GNOME 2.12 Previewed 437
An anonymous reader writes "Davyd Madeley has completed his Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12. Scheduled for release on September 7th, 2005, GNOME 2.12 has picked up a new theme, some features popularised by Apple's System 7, some new multimedia tools and plenty of bug-fixes."
BSD ? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:BSD ? (Score:2)
Re:BSD ? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:BSD ? (Score:4, Funny)
The current number of servers Netcraft reports as powered by GNOME now stands at zero. It's official. GNOME is dead. Upon hearing the news, creator Miguel de Icaza was seen working at Taco Bell, depressed, sweeping the floor, and muttering the words, "ay carajo..." The KDE dragon was unavailable for comment.
Or something. I don't quite have the knack for these.
What about Beagle? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:4, Informative)
There exists a port for every language, it just doesn't make sense. The basic algorithms for searching, and storing indexes hasn't changed for quite some time.
In the digital library space there even exists quite old (10 years) open source software such as zebra[1] which can handle large indexes fast. There are actually open standards[2] for information retrieval (IR), but nobody in the open source desktop space seem to know about it(?).
[1]http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra [indexdata.dk]
[2]http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/ [loc.gov]
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:4, Interesting)
mono as default platform into gnome.
i've heard that someone are working to produce a beagle replacement in python
http://img185.echo.cx/img185/2971/pybeagle47ya.pn
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:2)
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a mission to get going from source at the moment and even if you run a distro that already includes it, it doesn't take much to break it. Upgrading Firefox/Mozilla is enough in some cases (thanks to best's reliance on the Gecko libs).
Don't get me wrong. Personally I love the technology, but I really don't think its anywhere near ready for mainstream use. Great if you want to try out bleeding edge tech or help improve the software, but not if you just want a search tech that works.
The other downside is that beagled has to be run by the individual users when they log in. It refuses to run at boot as part of the init scripts. So its got to be included as either part of the xinit or shell rc scripts. Thus automation is going to be needed on the admins part at the moment. Sure, this can be done as a default part of a distro, but given its not ready yet...
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:3, Informative)
But I have been using beagle on my ubuntu machine using breezy backports. Ubuntu maintains its packages well -- I have not had beagle break at all over the past couple of months of using it. Setting it up to start when I start gnome has been the only kind of work I've had to do.
I'll admit, though, that the search is still fairly slow and not great at finding what I need. I am using version 0.11 th
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:3, Informative)
In my office I run an Ubuntu termsrv set up. No one has anything on their own machines except for a basic OS with an X server on it. Cuts back on hardware costs. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has set things up this way. Now add in a whole heap of mono processes going and you're gonna
Re:What about Beagle? (Score:3, Informative)
nice headline... (Score:4, Funny)
can someone correct the headline or something?
Totem (Score:5, Interesting)
Even changing the GStreamer backend for the Xine backend, Totem still never manages to play half the movies I seem to give it.
I do like the idea of a GStreamer based Mozilla plugin though. It will give users a great choice to drop the ugly Mplayer based plugin.
It Just Works Philosophy (Score:5, Interesting)
I am looking forward to this feature, especially - just another step towards making Linux more user-friendly.
In fact, this prerelease tour shows many exciting features for those who want to see a real desktop linux - improvements to Nautilus, a panel with Edit Menu option compliant with Freedesktop.org spec (how long have we been looking for something like this?), and more. Yay
Re:It Just Works Philosophy (Score:5, Funny)
Efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Gnome is great at turning a fast computer into a sluggish one. Just because you have all of those CPU cycles doesn't mean that they have to use them, especially when lots of them seem to be wasted.
For instance: if you look (strace) at a typical gnome program when it starts up, it stats zillions of files; many of them more than once. This is why startup is so sloooooow.
Oh, I am trolling am I ? We all have fast computers so why am I making a fuss ? Think about: being able to save power (improve battery life) with a slower CPU laptop; people in the third world who cannot afford the super computers that we, in the 1st world, have on out desktops; think about sharing a server between many people (eg LTSP).
It would be nice to see a gnome release that just concentrated on making the code faster.
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately, unlike a certain other purveyor of Desktop OS's, the devs are actually fairly committed to making everything faster and less resource hungry (witness the GNOME optimisation bounties, and the efforts of the Ubuntu team). Robert Love gave a very interesting talk on optimisation of the desktop environments (I can't find a link right now, but the talk was called "Optimising GNOME", although some of the library-level changes could be conscripted by KDE and anyone else, really). KDE posted some resource-consumption figures for the (very rough and unoptimised) KDE4 port of Kate, and it already looks significantly better. Add in the upcoming xgl et al, and things should hopefully get to the absolutely perfect state of getting faster and faster while still adding features that every developer yearns for :)
Of course, it's pretty much impossible to continuously increase functionality without paying some price in terms of resource-consumption, so you might be better off going to less featureful DE's like, say, XFCE, if you prefer speed over functionality.
Re:Efficiency (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
On my system at least (Ubuntu; maybe I should uninstall firefox-gnome-support...), Firefox now uses the GNOME file browsing dialog for saving files, and it takes forever for directories with many files, and doesn't seem to cache much, because the second through nth times around are just about as slow as the first.
Make it work, make it right, make it fast. (Score:3, Insightful)
Still ugly fonts (Score:4, Interesting)
Give me font rendering that doesn't suck.
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still ugly fonts - this works too! (Score:5, Informative)
2: You could install them via this script: http://vigna.dsi.unimi.it/webFonts4Linux/webFonts. sh [unimi.it]
Then do the following:
Configure X and Gnome to 96 dpi sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Locate Section "Monitor" and add the following lines before EndSection:
# DisplaySize 270 203 # 1024x768 96dpi
# DisplaySize 338 254 # 1280x960 96dpi
# DisplaySize 338 270 # 1280x1024 96dpi
# DisplaySize 370 277 # 1400x1050 96dpi
# DisplaySize 423 370 # 1600x1400 96dpi
Uncomment the line corresponding to your current resolution.
To get other values, use the following formula:
displaysize = {pixelsize}/96*25.4
Remember:
The display size must be "right" so adjust those values till you get your size right.
Re:Still ugly fonts - this works too! (Score:3, Informative)
The configuration-file editing is only necessary if fonts are the wrong size because X guessed your monitor size incorrectly (which is very rare in my experience, since it just fetches that information straight from the monitor, but it does happen). At any rate, Windows doesn't have the ability -- GUIfied or otherwise
Software patents and innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
But on the other hand, not having access to those techniques forces the X.org people to come up with innovative solutions to the same problems.
That's what patents are supposed to do. In practice there are two problems with this. Firstly what happens if the provably best algorithm is patented? (think: compression - eventually someone will come up with an algorithm which is provably optimal, and patent it). Secondly what happens if you need to implement the algorithm to interoperate? That's the case w
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:5, Informative)
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
And then select the bytecode interpreter from the menu. Fixed.
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:5, Informative)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<include ignore_missing="yes">/var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d
<match target="font">
<test name="size" compare="less">
<double>10</double>
</test>
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font">
<test name="pixelsize" compare="less" qual="any">
<double>10</double>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:4, Informative)
If web pages still look blurry, add the following line to ~/.bash_profile to disable antialiasing in GTK2 and Gecko:
export GDK_USE_XFT=0
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:2)
I will admit, XP's Cleartype really does look nice, though it goes a bit too far into blurry-land for my taste, depending on the output device. At least the subpixel hinting is tweakable on X11 with fontconfig/Xft.
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:2)
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:2)
If I've been working exclusively on linux for a few weeks I gag when I boot up windows and look at the fonts for the first time in ages. And vice-versa when I have been exclusively on windows for a while. It just depends what I'm used to.
OS X-alike font rendering in Gnome (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to emulate OS X's font rendering, that's easy to achieve in Gnome. Just go to Font Preferences, Details..., and set Smoothing to Subpixel (or Greyscale for a TFT) and Hinting to None. Then walk away from the computer for a few minutes, because it looks weird in direct comparison. When you come back, enjoy the smooth text!
s/TFT/CRT/ (Score:2)
God. Now THAT's a mean trick. (Score:3, Funny)
It's not for everyone (Score:2)
It might help that I sit a good metre away from my TFT (yes! LCD!) monitors, so I can't discern the individual pixels anyway.
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:2)
Um, I like "thin" and I don't find the Linux AA fonts to be "brittle and chintzy" which are certainly odd adjectives to use for a font (brittle? did you try to break your fonts by tapping them with a reflex hammer? chintzy? did you ask them for money?)
IMHO, the Cleartype fonts are just less readable than the subpixel AA fonts I see in, for example, KDE. I've spent tons of time trying to find a way to get Cleartype in XP to render Arial the same way that KDE does and as far as I
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes the font in every screenshot is still ugly
They don't look ugly to me at all. On the other hand, when I boot up Windows to test a website in Internet Explorer, I think the fonts are supremely crappy.
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:3, Insightful)
I also just put windows vista beta 1 on the computer with the dell lcd and the fonts still look bad. Maybe it's just preference or maybe it's because I'm used to the fonts in xorg, but i
Re:Still ugly fonts (Score:5, Insightful)
(However, I consider Times New Roman to be godawful no matter how it's rendered, or even in print, so I almost always use only Bitstream Vera Sans/Serif/Sans Mono, the TeX Computer Modern series, and a handful others like Gentium for special characters. I even have my web browser configure to use my fonts and only my fonts, to the best of its ability.)
new features, new shmeatures (Score:2, Interesting)
You know - those features that was recognized to be shitty and unusable. Removed default applications that simply don't work(r). Sourcebase size shrinking by megabytes. Abstraction and unification instead of the Linux Way(tm).
Yes, I'm flaming. But honestly - what's new? Desktop theme? Cool rendering approach? And why desktop envorement should ever mention HAL?
(yes, but I really like the fact that now Gnome is copying System7. Actually it's really a
True Transparencies? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:True Transparencies? (Score:2)
Still slow and buggy on my nvidia (Score:2)
With Composite enabled, I frequently suffer from complete lockups of Xorg (the mouse moves, but nothing else works).
So yeah, I'm with you on the "hope it doesn't".
Wow! (Score:3, Interesting)
Spatial Tree file view and huge directories (Score:2)
Yes! (Score:2, Interesting)
About time! Closing the application and losing the clipboard contents always annoying me and was a real embarrasment for Gnome. I'm glad it's been fixed but I wonder why it took so long.
Block middle click too, please (Score:5, Interesting)
Heads up: I'm not proposing to remove it, or even turn it off by default. I just need a way to turn it off manually. It is extremely annoying, and I (and other with me) *do* click middle by mistake - often - and that is a hell when scrolling around code in text editors... Yep, a lot of it probably owes to the mouse I have, it has a tendency to get stuck slightly on scrolling, which results in a click. But really, do I need to buy a new mouse for something as simple?
I don't use, want or need it, and it hinders me in my work. I would really like to see it go. (Maybe it really is a X.org issue in the end, though. Not sure where it would be best to implement it).
Did they fix the Gnome Settings Daemon? (Score:2)
Re:Did they fix the Gnome Settings Daemon? (Score:3, Informative)
As it says if you do
nautilus --help
But I don't really know about the correct icon for file types. Nautilus has done this for at least a year, and quite possibly more.
Re:Did they fix the Gnome Settings Daemon? (Score:2)
Re:Did they fix the Gnome Settings Daemon? (Score:2)
Gnome is a desktop environment. I don't think the developers care what happens outside Gnome. It's a shame because some of their applications are pretty good.
I had the same problem with gnome-settings-daemon under RH 9. FC3 seems to handle this situ
What about MIME types/file associations? (Score:2)
This isn't intended as a troll. I'm a GNOME fan. Just a frustrated one, regarding one particular feature of the system.
I don't know, GNOME's file associations seem really, really tricky to deal with. A few revisions back (2.6), I was marginally aware of how to manage file associations through control panel. I could not add my own icons to file types at all, but I at least managed to say which apps I wanted to be shown on Nautilus menu, which were available at all, and which was the default application.
I
Re:What about MIME types/file associations? (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously this isn't always desirable, I wanted custom jpg icons for each of my album folders and it would have been a bitch to do using a gui. So to get at the config files, do one by hand, and then look in ~/.nautilus/metafiles/
The format is quite straightforward xml and its easy to tweak by script.
Re:What about MIME types/file associations? (Score:2)
I have no freaking idea where this thing is actually stored. In GNOME 1.x, they used some kind of really broken text file format. In early 2.x, they seemed to just keep using it. Nowadays, I have absolutely no idea how it stores the associations. Is it somewhere in gconf database, finally? I also have no idea how to really manage these file associations in 2.10: Nautilus isn't particularly helpful and I couldn't find the knob in the control center.
You can change the file type associations by going to th
Apple System 7 ?? (Score:2)
Maybe some details could coinvince me?
Re:Apple System 7 ?? (Score:3, Informative)
Nice work... shame about those icons (Score:3, Insightful)
... s/icons/wrinkles
Bring on the spat of posts telling me I can change the icon theme, as of course I do [gnome-look.org], but I'll say it again: Gnome needs a new default icon set.
The icons in most of those screens are sadly still as dull, muddied, venerable and depressing as they were 6 years ago, when I first tried Gnome.
The forward and back arrows in Nautilus seem to have absoutely no graphical correllation with the rest of Gnome's visual landscape (except the Refresh icon). The ~/ icon still looks like a little squashy mushroom house from a childrens novel and the icons in the menu editor [gnome.org] (for menu groups) have no internal correlation other than they exhibit a tongue-and-cheek dig at futurism. Who actually thinks of a typewriter when looking for 'office', let alone a bricklayers tool when thinking about development?. Is this theme targeting a 50+ demographic? For icons so small, that aliasing really eats into their form and lastly the colour space of the icons seems all over the place, as though to solve the lack of a common palette they have simply mixed Khaki greeen into everything. This one thing KDE has really sorted out.
From what I have seen of Gnome desktops over the years, these default icons have a life expectancy of about 2 weeks (especially that home icon). Why not finally lay them to rest - or just move them down the theme list, far away from 'Default'?
Re:Nice work... shame about those icons (Score:2)
Re:Nice work... shame about those icons (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think Gnome needs a new icon set, I think you do. I like the current one.
Color Me Amazed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:5, Funny)
I don't want to flame, but I always wonder... how do people like you manage not to have seen this question discussed to death in every single previous Gnome or KDE-related discussion here on Slashdot since the dawn of time?
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2, Informative)
They do have more developers. Simply because its much easier to develop programs for KDE than it is for GNOME.
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
> KDE
SUSE/Novell, Trolltech, Mandriva and Linspire all pay people to work on KDE directly, to name just four companies you probably know by name. i could also name a bunch of small you companies you don't know who each fund part of a developer to several developers, ranging from co's like kitty hooch who funds quanta developers to KDAB who does a ton of work with KDE and groupware..
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
You then can learn something at 1 [kde.org], 2 [osdw.org], 3 [kde.org] and 4 [kde.org] or in incomplete summary: HP, Intel, Novell, Trolltech, Linspire, Mandriva and countless medium-sized businesses.
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2, Informative)
It seems that so much time is put in KDE and Gnome, that if the two teams worked together, they might make something superior to what they made on their own
Sigh. There's no way they'd be working together anyway. Gnome devs love C and GTK. KDE devs are C++ experts and like QT.
Besides that, Gnome users like Gnome. KDE users... well, like KDE. They can choose because both are different and there are many different kinds of users, you know...
There's not going to be a single desktop environment. Period.
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2, Insightful)
so right there is a major difference in both coding style and what not...You couldn't exactly "integrate" them.
I also prefer the looks of gnome but I know just as many people who like the look of KDE better. It's very subjective.
My biggest concern is my programs not matching. Seeing as I like GTK themes better then most KDE themes, and nothing exists to match GTK themes on KDE (just the other way around) I'm stuck with just attempting to mat
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
Bzzt! Xfce [xfce.org] is written in straight C using GTK+ directly. We have a couple support libraries with utility functions and custom widgets, but there are no "wrappers or something like that".
There are currently C++ [xfce.org] and Python [xfce.org] bindings, but the desktop itself is all written in C.
Explanation of the basics? (Score:2)
Neither do I, really.
I always wondered, and would very much like to find a good and simple explanation of these things.
What are exactly all these pieces, and what are the relations between the OS, X (are there alternatives to X on Linux?), GTK/QT/other?, Gnome/KDE/others?, Window managers, "Desktop environments", etc.
If someone knows a good page giving an overview of all this, that would be nice. And how this architecture is comparable
Re:Explanation of the basics? (Score:4, Informative)
Some call the OS just the kernel, and others put the OS as the kernel + libraries + basic utilities, and others put the OS as "everything that ships with your distribution". All of these are more or less correct, and just a matter of perspective. I personally prefer the latter two because it is the measure of compatibility of downloaded tools.
X is a graphical system. It is actually rather barebones, as it doesn't specify anything about how the controls work. It doesn't include a text entry box, buttons, graphics, or anything. It is simply a basic toolkit for network-driven graphics. It doesn't even hook up to sound.
A "toolkit" is a set of widgets -- text entry boxes, standard icons, buttons, etc. GTK and QT are toolkits.
A widnow manager is just what it says -- it manages windows. The top bar of windows, with their close, minimize, and maximize buttons, are actually drawn by the window manager, not the application. The Window manager often, but not always, draws to the background (sometimes the file manager does this). The window manager is involved if you have multiple desktops. It handles minimizing and maximizing. It handles laying out the windows, and telling them where they can and can't go.
A "desktop environment" is a complete collection of tools and specifications for a desktop. For example, the GNOME desktop environment consists of (a) the GTK toolkit, (b) a set of libraries for making applications work together in a consistent manner, (c) a panel and a set of applets (most desktop environments include a panel), (d) a set of specifications for interaction. These specifications include specifications for the function of window managers, specifications for human interface interactions, specifications for the handling of clipboard data, specifications of standard application interfaces for doing various things like printing, configuration, etc. Many desktop environments specify a default window manager as well.
Windows and Mac roll all of these parts into one. All you have is the desktop environment, which contains everything else. There is _some_ separation, but it is not as clear-cut as it is on UNIX. Whether this is a benefit or a flaw depends on your perspective.
Re:Explanation of the basics? (Score:2, Interesting)
The simplest window manager is probably twm. (In that it's nearly the minimum, even if it doesn't do it the now conventional way.) If you want to see what it does, login to a box with a session setting of 'failsafe' (Available on most linux boxes.) Then run 'twm &' (ampersand to put it in the background, so you have a command line free) then type in any favored application's name.
Now, other window managers add upon the simple positionin
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
Isn't that what the whole Bluecurve project was all about? Making Gnome and KDE apps look almost like they were the same interface? The final version of it (in Fedora Core 3 and RHEL 4
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm no expert by any means on either KDE or GNOME; this is all from what I've gathered as a KDE user, so don't quote me on any of this. I personally wouldn't want the two to become o
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
I doubt it. To make a comparison, if you have two trains facing opposite directions and you stick them together, what happens? No, they don't end up getting twice as far, they end up hindering eachother's progress, and the final combined result is less than what they could have accomplished on their own. While they may seem to do similar things on a very superficial basis, they have very different g
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
Because GNOME was started as reaction to Qt not being GPL licensed in ancient times.
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
The communists asked themselves the same question about any and all products.
The answer is that Humans are naturally competitive. To do their best they need to think the other mob are nipping at their heels. It's just human nature and it is the reason why products which achive a near monopoly find it so hard to keep quality high.
This post prepared on a GTK web browser under fvwm.
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2, Funny)
Because (Score:2)
You can't combine those. And hell, what's wrong with choice? You've got 27 linux distros, you can't handle two major window managers? You're lucky it's just 2!
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
KDE was influenced by CDE, a desktop environment on Solaris which showed that not everyone wants to have the same desktop environment, but has some nice features. Gnome was originally a backlash against a software licence used by KDE, and originally was some sort of odd mixed KDE (ie. CDE once removed) and MS Windows based on some code taken from the drawing program "the gimp". The project became more popular and less politically driven, breifly included Enlightenment as it's window manager (until the Enlightenment people ran screaming for the hills a few weeks later because gnome broke all of their cross-platform code and didn't care) and eventually became cross-platform and the useful thing you would have seen over the past few years. Now about the only vestige of it's beginnings is stuff like the windows registry style gconf which really is aimed for single user stand-alone systems and not for anything with aspirations beyond being a personal computer (ie. like something on a network!). There is a tool developed this year that allows gconf settings to be exported to other users on the same machine, so it's getting somewhere.
As for the actual window manager, you can use plenty of different ones and still use KDE apps or gnome apps - including the taskbar and menu style things.
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:2)
The idea that more people working on it brings better results is simply untrue. In fact, they are both probably a lot further along because they are separated. This allows them each to look at the problem from a different perspective, and build out those ideas, and thus provide new ideas to the other group. With a single project, everyone would have to agree about the project direction before moving forward. With multiple projects, multiple directions c
Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:4, Informative)
A GUI toolkit is part of the critical infrastructure of a software component on the desktop. Every application needs such a component (apart from fullscreen applications like games).
And a GUI toolkit is commodity, nothing special anymore.
Many developments begin at home, and these developments are the programmers' own crown jewels. I want to secure my investment in time and energy, and want to be able to deploy my ideas anywhere I see fit. Of course, I want to take my developments to the workplace and go on without interruption. This is freedom, and highly productive.
Re:KDE (Score:2, Interesting)
They don't always work together very well, but given the basic design differences in architecture, that's to be expected technically. Personality wise... well, it's my experience that the more intelligent a geek is, the higher probability that they believe that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot. (De Raat, Stallman, etc) That just b
Re:KDE (Score:2)
Re:KDE (Score:2, Insightful)
It's mainly the fanboys who don't STFU. Under the auspices of the http://freedesktop.org/ [freedesktop.org] organisation, KDE and GNOME (and other minority desktop!) developers regularly work together, standardising interaction protocols and whatnot. KDE and GNOME have different design philosophies, and I happen to prefer KDE (though I wish it wasn't written in Qt-extended-C++). I don't WANT
Re:KDE (Score:4, Insightful)
The same reason that you have to choose between Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and *BSD. The developers all have a different perspective on what defines good software, different project goals, different target audiences, and these differences are irreconcilable for the purposes of a single project.
I have to admit, I fail to see what is so utterly difficult about this concept that causes people to be so blind to the answer, despite the fact that they accept it on faith for everything else: why we have competing cars, fast food restaurants, colas, and so on.
Re:KDE (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously, though, why should unification be the ultimate goal? Different people have different ideas about what makes a good, p
Re:Lies! The true unified desktop is GDE! (Score:2)
No, I've got it: GDK.
Wait... Crap.
Re:Hidden sinker (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hidden sinker (Score:4, Interesting)
Note that there's nothing stopping a company from taking a snapshot of GNOME or KDE (or whatever), and spending a year or two turning it into an average-joe-perfect distribution. IMHO, selling to the teeming masses is more the job of a commercial distro vendor than hackers working on a desktop environment. Let the hackers have their fun (I know I do [xfce.org]), and let the businessmen make their money by appealing to the largest customer base.
Re:Hidden sinker (Score:2)
OK, tell me: How is this useful? Will KDE developers one day lay down their C++ compilers and start programming with GTK? No. Not going to happen. And users obviously disagree on which desktop is better, so none of them will go extinct by natural selection. So your comment is just wishful thinking, and not useful at all.
Here's a different wish: I wish people would stop posting comments like yours to every fuck
Re:Hidden sinker (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's MS Windows - is that 95, 98, ME, NT3.51, NT4, win2k, XP, 2003? All have their quirks, advantages, disadvantes, and users always hide their start menu entries in different spots if they've had the thing for a while.
Live with it, it isn't a monoculture anywhere, not even with Macs.
On linux at least you have the advantage that the tech support person could ask you to run switchdesk - or more likely they can get you to put something in a shell window (bash, csh
Re:Hidden sinker (Score:3, Interesting)
Look, you Mom isn't going to know that there's another desktop unless you tell her. She will just know her desktop.
My mother-in-law wanted a computer to surf the internet. I built a cheap linux box, indicating that she was getting "cutting edge technology" far superior to Windows. She asked me (proof of how far Microsoft's advertising budget has reached) if it was harder to use than Windows. My response was, "No, but if you learn something and then change, a lo
Nobody? I do (Score:2)
I like big icons, because they are easier to click. I have plenty of screen space, so wasting it isn't a problem.
I like stripes, because it's easier to track the information across.
I even like the spacial browsing mode of Nautilus.
Now, you can say that I'm an idiot for liking these things, but if nothing else, it proves that some people are happy with the direction Gnome's taking. We just don't tend to make a loud noise
Re:What I don't understand (Score:3, Interesting)
Meanwhile, I think this release of GNOME is going to be leaps and bounds better than 2.10. I really like the fact they've done their best to get Cairo up and running (that OpenGL rendering feature is something they've been needing for some time, especially where the rest of their
Re:System Seven Savvy (Score:3, Insightful)