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GNOME 2.6 Reviewed 169

Posted by Hemos from the review-it dept.
Kethinov writes "I just read this article reviewing GNOME 2.6 via the 2.5 development version. Many screenshots, plus extensive discussion on the new direction Nautilus is taking among other things. Worth a read. (A mirror would be nice ;)" Sorry - I duped this. Mea culpa.
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GNOME 2.6 Reviewed More

GNOME 2.6 Reviewed

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  • Mirror list (Score:5, Informative)

    by brejc8 ( 223089 ) * on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:30AM (#8702674) Homepage Journal
    Mirror list [wolffelaar.nl]

  • Article Text Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:31AM (#8702686)
    Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6
    Sayamindu Dasgupta
    The boring intro...

    As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD branch a spin - in order to find out what's new, as well as to get an estimate of how much we would have to translate (I hate that part of the job) to attain supported status. The last time I did this, I also wrote an article about what I saw, but unfortunately, I never learn from my mistakes - so here I go again....
    However, before jumping in into this guided tour, please remember that I have been involved with the GNOME community for the past few months as a helper in the GNOME Summaries, and I may not be able totally impartial towards GNOME. Feel free to consider me biased.
    The Vital Statistics

    Before going into the real stuff, let me give me a brief overview of my system, so that when I mention something as fast or as slow, you would be able to guess how it would crawl in your system.

    * Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
    * RAM: 512 MB of PC 2700 DDR RAM (with 875 MB swap)
    * Motherboard: Nforce 2 based mobo from Leadtek
    * Storage: A 40 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
    * Distro: Mandrake 9.2
    * Kernel: 2.6.2

    The Installation

    I had gone through (successfully) the GNOME dependency maze before, and to avoid losing my sanity, I decided to use jhbuild (one can also use GARNOME or cvsGNOME - maybe I'll test one of those with GNOME 2.8) .
    Using jhbuild is quite easy - just set some variables in ~/.jhbuildrc, and you are ready to roll. Jhbuild grabs the latest source code from CVS (taking care of the dependencies), compiles them, and installs them in whatever $prefix you want them to be in. OK - there was one major problem - but that was at a later stage, and it got fixed really quickly.
    First Impressions

    Fig 1. The default GNOME 2.6 desktop

    Jhbuild took around 6 hours to get a bare bones GNOME system up and running, and surprisingly, there were very few errors, and I had to manually intervene only thrice.

    I logged in as root the first time (yaya - I know security risk and other stuff..), to be greeted by a clean and polished looking GNOME desktop (Fig. 1) . (Note that I am running the Freedesktop.org Xserver here - so don't expect a stock GNOME 2.6 install to have panel shadows).

    Seeing an icon named "Computer" right on the desktop - my first reaction was to click on it, expecting Nautilus to pop up with my "/" directory or something like that.
    Nautilus goes spatial

    However, as soon as I clicked on that icon - my reaction was "Yikes!! What have they done to Nautilus ??". Gone was the old and familiar explorer like interface. In it's place was a really minimalistic window, with no toolbar, just a plain menubar. I was quite confused - I even clicked on "Help" -> "About" to verify that the "thing" was indeed Nautilus. After some head scratching I remembered a post at FootNotes, in which the Nautilus developers announced something about going "Spatial". People had been pretty much excited about this - though I personally had no idea about what this stuff was all about. Now I thought I understood.

    Fig 2. Spatial Nautilus - Showing "Computer"

    All my disks had been correctly identified by Nautilus, and was showing up in the "Computer" window (Fig. 2). But that was not very important at that point - all my attention was riveted on the new UI. After some Googling and RTFM sessions, I figured out that Nautilus was following a "Object Oriented" metaphor, instead of the normally used "Navigational" metaphor. The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time - i.e, the next time it will pop up in the same position. This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht

    • Spatial is a step backwards (Score:5, Insightful)

      by futuresheep ( 531366 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @11:27AM (#8703337) Journal
      This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht ml.

      Mod this however you want, but the only thing I though of when using Gnome's new 'Spatial' file browser last week was navigating around Windows 3.1. Not only is this a bad idea, but the implementation was inconsistent on the desktop. The taskbar icon started the familiar navigational version of Nautilus, the Desktop icon launched the spatial version. What should have been done was improving Nautilus itself, not making a drastic change to the way it works.

      This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop.

      • A paradigm a day, grows the complaints, right away (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop."

        And people wonder why the GUI hasn't changed appreciatly in the years since Xerox Parc. How can it, if every idea is greeted like the above? Jump over to OSNews and see the complaints about "Looking Glass". Any time success is defined by how much you emulate the old, then we will never progress.
        • This paradigm has already been tried, and it failed. Mac(Old Finder), Amiga, Atari, Windows (Before 95), all used spatial, Two don't exist, Mac and Windows dropped it.

          Its was crap then, its crap now. Redoing other peoples mistakes, is just bad way of doing things.

          Usability studies only take you so far, Real world testing proved it wrong.

        • Spatial is a step backwards (Score:4, Interesting)

          by futuresheep ( 531366 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @12:25PM (#8704047) Journal
          As a few other posters have said. This is a bad idea. It's been tried several times, each time there has been a replacement file manager developed that used a navigational structure. I had at one point 8 windows open to edit one file with the new nautilus. I thought it was rather interesting that the desktop group that espoused a 'cleaner' interface gave me a cluttered desktop.

          As my grandpappy used to say - Don't kill the cow because the milk is bad.
      • With all of the bugs and performance problems that the current version of Nautilus has, you would think that would work on fixing Nautilus before changing it.
        • With all of the bugs and performance problems that the current version of Nautilus has, you would think that would work on fixing Nautilus before changing it.

          I agree that all versions up to and including the Gnome 2.4 version of nautilus have been slow but they have made some huge performance gains with the Gnome 2.6 Nautilus. I've tried out the Gnome 2.6 beta 1, beta 2 and rc1 via garnome and things seem much snappier and loading a directory with 100's of files doesn't take 5 secs anymore, it is near ins

      • Nope (Score:4, Informative)

        by bonch ( 38532 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @12:40PM (#8704214)
        This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop.

        Absolutely, 100% wrong.

        Instead of completely tearing apart your idea that spatial is a "step backwards," I'll let a better-written article [arstechnica.com] say it for me.

      • Re:Spatial is a step backwards (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Minna Kirai ( 624281 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @12:50PM (#8704329)
        Spatial is a step backwards

        Your experience with Gnome isn't enough evidence to to judge against "spatial" interfaces as a whole. As you noticed, the implementation is inconsistent- suggesting that the problem is not with "Spatial" itself, but that particular program.

        However, pro-"Spatial" posters who jumped at you with "100% wrong" are also incorrect. In a deeper way, "Spatial" is truely a step backwards: because spatial filebrowsing is non-scalable.

        It only works for small problems, where the total complexity is bounded. Back when the Mac was young and "Spatial" was in it's prime, users operated on single floppies or 100 megabyte HDs. The solutions that worked then become unbearably messy when a 100 gigabyte HD may have a quarter-million files.

        And then there's networking. Considering that it may be useful to treat the drives of other computers or the whole internet with the same file-browser that handles your local data, and the quantity is just overwhelming.

        Non-spatial file-views are the only way we can expect to view local and remote files through the same lense.

        To make an analogy of a library: If you only have 20 books, then a card-catalog system is a waste of time. Just leave them out visible on a table, and let vistors find them "spatially". But with 20k books, the catalog is an important improvement, even though users can no longer retrieve volumes from "where I left it last time".
        • there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for different tasks. if the computer detects less than a certain number of files, the user can be presented, by default, with a spatial interface.

          more files and we have the extended navigational interface. with remote filesystems the user can be presented with a simpler navigational interface with special buttons that relate to the type of network environment the filesystem exists in.

          the computer can do all that, and the user can benefit.
          • "there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for different tasks."

            But from the context of your post, it is obvious that you really mean "there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for the same task, depending on some arbitrary (and not really predictable, intuitive, or easily explicable) face-changing of the UI, chosen by the damned computer for the hapless user.

            Ow, my head hurts just imagining how obstinate such a system would be to use.

            When you see your idea explained the way it r
        • Lets' try and puch this (rather nice) analogy a little further to show the difference.

          Libraries still lay books out spatially - the fiction section is on level 3, the math books are on the 5th floor, the literary criticism in onthe 2nd floor etc. That kind of makes sense, and helps people navigate in a rough sense to what they want.

          I would claim, however, that the difference between spatial and navigational is similar to the difference between staircases and elevators. Imagine you're in a huge library.
      • I think the point of the spatil nautilus is that you really don't need to move around your filesystem like an old DOSbox. A package manager covers about 95% of what you would use it for.

        Mostly you just move inside your home dir. I have never used the old nautilus because it feels very "too much". With this new one I have some shortcuts on my desktop for my music and movies and now I at least use it sometimes.

        It's also about 90% faster than previous versions and there is the option to "browse" the old way
      • What I particularly found ugly was the Nautilus was started with the Gnome desktop from KDE. Not a fault of KDe but from Gnome. Some Gnome developers are zelots that are an interoperability risk.
      • I have no interest in spatial browsing. I'll be turning it off immediately.

        However, I'm not annoyed it went in. The GNOME desktop is kind of like a Mac desktop, only with you in complete control, and running on whatever hardware you choose. If Steve Jobs and the Apple desktop guys decide they don't like spatial, bam, it's gone, and tough luck to you if you liked it. With GNOME, you have more freedom than that.

        Maybe some Mac folks who used and liked spatial from pre-OS X days will adopt GNOME now.

        stev
        • Mac OS X still allows you to browse the entire tree spatially and has since the very early public beta days. At the school I work with we have spatial turned on by default in order to help older teachers whom we've had to train them with the old finder for the last 12 years or so.

  • not that excellent. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Tirel ( 692085 )
    I have done a little review of my own and wasnt impressed with GNOME 2.5-dev, not that it lacked anything, it is more that it had TOO MUCH of everything. AA fonts, sounds effects pretty menus and icons, window shading and whatnot do not make a productive work environment. I mean, this is unix we are talking about, bring on the lightweight tools that run on a P100, gnome 1.x sort of had it right, but with the switch to GTK2 everything has done down the drain, well, sort of. I guess it is nice if you have a P

    • Re:not that excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arcanumas ( 646807 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:48AM (#8702825) Homepage
      Nobody is forcing you to use Gnome or KDE desktop.
      If you want a ligh one use fluxbox [sourceforge.net] or if you uber-cool-unix-hacker ratpoison [sourceforge.net]

    • But that's what people want (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:53AM (#8702899)
      People love that clean feeling. It makes them more comfortable. The first thing I think of when I see IceWM screenshots is how old school they look and how I assume, "I could never get anything done on that." Let's not start a gui war, but the gui is what people see, not the kernel source code. I think that it is very important for developers to focus on this. Linus has the kernel, but the gnome and kde people have more of the end user to worry about. Making the gui look more stable is important not just for "pulling people away from winblowz" but to keep people on gnome. Also, the switch to gkt2 allows things to look more seamless which is what windows users are more or less comming to expect. Ironically though, office doesn't look like anything. I'll never understand that!

    • Re:not that excellent. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree that AA fonts, sounds, and general eye/ear candy does not improve productivity very much, but you're forgetting two things:

      A) Productivity can be improved a little by making the workplace more comfortable/pleasant.

      B) Many people in the workplace (i.e. if you want to capture the desktop market) don't want to put up with an ugly desktop. MacOS is pretty, even Windows is getting prettier (I can't exactly call that Luna theme 'pretty', but, well, they're working on it). To take Windows from a user a
    • As much as I enjoyed the ugly hack known as GNOME 1.x, personally, I like to be able to READ the text on my screen!

      From my own experience, GNOME 2.x needs about 128MB of memory(256 if you want to run OOo too), and a 233mhz PII processor. That's hardly demanding these days, even in poorer countries. Those are the scraps we're throwing away here in the U.S. and elsewhere, afterall.

      But that's not even considering that you can still use non-AA fonts with GTK2. Use the fonts that come with X, and don't se

      • But that's not even considering that you can still use non-AA fonts with GTK2. Use the fonts that come with X, and don't set GDK_USE_XFT. Enjoy some nice jaggy fonts :)

        If you're gonna promote non-AA fonts, at least let's do it properly. Actually, yes, it can be a nice experience to only activate AA from a certain size upwards, say 10 or 12 pixels. And the way to do that is either through Gnome's own configuration, or by changing your FontConfig settings via ~/.fonts.conf. And using some quality TTF font [sourceforge.net]

    • Well, they've made it configurable, using a bit of the Control Center or some gconf hacking would enable you to change themes to low-CPU ones, remove icons, etc. I have a full understanding for the GNOME folks wanting to have the default dekstop look nice.
    • This is also one problem I ran into.

      I want to turn off full window dragging/ resizing.. I want only the simple outline. i also want to turn off EVERY other bit of eye candy... we tried and tried and finally switched all the xterminals over to windowMaker and cut the bandwidth to the x terminals by 90%.

      both KDE and Gnome need to give users the ability to turn EVERYTHING off.

  • Menus and DDLs are nice - a bit like OSX (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zog The Undeniable ( 632031 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:34AM (#8702715)
    But that "default desktop" screenshot is pig-ugly. Grey isn't going to pull in the XP-using Teletubby-land loving hordes. I think they should have a nice default background image, and if you want to get rid of it, you can. It can't be hard to improve on "Bliss", anyway.

    • Those hordes you talk about are hardly going to download and compile GNOME CVS in the first place. They'll get it from their $distro of choice, which will have packaged things according to their target (supposably, at least).

    • Re:Menus and DDLs are nice - a bit like OSX (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FatherOfONe ( 515801 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @12:02PM (#8703745)
      Just for
      "XP-using Teletubby-land loving hordes"

      You must get modded a +5 Interesting...

      I haven't laughed that hard in a while.

      Now as another poster said. Very few are going to download this on the web and compile it. Most will wait for SuSe/RedHat/Mandrake et all to put it in their distibution. Notice that this guy said it took almost 6 hours to set up! Heck he even considered it good that it only had 3 errors he had to manually fix. No "teletubby" is going to be able to do that.

  • GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer. (Score:3, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:34AM (#8702716)
    That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.

    Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.

    If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.

    I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).

    Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.

    Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.

    Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.

    Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.

    Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.

    We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.

    - GTK-Application-Window,
    - BonoboUI Window,
    - GnomeUI Window,

    Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface bui

    • Re:GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rahga ( 13479 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:42AM (#8702779) Journal
      Hello, oGALAXYo.

      Nice to see you using the "worked on GNOME for 5 years and got ticked off" line, it makes it much easier to put together posts you've made on "osnews.com". Haven't seen you posting much there lately, but I assume that's only because you've been banned there.

      How long did you have this rant stored on your copy of notepad... er, I mean, whatever text editor comes with MorphOS? Why did you post as an AC? I've got nothing personal against you, but man.... I've got to call a cheese a cheese.

    • Greatly exaggerated (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      GStreamer is not a part of GNOME D&DP. It has been proposed for inclusion, but was never actualy added. And the GStreamer Homepage states clearly that the GStreamer API ist nowhere stable.

      The Gnome API on the other side has been stable since 2.0 (the change from gtk1.2 to gtk2.0).

      I admint, though, tat gui programming in C is non-trivial, but there exist multiple bindings for Gtk/Gnome. Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, Java and C#. Pick your favourite language.

      I don't think that the (as you called) gnome-ific

    • Re:GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rhesus Piece ( 764852 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @11:12AM (#8703142)
      *sigh*.. again somebody goes and ruins a perfectly good flamewar by actually posting information.
    • Pretty much echoes my feelings when I switched from Gnome/gtkmm to KDE/Qt back in 2000. Nice to see some things never change :-).

  • A repost... any new articles? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rahga ( 13479 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:35AM (#8702723) Journal
    This is a repost of an article submitted by the author and posted by Taco [slashdot.org].... I wonder if any newer articles about this topic have been posted since? Personally, I doubt we will see too much more from article-writers until GNOME is packaged up by the major distros...

    • Forget being packaged up, Gnome 2.6 still (to my knowledge) hasn't been released yet. The gnome.org site still doesn't mention anything about 2.6 (beyond the 2.5 roadmap), just the delay from the intrusion. The desktop releases directory stops at 2.5 as well.

      At least once the Gnome team finishes whatever integrity checks they've got going, we'll start hearing from the Gentoo zealots.

  • full mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:36AM (#8702730) Homepage
    http://www.xml-dev.com/xml/gnome/GNOME_2_6.html [xml-dev.com] with images and everything.

  • GNOME catching up to Windows... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:39AM (#8702753)
    GNOME has a netstatus applet now, which lets you know about the status of your network interface. It is similar to the Windows XP network status applet (which spews forth those irritating balloon like message boxes from the taskbar every now and then).

    Like when your connection goes down? Wouldn't you like to know when that happens? I rather would. And, not to troll, but Windows has had that since NT 4.

    What is with some developers and their attitude towards little Windows-like widgets? Some of those things are actually useful. And if you ever want GNOME to approach the functionality of, say, Windows XP (and I do say functionality; the XP interface simply does a hell of a lot more) you need to focus on both "polish and more polish" and the inclusion of useful little applets.
    • They can be very annoying on wireless connections under non-ideal conditions, especially when it's popping on and off when you don't even care.

      These balloon tips will be removed in longhorn I believe. So we won't have to deal with them for too many more years. Registry tweaks can also disable specific balloons (eg low disk space on drive d) as well.

      Overall, I like the balloon tips but I think longhorn's sidebar will really step things up another notch.
    • What is with some developers and their attitude towards little Windows-like widgets? Some of those things are actually useful. And if you ever want GNOME to approach the functionality of, say, Windows XP...SNIP

      GNOME and KDE are not the only desktops for Linux, despite what many seem to think. WindowMaker (with cousins like fluxbox) are much older and support tiny programs called dockapps [dockapps.org] that do anything you could want them to. The variety, configurability and stability of this tiny applets beats Windows,

      • "GNOME and KDE are not the only desktops for Linux, despite what many seem to think."

        You say this dispite the fact that many, many people always complain about "hundreds of desktop environments and window managers"?
        • Yes. I remember thinking just the same way. I nearly screamed in terror the first time I saw the thousands of packages on the Debian CDs. Then, slowly, I familiarized myself with all of these confusingly similar programs, and now I know them well. It was a slow accumulation of knowledge over time; it cannot be done in a single night's browsing.

          It is no less daunting than memorizing all the trivia surrounding baseball or football (or any professional sport, for that matter). 'Joe User' can follow such spor

    • One thing Windows XP doesn't provide is a "Workspace switcher" or pager the quality of GNOME's. The one you can donwload with the Power Toys isn't very good. For instance, being able to drag and drop windows onto your desktops is a feature I would be very sore to lose.
    • I read that as complaining about the balloons, rather than the notification, though maybe I'm reading my own complains into it.

      I hate using Windows, because these balloons keep popping up and there's no obvious way to get rid of them. Sometimes they have a close button, sometimes they don't. Sometimes clicking on them closes them, sometimes it runs a program. Sometimes they have a relatively short timeout, sometimes it lasts for ages. They're totally unpredictable for someone who uses Windows as rarely as

  • Slashdot, have you no pity? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TrekkieGod ( 627867 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:41AM (#8702775) Homepage Journal
    Curse you slashdot!

    Why must you tease me with your promise of screenshots? Gets me every time...

    I'm always fooled into this false sense of security based on the fact that no one really rtfa's, and click on the link, only to find the slashdotting effect has forced me to go work instead of look at pretty pictures.

  • Save Dialogue (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Czernobog ( 588687 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:43AM (#8702790) Journal
    Disclaimer: Have only seen the screenshots, not used.

    Does that "save" dialogue make sense to anyone?
    I'd have thought that saving would be the easiest thing in the workd and yet it's not obvious where the file is being saved at.

    • Re:Save Dialogue (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not really...

      The new "spacial" nautilus hides file pathes from the user (which might be a good thing or not) and that's hailed as a useability improvement (see the spacial link in the article). On the other hand the new file dialog seems to be centered around a new file path widget. Does somebody understand that?

  • a step in the right direction (Score:4, Informative)

    by spectre_be ( 664735 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @10:53AM (#8702909)
    i must say. i've been using gnome 2.6 since first release candidate and although there aren't an overwhelming number of new features i do find it to be a big improvement over 2.4
    the new file selector for one is very nice, although it still has a few rough edges.
    personally i'm not too fond of the new 'spatial' nautilus even though i've been a mac user for many years. i miss (or missed) a shortcut to close all open windows for example. nautilus *is* blazingly fast though. also, browsing samba networks works very nicely.
    i'm very curious as to the final release. with it's shortcomings gnome remains my most used desktop environment.
    great going guys, keep up the good work.

  • Spatial Not worth it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by leonscape ( 692944 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @11:08AM (#8703102)
    I remember on the Amiga, and Macs having spatial, and this is a very bad move from GNOME.

    Its a mistake, Every one used Directory Opus to deal with files on the Amiga for a very good reason. Spatial handling is messy, and a pain in the arse.

    There not just redoing things, there now repeating other peoples mistakes. ArsTechnica is quite good normally but spatial file handling was never any good.
    • Not sure. I really liked spatial environments back in my Atari days. The only thing you really need for dragging around icons in an efficent manner in spatiality is space on the desktop. Thats why it sucked back then. Now with high resolutions everywhere I am willing to retry the concept. Dont like it still? You can turn back to the old default.

      • Resolution does help, but it still doesn't work, I had the Amiga up to 1280x1024, as my current Desktop, and once you start having to go down more than two directories, for two diffrent areas you can have up to seven windows, all overlapping.

        We've invented things to stop that from happening in other applications ( Tabbed browsing, virtual desktops ), why bring it back for file browsing?

        • Re:Spatial Not worth it (Score:4, Informative)

          by Nodatadj ( 28279 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @12:12PM (#8703860) Journal
          You know that Shift-Ctrl-W will close all the parent windows, and that double middle clicking a directory will open the directory and close the parent, right?
          • Which then destroys the point of Spatial Navigation. Where back to one window, Why not just use the one window? and change the contents when you click on the directory. The only diffrence between this and they way things where done before is the size and position change, which without the parent windows open means nothing, spatially.

            Why bring all the extra overhead of opening and closing windows? Why change it at all in fact.

            I think its a mistake, Spatial is obvious, infact so obvious is was the very
    • I've been running Gnome 2.6 (It's almost all in Gentoo now but masked) for roughly a week and I'd have to agree with you. I'm not a big user of Nautilus anyway but why I would want a Mac OS-9esq filesystem browser is beyond me. Fortunatly, there is an option you can bring up in gconf-editior under the nautilus tab and that will convert it back to the explorer style interface. In that same folder is the option to turn of the "we didn't have enough useless icons on the desktop so lets add one more" My Com

      • Re:Spatial Not worth it (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        As for that fileselector - I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to be able to type the full path name in so I can open the directory or file I want. That is a MAJOR obstruction.

        Press CTRL+L in the file chooser.
      • Replying to my own post but oh well:

        As for that fileselector - I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to be able to type the full path name in so I can open the directory or file I want. That is a MAJOR obstruction.

        After you have the fileselector open its Ctrl-l (That's an L) and that'll let you open a location and that has tab completing.
      • So Nautilus in 2.6 is good, when you turn it back into Nautilus from 2.4 This does not bode well.

        Why "My Computer" I though KDE was the one being accused of being a Windows Look-a-like.

  • Is Nautilus still a buggy bloated POS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jagasian ( 129329 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @11:37AM (#8703473)
    I am writing this from my Fedora Gnome desktop, which I use on a regular basis. Therefore I am very knowledgable on the bugginess of Nautilus. It is slow, buggy, and lacking in features. If something big doesn't happen by the next Fedora release, I will be switching to KDE 3.2... as I recently demo'ed it on a Mandrake install. Konqueror is fast, featureful, and seemed to have far fewer bugs than Nautilus.

    The only problem is that I am really used to Gnome's look-n-feel, but I guess since I am using Fedora, that won't be as much of an issue due to the whole Bluecurve thing.
    • Slow, buggy, and lacking features?

      Well, coming from Fedora Core 2 test 2, I can tell you this about Nautilus:

      1) It's not slow anymore - Nautilus 2.6 is damn fast (finally! :-)

      2) I haven't really come across any bugs yet - not that they aren't there, but there are no big ones that I can see

      3) This is the best Nautilus yet for features, too, though some people insist on a file manager they can tweak the hell out of. If that's what you want, stop using Nautilus immediately, because it will never be what y
      • I must admit that I have seen a noticable improvement with the changes in the Gnome from the one that shipped with Redhat 9 to the one shipped with Fedora Core 1. In Redhat 9, Nautilus was basically unusable. It would "timeout" even on relatively small local directories. Don't even get me started on directories with many small files.

        The Nautilus in Fedora Core 1 was orders of magnitude faster than the one shipped with Redhat 9... however, it was still slow compared to Microsoft's Windows Explorer. It w
      • One of the bugs that I noticed when I was running the beta was that when you dragged and dropped, the keyboard shortcut to make it move instead of copy didn't work. You had to use the menu shortcut, and select move from the list. Quite annoying, since Nautilus moves by default for some transfers and copies for others.
    • So why don't you switch to KDE 3.2 now? Nobody's forcing you to use GNOME and threatening the developers certainly won't help.

      As for me: I'll stay with GNOME and Nautilus. I don't find it useless, it does everything I need in a minimalistic interface.
      The new Nautilus is *sooo* fast that it isn't even funny anymore. It's even faster than Windows Explorer. :/
      • Switching one's desktop isn't something that can be done at the drop of a hat. I the same desktop at both home and work. There are many things that I must do in order to properly switch over.

        Just as you can get locked in to the Windows interface, you can get locked in to FOSS desktops. I plan on switching with Fedora Core 2, and once I am used to KDE there... I will probably switch to KDE on Debian Sarge once it goes stable. This is a case where Redhat's Bluecurve project pays off, as it will lessen th
        • "Switching one's desktop isn't something that can be done at the drop of a hat."

          Really? I can use KDE flawlessly. Back when I began using Linux (before all the Bluecurve stuff), I had absolutely no problems using GNOME or KDE. Buttons still look like buttons and menus still look like menus. You still have a window list and a "start" menu.

          "The versions of Gnome shipped with Redhat 9 and Fedora Core 1 are extremely buggy... mainly due to Nautilus."

          No problems here. Nautilus has never crashed on me ever

  • Ugh. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Moderation abuser ( 184013 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @11:58AM (#8703713)
    So how's performance? Or does it just not matter these days?

    Look. Unlike Windows, this stuff is going to be going on to multi-user systems. There will be tens, hundreds of instances of each of the applications running on a particular machine... Over the network... Performance for X based applications is *absolutely crucial* in the corporate environment. That *is* where Gnome is going, isn't it?

    Gnome 2.0 (Solaris packages) performs poorly in comparison to other X based UIs like CDE and Openstep. Both in local and network performance. So, does 2.6 suck or is it acceptable, is it even better?

    • Re:Ugh. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sadly, your points will probably be ignored by the average Slashdot user who doesn't see a problem on his 3 GHz 1 GB RAM box. With many open source projects, efficiency and elegance seems to be going down the tubes. That doesn't bother me, as I use IceWM, but developers should consider the LONG RUN.

      Being just as bloated and slow as Windows XP helps nobody. It's hard to get people to convert, it's a problem for third world countries, and it just gets people on the upgrade treadmill we used to mock Wintel ab
      • Very unpopular comment but here goes...

        Third world is not where the money is, why should RedHat care at all. Gnome hackers are going to have at least half decent computers why should they care too much? I mean come on, No matter what the spec your going to have at least a $100 monitor, and a decent base unit is only gonna cost you $250 to $300. Yeh whine all you want about not being able to run 100 GNOME processes but your a hippie to care. I mean shit GNOME specs are pretty damn low as then are (700Mhz +
        • 4Gb RAM, 15krpm SCSI disks, quad gigabit LAN and NO monitor.

          They cost around 10k. Now. How many users will it support? 50? 100? 200? If you double the requirements you half the number of users and double the amount of money the corporation has to spend on new machines.

          More important than that is the LAN performance. Have you got any idea how much it costs to put in gigabit switches and flood wire a building with cat5 or cat 6 cabling?

          Why? Why? Why would you do this? Why not just put a machine on every de
    • That's a good question. Last time I tried to use a GTK+ app through the network (from home, running the app in my work machine), GUI performance was really bad. Menus took ages to redraw.

      On the other hand, I use KDE apps in the same manner and the performance is great. There's a little bit of lag compared to apps running locally, but nothing that makes it unbearable to use.

      Does anybody have any idea of why Qt performs so much better than Gtk+ in this regard?

  • I'm impressed (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sergio Duran ( 766388 )
    It's been like 6 years since i started using linux and applications are evolving pretty nicely, I can't remember them beeing faster (since I keep upgrading my computer) but the looks and usesfulness are definitevely worth the time... it has already caught up with windows and can even do a lot more things. When I install linux on a friend's PC... they can't avoid to be amazed and enjoy the nice tricks gnome has to offer.

    People complaining about applications/desktop environments beeing bloated should get a n

  • Have they fixed the panel in 2.6? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cthefuture ( 665326 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @01:00PM (#8704445)
    I'm considering upgrading to GNOME 2.6 but really the only reason would be because I want the damn panels to stop rearranging the icons/launchers/applets.

    It seems like every other time I login all my icons, launchers, and applets have been magically rearranged on the panel. Man that pisses me off to no end.

    The worst problem is when your system locks up or otherwise crashes and you're using ReiserFS. Oh man, I feel so lucky when my entire desktop and all the panels don't get trashed. I can't count how many times I've lost my entire GNOME setup due to my system locking up. Something about the GNOME preferences system, it must hold lots of files open all the time or something. This is one problem I can not tolerate and for a while I switched to KDE solely because of this insanely stupid behaviour.
  • I started using the Spatial Nautilus and found it cumbersome in several ways (hard to navigate between directories/windows, desktop getting cluttered, Metacity not popping up windows in the most logical places, etc.) I'm in the middle of writing up a proposal that can help it become a little more useful.

    The general idea is to modify the windows-list applet so that when it's on a vertical taskbar, it shows a GtkTreeView of the windows spawned for that desktop. Since subdirectory windows are now children of
    • > desktop getting cluttered

      Use middle click to open the directory and close the parent, use the backspace key or the selector at the bottom of the window to open the parent again.

      > Metacity not popping up windows in the most logical places,

      In spatial nautilus they should pop up at the same position that they were at the last time you used it.

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