting me, but no, I wouldn't listen... I installed the much tauted Kubuntu and paid the price (don't even get me started on Ubuntu itself)...
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:3, Informative)
There are many great advantages of KDE, such as platform independence and SVG rendering like you mentioned.
Again, I suggested the problem isn't the features.
As for making KDE 4 operate or look like OS X or Vista, that depends how much control we have over the interface. My fear/concern is that given recent discussions and posts with Aaron suggest we will have less control.
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:5, Informative)
On top of that you have Aaron Segio now suggesting that users should have less control over configuration, fewer choices, and saying that end users are dumb. He also has suggested repeatedly lately that if you're not a coder, then you can't comment on UI issues.
Can you prove those 2 statements? Can you provide links to statements where he says that?
From my use of KDE 4.1, I, a user, have the exact same configuration menu in konqueror that I used to have, and I now have dolphin, with simpler configuration, that has been added which I can use standalone, or along konqueror or not.
As a user, it seems I now have more choice.
Plasmoid seems a little raw right now, but I have the feeling they are the equivalent of firefox extensions.
Basically, they are putting the desktop in the hand of the users. You will have extension, sorry, plasmoid, whith little or no configuration, and some some with heavy configuration and you will just choose and build your own personnal desktop. Just like firefox with its extensions.
So your comment about them dumbing down the desktop or removing it from the users hand is pretty much out of the picture, it's quite the opposite.
As for aseigo, I follow his blog and I can't remember him saying users can't comment on UI issues. If you'd give links to that than I might find your comment informative, right now, it seems mostly flamebait.
(My bet is that he said that as long as the underlying technology is not ready, the discussion about with or without 'insert your preferred desktop item or usability issue' are irrelevant.)
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:5, Informative)
this is one reason why I continue to use gnome or xfce instead of the new KDE. Of all things they removed one feature most important to me:
the ability to change tabs in konsole by pressing alt-# (ie, alt-1 = go to tab 1, alt-2 to tab 2 etc.)
I asked in the #kde-devel channel if it was removed intentionally or just hadn't been re-added. Aaron's first response was to claim I must not use a terminal much (I'm a systems admin and programmer, I spend nearly all day in a terminal.) He then said that terminal programs should bind as few keys as possible because terminal programs have already assumed nearly all possibly combinations.
I offered a patch that would re-insert them as an option -- not enabled by default but there for people that decided they wanted to set it. It was turned down.
Fuck it all, KDE is going the same way GNOME did. I'll stick with vim, mutt, and move back to freaking wmaker or fvwm if it's the only way to have a system that doesn't treat me like I'm five years old.
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:3, Informative)
The KDE 4.0 icon fiasco is going out the window. In KDE 4.1, you have a folder view applet on your desktop that operates largely like a file manager window. You can change the folder it views, and even filter it with smart searches, and Nepomuk meta-data.
I hate having the applet on my desktop, but in the future supposedly it will be the desktop, and support themeing/wallpapers, etc.
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:5, Informative)
Community software should mean that people can easily post bug reports and get issues like these addressed.
Open a bug for each issue and hopefully they will be addressed.
I think it is beneficial to the entire community when people report these things.
Here is the GNome developer response [gnome.org] to the screensaver thingie:
Comment #1 from William Jon McCann (gnome-screensaver developer, points: 22)
2005-09-19 13:32 UTC [reply]
I don't have any plans to support this. My view is that any screensaver theme
that requires configuration is inherently broken.
Is developer arrogance a bug or a feature?
Re:Background (Score:5, Informative)
Probably /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop.
Re:All hail letter "g" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the GNome developer response [gnome.org] to the screensaver thingie:
Is this a troll or do you suffer from short attention span? This was his first comment, but the discussion on bugzilla was very long, and further down he identified technical issues that prevent this from being done sanely atm, wrote an FAQ on the matter, asked for help from those who see this feature, and so on. Anyone interest in the issue is well-advised not to rely on the parent but read the discussion themselves.
Re:Problems with KDE4? What problems?.. (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I know KDE4.0 was never meant for the end user but for developers. I tried it once and told myself: "Looks promising but is not ready to use for me.[0]"
So I waited and at times looked a bit a the latest progress with packages from the svn trunk for my distribution. My impression is that the progress, that KDE4.0 to now made, is just amazing. I am currently using the svn packages more often than my old KDE3.5.9 install, simply because it is a very pleasant experience. I would have switched already, if it was not a "unstable"[1] version and I will definitly switch when 4.1 sees the light of the day.
So let's go on to your issues: Moving widgets in the panel (the task bar is only for displaying your applications) should have been added yesterday or so (according to a blog post at planetkde.org).
Showing the contents of ~/Desktop: The folderview can do that, but not only that. It can also display any folder (for instance on a remote machine as well). It will be able to show the results of nepomuk searches, but this is not ready yet. I for my part had never any icons on my old desktop, because, I think, it looks like I still have lot of work to do. Now I can easily display the folder(s) that I am currently working on and hide them when I am done. I must say, it is way better than the old system for me.
For launching applications, I never used icons (Keyboard > mouse for me) but used the old "Run command". Now there is krunner which is way better than the old system.
As another developer to the KDE team: I love what you are doing with KDE4 and I hope that you can keep the good work up.
[0] I am a developer as well.
[1] unstable as in not finished. I have not experienced lots of bugs, but instead it almost never crashes, which is quite impressive for this kind of packages (compiled directly from the latest source code).
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:2, Informative)
Have a look at comment 85 from the link you posted.
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154535
You say this discussion suggests Aaron is trying to give users less control but he has designed plasma in a way that means it is not possible for him to have this ultimate control and this is intentional.
Plasma is flexible enough that you can implement your own desktop containment without the corner icon but the current default one is being designed with things like touch screens in mind where you can't right click to configure things. The icons presence is therefore required and people who don't like it will be able to choose a containment without it. More control!
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:4, Informative)
His blog was unavailable for a while but it came back online several days ago.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:4, Informative)
Kubuntu defaults to KDE 3.5 last time I checked. Yup, running Kubuntu 8.04 right here, using KDE 3.5. The remix is KDE4, but hey, they're experimenting with it. You can OPTIONALLY install it, but you don't have to run with it if you don't want to. But they can't get feedback if no one uses it.
What was it you were bitching about again?
Re:All hail letter "g" (Score:3, Informative)
Gtk and Qt are just widgets. You want more than that: for example, KDE3 offers kioslave, with which you can dynamically mount devices without root privileges or rip CD audio to mp3 on-the-fly. The Kpart stuff allows you, for example, to embed text-view widget in Konqueror that looks and acts in the same way as in Kwrite. And so on.
> why aren't they built on a generic library?
Take a look at the X11 API, or at some apps written in it (xcalc, xevil, etc). With the qt3 dev headers come a few examples of pure qt3 apps - they do not look nor feel like KDE. Kadu, an IM client for the network Gadu-gadu (very popular in Poland) is written in pure Qt - and it doesn't integrate well with KDE, too.
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:3, Informative)
KDE 4 with plasma is going to have more features, no less, they are just going to be added in a different way than what you seem to expect.
For example a lot of people have complained about the toolbox and its inability to hide and Aaron has said that he will reject any patch that changes this behavior. however you can still have this option, the only thing that you need to do is to write a different containment where the toolbox is not shown, add this containment to your desktop, drop the default containment and you are done. By 4.2 it may even be possible to have a containment with traditional desktop icons and no toolbox if someone steps up and writes it.
The bottom line here is that in plasma the "Desktop" is a plugin (called containment) and you are free to choose the containment that you like the most. The only problem right now is that there is only one containment available, but if you carefully read Aaron's comments you will notice that he actually encourage people to write and use different desktop containments.
GNOME 3.0 (Score:2, Informative)
From the GNOME website:
Some GNOME hackers have discussed what form GNOME '3.0' would take, such as radically changing its user model or taking advantage of new technologies. However, the changes in this roadmap are more incremental, designed to fit within the basically stable UI and APIs we guarantee within the 2.x series. For more on the radical changes that could be in a GNOME 3.0, see the long-term ideas at ThreePointZero. And remember, even then, the GNOME 3 APIs would be available in addition to the existing GNOME 2 APIs, so there is no risk that today's applications would break in the future.
=> Further see http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero [gnome.org]
I liked that idea. Maybe it's just a version bump to reflect the progress they're making.
Re:KDE 4.0 Is Not a Failure (Score:3, Informative)
With the way Aaron is running the show, every one will have to wait for 4.5 for it to be as good as 3.5.
snip
Aaron is a hell of a developer, but he is no project manager. He can't see the forest through the trees. Anyone who is in charge of a project like he is should not be coding.
Aaron is not in charge of KDE. No one person is anyways but although Aaron is a core developer he does not run KDE or choose its direction.
What he does do is a lot of interaction with the press and presentations at events and such so in that regard he has acted as the face of KDE in person.
He also maintains the Plasma program (he does not run the whole show though, there's more people than just him working on Plasma). Many people see it as the "face" of KDE 4 in that it is the most-prominent GUI in KDE.
But he does not choose when we release, what goes in KDE, who works on what, or any of that. KDE has its own Release Team for handling releases (and the Release Team chose to delay 4.0 for 2 months and then after the final RC series to release). Aaron certainly puts in a lot of work to KDE but even if you think the release was a disaster he's not the one to blame. You can blame me if you want, I argued for releasing 4.0 after the first delay in addition to Aaron. ;)
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen him use the term stupid directly repeatedly. Also a recent comment of his was that non-coders on the whole shouldn't be allowed to comment on design issues.
He also repeatedly said that if you don't read the code, you can't understand the UI. That itself is a problem.
Frankly, end users should be able to pick things up and learn them intuitively. Suggesting that if you don't read the source code, you can't understand the project means there is a serious usability issue.
Re:Which is actually more work? (Score:3, Informative)
This is a noble goal, and I support a unification on top of Qt4, but it's just not going to happen as long as Qt4 is GPL. GNOME deliberately uses the LGPL to allow free proprietary development (think VMWare, or even just GPL-incompatible like SWT/Eclipse).
If GTK was abandoned, a lot of projects would have to change their license or fork the toolkit. A *lot* of the software we use is GPL incompatible. That doesn't make it non-free, it's just the way the licenses work. For me the biggest hit would be Eclipse, which is based on SWT, which can legally derive from GTK but not Qt.
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:4, Informative)
As for aseigo, I follow his blog and I can't remember him saying users can't comment on UI issues. If you'd give links to that than I might find your comment informative, right now, it seems mostly flamebait.
Bug 154535 is a user request for the ability to optionally remove the toolbox "cashew". 154535 has the second highest number of votes of any plasma bug. Aaron marked it as WONTFIX ("that is the final resolution of this issue as per the maintainer of the project"). Here are two examples of his attitude:
#53
it would be nice, however, if in situations like this you refrained from commenting ... i don't particularly need to open my inbox, go through the bug reports and read this kind of stuff.
#84
please, please, please people: don't try and get involved in discussions of design. if you are technically capable of doing so, read the code and jump on panel-devel and discuss things with the rest of the team in a reasoned and well-informed manner.Re:KDE 4.0 Is Not a Failure (Score:2, Informative)
I thought as KDE eV president he was the man responsible. I stand corrected. You are to blame. :-)
The KDE e.V. [kde.org] is a non-profit organization which is intended to handle legal and financial matters for the KDE project. So it has a lot to do with KDE but one thing it does not do is dictate the coding done or the direction the project takes. Which is just as well as many KDE contributions are not KDE e.V. members
KDE is my favorite desktop, and I think you're doing great work. I don't take issue with any of that. I just take issue with the release cycle/version numbering. I would not have released a 4.0 without the KDE killer app - KOffice - ported and ready to go. Did MS release Win95 separate from Office? No. What good is a platform release if none of the major apps are ready? Why upgrade?
Well I wouldn't say *none* were ready. :) But yes, before KOffice and for example KDE PIM (the "killer app" for a lot of people) could be ported there had to be libraries to develop on. Even right before we released 4.0 we were debating internally on whether or not it was a good idea based on the status of the applications and libraries. In the end I think the fact that only released software actually gets used (and therefore tested) won the day. We didn't release a bomb with known show stoppers and I know it was put somewhere that Plasma had some changes yet to go, but it was important to at least release something once we had something that we could release.
Think about it this way, with the release of 4.0 we got *tons* of user feedback, mostly from bleeding-edges users who don't have the time or inclination to manually build betas or release candidates. There was a corresponding large increase in code quality from 4.0 to 4.0.1 (and on to 4.0.4). In addition since the number of people routinely using 4.0 went up after the release we got a lot of feedback about where to go as far as features are concerned and right now the 4.0 to 4.1 leap is looking like one of the most impressive minor version bumps in the time I've been using and working on KDE.
Had we not released KDE 4.0 then at this point we might just be getting to a 4.0.2 quality and 4.1 would still be a ways off yet. I know people are annoyed when they install shiny new 4.0.4 and it's missing stuff they liked in 3.5 but if KDE holds onto its code forever then it risks becoming completely irrelevant. And that's all we did, a release, we didn't make people use it, we didn't put things into the release notes that didn't actually exist, and although based on the feedback we managed to oversell 4.0 that was not our intention.
I hope you understand that my interest is just in KDE succeeding.
I appreciate that, I'm just trying to stick up for Aaron when he receives undeserved criticism. I understand that he is in many ways the public face of KDE but it's still a project whose path is dictated by where the development takes it. Aaron leads by example with Plasma but there is much much more to KDE 4 than just a new taskbar and widgets.
Protip: If you're married/in a relationship then attach a "Picture Frame" plasmoid of your significant other to your desktop. It's in the background so it won't interfere with your work but when the desktop is visible so is the picture which has scored me major brownie points with my wife at least. ;)
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:1, Informative)
Is Stefan Gehn actually a kmail developer? I don't see him in the authors list and a quick google associates him with kde multimedia, not kdepim. Anyone with an account can comment in bugzilla, but isn't necessarily authoritative.
+1
this is the real answer:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86423#c19
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:1, Informative)
Here are two examples of his attitude
#84
please, please, please people: don't try and get involved in discussions of design. if you are technically capable of doing so, read the code and jump on panel-devel and discuss things with the rest of the team in a reasoned and well-informed manner.
And like Enderandrew, you misquote and distord what he said. .. well .. bizarre.
Here is the original text:
___
please, please, please people: don't try and get involved in discussions of design. if you are technically capable of doing so, read the code and jump on panel-devel and discuss things with the rest of the team in a reasoned and well-informed manner.
otherwise, just describe your paint point (what you expected, what actually happened, the difference, etc). leave out the editorials and don't offer suggestions on how to code your preferred solution. editorials just annoy people and have no actually useful content in them (that includes calling people names, judging their competency and character, etc), while coding suggestions about a code base you aren't familiar with is
___
He says to not give suggestions in code design if you're not a coder or not familiar with the code, not that user should have less control over configuration, fewer choices, and saying that end users are dumb or should not get involved in discussions of design.
On the contrary he asks for user input, but descriptive and without pathos.
Btw, this is a bug report from december, this feature was very different back then and I found it very annoying. It has been improved since then, and I kinda don't mind anymore and even find it interresting.
And also, after reading this discussion, since I found out that aseigo is willing to accept different desktop countainer with different behavior, like one without this feature, I feel more relaxed toward it.
My understanding is that those kind of discussions are huge quiproquos where people who report real problem have knee jerk reactions to the developpers answers because they (feel they) don't carefully listen to their answer and developper soon have knee jerk reactions to those topics because they fail to to convey to those users that they listen and care.
rinse
repeat
gets worse
The worse part is that it's all based on time. Neither the users nor the developpers have the time to improve this situation.
Re:Problem with KDE 4 (Score:3, Informative)
Whatever, you misrepresented the actual situation with this issue.
You may be right. In the sense of fairness, here is another quote from the same link as above. Also, please notice that six months have past since the previous post:
Comment #22 from William Jon McCann (gnome-screensaver developer, points: 22)
2006-03-03 14:44 UTC [reply]
Take it easy everyone. Please understand that I'm not paid to do this and it
isn't my full time job. Also understand that simply reiterating the issue
doesn't add anything. Also, unless you are motivated enough to actually write
some code or pay/convince someone else to do it for you then you are less
likely to get what you want. That's open source for you. Please try not to
make demands of me.
I've added a stub to the FAQ about directory translation.
Chris Weiss: I'm glad to see that you have actually looked into this. I'm
afraid there is probably something wrong with your system since that should
work fine. Try submitting a bug to your distro.
Miles: Looks like someone upgraded the wiki and it changed the way the URLs are
accepted. Try, http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions [gnome.org]
I think was is needed here is a product manager or something that acts as a firewall/router to translate between the actual coders and the general public.
Coders are geeks. They don't deal well with people who don't understand what it is that they really do. It doesn't help that they get bombarded with stupid requests from people who don't know what the software is supposed to do. In my current position, part of my job is to act as that firewall. I take the good requests to our developers to consider and keep the stupid ones to myself. I understand coders and don't get offended when they say, "that's a stupid idea. This was never designed to do that crap and the user needs to find another way to get that done." The user would get offended and find another solution to their problem, probably from our competition (Linux's main competition is Windows). Instead, I tell them, "here, try this application. It does a better job as all it really does is what you are trying to accomplish."
Either way, users need to be treated with respect whether they are paying customers or not. When I'm deciding between upgrading my 50 office machines to Visa or switching to Ubuntu, it doesn't help when my requests are brushed off because a developer doesn't think they are necessary.