suka writes "In a fresh interview with derStandard.at, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talks about GNOME 3.0 — its strengths, but also about what he thinks is missing. He also mentions ongoing talks for a common meta-release-cycle with Debian which could delay the next LTS."
I'm not worried about X breakages, personally. I even have an Intel 945G and I can live with the problems its causing. What I can't live with is the extreme instability of Pulse Audio. It crashes my apps contstantly from broken pipes. OK, people should be checking their pipes. But Pulse Audio itself crashes very frequently (about every hour or so on my machine). Rhythmbox won't go for more than 10 minutes without either crashing or audio failing. This is incredibly bad for me.
I realize that it's probably due to older, underpowered hardware (3 year old cheap laptop), but this should not be happening. I've yanked Pulse Audio from my machine altogether now and it's a lot more stable. I was also getting lock ups in Firefox every hour or so. Now that I've dumped Pulse Audio, I've only had one lock up in the past 3 days (still can't figure that one out -- related to video drivers???).
So, I plead with Ubuntu developers: either fix Pulse Audio, or punt it. The extra features it has is *not* worth the massive pain that some people experience.
There's more problems than just pulse audio, there are too many daemons appearing in general. Stuff like gnome-pty-helper, gnome-keyring, ssh-agent, consolekit, hal-addon-storage, gconfd. All this stuff is fine on general purpose machines when the user mainly engages in browsing, multimedia, IM and office apps. The problems arise when you want to do something demanding like A/V work, with distros increasingly integrating services for the common usage case it's becoming increasingly difficult to get a usa
Whats the point of it? my problem with pulseaudio is I'm getting all these bugs but i cant see a singe case where its better than a tricked out alsa setup (well actually it does deal well with simultaneous log-ins, but I'm sure that could have been edged into alsa without as many problems as PA brought). Perhaps the problem is distros have invested a fair bit of time in it, and now they're in the longest que for the bar but don't want to switch because while they would get served sooner, they'd have to acce
The pathetic thing is that I've never had trouble with it because I go to the website and read the Pulseaudio/Perfectsetup document. It's too bad none of the distribution or even package maintainers seem to want to read it, ESPECIALLY Ubuntu which does things WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
DITO - with 8.10 I had to buy a webcam just so I would not get delay on my microphone when skyping. After 9.04 not even that workaround worked any longer. I have since switched to Arch even though that is likely not what I want either. I wish I was a millionaire and had money to hire a dev-team to create a proper linux distro.
I only hope they will follow a different path than KDE team.
They rushed to release 4.0 and since then I'm still struggling to have all the features I used to have in KDE v3.5.
And, more important, I hope that Ubuntu people won't trash GNOME v2 from night to day like they did with KDE v3.5.
Well I am using kde 4.2 now on just one of my machine and its awesome. It is so snappy and uses far less resources than kde 3.5 which i use on the other machine. But still not as lightweight as iceWM that i use on yet the other machine. In fact once the new slackware comes out I will probably switch all machines over to kde 4.2.
What went wrong was that distro put in the new version far too early.
I have never really liked gnome... It always seems to consume the ram like a windows desktop...
I use that version on OS X, thanks to Fink project. While they don't promise any kind of 'final' version at this state, I can easily keep KDE 4 applications in my OS X Dock, using them instead of iTunes for example.
They are linked to actual OS X frameworks, down to Quicktime and very interestingly they use far less CPU and resources than regular OS X apps.
There are similar reports from Windows users who binary installed it and using Amarok 2 etc. right now. While on it, is there any reason why KDE 3.5 given up when KDE 4 installed? I keep using KDE 3.5 suite on OS X too. It doesn't conflict with anything at all including KDE 4.
I think what KDE 4 is and what a huge revolution it is will be understood in 1-2 years. For example when Nokia and other members of open source Symbian foundation starts using it in some form in their smart phones.
Gnome 2.0 was just as unusable. They just pretended is was for philosophical reasons.
OSX 10.0 was crap, hell even Microsoft needed 3 years after Vista (with some major architecture changes).
It just takes too much time the achieve feature/stability/usability parity with the old system no matter how needed those major under-the-hood changes were.
So sorry, Gnome will take the same path as everyone else and sites will rush to declare 3.0 "A Major Disappointment". What you can hope for, though, is that distros won't be so braindead to drop Gnome 2 immediately after the 3.0 release.
Honestly, there was a time when distributions were concerned about providing a usable user experience instead of just grabbing all the latest stuff, add their configuration tools and ship that crap. See PulseAudio, great idea, terrible execution on every single fucking distro I've tried.
The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish but it did have some positive sides. If they hadn't released it as 4.0 a lot of people wouldn't have tried it out and therefore they wouldn't have found as many issues as they did. They certainly should have worked more closely with the main KDE distributions to make it clear to end users they 4.0 was going to be a dog. With hindsight I think it would have been better to have held off on 4.0 until it was 4.1 quality. That way they would have got most of the user testing but without so much of the "I want to stab you in the eyes for making me ruin my machine".
I don't hold out much hope for Gnome bringing great new things to the party. I try it out every now and then but it just doesn't do it for me in the same way that KDE does. All the Gnome LAFs look terribly dated dumbed down. While I don't spend my days admiring the widgets used in my applications I prefer to look at something that is pleasing to the eye just like I would rather the view from my house was green fields rather than a rubbish dump.
The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish...
Hmmmm, it wasn't from KDE's perspective. It's the way things have always worked. The KDE developers set themselves some goals for KDE 4.0 and they achieved them - mainly API and ABI stability. What happened was that distributors then blindly started compiling and packaging it and then whinging when they found out that their users weren't too happy with it. Virtually all distributors are braindead when it comes to putting together a whole system and looking intelligently at the software they want to use. It's why we have PulseAudio being thrown into desktop systems today. That thing isn't stable at all, let alone feature complete.
people pick up a.0 release and are surprised its not as polished and featureful as a.5? WTF?
The kde4.0 snafu really highlighted a problem in ubuntu->KDE communication, other distros got that kde4.0 would be rough around the edges and at least offered kde3.5or shipped their 4.0 with a lot of patches ect. I tend to follow kde developement from afar and I've always know that kde4.3 is the first kde4 that is end user ready.
No, distribution packagers decided KDE 4.0 was good enough to include in their releases so it got sent out to a lot of people. I don't know if you tried 4.0, but I did. It was horrible. Saying, "it was not as polished and featureful," does not describe what happened with 4.0. KDE 4.0 was a huge, massive step backwards in functionality that should never have been considered for release. It was barely alpha-grade software at release time. It still contains idiotic major achitectural mistakes (like what amounts to an entirely new, and needlessly separate windowing system for the Plasma widgets) and requires a major reorganization to what goes where (I can never find the right submenu / screen to make adjustments because they're split over too many unrelated interfaces).
Blaming the users is shortsighted. Blaming the distro packagers makes some sense. But placing blame on the KDE team for the total cockup that was 4.0 is putting it where it is due. KDE4 is inching toward consistency and usability, but what we have NOW is what should have been the original release -- ignoring the massive mistakes in the redesign that remain deeply baked into Plasma.
The message here is simple: if you're going to radically redesign a product with a large user base, don't release the replacement until it's in much better condition than for minimal changes. With 4.0 and the introduction of Plasma, the KDE team should have (beyond being struck repeatedly with a two-by-four for being frelling nincompoops) skipped a release cycle in order to get things into better shape.
I would say that when you release something to the public (especially with large "marketing battage") it is for the public, unless stated differently.
And then, what about all subsequent releases untill now? Are all of them "not for the end user"?
Since 4.2, KDE works just fine. I use it all day long and have no trouble with it. The early releases were majorly broken though. Why they made it into the distros is beyond me.
So, it finally happened!
A major effort by a distro to fix one hundred really small but irritating bugs. Also known as polish. This is what Ubuntu needs, and to be fair has been quite good at. Just fixing more and more of the tiny annoyances is what creates a well-rounded desktop. On the other hand, they are introducing Gnome Shell, which while probably cool, will certainly introduce a couple of hundred new paper cuts!
I'm not a Ubuntu advocate (more of a Fedora/RHEL person really) but if the well documented problems with KDE 4 are anything to go by then including Gnome 3 in the next LTS release of Ubuntu would be IMHO a big mistake. An LTS release deserves to be of the highest quality from Day 1. To me it would be madness to base an LTS release on anything Gnome 3.0. IMHO an Ubuntu LTS release whould be the desktop equivalent to RHEL or SLED in terms of stability. If it is not then you have shot yourselves in the foot. If this means being conservative in package selection then so be it.
Long Time Service release. They have to support it for 4 years, fixing bugs, preventing security problems etc. That would be more difficult to do if the LTS ships with Gnome 2 but Gnome 2 isn't being actively supported by its developers (who are working on Gnome 3).
Well, GTK+ is due for an overhaul. Fix the damn file picker. Get rid of all that excessive padding, maybe by making it themeable. Some consistency in menuitem dimensions would be nice.
Also, either give Metacity some features, at least the bare essentials, or switch to another window manager. That non-optional minimize effect is cringe worthy.
People who modded this troll really need to stop and think about it - parent is just about spot on. The look and feel of the vast majority of GTK apps is frankly awful.
Some consistency in menuitem dimensions would be nice.
Now admittedly maybe this only manifests when you're using small interface fonts (I'm using 7pt here, for reference). Taking GIMP's menus as an example, menu items with images are significantly larger than ones without - a full 25% larger (20 vs 16 px). I don't have a huge number of gtk apps on my system to check this in, but inkscape and wireshark seem to have the same issue.
Fix the damn file picker.
This is a pet peeve of mine too. Bearing a striking resemblance to one I remember from Apple Mac systems pre colour monitors, the current design of the filepicker was in no way an improvement.
For some reason or another the "location" text field is hidden by default (and even when shown, is oddly not populated by default with the path to the current directory). What could have been useful breadcrumb-style navigation buttons were added, except all but the one representing the current directory is hidden until you click a different button (this is despite there being the entire width of the file picker for them to fill). The lack of switchable view modes in the file listing is mystifying, it seems to display "thumbnails" of images when browsing, but it doesn't seem to be possible to make those thumbnails any bigger than 16x16px.
That non-optional minimize effect is cringe worthy.
Also the effect that draws big bold black rectangles on your screen to indicate the borders of hidden windows while alt-tabbing. Something regrettably KDE copied. I don't need this, if I wanted to waste my time with annoying and ultimately useless visual effects I'd install compiz.
In reality, once it has become difficult or event impossible to make the system behave in a manner conducive to it actually being useful for anything, it's time to look elsewhere. As I often have to remind people, just because they are happy with the default settings doesn't mean everyone will be.
The GTK file picker is quite possibly the worst file picker I have ever seen. Even Windows 3.1's crappy stuff was better - it might not support long filenames, but at least it didn't require one extra click in order to do anything useful.
Seriously, "browse for other folders"? I still maintain that the genius who thought that up needs to be shot.
Picking a directory is tedious and unintuitive. When I just click the OK button to pick the current directory, nothing happens. I have to click an empty space in the directory, to 'select it', first. When I use the crumbtrail to navigate to a parent directory, it automatically selects the child directory I just came from. When I click OK does it pick the current directory, or the selected directory? Who knows. When I open the file picker later it always opens in the parent directory of the previously picked one. Why in the parent?
There are many usability problems with the current file picker.
You login, which you don't actually have to do anymore because it was too complicated, and you're presented with a fullscreen dialog box that says:
"You are too fucking stupid to use this computer. You don't understand files and folders and things. Click OK to shutdown your computer. Your computer will shutdown in 28 seconds anyway, because you're probably too stupid to work the mouse. That's the thing underneath your hand. What? That's the thing attached to your arm. Ah, fuck it. 20 seconds."
That's pretty much the entire GNOME 3.0 experience. The dialog box has been in development for the last 18 months, but obviously there's still a lot of usability testing left to do, mostly by Redhat and Canonical "engineers". The OK button logic was originally written in C but they've redone that in C# running on Mono, and Miguel de Icaza is already calling the work "superb".
Meanwhile, the KDE people have been busy readying the next batch of widgets that you will never add to your exciting K desktop experience.
Future plans for GNOME involve reducing the 3.0 dialog box down to a single pixel, then translating the status of that pixel into the power LED on your computer. This will remove the need for a display, further simplying the desktop experience and reducing enterprise costs. KDE plans to turn its entire desktop into a widget of itself, allowing you to remove it entirely with a single right-click.
Yes, my friends: the future of the Linux desktop is no more fucking Linux desktop. What a relief.
I'm suprised Shuttleworth didn't mention Zeitgeist [gnome.org], which is a solution to the difficulty of manually managing files and folders and is, as I understand it, being considered for inclusion in GNOME 3. The basic idea is to group files (and other activities, like web bookmarks and email contents) automatically according to human-relevant criteria, like "edited last week" or "related to this document I'm writing." It's still very much a work in progress, but it looks like it could be pretty great.
What's it with this "i am too stupid to put a file in a folder, and therefore it is too difficult" "philosophy"?
I have tested every single one of those "automatic" and "intelligent" file management methods, and they always resulted in massive chaos, that was never the case with simple file systems and soft links. The problem was, that you could never be sure if a file was completely gone, in what "folders/categories/tags/whatevers" is still existed, sometimes moving files was a major hassle, and sometimes it was completely impossible to organize the files in they way I wanted (and always did with normal files and folders), because those "intelligent" methods were way to stupid, simple, and yet overly complicated. Or in other words: They had the elegance of a hillbilly Godzilla in high heels, stumbling down a red carpet at the Oscars.
If you want to make it actually better, create an ontology. Make it a semantic system. Just let it be elegant, clean and efficient at the core. And then add a properly fitting new UI concept to it, that completely throws the old models and analog-analogies away.
Then you will get a system that makes sense.
I still wait for someone doing such an ontology right.
Ever watched someone who hasn't grown up on computers use files and folders? The physical notion may not be confusing, but the computer implementation definitely leaves a lot to be desired. I have had a 60minute discussion with someone about the distinction between copy & cut, and when it does and doesn't work. So yes... files & folders as used by computers can be enormously complex for those who are not accustomed to remembering large tree-maps;-)
This is exactly why I hated it when MS started ramming the new term "folders" down our throats. The word "directories" suited better, as it did not conjour up invalid analogies in the minds of newbies. Now instead of just having to explain what a directory is, I now have to explain what a folder is AS WELL AS how it's not like a real folder.
LOL. Speaking of consistency (or the lack thereof), consider the following Powershell commands and their respective aliases (I'm going by memory here so someone correct me if I'm incomplete):
Get Child-Item (aliased to 'ls')
Set-Location (aliased to 'cd' and 'chdir')
New-Item c:\foo -type directory (no alias) New-Item c:\foo\file.txt -type file (no alias)
Remove-Item (aliased to 'rmdir')
The default aliases seem to include both DOS and *nix commands, and DOS (or some stench of it), seems to be alive and well despite being officially killed off when Win2000 was released.
So, in the Microsoft world, we've gone from using 'directory' in DOS, to 'folder' in Windows, to 'Items', 'Locations' and '-type Directory' in PowerShell. No wonder everyone's confused.;-)
Oh noes. People are getting back to be being overly pedantic. Might as well start the "Untitled Folder" convo here. How can a folder be untitled yet have the title "Untitled Folder"? Because it is short for "Untitled Folder (by you)" you clods. Now that is out of the way...I shall hide under my rock again.
They are almost synonymous. So someone with a non-computer background won't intuitively know which one is supposed to contain which.
In computer lingo:
a file is an entity that might be analogous to a wad of paper (e.g. a word processor document), but might not (e.g. an MP3)
a folder is a container for zero or more files
So it's completely unintuitive.
I think the word 'file' has its roots from the days when a 'record' was still a fundamental concept. So a 'record' is a sheet of paper, a 'file' contains a bundle of records.
I prefer 'directory'. At least then it doesn't push a false analogy on an already confused mind.
In computer-space we have either directories/files or folders/documents.
In any case, word excel and powerpoint documents can contain multiple sheets of paper, and I see a lot of people take that to extremes - for example having all the day's letters contained in one word document, or every single spreadsheet they work on in one excel document.
In computer-space we have either directories/files or folders/documents.
MS Windows uses "Files" and "Folders". Actually, the type of a folder is "File Folder". A "document" is a subtype of "file", because a "file" can also be an "application" or "program". A "file" could also be an "archive", which contains "files" and "folders". Some "archives" are called "cabinets". And of course all these files, folders, archives, cabinets, etc. can be seen in windows. Of course to be able to see those windows you first need to use a key, to open the lock. And to add protection from outsiders to see you files, etc. we have walls of fire. All the files, folders, etc. are stored on something called "drives"... why on earth are they not called "rooms"? And I wonder where the "roof" is in all this stuff.
In any case, word excel and powerpoint documents can contain multiple sheets of paper, and I see a lot of people take that to extremes - for example having all the day's letters contained in one word document, or every single spreadsheet they work on in one excel document.
During the late 80s/early 90s I worked for a firm that had a satellite office with a single PC which was running Wordpress on DOS. The secretary there had a single document containing every single letter she had typed over the past three years. She typed letters for an office of 15 engineers and regularly wrote several every day.
Worse still, when she opened it (fortunately just the once per day) she would press the down cursor key repeatedly until she got to the last line. She spent approximately half an hour doing this I asked her how she found an old letter to check, and she replied it would be in the filing cabinet behind her. No matter ho many times I tried to show her how to use individual files, she went back to this single document. I once discovered we had no backup of this single file (it was saved outside of the document directory) and I still have the occasional nightmares about it.
Waitress: Morning! Man: Well, what've you got? Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and meatspace; egg bacon and meatspace; egg bacon sausage and meatspace; meatspace bacon sausage and meatspace; meatspace egg meatspace meatspace bacon and meatspace; meatspace sausage meatspace meatspace bacon meatspace tomato and meatspace; Vikings: meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace... Waitress:...meatspace meatspace meatspace egg and meatspace; meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace baked beans meatspace meatspace meatspace... Vikings: meatspace! Lovely meatspace! Lovely meatspace! Waitress:...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and meatspace. Wife: Have you got anything without meatspace? Waitress: Well, there's meatspace egg sausage and meatspace, that's not got much meatspace in it. Wife: I don't want ANY meatspace!
Or you could be less elitist and realise that we're far beyond having to manually file things in this day and age, indeed that is something the computer was meant to eradicate.
A tagged document repository (with versioning history) would be best. Coupled with desktop search and changing the system file open window to be one that lets you use said search and tags to find the file instead of clicking through folders. Most files people want are more recent, so a default view of reverse chronological for the filetypes the application supports would be best.
You do, of course, still need a traditional filesystem view of this repository, and that is probably where the work will go in. Sure, tags could be folders, and you could have multiple ways of drilling down to the same file. You'd probably have a folder hierarchy that shows the most used tags at the highest level, then each subfolder is really a tag filter.
Coupled with desktop search and changing the system file open window to be one that lets you use said search.
The GTK file open windows do in fact integrate desktop search, as well as a recently used file list, although the standard folder view is the default, and the search and recent options are not especially prominent. I've only recently got into the habit of using them, and they certainly are, a lot of the time, far superior to digging through some confusing mess of folders.
Arguably a Unix filesystem already is a tagged repository.
In Unix-y filesystems, you don't put files in folders. You put files in the filesystem, where they get a number (inode number). Then you can set up other special files (directories) to act as indices, linking names to the inode number - as many as you want. Voila - nest-able tags (albeit not versioned in most filesystems.)
(Actually, if Unix hadn't insisted on banning '/' and NUL from filenames, a directory could in fact link arbitrary binary data to inode numbers. Bit of a missed opportunity there..)
Sounds great to me - obviously you wouldn't call it that though! Consider gmail "labels" vs traditional email/imap folders - labels are both easier to use for novices and more flexible for capable users.
I've been pushing this for the last six months. I think that the best example of how to use a tagging system already exists in programs like F-Spot. A tree-like tag system goes on the left. A time-line goes on top. The files are in the main pane in reverse chronological order. Double-clicking takes the main pane into "view" mode and embeds a document, image, or video viewer. Click the "edit" button to open an editor.
The "open file" dialog in applications would be the file browser with a filter for supported
Seriously, if files and folders confuses you, you might want to reevaluate your need to use a computer.
A bit harsh, but I'd agree otherwise. I think the problem is that for those that do understand the concepts of files and directories, they balk at the idea of having to use them.
Granted it's possible that the average person in daily life has an aversion to organisation, but what I see is a relatively recent and often shrill insistence that their computer (and, by extension, the applications they use) shou
what I see is a relatively recent and often shrill insistence that their computer (and, by extension, the applications they use) should do their work for them and magically organise everything behind the scenes.
And then there's the bit that always gets me (and which annoys me with some of the Firefox 3 results and can be a touch annoying with too many Gnome Do extensions): They also want to to magically understand what they meant when they try to find files from the magical file system.
Since we are going to have non technical people using linux I think it would be better to have everything in / except/home under a folder like/linux. So you would have...
But they don't get hierarchies, because hierarchies don't exist in nature.
I'd have to disagree with you here. The very words we use to describe hierarchies come from nature - look at 'trunk' / 'branch' / 'leaf', 'parent' / 'child', 'master' / 'slave'. Maybe they don't instantly, intuitively get the idea when it's used as a metaphor, but that's partly vocabulary. They'll get it quickly enough if you explain to them that a 'folder' or 'directory' is a box, and a 'file' is a bit of paper that you can write on, and you can put either paper or boxes in any box.
If they don't 'get it' when it's explained that simply, then they're below the mental cutoff for that level of abstract thought. Many people (for instance) struggle to execute a sequence of simple instructions, and cannot solve even simple logic problems. They literally don't have the mental machinery required to visualise three different entities and the relationships between them, "A is next to B and B contains C". I'm not saying they're 'idiots' or that they're worthless, they just don't have abstract thought among their strengths.
Pulse Audio is what I worry about (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not worried about X breakages, personally. I even have an Intel 945G and I can live with the problems its causing. What I can't live with is the extreme instability of Pulse Audio. It crashes my apps contstantly from broken pipes. OK, people should be checking their pipes. But Pulse Audio itself crashes very frequently (about every hour or so on my machine). Rhythmbox won't go for more than 10 minutes without either crashing or audio failing. This is incredibly bad for me.
I realize that it's probably due to older, underpowered hardware (3 year old cheap laptop), but this should not be happening. I've yanked Pulse Audio from my machine altogether now and it's a lot more stable. I was also getting lock ups in Firefox every hour or so. Now that I've dumped Pulse Audio, I've only had one lock up in the past 3 days (still can't figure that one out -- related to video drivers???).
So, I plead with Ubuntu developers: either fix Pulse Audio, or punt it. The extra features it has is *not* worth the massive pain that some people experience.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's more problems than just pulse audio, there are too many daemons appearing in general. Stuff like gnome-pty-helper, gnome-keyring, ssh-agent, consolekit, hal-addon-storage, gconfd. All this stuff is fine on general purpose machines when the user mainly engages in browsing, multimedia, IM and office apps. The problems arise when you want to do something demanding like A/V work, with distros increasingly integrating services for the common usage case it's becoming increasingly difficult to get a usa
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Whats the point of it? my problem with pulseaudio is I'm getting all these bugs but i cant see a singe case where its better than a tricked out alsa setup (well actually it does deal well with simultaneous log-ins, but I'm sure that could have been edged into alsa without as many problems as PA brought). Perhaps the problem is distros have invested a fair bit of time in it, and now they're in the longest que for the bar but don't want to switch because while they would get served sooner, they'd have to acce
Re:Pulse Audio is what I worry about (Score:5, Interesting)
The pathetic thing is that I've never had trouble with it because I go to the website and read the Pulseaudio/Perfectsetup document. It's too bad none of the distribution or even package maintainers seem to want to read it, ESPECIALLY Ubuntu which does things WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
DITO - with 8.10 I had to buy a webcam just so I would not get delay on my microphone when skyping. After 9.04 not even that workaround worked any longer. I have since switched to Arch even though that is likely not what I want either. I wish I was a millionaire and had money to hire a dev-team to create a proper linux distro.
Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:5, Insightful)
They rushed to release 4.0 and since then I'm still struggling to have all the features I used to have in KDE v3.5.
And, more important, I hope that Ubuntu people won't trash GNOME v2 from night to day like they did with KDE v3.5.
Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:5, Insightful)
What KDE4 proofed is that you can also sit down and have really interesting conceptual changes that get introduced as big shifts.
What KDE4 proofed is that if you make really awful software that is full of bugs even long term fans will switch to using an alternative.
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Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:4, Informative)
What went wrong was that distro put in the new version far too early.
I have never really liked gnome... It always seems to consume the ram like a windows desktop...
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Same on OS X/PPC (Score:5, Interesting)
I use that version on OS X, thanks to Fink project. While they don't promise any kind of 'final' version at this state, I can easily keep KDE 4 applications in my OS X Dock, using them instead of iTunes for example.
They are linked to actual OS X frameworks, down to Quicktime and very interestingly they use far less CPU and resources than regular OS X apps.
There are similar reports from Windows users who binary installed it and using Amarok 2 etc. right now. While on it, is there any reason why KDE 3.5 given up when KDE 4 installed? I keep using KDE 3.5 suite on OS X too. It doesn't conflict with anything at all including KDE 4.
I think what KDE 4 is and what a huge revolution it is will be understood in 1-2 years. For example when Nokia and other members of open source Symbian foundation starts using it in some form in their smart phones.
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Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:5, Informative)
OSX 10.0 was crap, hell even Microsoft needed 3 years after Vista (with some major architecture changes).
It just takes too much time the achieve feature/stability/usability parity with the old system no matter how needed those major under-the-hood changes were.
So sorry, Gnome will take the same path as everyone else and sites will rush to declare 3.0 "A Major Disappointment". What you can hope for, though, is that distros won't be so braindead to drop Gnome 2 immediately after the 3.0 release.
Honestly, there was a time when distributions were concerned about providing a usable user experience instead of just grabbing all the latest stuff, add their configuration tools and ship that crap. See PulseAudio, great idea, terrible execution on every single fucking distro I've tried.
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Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:5, Interesting)
The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish but it did have some positive sides. If they hadn't released it as 4.0 a lot of people wouldn't have tried it out and therefore they wouldn't have found as many issues as they did. They certainly should have worked more closely with the main KDE distributions to make it clear to end users they 4.0 was going to be a dog. With hindsight I think it would have been better to have held off on 4.0 until it was 4.1 quality. That way they would have got most of the user testing but without so much of the "I want to stab you in the eyes for making me ruin my machine".
I don't hold out much hope for Gnome bringing great new things to the party. I try it out every now and then but it just doesn't do it for me in the same way that KDE does. All the Gnome LAFs look terribly dated dumbed down. While I don't spend my days admiring the widgets used in my applications I prefer to look at something that is pleasing to the eye just like I would rather the view from my house was green fields rather than a rubbish dump.
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Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmmm, it wasn't from KDE's perspective. It's the way things have always worked. The KDE developers set themselves some goals for KDE 4.0 and they achieved them - mainly API and ABI stability. What happened was that distributors then blindly started compiling and packaging it and then whinging when they found out that their users weren't too happy with it. Virtually all distributors are braindead when it comes to putting together a whole system and looking intelligently at the software they want to use. It's why we have PulseAudio being thrown into desktop systems today. That thing isn't stable at all, let alone feature complete.
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Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase (Score:5, Interesting)
people pick up a .0 release and are surprised its not as polished and featureful as a .5? WTF?
The kde4.0 snafu really highlighted a problem in ubuntu->KDE communication, other distros got that kde4.0 would be rough around the edges and at least offered kde3.5or shipped their 4.0 with a lot of patches ect. I tend to follow kde developement from afar and I've always know that kde4.3 is the first kde4 that is end user ready.
No, distribution packagers decided KDE 4.0 was good enough to include in their releases so it got sent out to a lot of people. I don't know if you tried 4.0, but I did. It was horrible. Saying, "it was not as polished and featureful," does not describe what happened with 4.0. KDE 4.0 was a huge, massive step backwards in functionality that should never have been considered for release. It was barely alpha-grade software at release time. It still contains idiotic major achitectural mistakes (like what amounts to an entirely new, and needlessly separate windowing system for the Plasma widgets) and requires a major reorganization to what goes where (I can never find the right submenu / screen to make adjustments because they're split over too many unrelated interfaces).
Blaming the users is shortsighted. Blaming the distro packagers makes some sense. But placing blame on the KDE team for the total cockup that was 4.0 is putting it where it is due. KDE4 is inching toward consistency and usability, but what we have NOW is what should have been the original release -- ignoring the massive mistakes in the redesign that remain deeply baked into Plasma.
The message here is simple: if you're going to radically redesign a product with a large user base, don't release the replacement until it's in much better condition than for minimal changes. With 4.0 and the introduction of Plasma, the KDE team should have (beyond being struck repeatedly with a two-by-four for being frelling nincompoops) skipped a release cycle in order to get things into better shape.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And then, what about all subsequent releases untill now? Are all of them "not for the end user"?
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Since 4.2, KDE works just fine. I use it all day long and have no trouble with it.
The early releases were majorly broken though. Why they made it into the distros is beyond me.
Yay! Fixing 100 Paper Cuts! (Score:4, Informative)
https://launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts [launchpad.net]
Don't include Gnome 3 in the next LTS (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a Ubuntu advocate (more of a Fedora/RHEL person really) but if the well documented problems with KDE 4 are anything to go by then including Gnome 3 in the next LTS release of Ubuntu would be IMHO a big mistake.
An LTS release deserves to be of the highest quality from Day 1. To me it would be madness to base an LTS release on anything Gnome 3.0.
IMHO an Ubuntu LTS release whould be the desktop equivalent to RHEL or SLED in terms of stability. If it is not then you have shot yourselves in the foot. If this means being conservative in package selection then so be it.
Re:Don't include Gnome 3 in the next LTS (Score:5, Insightful)
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GTK (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, GTK+ is due for an overhaul. Fix the damn file picker. Get rid of all that excessive padding, maybe by making it themeable. Some consistency in menuitem dimensions would be nice.
Also, either give Metacity some features, at least the bare essentials, or switch to another window manager. That non-optional minimize effect is cringe worthy.
Re:GTK (Score:5, Insightful)
Now admittedly maybe this only manifests when you're using small interface fonts (I'm using 7pt here, for reference). Taking GIMP's menus as an example, menu items with images are significantly larger than ones without - a full 25% larger (20 vs 16 px). I don't have a huge number of gtk apps on my system to check this in, but inkscape and wireshark seem to have the same issue.
This is a pet peeve of mine too. Bearing a striking resemblance to one I remember from Apple Mac systems pre colour monitors, the current design of the filepicker was in no way an improvement.
For some reason or another the "location" text field is hidden by default (and even when shown, is oddly not populated by default with the path to the current directory). What could have been useful breadcrumb-style navigation buttons were added, except all but the one representing the current directory is hidden until you click a different button (this is despite there being the entire width of the file picker for them to fill). The lack of switchable view modes in the file listing is mystifying, it seems to display "thumbnails" of images when browsing, but it doesn't seem to be possible to make those thumbnails any bigger than 16x16px.
Also the effect that draws big bold black rectangles on your screen to indicate the borders of hidden windows while alt-tabbing. Something regrettably KDE copied. I don't need this, if I wanted to waste my time with annoying and ultimately useless visual effects I'd install compiz.
In reality, once it has become difficult or event impossible to make the system behave in a manner conducive to it actually being useful for anything, it's time to look elsewhere. As I often have to remind people, just because they are happy with the default settings doesn't mean everyone will be.
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Re:GTK (Score:5, Insightful)
The GTK file picker is quite possibly the worst file picker I have ever seen. Even Windows 3.1's crappy stuff was better - it might not support long filenames, but at least it didn't require one extra click in order to do anything useful.
Seriously, "browse for other folders"? I still maintain that the genius who thought that up needs to be shot.
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Re:GTK (Score:4, Insightful)
Picking a directory is tedious and unintuitive. When I just click the OK button to pick the current directory, nothing happens. I have to click an empty space in the directory, to 'select it', first. When I use the crumbtrail to navigate to a parent directory, it automatically selects the child directory I just came from. When I click OK does it pick the current directory, or the selected directory? Who knows. When I open the file picker later it always opens in the parent directory of the previously picked one. Why in the parent?
There are many usability problems with the current file picker.
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GNOME 3.0 sneak preview (Score:5, Funny)
You login, which you don't actually have to do anymore because it was too complicated, and you're presented with a fullscreen dialog box that says:
"You are too fucking stupid to use this computer. You don't understand files and folders and things. Click OK to shutdown your computer. Your computer will shutdown in 28 seconds anyway, because you're probably too stupid to work the mouse. That's the thing underneath your hand. What? That's the thing attached to your arm. Ah, fuck it. 20 seconds."
That's pretty much the entire GNOME 3.0 experience. The dialog box has been in development for the last 18 months, but obviously there's still a lot of usability testing left to do, mostly by Redhat and Canonical "engineers". The OK button logic was originally written in C but they've redone that in C# running on Mono, and Miguel de Icaza is already calling the work "superb".
Meanwhile, the KDE people have been busy readying the next batch of widgets that you will never add to your exciting K desktop experience.
Future plans for GNOME involve reducing the 3.0 dialog box down to a single pixel, then translating the status of that pixel into the power LED on your computer. This will remove the need for a display, further simplying the desktop experience and reducing enterprise costs. KDE plans to turn its entire desktop into a widget of itself, allowing you to remove it entirely with a single right-click.
Yes, my friends: the future of the Linux desktop is no more fucking Linux desktop. What a relief.
GNOME 3's solution for files and folders (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm suprised Shuttleworth didn't mention Zeitgeist [gnome.org], which is a solution to the difficulty of manually managing files and folders and is, as I understand it, being considered for inclusion in GNOME 3. The basic idea is to group files (and other activities, like web bookmarks and email contents) automatically according to human-relevant criteria, like "edited last week" or "related to this document I'm writing." It's still very much a work in progress, but it looks like it could be pretty great.
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Re:GNOME 3's solution for files and folders (Score:5, Interesting)
What's it with this "i am too stupid to put a file in a folder, and therefore it is too difficult" "philosophy"?
I have tested every single one of those "automatic" and "intelligent" file management methods, and they always resulted in massive chaos, that was never the case with simple file systems and soft links. The problem was, that you could never be sure if a file was completely gone, in what "folders/categories/tags/whatevers" is still existed, sometimes moving files was a major hassle, and sometimes it was completely impossible to organize the files in they way I wanted (and always did with normal files and folders), because those "intelligent" methods were way to stupid, simple, and yet overly complicated. Or in other words: They had the elegance of a hillbilly Godzilla in high heels, stumbling down a red carpet at the Oscars.
If you want to make it actually better, create an ontology. Make it a semantic system. Just let it be elegant, clean and efficient at the core. And then add a properly fitting new UI concept to it, that completely throws the old models and analog-analogies away.
Then you will get a system that makes sense.
I still wait for someone doing such an ontology right.
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This is exactly why I hated it when MS started ramming the new term "folders" down our throats. The word "directories" suited better, as it did not conjour up invalid analogies in the minds of newbies. Now instead of just having to explain what a directory is, I now have to explain what a folder is AS WELL AS how it's not like a real folder.
Folders before windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't surprise me if it goes back to xerox alto.
That doesn't mean that it's ultimately helpful, but it's so entrenched it seems harder tho change it than to fix it.
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Re:"folder" considered harmful (Score:4, Informative)
MS-DOS has DIR command
LOL. Speaking of consistency (or the lack thereof), consider the following Powershell commands and their respective aliases (I'm going by memory here so someone correct me if I'm incomplete):
The default aliases seem to include both DOS and *nix commands, and DOS (or some stench of it), seems to be alive and well despite being officially killed off when Win2000 was released.
So, in the Microsoft world, we've gone from using 'directory' in DOS, to 'folder' in Windows, to 'Items', 'Locations' and '-type Directory' in PowerShell. No wonder everyone's confused. ;-)
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
In meatspace:
They are almost synonymous. So someone with a non-computer background won't intuitively know which one is supposed to contain which.
In computer lingo:
So it's completely unintuitive.
I think the word 'file' has its roots from the days when a 'record' was still a fundamental concept. So a 'record' is a sheet of paper, a 'file' contains a bundle of records.
I prefer 'directory'. At least then it doesn't push a false analogy on an already confused mind.
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:4, Interesting)
In computer-space we have either directories/files or folders/documents.
In any case, word excel and powerpoint documents can contain multiple sheets of paper, and I see a lot of people take that to extremes - for example having all the day's letters contained in one word document, or every single spreadsheet they work on in one excel document.
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
In computer-space we have either directories/files or folders/documents.
MS Windows uses "Files" and "Folders". Actually, the type of a folder is "File Folder". A "document" is a subtype of "file", because a "file" can also be an "application" or "program". A "file" could also be an "archive", which contains "files" and "folders". Some "archives" are called "cabinets". And of course all these files, folders, archives, cabinets, etc. can be seen in windows. Of course to be able to see those windows you first need to use a key, to open the lock. And to add protection from outsiders to see you files, etc. we have walls of fire. All the files, folders, etc. are stored on something called "drives"... why on earth are they not called "rooms"? And I wonder where the "roof" is in all this stuff.
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:4, Funny)
I think more people would expect it to be a wall of fire.
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, word excel and powerpoint documents can contain multiple sheets of paper, and I see a lot of people take that to extremes - for example having all the day's letters contained in one word document, or every single spreadsheet they work on in one excel document.
During the late 80s/early 90s I worked for a firm that had a satellite office with a single PC which was running Wordpress on DOS. The secretary there had a single document containing every single letter she had typed over the past three years. She typed letters for an office of 15 engineers and regularly wrote several every day.
Worse still, when she opened it (fortunately just the once per day) she would press the down cursor key repeatedly until she got to the last line. She spent approximately half an hour doing this I asked her how she found an old letter to check, and she replied it would be in the filing cabinet behind her. No matter ho many times I tried to show her how to use individual files, she went back to this single document. I once discovered we had no backup of this single file (it was saved outside of the document directory) and I still have the occasional nightmares about it.
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:5, Funny)
Waitress: Morning! ...meatspace meatspace meatspace egg and meatspace; meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace baked beans meatspace meatspace meatspace... ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and meatspace.
Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and meatspace; egg bacon and meatspace; egg bacon sausage and meatspace; meatspace bacon sausage and meatspace; meatspace egg meatspace meatspace bacon and meatspace; meatspace sausage meatspace meatspace bacon meatspace tomato and meatspace;
Vikings: meatspace meatspace meatspace meatspace...
Waitress:
Vikings: meatspace! Lovely meatspace! Lovely meatspace!
Waitress:
Wife: Have you got anything without meatspace?
Waitress: Well, there's meatspace egg sausage and meatspace, that's not got much meatspace in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY meatspace!
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you could be less elitist and realise that we're far beyond having to manually file things in this day and age, indeed that is something the computer was meant to eradicate.
A tagged document repository (with versioning history) would be best. Coupled with desktop search and changing the system file open window to be one that lets you use said search and tags to find the file instead of clicking through folders. Most files people want are more recent, so a default view of reverse chronological for the filetypes the application supports would be best.
You do, of course, still need a traditional filesystem view of this repository, and that is probably where the work will go in. Sure, tags could be folders, and you could have multiple ways of drilling down to the same file. You'd probably have a folder hierarchy that shows the most used tags at the highest level, then each subfolder is really a tag filter.
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The GTK file open windows do in fact integrate desktop search, as well as a recently used file list, although the standard folder view is the default, and the search and recent options are not especially prominent. I've only recently got into the habit of using them, and they certainly are, a lot of the time, far superior to digging through some confusing mess of folders.
Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:5, Interesting)
In Unix-y filesystems, you don't put files in folders. You put files in the filesystem, where they get a number (inode number). Then you can set up other special files (directories) to act as indices, linking names to the inode number - as many as you want. Voila - nest-able tags (albeit not versioned in most filesystems.)
(Actually, if Unix hadn't insisted on banning '/' and NUL from filenames, a directory could in fact link arbitrary binary data to inode numbers. Bit of a missed opportunity there
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds great to me - obviously you wouldn't call it that though!
Consider gmail "labels" vs traditional email/imap folders - labels are both easier to use for novices and more flexible for capable users.
YMMV, as ever.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been pushing this for the last six months. I think that the best example of how to use a tagging system already exists in programs like F-Spot. A tree-like tag system goes on the left. A time-line goes on top. The files are in the main pane in reverse chronological order. Double-clicking takes the main pane into "view" mode and embeds a document, image, or video viewer. Click the "edit" button to open an editor.
The "open file" dialog in applications would be the file browser with a filter for supported
Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sooner or later, everyone re-invents VMS.
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Re:The only thing I got out of TFA... (Score:4, Informative)
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeZeitgeist [gnome.org]
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Seriously, if files and folders confuses you, you might want to reevaluate your need to use a computer.
A bit harsh, but I'd agree otherwise. I think the problem is that for those that do understand the concepts of files and directories, they balk at the idea of having to use them.
Granted it's possible that the average person in daily life has an aversion to organisation, but what I see is a relatively recent and often shrill insistence that their computer (and, by extension, the applications they use) shou
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And then there's the bit that always gets me (and which annoys me with some of the Firefox 3 results and can be a touch annoying with too many Gnome Do extensions): They also want to to magically understand what they meant when they try to find files from the magical file system.
People have these fan
(OT) smart systems that suck: Wolfram Alpha. (Score:5, Interesting)
you might enjoy this article (or perhaps you've already read it?): http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html [blogspot.com]
I know I did.
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Or you could do what MacOS does to hide the unix filesystem from the user.
Re:No need to be catty (Score:4, Insightful)
But they don't get hierarchies, because hierarchies don't exist in nature.
I'd have to disagree with you here. The very words we use to describe hierarchies come from nature - look at 'trunk' / 'branch' / 'leaf', 'parent' / 'child', 'master' / 'slave'. Maybe they don't instantly, intuitively get the idea when it's used as a metaphor, but that's partly vocabulary. They'll get it quickly enough if you explain to them that a 'folder' or 'directory' is a box, and a 'file' is a bit of paper that you can write on, and you can put either paper or boxes in any box.
If they don't 'get it' when it's explained that simply, then they're below the mental cutoff for that level of abstract thought. Many people (for instance) struggle to execute a sequence of simple instructions, and cannot solve even simple logic problems. They literally don't have the mental machinery required to visualise three different entities and the relationships between them, "A is next to B and B contains C". I'm not saying they're 'idiots' or that they're worthless, they just don't have abstract thought among their strengths.
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