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A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.6 428

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
A user writes "GNOME 2.6 is just around the corner, and I figured out that many GNOME users would like to know what's in store. So I installed GNOME 2.5 (development version for 2.6) in my box, and came up with a list of the new stuff that are coming up. (and just in case, copies of the article are also available here and here)."
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A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.6 More

A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.6

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  • Almost as interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:29AM (#8497270) Homepage
    as the Gnome desktop itself is the fact he's using the freedesktop xserver to run it. I had no idea it was so far advanced.

    • Re:Almost as interesting... (Score:4, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @10:33AM (#8498356)
      The FD.O X server runs existing X apps just fine. Since it was based on the already-working kdrive server, it should be working (varying degrees of "working") through most of its development cycle.

  • Gnome 2.6 beta 1 release (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:31AM (#8497285)
    If you want to help Gnome 2.6, then you are in luck! The Beta release is here and it needs testing

    More details here [osnews.com]

    Don't forget to report the bugs!
    • Since you seem to be part of the team, I'll bite.

      I've been trying to install gnome off and on for the past month and a half. Problem is that it's a major bitch to install, even with neat little shell scripts like CVSGNOME I run into at least a dozen quirky dependencies. Each dependency is hell and a half to get working, and requires at least an hour googling and tweaking to get running.

      The first time I tried to install I got up to the point where I needed some XML library, which needed a font library, whi

      • Re:Gnome 2.6 beta 1 release (Score:5, Informative)

        by MenTaLguY ( 5483 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @10:27AM (#8498307) Homepage
        Having recently done a GNOME build from scratch on HP-UX, I had to work out the dependencies (I just used a makefile rather than figuring out the optimum order by hand).

        As far the core GNOME libraries go, though, here's an excerpt from the dependencies section of my top-level makefile. If you start from the bottom of this list and work your way up, installing the dependencies before you install each library/package, you should be OK.

        (you may already have some, like xrender, if you have recent XFree86)

        GConf: popt glib ORBit2 libxml2 gtk+

        libgnomeui: gtk+ libxml2 libgnome libgnomecanvas libbonoboui libbonobo

        libgnome: glib gnome-vfs libbonobo GConf

        gnome-vfs: glib libxml2 libbonobo ORBit2 GConf gnome-mime-data

        libbonoboui: gtk+ libbonobo libgnomecanvas libxml2 GConf

        libgnomecanvas: gtk+ libart_lgpl pango

        libbonobo: glib libxml2 ORBit2

        libgsf: glib libxml2

        libglade: libxml2 gtk+ atk

        gtk+: glib atk pango

        pango: glib freetype fontconfig xft

        ORBit2: popt glib libIDL

        xft: fontconfig freetype xrender

        fonts: fontconfig

        fontconfig: freetype expat

        atk: glib

        xrender: render

        render: pkgconfig

        glib: pkgconfig

  • New File Selector - WOO HOO (Score:5, Informative)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:37AM (#8497328) Homepage
    A new GTK file selector. FINALLY. I can't wait to use the new one - the old one was one of the great warts of the free desktop world, IMHO.

    But they have decided to remove the text entry box??? Eeep. I guess having the Ctrl-l shortcut to get one is OK (after all, it will most likely be geeks that want direct text on a file open) but thats one they need to document WELL.

    On the whole though, it might be a good thing. I guess we'll have to wait and see. But text box or not, it can hardly be worse than the old one.

    • Re:New File Selector - WOO HOO (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hattig ( 47930 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:46AM (#8497391) Journal
      The best file selector in my opinion ever, was the ASL file requestor on the Amiga. It just worked (tm). Whilst the old GTK file selector was the worst I have ever had the misfortune to use, none of the others come close - Windows is annoyingly cludgy still (at least it is resizable now). KDE's isn't that bad though, certainly a lot better than a lot of the others.

      Then again, I think that the Amiga did a lot of things right for the desktop part of the OS, and in many underlying areas. Not bad for such an old, quickly written system.

    • Re:New File Selector - WOO HOO (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It is certainly not just geeks who will want or need to type in file names. Skilled typists will not want to move their hands from the home row to open a file. Making them use the mouse to open a file is a bad idea.

      It's important to remember that some users are much more skilled at using some aspects of the computer than are developers, and that "easy to learn" is not the same as "ease of use."

      • New File Selector with type ahead (Score:5, Informative)

        by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:34AM (#8497774)

        It is certainly not just geeks who will want or need to type in file names. Skilled typists will not want to move their hands from the home row to open a file. Making them use the mouse to open a file is a bad idea.

        So ... type in the name of the filename, anywhere in the window. This file selector has type-ahead support so it will search through the files looking for the next file that matches the string you have typed so far. If you've been using this feature extensively in Mozilla, it'll be second nature already.

        Cheers,
        Toby Haynes

        • One thing that sucks about the typeahead lookup or whatever it is, is when I'm attached to a network drive at work over our slow ass Cisco vpn. It reading in the info to do the lookup makes typing anything in a huge struggle and I end up just using the mouse anyway. If it were a checkbox or menu item in the file selector dialog itself, it would better. And maybe it is, if anyone can enlighten me, using KDE btw.
    • The best file selector is no file selector at all. Since there is already a file browser such as Evolution (or its equivalent) that should be used, and made quick and easy enough for simple file selection tasks. To open a file, just view its directory and click on it; the application loads automatically and there is no real need for the two-step 'load application then use the Open menu', which dates from a time when computers didn't have a single GUI and there was no means to just open a file directly. T

      • Re:New File Selector - WOO HOO (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ultranova ( 717540 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @10:10AM (#8498089)
        Since there is already a file browser such as Evolution

        Isn't Evolution a mail reader and not a file browser ? Or did you mean Nautilus ?

        To open a file, just view its directory and click on it; the application loads automatically and there is no real need for the two-step 'load application then use the Open menu', which dates from a time when computers didn't have a single GUI and there was no means to just open a file directly.

        Or you could leave both options open and let people use whichever they want. Like it's done now.

        Besides, if I have both mplayer and xine installed, how does the One File Browser know which one to launch ? Or Emacs and Vi ? Or whatever ?

        And yes, I realize you can set this in preferences; but suppose you want to use different tools for different tasks, despite the file format being the same ? Or if I just want to try out a new program ?

        To save a file, why not drag it from the application to the directory window.

        Because that would mean resizing application windows to fit them besides the directory windows, and be a lot more hassle than simply using a selector window ?

        Matthew Thomas pointed out better than I could that the separate file-picker is user interface cruft left over from an earlier age.

        No, it's a useability feature. Lacking a separate file selector would give users unneccessary grief.

        Let's just have one file browser in the desktop and make it good enough to use for everything.

        The more features you bundle into a single program, the less likely it performs any of them well, simply because different features (such as useability and low learning curve) conflict with one another.

      • That'd suck. I *hate* file browsers. Currently, opening a file involves:

        File -> Open -> Select File

        With a file browser system, it would be:

        Un-maximize word processor -> open browser app -> find folder -> position windows for drag & drop -> drag & drop

        There are additional problems. From my experience with Windows users:

        1) They don't understand drag & drop
        2) They don't understand hierarchical filesystems

        They think in terms of applications, not files. They want to open a Wor

      • Re:New File Selector - WOO HOO (Score:4, Insightful)

        by juhaz ( 110830 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @02:19PM (#8501029) Homepage
        Why is it that drag & drop fanatics are always trying to force their preference to everyone else?

        EVERY TIME there's talk about file selectors, someone pops up and seriously suggests an option that not only encourages the need to use mouse, but actually requires it.

        Especially for saving... instead of hitting ctrl-s (and quickly typing a name if it's the first time), I'm supposed to a) resize application window, b) locate file manager from open windows, or open one if it isn't running, c) drag icon somewhere? Excuse me, I think I need to puke.
    • A new GTK file selector. FINALLY

      I hope they remember to send the KDE team a thank you note.

  • Performance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:37AM (#8497329)
    When will we start to see serious performance improvements? Currently, GNOME doesn't feel much better than Windows XP, and it needs at least 128M to run acceptably with other apps.

    Linux is supposed to get us off the upgrade treadmill, but as far as I can see, GNOME just keeps getting bigger, slower and more complex. I've switched to XFce; it's so much faster. KDE is a hog too, but at least they're concerned about performance and efficiency as the 3.2 release shows.

    Really, this is something we should think about. When gconfd is eating up 20 megs (resident), just for a configuration back-end, it's evident that we're getting sloppy. A faster Linux could work wonders in terms of corporate and home adoption, but we just seem to be chasing Moore's Law and copying Microsoft for bloat.

    I'll try GNOME 2.6 when it arrives, but to give a better impression to newcomers we need to make things noticably faster, more elegant and more efficient than Windows. Companies have to support all this code into the future, after all...

    • Re:Performance (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:51AM (#8497410)
      Part of the problem is that developers, being geeks, tend to have all the latest kit. So the GNOME hackers working on their 512M / 1G 3 GHz box won't be concerned about performance, but the millions of desktop users running lower-spec machines will.

      Let's be clear about this: the vast, VAST majority of machines on the planet, in homes and in businesses, have 32M, 64M (and occasionally 128M) RAM. That's nowhere enough to run GNOME/KDE, OpenOffice.org and Mozill at a realistic and usable speed. When did we become just as bloated as Microsoft?

      If the GNME developers don't step back, look at the problem and concentrate on efficiency and clean design (rather than flashy features and bloat), it'll lead to long term damage for Linux on the desktop. They're doing a great job bringing Linux to the masses, but the masses are going to be less enthusiastic about Linux when it keeps requiring hardware upgrades...

      • On the other hand, WinXP won't run on those machines either. They are probably running Win98, in which case they can be safely replaced by KDE1 or an older version of GNOME. You can't expect all the latest features with 32 megs of RAM.
      • "Let's be clear about this: the vast, VAST majority of machines on the planet, in homes and in businesses, have 32M, 64M (and occasionally 128M) RAM."

        What are you talking about? Everywhere I look I see people with at least 128 MB RAM computers at home. 256 is not rare these days.
        And let's face it: Windows XP won't run quickly with less than 128 MB RAM. I've seen some XP boxes with 128 MB RAM and they are *horribly slow*.
        As Windows XP gains more and more market share, which means more and more people are u

        • Re:Performance (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Malc ( 1751 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:46AM (#8497876)
          According to Google's Zeitgeist" [google.ca], Windows XP represesnts 45% of the market out there (well, of their customers/users). Windows 2000 represents 18%, and although it will run in 64MB, I don't view anything less than 128MB realistic. Therefore, I would guess that the majority of people are already using machines with 128MB or more.

        • Re:Performance (Score:4, Interesting)

          by maxwell demon ( 590494 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:51AM (#8497924) Journal
          Some of the features described (the OO behaviour of the file manager, file templates) have been there under OS/2 Warp 3, running in acceptable speed in as little as 8 MB. And that was on a 486DX2/66.

          IMHO, a window manager/desktop environment should always try to eat up as little space as possible. After all, the applications you run are getting more memory hungry as well.

          BTW, nice to know that OS/2 goodies start to show up in GNOME! Now give me "Arbeitsordner" (don't know what the English name is, it's file manager windows which remember the documents opened from it and closing/reopening them when they are themselves closed/opened; sort of session management for single file manager windows), and I'll no longer miss anything from OS/2 Presentation Manager in Linux.

          • Re:Performance (Score:3, Insightful)

            by FooBarWidget ( 556006 )
            Did you forget everything else? Antialiased fonts, a configuration system which supports multiple backends (XML or LDAP or anything you want; important for businesses), heavy use of graphics that have millions of colors, bigger screens, more advanced underlying architecture (important for third-party developers!), MIME type sniffing, etc.

            Yes OS/2 Warp did some of that but it also looks bad by today's standards and isn't nearly as advanced or polished.
    • I use fluxbox and I run gnome-settings-daemon and kdeinit in my .xsession. All my gnome/kde apps are fully eye-candied up and it's all really, really fast, and doesn't use much memory.

      Of course, there are tradeoffs. It doesn't work like windows. It's different. It's better. It's every thing you ever wanted in a beer ... and less.
    • If Gnome is meant to provide a familiar "window's like" environment for those who switch to linux, it is going to have to take advantage of the available RAM and CPU. Computers keep getting more powerful and memory is getting much cheaper. I'd say the majority of people have above 128 MB of RAM and RAM is cheap.

      There are alternative environments for older systems out there. I think Gnome should definitely focus on efficieny but I don't think they should focus so much as to not incorporate new featur

      • Re:Performance (Score:2, Interesting)

        by tolan-b ( 230077 )
        I run gnome 2.4 on an athlon 800 with 384 meg ram, and it's pretty slow to be honest.

        I know that's not a particularly up to date processor, but it's not that uncommon for home users.

    • Re:Performance (Score:5, Informative)

      by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:05AM (#8497526)
      "When will we start to see serious performance improvements?"

      With GNOME 2.0 and 2.6. Nautilus 2.0 got a huge speed boost compared to 1.x. Nautilus 2.6 is spatial and has because even faster. Windows appear instantly.

      "Linux is supposed to get us off the upgrade treadmill, but as far as I can see, GNOME just keeps getting bigger, slower and more complex."

      Not true. GNOME (and KDE!) have only gotten faster and faster. The exceptions are KDE 2.0 (which is slower than 1.0; but 3.0 is faster than 2.0 and 3.2 is even faster than 3.0) and GTK (which has become a little slower but also smoother because of extensive double buffering). On this system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz 390 MB RAM) I can definitely say GNOME 2.x is faster than 1.4. And GTK 2 feels smoother than GTK 1.

      "When gconfd is eating up 20 megs (resident), just for a configuration back-end, it's evident that we're getting sloppy."

      OMG not this again. I will repeat it *again*. Don't trust memory reports! The 20 MB you read includes shared memory! In reality it uses a lot less than 20 MB, somewhere around 6 MB on my system.
      People who think software x is bloated by looking at the system monitor's memory report are just deceiving themselves.

      And sometimes you need to use more resources in order to make things faster. Low memory usage doesn't always equal fast and high memory usage doesn't always equal slow!

      • Re:Performance (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:45AM (#8497873) Homepage
        On this system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz 390 MB RAM) I can definitely say GNOME 2.x is faster than 1.4.

        That's the same argument Microsoft used to say that Windows 95 is faster than Windows 3.1. And on a system with plenty of memory, it is. But most people's experience with the hardware available at the time was that Win95 was much much slower, thrashing horribly with less than eight megabytes and still rather uncomfortable with less than sixteen.

        Making a program twice as fast in CPU time but at the expense of using twice as much memory may not be a good trade-off. If you start running low on memory then you get a very steep performance drop from paging to disk (or not having enough RAM for disk cache, which is effectively the same thing). The most important benchmark is how it performs on a machine with, say, 64 megabytes of RAM, or whatever minimum level you want to require. Not shaving a few fractions of a second off times on recent hardware.

        • "That's the same argument Microsoft used to say that Windows 95 is faster than Windows 3.1"

          No it isn't. I'm talking about 2.x and 1.4 on the same system! GNOME 2.x on an Athlon 1.4 Ghz + 390 MB RAM is faster than GNOME 1.4 on the very same system!

          "But most people's experience with the hardware available at the time was that Win95 was much much slower, thrashing horribly with less than eight megabytes and still rather uncomfortable with less than sixteen."

          Yet Win95 won and all the critics were beaten d

      • I disagree (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bsd4me ( 759597 )

        ``Not true. GNOME (and KDE!) have only gotten faster and faster. The exceptions are KDE 2.0 (which is slower than 1.0; but 3.0 is faster than 2.0 and 3.2 is even faster than 3.0) and GTK (which has become a little slower but also smoother because of extensive double buffering).''

        I can't comment on KDE, but when I upgraded from Gnome 2.2 to 2.4, I noticed significant performance hits. The desktop took longer to load, and in general, were noticably slower.

        ``On this system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz 390 MB RAM) I

    • So you can be 10x more efficient with your systems than you can on an individual basis. Assuming you design your system archtecture with a bit of thought. Of course, very few do.

    • Re:Performance (Score:4, Informative)

      by murrayc ( 19323 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:08AM (#8497549) Homepage
      Nautilus is much faster in GNOME 2.6. And it was faster in 2.4 than 2.2, and faster in 2.2 than 2.0.

      There are also several specific performance improvements in particular GTK+ widgets, and the GNOME Help system has had an incredible speed up.

      Linux kernel 2.6 also makes a very noticeable difference, with it's pre-emptive schedule that gives priority to things that the user is doing.
    • Then yeah both KDE and Gnome will seem like hogs. I am doing this on a Dual P3 900mhz with 512mb, not a super machine but hardly bad and the speed difference is staggering. Switching desktops wich I do a lot is a breeze in XFCe, a pain in KDE and slow in gnome. KDE gets off because I had different wallpapers for each desktop in that one but Gnome doesn't even support that.

      Only thing I miss in XFce is that konsole doesn't seem to want to work well. A tabbed multi terminal app is very very usefull to me :) a

    • You know, I quit trying new desktops about a year ago. I'll still install KDE for a newbie, but I only use XFce4 on my desktops. The others don't offer anything over it that I want. I do wish GNOME were a better choice for newbies as it is prettier and arguably friendlier, but its instability in my experience is a show-stopper. KDE can also get its panties into a twist, especially where sound is concerned, but on the whole it's a smidgen more reliable than GNOME.

      Of course, neither can touch any of the "lig

  • Wow... (Score:5, Funny)

    by unknown_host ( 757538 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:42AM (#8497361)
    "and now it is much easier to manage one's wallpaper collection".
    That does it. I am shifting to GNOME.

  • gpdf (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:46AM (#8497387) Homepage
    Hmm. I really hope they do have thumbnail and bookmark support, and continue to add features. Xpdf is a nice renderer, but the interface IMHO is not exactly a nice one. If gpdf can become the full equal of Acrobat Reader I'll be one very happy camper.

    • Re:gpdf (Score:2)

      by GiMP ( 10923 )
      Of course, there is always the real Acrobat Reader for Linux. Of course, that won't help you on FreeBSD (without Linux compat) or with getting on RMS's good side.

      I personally think that GGV is great, but I'm excited to see what gpdf might bring.
    • As long as it doesn't copy the "use 100% of CPU whenever I'm running" feature.

      Even without that, I'd still use xpdf. Bookmarks are arugably of use, but thumbnails? No way.

  • File selectors? Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:46AM (#8497393)
    They go to all the trouble of creating a decent filer, Nautilus, and then ignore it for opening and saving documents by sticking with stupid file selectors. Again. Do any GUI developers bother challenging tired, illogical concepts? (Check out ROX for true drag and drop opening and saving: here [sourceforge.net])

    • Re:File selectors? Why? (Score:4, Funny)

      by DreadSpoon ( 653424 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:46AM (#8497882) Journal
      Getting rid of file selectors all together is *waaay* too big of a change for a minor version increment. Maybe in GNOME 3.0, sure. But not just jumping from 2.4 to 2.6. That'd be like dropping a new VM in a stable kernel series or something. ;-)

    • Re:File selectors? Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Stinking Pig ( 45860 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:50AM (#8497914) Homepage
      I would assume it's because nautilus is a lot bigger than a gtk file selector. Anyway, a file selector is still required because people will choose to run your apps while the whole DE is not running. For instance, I run a number of GNOME and KDE apps on XFce4; I may have konqueror installed, but it never runs and I certainly don't have nautilus installed. Even if they were installed, if they were required to do file operations from Cervisia or Gnumeric I'd have to wait for those browsers to come up from a standing start when all I wanted was to open or save a file.

  • Spatial Nautilus? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As much as I like the idea of it being smaller and faster, it's still kind of strange.

    The windows take up 1/4 of a 1024x768 screen. I don't want to have a bunch of gigantic nautilus windows filling up my small screen.

    • Can anyone who's used both comment on whether "spatial nautilus" is the same sorta thing as Windows Explorer's "Open each folder in a new window" non-feature? It sure sounds like it from the article, but it's the first thing I turn off in Windows, so I have no idea if Explorer tries to remember size and location for each open folder or not.

      Some of those linux paths get kinda deep, you know. I can't imagine trying to inspect something like /lib/modules/2.4.18-bf2.4/kernel/drivers/net/tuli p /tulip.o to m

  • Gnome and KDE interoperability (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @08:57AM (#8497455)

    I've always thought that the reason having two (main) desktops (KDE and Gnome) is good is not necessarily because of the competition, but because there is a need to interoperate between the two, so sensible 'generic' programming interfaces need to be created. This should create more modular code, and modular code makes successful open source projects.

    However, to what extent is this true? Can I, for instance, use just the Gnome file manager in KDE, and vice-versa? Is it an aim of these projects to make this level of interoperability a goal?
    • However, to what extent is this true? Can I, for instance, use just the Gnome file manager in KDE, and vice-versa?

      Yes, you can. Try nautilus --no-desktop (I think that is the switch).

      Expect some stuff to break though. Noticeable KDE uses illegal URI syntax so drag and drop of files etc to/from KDE apps won't work so great I suspect.

      Standardisation will allow us to reach these giddy levels of interop but it's not there yet, and to be frank most effort is going on stuff that actually matters (like the

      • and to be frank most effort is going on stuff that actually matters

        I do think it matters a lot. Yes, I know standardisation of interfaces is very difficult, but we have the development of KDE apps and Gnome apps, for instance Gnumeric and Kspread. The developers of these programmes should not have to worry what desktop it will run on, they should work with generic programming interfaces.

        I appreciate this is very difficult but as I said in my original post, it's a good thing to have both KDE and Gnome be

    • Re:Gnome and KDE interoperability (Score:5, Informative)

      by dominator ( 61418 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:29AM (#8497721) Homepage
      There's quite a bit of inter-operability work going on at freedesktop.org [freedesktop.org]. There's a lot of shared specifications and software there. Plus there are software libraries that both DEs use that aren't listed on FDO, like libxml2.

      The KDE folks have also worked on some Qt-GTK toolkit inter-operability stuff. See also:

      GTK-Qt [kde.org]
      Ditto [kde.org]
      Glib/Qt main loop integration [kde.org]

      amongst others.
    • I agree, and this is happening somewhat, especially the standards being set by freedesktop.org.

      However I see no sign of them doing some stuff that should not be hard. Some services should be provided by running a seperate program, so that program could be replaced. An obvious one is to make the file chooser be a seperate program. In my sample programs, statically linked with the fltk toolkit, the file chooser is sometimes 1/2 the entire size of the program! And you cannot change it. And every program runni

  • OS/2 lives again! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Garg ( 35772 )
    From the decription of the 'spatial desktop', it sounds like OS/2 Warp circa 1995.

    We only had to wait a decade or so for Moore's Law to make it usable... :-)

    Garg

  • Nice Job (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ickoonite ( 639305 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:11AM (#8497580) Homepage
    GNOME vs. KDE will perhaps be one of the holy wars of this millennium, and this is certainly another kick in the teeth for the ever-so-slightly clunky KDE (in my opinion). As said in the article, the developers have done some superb work and, well, put it this way, it is almost making me want to lose Mac OS X on one of my iBooks. Do not underestimate the pulling power of eye candy and the HIG [gnome.org]!

    Liberal inspiration has, of course, been taken from the Apple way of doing things - the spatial navigation is, as noted in the Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] article, based on the pre-OS X MacOS Finder. And that's no bad thing, certainly if FOSS wants to move towards real usability on the desktop.
    The file dialogue boxes are also notably similar to Mac OS X's way of doing things, although the puzzling (at least to me) scrollbars that the Mac uses to browse up and down a directory tree are here replaced with arguably simpler tabs. Very nice touch.

    Personally I'll keep Mac OS X on this for the moment, if only to avoid kernel recompiles and incompatibilities arising from that, but hell, if I were a Windows user, I'd be sitting here asking myself why the fuck I am waiting till 2006 for Longhorn when I can have this now...
    Zealots were quick [winsupersite.com] to criticise [winsupersite.com] the most prominent competition - Mac OS X 10.3 - in terms of eye candy on the desktop when it came to making comparisons with their darling Longorn (which is, rather pointedly, not available for purchase yet). Now that UNIX is offering two superb alternatives, one of them properly FOSS (and, more importantly, runnable on x86), Windows' days should surely be numbered...?

    iqu :)

    • Re:Nice Job (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ajagci ( 737734 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:55AM (#8497952)
      GNOME vs. KDE will perhaps be one of the holy wars of this millennium,

      Yes, and like most holy wars, it's about obsolete ideas. Gnome and KDE are both serviceable desktop environments, but let's not kid ourselves: imitating Windows and MacOS should not be the future of computing.

      Personally I'll keep Mac OS X on this for the moment, if only to avoid kernel recompiles and incompatibilities arising from that,

      Whatever makes you happy, dear. Personally, I dumped Mac OS X because I got tired of the manual upgrades and install hassles; Debian has been much less effort to maintain and has a lot more software available for it. And kernel upgrades just work, with no recompiles, with Debian.

      • Re:Nice Job (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ickoonite ( 639305 )
        I was going to agree with you whole-heartedly, but then I reread your post a couple of times...

        Away from the desktop on x86, I'm a Debian man, and it has done a superb job as a router and web server at home. The upgrades are superbly simple for a Linux-based operating system. And, should I be bothered, I'm sure it might make a reasonable desktop...
        But you have piqued my curiosity - I am intrigued, what, pray tell, do you mean by "manual upgrades," "install hassles" and "a lot more software available for

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:37AM (#8497802)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Nicely written article!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mritunjai ( 518932 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:41AM (#8497832) Homepage
    Have to say it, this was one of the best written personal review article submitted to slashdot in recent past.

    It covers the functionality well, does not break the continuity and was fun to read.

    If only we had more articles like this, slashdot might gain few more subscribers.

  • you guys are so mean (Score:5, Funny)

    by tuggy ( 694581 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:48AM (#8497899) Homepage Journal
    triple slashdotting??
    are you trying to break a new record or what? ^_^

  • twist on an old alaskan joke. (Score:4, Funny)

    by juggaleaux ( 725689 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:51AM (#8497915) Homepage Journal
    "My Uncle switched Linux Desktops today." "Gnome?" "Know him? He's my uncle!"

  • About spatial navigation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mst76 ( 629405 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @09:56AM (#8497967)
    Some people have the misconception that "spatial navigation" is about having one window per folder, but that's not really the point. In explorer-like navigation, every window is a partial view of the filesystem. Every window can be used to navigate the fs with browser-like controls (forward, backwards, folder up, folder down). Two windows are just two views of the fs, they can point to the same folder.

    The defining characteristic of spatial navigation is that a folder window IS the folder. That's why there cannot be two windows on screen that show the same folder, and why there are no navigation controls. The fact that folders open in the same place as when you left them is just a result of the fact that the position is an attribute of the folder itself, not of a windows which is a viewport of a folder. It's a subtle difference that people who have worked with explorer-like browsers for too long may have some difficulty adapting to.

    Personally, I feel more comfortable with an explorer-like fs browser, maybe just because I'm used to it. It seems easier to manage large trees this way. But I can easily see why new computer users would be less confused with the spatial model. It's hard for some people to understand (and remember!) that a dozen of shortcuts to "My Documents" in different places all point to the same folder "underneath".

  • No pattern match in file-selecter (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheSunborn ( 68004 ) <mtilstedNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday March 08, 2004 @10:00AM (#8497994)
    Did they REALLY make a file requester widtout pattern matching? WHY? Even windows got that feature, and it is so usefull that there are NO reason to leave it out.

  • One thing that always bugs me (oops, I mean... "enchants me") about these reviews is the obligatory sentence "slick and polished desktop". Look at the picture... it's an empty grayish uniform square with nothing on it... Now if the Gnome developers could only remove the remaining 1-2 icons and the menubar, add a command prompt right over it (alpha-channel of course)... would be an extra-clen super-polished desktop! Oh the joys of removing everything, and going back to the CLI!

  • Watch out for line breaks in article (Score:5, Funny)

    by palad1 ( 571416 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @10:09AM (#8498074)
    Firefox was set to 800x300 , here's what I could read:

    As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD

    those bengali guys sure are strange...

  • Spring loaded folders (Score:5, Insightful)

    by unoengborg ( 209251 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @10:25AM (#8498280) Homepage
    This new spatial apperance of the new Nautilus reminds me of old MacOS finder. I liked it back then and I will probably like it in Nautilus.
    But I am a bit worried, some folder hierachies in Unix is quite deep.

    Perhaps they should introduce something like the Mac spring loaded folders.I.e. if you want to move a file down in the hierachy you just drag and hold it over a folder, after a short while the window opens, and you hold the file over a folder in that window, until that opens and so on. When you finally reach the right folder you drop the file, and all windows you encountered on the way is closed automatically.

  • Gnome for the Developer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 0xB00F ( 655017 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @10:33AM (#8498354) Homepage Journal
    <rant>
    Not trolling or anything, but here goes...

    As a developer, I have always been interested in writing software for Gnome since 1.x. The one thing that has really set me back from doing so is the fact that with each and every iteration, something in the very core of Gnome changes and more often than not, those changes mean that you would have to recode large chunks of your software to cope with the changes.

    Yuh, sure all your Gnome 1.x apps will still run but it won't be able to use any of the new features in 2.x. This comes naturally, since this is after all a "major release" upgrade. They've really done it with 2.x this time, something major changes with each "minor" version is released. I know this is all about bringing Gnome closer into the "integrated desktop where you have everything you need to do everything you need" that it is trying to achieve.

    Case in point, this whole new-fangled "Object-Oriented" metaphor. Now not only do I probably have to learn a whole new set of interfaces to get desktop integration going for programs that I write for Gnome, I also have to learn how to operate this contraption. I mean come on! Do we really need all this HIG crap?!? My UI was "usable", at least for me, before all of this HIG things were implemented. If the developers want to implement this HIG thing, then go ahead and do it but it would also be nice to let users with "bad habits" choose to revert to the old UI behavior when they want. And for heaven's sake, leave the API's unchanged until the next major release! Being a developer for Gnome is a lot like being Sisyphus. [colorado.edu]

    Now I realise why there are more apps written for KDE than for Gnome.
    </rant>

    Yuh, I know this rant probably doesn't make any sense to you. But maybe that's because you haven't been around when Gnome 1.x was new and Miguel was still sane.

    (puts on asbestos underwear and ducks under the sink)
    • Do we really need all this HIG crap?!? My UI was "usable", at least for me, before all of this HIG things were implemented.

      Yes. Or rather, each and every one of us might not be in dear need of it, but if we want Linux and free software to grow into the mainstream, then we sorely need human interface guidelines and more of the kind. Open source programmers write software to scratch their personal itch--that itch most often doesn't include creating user interfaces that follow good user interface practices,
    • They've really done it with 2.x this time, something major changes with each "minor" version is released.

      I have several apps originally written against GTK 1.3 (a prerelease of 2.0). They compile perfectly against GTK 2.4. Nowhere has backwards compatibility been broken.

      Now not only do I probably have to learn a whole new set of interfaces to get desktop integration going for programs that I write for Gnome

      The Nautilus changes are irrelevent to other GNOME apps. Unless you've was jimmying around with Nau

  • I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @03:11PM (#8501682)
    The whole spatial thing, that is. It looks to me (reading the article and looking at the screenshots) just like the old 'Navagational' method. He's still browsing down to his files, it's just that there's windows open for the parent folder (and I think they're attached somehow to the parent).

    I thought (and admidt I may be wrong) that the point of 'spatial' was to change the way files are stored all together. So that instead of putting an mp3 in /home/me/mymusic the operating system (here meaning all the software that's running my computer) takes care of that for me, storing by object type and letting me look for things based on what it is (an mp3) and it's meta data (artist, song, title, etc). Is this sort of functionality meant to be in Gnome 2.6?

    I'd like to see something to replace the file/folder Navigational method. It breaks down once you've got over 1000+ individual files scattered on your hard disk.

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