Shuttleworth's Take On GNOME 3.0, Coordination with Debian

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."

Yay! Fixing 100 Paper Cuts!

[ziggamon2.0]

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!

https://launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts [launchpad.net]

Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase

[TheTurtlesMoves]

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...

Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase

[Fred_A]

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.

Re:Not the KDE4 way, plase

[nutshell42]

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.

Re:The only thing I got out of TFA...

[jonbryce]

Or you could do what MacOS does to hide the unix filesystem from the user.

Actually, they will.

[Chibi Merrow]

Linus did.

Re:"folder" considered harmful

[value_added]

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):

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. ;-)

Re:The only thing I got out of TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

During my short adventure with Win7 I'm pretty sure I also noticed that subfolders of My Documents are now called "libraries".

Re:The only thing I got out of TFA...

[Knuckles]

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeZeitgeist [gnome.org]