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GNOME GUI

The Future of GNOME 288

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
RPoet writes "LinuxWorld Today has an interview with Miguel de Icaza, in which he talks about what we can expect in the upcoming GNOME versions 1.2 and 2.0. " He also explains what he & Nat's new GNOME company is up to and assorted other worthwhile tidbits. Not a bad interview.
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The Future of GNOME More

The Future of GNOME

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  • "freedom of choice" and "flexability" ... bullcrap?

    Do you work for the government?

  • I think the poster was being sarcastic. You took it a bit too literally... except for the part about the root menus.. I think he was serious about that.

  • i wish there'd be a simple standard way to do it but there isnt. a simple shell script that adds the command to your start menu on whatever wm youre runnning would be a nice touch to rpm. im willing to bet smIRC doesnt do the same if the user runs afterstep/kde.
  • > GNOME is where windows and
    > the MAc were about six years ago.

    Umm...no. GNOME is far more advanced than both of the aforementioned interfaces were 6 years ago. In many ways GNOME is more advanced than where either of those interfaces are NOW.

    --Jamin Philip Gray
    jamin@DoLinux.org

  • Personally, I think the GNOME team should *F*O*C*U*S* a little more on what exactly it is they want to do in the future. The GNOME project has started out with little focus and brings to light the unavoidable "problem" with free software: everyone wants to throw their ideas in. Of course, I'm not saying that this is a bad idea. The GNOME team just appears to throw in every "neat" idea someone gives them (case in point: a fish applet. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? STABILITY FIRST, FISH APPLET LATER.)

    The KDE team, on the other hand, comes off a lot more "clear-headed". Case in point: the CORBA issue. The KDE team got a stable product out the door first, THEN came back to add the bloated monster of CORBA to it. The GNOME team, on the other hand, said "let's put CORBA in from the get-go! Yeah! So we can show off this badass CORBA fish applet!" Christ. At least the KDE team has something they can drop their CORBA interface in, rather than turn KDE into a convoluted mess.

    Aesthetics. Hmm. GNOME is (dare I say it) pretty ugly. You can dress it up with those god-awful pixmap themes all you want, but it still looks pretty wretched. KDE looks slick. Great icons. Great interface design (bearing some resemblance to Windows, but hey. You want new users to feel comfortable, right? You don't exactly want to throw them into a freaky-looking desktop with a giant foot and weird-looking Rasterman-ized icons.).

    Speed. I can hardly believe there are people that claim that GNOME is faster than KDE. Cut down on the crack! With all that CORBA garbage (a fucking fish applet! That just sits there! Using CORBA!), it gets really bogged down. KDE, of course, free from CORBA (IIRC... I don't think the 1.x branch has anything to do with it) is a lot snappier, more responsive. Inevitably, someone is going to come out of the woodworks and claim that their 486DX2/66 with 8MB RAM is as snappy and responsive as ever. Go nuts. I have a P233 with 96MB RAM. I expect GNOME to run flawlessy -- start relatively quickly and overall be so fast it would be just like running a minimalistic window manager. Is it? Not close. Do I expect too much out of GNOME? Apparently I do.

    Libraries. Is it just me, or does anyone else get ALARMED when "ldd " yields a list of libraries so long you have to scroll up to see the beginning? JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, GUYS. Talk about throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. And linking the esound library even to programs that don't use sound? Cool! Now... do I even need to mention the problem this brings up when trying to DOWNLOAD the GNOME sources (or even packages for that matter)? Once again, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, GUYS. There's like 30 or so goddamn tarballs/packages you have to get! Ever thought about putting that myriad of supplemental libraries in ONE tarball? At least downloading the KDE sources isn't OVERWHELMING; it's just a few tarballs. Sweet and simple.

    I'd really like to see GNOME do well -- really. It has great potential (notice "has" -- they can still clean up their act). In the future, the GNOME team should stop acting so high and mighty just because GNOME is completely free software and follow the KDE team's example -- they really seem to have it all together. Don't concern yourself with all sorts of crazy shit like CORBA-izing everything and binding every obscure language under the sun -- Keep It Simple, Shithead.
  • IceWM handles the panel pretty, even if it isn't compiled with gnome support. Howevever, sometimes it can go haywire, and not respect the panel. If this happens, reshape the panel in someway, like enable then disable autohide, or retract and then re-retract(or track, make it visable again, you know) with the hide buttons. However, if you have been using newer gnome releases (like 1.0+) this won't happen.

    I went to try E again, it crashed, probably a fluke, but, I think I will wait a few months before I use it again.
  • GMC did "work", and I think it is a GOOD sign that the GNOME developers recognized that something needed to be improved. It shows that the project is still alive and growing.

    Well, I'm glad it works fo you but on all machines I have installed GNOME GMC showed all kinds of crashes and usability problems. After months of use of GNOME I was still using MC.

    This is a broad accusation you just made about all of GNOME, but you're basing it on one program. Don't tell me KDE never scrapped an idea.

    We are comparing apples and oranges here. My "accusation", as you call it, to GNOME is based on the fact that KDE came out first. Of course you scap an idea or two in developing a new project but my question was: do we really need anothe Desktop Manager since KDE is already out ? After evaluating both programs I realized that the answer, for me, is "NO !". All the energy poured on GNOME could have been reversed to create a free themable clone of Qt and help KDE to get more features sooner.
  • Ahem. KDE has a new file manager too. Konqueror, it's called. I just read about it on Slashdot. Admittedly, it's a newer story.

    yes, but the old one used to work pretty well. GMC never reached the point of being usable.
  • actually ive experienced something like this too..although i wouldnt use the choice of words used i can understand the frustration.. :) .."everyone seems to know about" probably came from posts to the GTK mailing list (around 4 last time i checked with geocrawler..perhaps more now) .. GTK 1.2.3 (stable) doesnt support it.
  • I agree completely - Tip of the Day is THE most annonying feature ever invented. Couldn't they just have a help page with all of the tips on there?

    And besides, advanced users will fiddle around with stuff, and figure it out pretty fast - I know I always do (tip: try reading the man pages/help files :)
  • exactly his point.....you have to do it yourself if the program package didn't do it.....its ALWAYS the program packager's responsibility to notify the OS which executable runs the app.....
  • > Despite Miguels plans with no code to back it up

    I have 3 letters for you:

    C V S

    --Jamin Philip Gray
    jamin@DoLinux.org

  • I haven't seen their specifications, but if it's yet another "everyone must switch to Unicode to get any kind of language support (unless he is already using iso8859-1 that coincides with first 256 Unicode characters)", cyrillic and asian languages support will become a nightmare.
  • Geographically it's pretty much that way. The only way to get to Redmond is to go over bridges, one of which goes through another city. And that's just to get to Bellevue. Redmond is past it.

    Ten years ago it was all cow pasture over there. Now it's LA North. Seattle is still the same as it ever was, plus we're more fun at parties.

    Lake Washington is bigger than some middle eastern countries ...
  • change settings shown using the drop down menus to threaded and -1. bad comments / trolls / idiots / micro$ofties need to be marked down.
    nuf sed.
  • Ooh. So, my son has a 333Mhz iMac. I am in such awe of you.

    I like windows, they look good on houses ...

  • Of course, OLE is not CORBA. CORBA is useful, cross-platform, and OLE is a joke.

    But - you knew that ...

  • And, once W2K ships (in 2002), we can expect Y2KTrolls.

  • Not to nitpick...but doesn't Miguel come off in this interview as a little naive or something? I can't quite put my finger on it....but I can picture an executive reading this and laughing his arse off.

    I'm not saying his company won't work....but this reads a little like an Onion article or something.

    that's just my $0.06 (Canadian) mind you.



  • Rather, I think it is more likely that they want to keep up with KDE, which is about to release 1.1.2 (though some developers wanted this to be 1.2) and which is on the way to delivering on 2.0!
  • Fifth in New Hampshire? Hmmm. I think it's first in Washington state ...

  • I have to agree. I haven't been reading /. lately, but today I've been browsing most of the stories, and I'm thinking that ol' BG and his gang are all over the comments. Must be desperate times on the MS campus. Get out and astroturf when you can't produce good product. Hey, it's worked so far, now hasn't it?

  • C'mon, we dont need to boost the version number that much, surely. Whats wrong with 2.3,4,5,6 etc?
  • Nope. It should be a part of Xlib specifications.
    Every GUI toolkit links with Xlib. The makers of kwm,E,etc might provide way for doing this as long as you link with their libs which is what I wanna avoid.
  • I think that's about $0.03 Canadian; you guys are doing just fine.

  • before we put the cart before the horse . . . (Score:3)

    by alhaz ( 11039 ) on Thursday August 19, 1999 @06:03AM (#1737597) Homepage
    Honestly, I don't know if it's just Gnome, or just Enlightenment, but whoever's fault it is, the configuration of E+Gnome in RedHat is positively the worst window managment system I'v ever encountered.

    Think about it. Windows start without focus. You can't click in the window to give it focus, you have to click on the title bar. if you leave the pointer over the title bar, you get a big yellow box explaining how to move the window.

    Clicking on it's button on the task bar doesn't give it focus. if it's behind another window, you have to move or minimize one or the other in order to change focus.

    Now, these are very simple complaints. I currently use IceWM because it (a) basicly does what i need a window management system to do, and (b) mimics the z-ordering rules OS/2 uses.



  • The menus problem is only a part of bigger issue that causes so much pain for somebody trying to write GUI apps ( and I am currently trying to do exactly that.) The issue is >> lack of standards.
    The fact that Debian has a tool to do it automatically doesn't help me much cause RedHat for example doesn't offer that option and even if it did it would be completely different than what Debian does. The same goes for Suse, TurboLinux and whatever else is out there.

  • How much of that 1MB is actually unique to the fish applet? I would think that it is not much.

    You noticed how it was linking with a number of libraries. Did you know that two programs using the same shared library share the code segment of the library. If you add up the memory usage of all the GNOME programs the way you are measuring it, they will get a number much larger than the actual memory usage. Shared libraries are good.

    As for the fish applet, if you are writing the applet panel interface, you would want to test it with a simple applet (such as one that simply displays a pixmap to its screen area, and has a few menu items on its context menu), rather than a complex one such as mini comander, so that problems can be isolated easily.

    If you do not like the fish applet, why would you put it in your panel?
  • I'd agree with that. GMC sucks. That's why it's good they're ditching it.
  • Why do "Real Seattlites" have such contempt for Eastsiders. Isn't it all pretty much one big city anyway? Is it the same thing as in NM we always complained about Texans, it's just that we were more spread out?

    I was in Seattle last weekend. You have to admit you still have more than your fair share of Starbucks/etc. *grin* If you look in the trash cans on the street they are full of just coffee cups.

    Don in Bellevue. (well, I work in Everett)
    (I only lived there 7 months so far, moved from New Mexico, so I'm probably not-like-them, whatever that may be.)
  • 1) Ok.
    2) Ok.
    3) While i chuckled. The icons aren't useless. Come on! They link to the red hat site..so they have the red hat logo. One of them links to the Gnome site, and it has the Gnome logo. Certainly makes sense to me.

  • > There is unfortunately no way to get E to play nicely with the panel.

    OK, I must have an older/newer version of something on my computer because E works fine with the pager. However, when I go into the office to work, it doesn't work right at all there (clicking on a task doesn't not bring the window to the foreground). I never set anything special to make it work on my machine so I guess it's the version of Gnome I installed. The version I use at work came with Red Hat 6 so I don't know if I just haven't updated Gnome in awhile to run into this problem or if I happen to have a newer version of Gnome than comes with Red Hat 6. What I would like to know is how can I configure E to play nice with the Gnome pager in Red Hat 6? It's not impossible since it works fine on my home machine, but I didn't set anything special to make it work here.
  • "If Bill Gates had a nickel for everytime I had to reboot... oh wait, he does!"


    That's a lot of nickels if you payed $90 for Windows. I calculated 1800 nickels. Or 1799.8 if you payed $89.99 (like most software retailers charge for the upgrade -- who buys the whole version?).
  • I like KDE, I like GNOME. They are both nice to me, and I use KDE on my notebook (Travelmate 5000, P90, 16 RAM) wich is kinda slow, and GNOME in my desktops. I like both.
    I use enlighthenment sometimes, and WindowMaker others. It's a question of mood. I certainly don't use NT, because I won't pay, no way...Linux just fills all my needs in the office, at home and in the road. I take my travelmate on vacations and amuse myself coding. Yes, I'm a nerd...
    But I know what I want from my OS and from my GUI...FLEXIBILITY and FREEDOM OF CHOICE.
    If somebody don't like this...well is up to them.

    Many friends of mine, installed Linux on their homes just because the look and fell of GNOME or KDE was new and exciting, they visually liked, more than windows9x or NT.
    I fell strange watching them swithching OS, just because the GUI,(I switched OS without thinking in the GUI...), but now, in Linux world, they can switch desktops as often as they want.
    This is not religion or politics, so keep the flames away, is just a choice.

    My Box, my choice
  • Java sane choice for GUI ?
    Definately not in 1999 ...
    Ever tried to use Swing ??? It so "blazingly fast" it even puts slowest Motif to shame.
  • Windows was not written in C++. Win API is C based so check your facts before you post crap like this.
    (MFC is basically wrapper around Win API)

  • ...or they might design an API that would be implemented by a library separate from Xlib and not specific to KDE, E, etc., so that an application doesn't have to be linked with some particular desktop environment's or window manager's library.

    Now, it might be nice if that library became a part of Standard X, so that one could, in theory, count on it being on every system that has X; I don't see why it would matter whether the routines were in Xlib itself or in some other library that's part of Standard X.

    Unfortunately, "in theory" doesn't mean "in practice"; regardless of whether those routines went into Xlib, or into a separate library, in X11R6.5, or X11R7, or whatever, that wouldn't help people who had Boring Old X11R6.4 or Boring Old X11R6.whatever-Based CDE or whatever.

    Putting it into a separate library might make it slightly easier to add it to a system with an old version of X - you wouldn't have to replace Xlib, you could just add the library.

    So perhaps it should become part of the X11.whatever specifications, but that doesn't mean it should necessarily become part of the Xlib specifications.

  • Care to expand your argument away from the blasted fish?
    After all, we've had xfishtank for years now... and xsnow...

    There's no obvious *reason* why it should be "stability first, then fish applet" at all. You need something to test the underlying whatsits with.

    Doesn't KDE use corba too, anyway?

    ~Tim
    --
  • if you leave the pointer over the title bar, you get a big yellow box explaining how to move the window


    Does anyone know how to turn this thing off? It's incredibly obnoxious!


    Regarding the task bar, as others have mentioned, it's fixed in newer versions of Enlightenment.


    -Bruce

  • Bah, I botched the quote I saw someone had:

    "If Bill Gates only had a nickel for everytime Windows crashed... oh wait, he does!"

    Implying that

    bill_gates_net = (number_of_all windows_crashes_throughout_time * .05);
  • Forking a project counts as "NIH", doesn't it?
  • Being the fastest ORB in existance is like being the leper with the most fingers.
  • Solution: Multiple workspaces is a possibility. Default is only one workspace. In the "Daily Tips" or whatever your equivalent is, have a tip that says "Did you know... that you can have multiple [workspaces | virtual screens | desktops]? Just [fiddle option thingamabob under menu whatsit]." So the advanced users eventually run across this feature and use it, but the beginner doesn't get confused by it.
    -----
  • Panel, not pager. The pager works fine, but in a perfect world E would make sure that windows never appeared BEHIND the panel (Mac and Win* apps don't appear behind their taskbars.) Changing the focus should fix your problem, though.
  • thee file manager, be nice to thumbnail images.
    imlib may be good for this, actually id like
    something where it checks for a flag on the mime
    type to run a little prodeure defining how to make
    the icon, the obvious use is to thumbnail
    images, but someone creative may come up with
    other uses too. (render a tiny imges of a 3d file
    with a little logo of that program for example,
    or have different color spreadsheet icons based on
    the rest of the name)

    to anyone who worries about slowing down the file
    managers, switch statements are practically free
    and the time to thumbnail an image is only used
    once (again the ubiquitus .xvpics comes to mind)
    the first time and when the image changes.

    seems like i may get my wish about being able to load an image into an existing gimp process...
  • You can get themes for Windows too and you've been able to get them since Windows 95

    What, the collections of a few bitmaps, a background, some cursors, and default window colors? I think most Linux themes are more flexible than that.

    For example, not a theme issue directly, but KDE will allow menus to be attached either to each application, like in Windows, or the top of the screen, like on Macs.
  • Excuse me sir, but you are dumb.

    I'm tired of listening to this by GNOME backers because it is utterly false.

    KDE already has bindings for C++, Python, and Smalltalk, and Java is coming along nicely. I'm aware of GNOME bindings for C, C++ (but the C++ bindings are piss poor), python, and guile. It's just a metter of writing the bindings if you want them.

    Second, have you read the docs for GNOME's orb ORBit. It has _only_ C bindings. Mico contains bindings for 3-4 different languages if I remember correctly. Now KDE is moving towards their own ORB, tinymico, a hack to mico to reduce memory usage. I'm not sure of the bindings for it.

    Basically, you are dead wrong. There is nothing about the GNOME design that makes it particularly language agnostic, and its orb is very limited. KDE is at a point of being eqaully capable to GNOME in terms of language bindings, and I'm certain, given time, it will pass it.
  • Well, I don't know about the design of OLE.

    I for one would like to have compile time checking of types and method function signatures. The VB design gets around this pretty nicely, I admit, but if I don't want to program in their IDE, or I'm using some other kind of a language I want to connect with activeX, then it makes debugging a much bigger chore.
  • A bug that everyone "seems to know about".
    Did you actually report it?
  • "The M$ OLE system is not a bad design"

    Sorry. OLE/ActiveX is not a good design for the following reasons:

    1) It's too complex.

    2) It has serious security problems due to the use of the variant structure which exposes the type of the information being transfered to potentially malicious interceptor programs.

    3) It cannot be used to properly implement automatic snap-in conections within a compositional environment because it is not a true message passing model. A message passing model is inherently non-blocking.

    4) It does not provide a symetrical male/female mechanism for connections. Complementary connectors are a must for automatic connector creation given either a pre-existing male or female connector. It would also automatically match the message type between sender and receiver. This would eliminate tons of errors.

    5) It uses a reference count. This can lead to serious reliability problems if a connected object crashes or hangs.

    There are other flaws but these will do.

    Louis Savain

    Computation is really communication.
  • If you look at it from a real user interface standpoint rather than a personal preference standpoint Mac OS does much better than Windows, and just about everything else out there. That doesn't mean you or anyone else has to like it of course, it just means it follows more of the rules for good UI.

    Are there any really UI-oriented people working on GNOME? It seems to be it could benefit greatly from this. Trying to match the Windows interface is not a good goal for the OSS community, because frankly Windows isn't very good at UI.

    Since you don't have to worry about the bottom line, the OSS community is an ideal environment to test out new ideas and do things that haven't been done before, and it would be especially great to see that happening in the UI department as Linux tries to get a hold in the desktop market. To the typical user UI is much more important than buzzword compliance. If Linux can be made easier to use than Windows, Microsoft will truly have something to fear on the desktop.
  • Yes. You are right - it doesn't have to be located in Xlib as long as it is toolkit independant.
  • Do you have an URL where I can get more info? Thanks in advance.

  • I am completely disgusted by the level of misinformation that's in this thread. "GNOME people are dorks, they're using OLE instead of CORBA", etc etc.

    Instead of posting inane crap that you know nothing about, read correct information straight from the source.

    GNOME Component Architecture white paper [gnome.org]

    Thanks.

  • You've made some valid points, but I feel some clarification is in order:

    • Most of your complaints are with Enlightenment, not Gnome. Just because RedHat's default configuration has a _very_ poorly configured Enlightenment as the window manager, that doesn't mean that E == Gnome.
    • As other posters have mentioned, most of your complaints have been addressed in later releases (again, of E, not Gnome).

    This is not to say that Gnome has no problems... I'm constantly deleting core files from my home directory. But I'm using Gnome with WindowMaker at home and at work every day, and I'm quite pleased with it. I don't suffer from any of the usability issues you've described. The problems you mention are Raster's issues to deal with, not Miguel's.

  • Ok, the *.desktop format is also going to become the KDE standard. Then it would pretty much become the linux standard. It won't be that hard too, since the *.desktop format is just the *.kdelink format without all of the K's. I am not sure if it is done, but I would bet CVS KDE uses it now. So the work is being done, its pretty trivial (could be done with a script, in fact here [netnerve.com] is a link to one), and now they can worry about Bonobo/CORBA/KOM/OpenParts.

    Also, If you compile IceWm with gnome support, it reads gnome menu's (both for the user and the system menus).
  • Yes, we know that Mathias was the founder of LyX. Then,he went off to work on KDE, and the rest of the LyX team carried on by themselves... until he showed up and pissed them all off by porting it to KDE without talking to anyone who was still working on LyX. They've since made up (afaik), but it was certainly ugly for a while.
  • .fvwmrc is NOT source code. It's a configuration file for fvwm that can be as simple or complex as the user wishes it to be. It contains plenty of remarks to help a new user figure out what can be done. The writer is not claiming to fix bloat or bugs in anything; he is simply expressing an understandable preference for a much smaller, simpler and more streamlined window manager as a way to *avoid* bloat and bugs in other WM's.

    Hope this helps!

  • I don't know if Miguel or anyone that matters will ever read this but here's a suggestion:

    Put the smack down on Gnome developers that fail to include "start menu" things with their distros. If rpm doesn't facilitate this intelligently then EXTEND the spec for Gnome apps!
  • The fault lies entirely in the default configuration of Enlightenment; it's a matter of changing a couple of parameters in the enlightenment configuration app.

    For me, gnome is very stable (I use the latest RPMs) and a very enjoyable environment.

  • Which is the entire point of the OLE-like stuff in question! It lets you use a separate spreadsheet, word processor, graphics program, etc, and still combine different things in one document rather than forcing you to use one giant app that does everything to make documents containing different types of data.

    It's not quite on the level of using piping to tie together tiny apps, but such tricks are hard to pull with GUIs.
  • Here, try on these +2 Goggles of View Sarcasm and read what you were replying to again...

    ///jeff
  • I don't know why everyone insists that writing a GUI in C is insane. It's not. Writing a GUI with GTK+ in C is pretty darn pleasant, actually. If you want _unpleasant_, I'm sure we can dredge up some examples.

    And it's nice to write the GUI in the same language you write everything else... GUI builders can't handle all your gui code unless you're just doing a static form. If you are dynamic form or something else, you'll always need to write code.
  • I was using the latest one and it had this problem. I had to downgrade to fix this.

  • The part that is not obvious is why people have to bitch about something they don't even want to use. As the previous poster said, you don't have to use it, so why are you bitching about it?

  • If it will become one then great !
    Another issue resolved ...
  • I like gnome, but i'm not very concerned with the panel or the file manager. I'm looking forward to Gzilla and their office suite.

    If only someone could construct a new interface for graphical applications. My favorite at present is WindowMaker as it is relatively different from the rest (please no flames about how it too is a clone of next-step fame)

    What is on Gnome's side is that gtk seems to be relatively common. Anyone have any stats on the number of applications in gtk, qt, and others? Num of coders?

    Anyone know what WindowManager will be gnomes next favorite now that enlightenment is estranged?

    I can't wait to see what the next version of enlightenment contains, as I recall mention of it too having greater functionality
  • Actually, I like what Gnome is doing, release early and often, just like Linux.:)

    If you find bug(s), please report them. As with any opensource project, more people find bugs the better.

    Reusing KOM/OpenParts would not have been very practical since last time I looked, there is no C binding for KDE, maybe I'm wrong.

    As for "vapour stunt," you must not use mc. Anyhow, attacking opensource developer is wrong since if you don't like what they do, don't use it.
  • OK, before calling me a moron perhaps you should check your facts.

    Either ORBIT only supports C, or the core GNOME docs are horrible (which I'd consider at least as bad).

    From the GNOME FAQ found directly off of www.gnome.org:

    ORBit is intended to be multilingual; ILU proves that this is possible. Right now it only supports C, but in the future it will support other languages. (Really, we mean it! It is a very, very new project right now, which is the only reason it is C only.)

    If GNOME's own docs are right, ORBit only supports C, and that's all there is to say about that.
  • As I said, ALL gnome apps should be using a *.desktop file for putting a shortcut on the foot menu. All gnome apps that I get do this. If it doesn't it is not a real gnome app. However, the gnome developers aren't the rulers of some world order, so they can't MAKE anybody do this. The only thing they should do is don't provide a link on the gnome website to an app that doesn't install a *.desktop file.

    Could you tell me what you mean by no standard. It seems about as good as a standard as you can get, considering there is no law on breaking them.
  • Isn't Gnumeric the only GNOME app of the ones you mention? Or have ABIWord and GIMP switched from pure GTK+ lately?
  • I suspect that all these people whining about memory usage could use a quick refresher in how memory works in UNIX. This goes for the people who say "X SUCKS because it uses 25 megs of RAM!" when they have a 16 meg TNT card in their computer, too. Newsflash #1: the X server mmaps the video buffer into its address space! (For the less clueful out there, this means subtract your video ram from the memory usage reported by the X server). Newsflash #2: Libraries are also mmaped into the address space! (So is the executable for that matter).

    Ok, so all these libraries are getting counted multiple times, they still all add up, you say? UNIX demand pages executables and libraries into memory, so big, featureful libraries are good, since you only pay for the parts you use! (well, in 4kb chunks on intel, but you can't have everything).

    This should all be put in a "troll-FAQ" somewhere; I'm tired of seeing the same stupid trolls over and over again. Yes, X, GNOME, and KDE all have flaws, some of them large, but NONE are insurmountable, and the progress in all these areas (Have you seen XFree 3.9 yet?) has been amazingly rapid.
  • Bonobo (Pan Paniscus) or pigmy chimp, endangered species. Homosapien's nearest cousin in primate. They are similar to human in sex behavior, who fscks alot among them, practicing incest, poligamy, everything. everyday is mating day. no season no shit.


    just for info
  • GNOME is great! I was suprised as hell to see how great it was when I upgraded from RH 5 to a brand new cheapbytes version of Mandrake 6. Wow It is sweet. I *COULD* set this up for my mother to use. If not for the pig of the Netscape I could. She only needs the web and mail.


  • Their JVM kicks your ass.
  • > Tell me why the reverse NIH argument couldn't be made against KDE's object model?

    Well, because KDE's object model was started *before* baboon (or bonobo or however its called today)?
  • I wrote a C binding for Qt. Extending it to KDE was trivial (just edit the headers into a simpler class description format for a script that actually did the binding).

    How trivial? Well wrapping Qt, including writing the script mentioned above took a week, and I did it just to win a USENET argument.

    Now, why did this binding never evolve further? The interest in C bindings for KDE and Qt seems to be limited to people that don't code, for the most part.
  • PLEASE, not wide characters!

    There is something called UTF-8. It means your text is stored in the same space it was before but it contains not just 65536 characters, but 2^31 possible characters, and you NEVER have to put an "if" in there to say "wide or normal characters". And all the c string functions still work, and they are FAST and byte-oriented.

    "Wide characters" are the biggest impediment to internationalization there is. We would be much better off if everybody was using ASCII because there would not be those "if" statements and "character sets" that any correct Unicode system has to be compatable with. Please don't add this crap to yet another toolkit and environment.

    PS: It has already taken Qt down with it. Qt now copies every string argument you pass it to it's own memory in order to pad it to 16 bits. This is an annoying, horrible waste of time for the vast majority of users, and makes it impossible to pass UTF-8, and has noticably slowed all the KDE applications.

  • You are right about Windows but I can't agree with Mac - it is ugly and hardly functional - at least for me.
  • I know that comment was probably flamebait but I'm going to give it a serious response...

    This seems to come up every time GNOME or KDE is mentioned. Yes, Windows already has a tried and true desktop which is easier to use for some people (since GUI ease-of-use is a very personal thing, some like one GUI and other like another. Choice is good!). And Linux is only reaching the stage of having a useful desktop system (KDE is already there, and GNOME is getting there rapidly as well), so it can't be called "tried and true" yet. But -- Linux isn't a "real" operating system? How's that again? It boots up my computer and runs all my programs, delivers my E-mail, etc. If that's not a real operating system, I don't know what is. And in terms of the "catch-up", you can just as easily (more easily, IMO) argue that Windows is playing "catch-up" to UNIX in all areas *but* the GUI. Networking and communications (E-mail, WWW, FTP, newsgroups) and security are just some of the areas that UNIX has long been good at and in which Windows is just playing "catch-up". (And in security particularly, Windows still has a long way to go).

    And why not use Windows? Well, there's really no reason not to, if it's the right tool for the job. See, I'm neutral in the OS holy wars -- I don't care what you use, and I'll use the right tool for me. I don't use Windows because Linux does everything I need, has higher quality in many areas, and costs me $89 less than Windows (a very important consideration on a college student's budget!). Also, I happen to not like Microsoft's monopolistic practices, so I guess I'm not all that neutral. But if a Microsoft product is the right tool for the job, I'll use it.

    Sorry. You'll get no flames from me.
    "Hey! You're one of those condescending UNIX users!"
    "Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a real operating system."
    - Stolen from Dilbert (I think) and changed a little
    -----

  • You can't just ask that question and drop it! Dammit! I want to know how it is.

    So, how is it? :)
  • What's the point of all this bragging about ActiveX-like capabilities when there are missing major parts like for example way to automatically add something to start menu. This is all hogwash, it only looks half-decent on the surface, underneath there is nothing to support that. Everything has to be done manually ( KDE is not perfect, but much better in this regard)
  • Go grab your copy of Inside Windows NT, and actually read it (it actually isn't a bad book). The kernel-GUI relationship is very similar to the way it always has been in UNIX. There are a few difference, NT integrates GDI at a very low level, which allows for a bit faster of drawing to the screen. This is a good thing. The GGI project's KGI does a similar thing, but probably won't find its way into the linux kernel for a while, if ever. Some core linux deveopers don't agree with the assertation that having your video drivers in kernel space is a good thing.

    As for the GUI, under windows explorer.exe and friends, that's just as abstracted from the core OS as KDE or GNOME or $WM is from the core UNIX OS. The Win32 subsystem runs above kernel space in NT just as X runs above kernel space in UNIX. Now, under NT if the Win32 subsystem dies, the kernel dies. This is because it is assumed without the Win32 subsystem your machine is worthless. This is a bad idea, IMHO. Furthermore, it is quite possible to replace your GUI (explorer.exe) with something else. Lightstep comes to mind as an alternative. You can also use things like zsh (which I do on my work machine a lot).

    The primary difference in terms of GUIs is that UNIX gives you a lot more freedom, flexibility, and customizability than Windows NT does, plus problems up in the Graphical Engine section (X or Win32 layer) are less likely (it still not fool-proof) to take down the machine under UNIX.
  • Have you heard of Cygnus Solutions? This sounds very much like them when they started out. Granted, they started working on gcc, gdb, binutils and such, but it sounds like the same concept. I think what they are doing is a damn good idea, and it should help progress it quickly.

    Besides that, I personally think it looks good, works well, and is going to be around for a while. Lots of new applications are coming out every day that are designed to integrated with gnome from the ground up.

    Just my $.02.
  • Please don't confuse me with the Windows advocate who replied to my message. I was comparing GNOME with KDE, not with Windows; Windows makes me retch.
    --
  • I think you are right. Lack of standard GUI i hurting Linux position as a workstation terribly.
    But , try to mention that - you will get tons of post of people defending "freedom of choice","fexibility" and all that bullcrap.
  • I don't think this is correct. As I understand it, the new QString class in Qt stores a string as either 0, 1, or 2 arrays, meaning that it dynamically adds width to the characters as needed.

    As for UTF-8, I think it's a good idea to store files in that format, but for internal processing, it can't be as fast as wide characters: each character in UTF-8 occupies between one and six bytes; I would imagine that this would make character counting quite slow, because you'd have to iterate through the whole string.

    --

  • There are several window managers that emulate the MacOS look. I don't know their names offhand, but a little research at Freshmeat [freshmeat.net] or Linuxberg [linuxberg.com] ought to turn something up. And check Themes.org [themes.org] for MacOS themes for various themable windowmanagers.

    It's just that you never hear about these Mac-like windowmanagers in the press because they're all getting excited about a Windows-like desktop system. But they're out there.
    -----

  • Gee, I guess the Micro-Trolls are out in force today, huh? Is this the best that the anti-Linux task force can muster.

    I fart in your general direction. :P

    One of the things I like best about a separate GUI is that if an app hangs, I can kill X and restart it in a few seconds rather than have to reboot the whole OS, like when Word locks up twice a day here at work.

    "If Bill Gates had a nickel for everytime I had to reboot... oh wait, he does!"

  • No. Mac interface is hardly usable - if you wanna look at the state of the art look at Windows. Seriously.
  • Just an attempt at a little bit of humor. However, I think the fish applet signifies everything that's wrong with GNOME: bloatedness (it's about 1MB in size), it uses CORBA (for no good reason -- all the applets do), and it's linked to an incredibly large number of libraries. Pretty pathetic for an applet that the authors stress over and over again has no purpose...
  • Yup, and you are tied to the GUI that you get shipped with it. With X you can run any window manager that you damn well please, and there are lots of them. You can configure the desktop the way YOU want it, rather than the way that someone else told you to like. I would say that the inferiority lies in something that is unchangable. You don't even have to run X/desktop/GUI/whatever with linux, thereby giving you a system that also takes less resources if you don't need graphics. Linux will always be inferior as it doesn't come with a GUI as standard and is only as an add on. We moved away from a separate GUI shell when we ditched Win3.1. I suggest you lot should do the same or be left in the past Oh yeah, I forgot that MS products are the wave of the future. :)0
  • They probabably wouldn't be working on KDE anyway, unless it was bassed on C. I guess you could say this about a lot of things. I think about all of the stuff on the freshmeat and think "How about a good 3d editor, word processor, web browser, e-mail client, whatever instead of all of this crap". But I guess that crap (irc clients, gui clients to stuff I never heard of, etc) is usefull to somebody.
  • Why do "Real Seattlites" have such contempt for Eastsiders. Isn't it all pretty much one big city anyway? Is it the same thing as in NM we always complained about Texans, it's just that we were more spread out?

    Nah, it's because you're a bunch of republicans. Alright, check that, it's not because you're republicans, it's just that voting republican is one of the symptoms of whatever disease it is the eastside's got.

  • Reading the posts above just about everyone is offtopic. Not one post about what people think about the future of GNOME. It's either KDE people who think they are gods gift to the world. Windows people who don't know any thing about linux anyway or just plain old trolls.

  • Wow, you're right! I don't think I've ever seen a lower STN ratio on an article before. Ah, the flame wars are back--just as the people at KDE and GNOME start getting along the users (and people who seems to either like MS products or like to make people mad, probably the latter) start fighting again.

    I started using GNOME when it was the "morally superior" desktop. The Trolltech basically fixed all that, but I was already using GNOME so I didn't see the point. If KDE becomes sufficiently better than GNOME that it's worth the effort and disorientation of switching, I will. I would hope the reverse would be true for most KDE users.

    Despite what a lot of people may say, recent GNOME releases have been very stable (they leave lots of core files, but that's only because my X-server dies). And this interview shows that GNOME is getting more done. It looks like GNOME Workshop will be a nice competitor to KOffice, so neither will stagnate. As long as the filesystems are compatible, I wouldn't mind having both.

    Other thing that surprised me: GNOME Filesystem?!
  • I am disappointed to see the high amount of flames and trolls taking place. If people actually take the time to read about what Gnome is doing with CORBA, XML, and bonobo. People are immediately assuming that bonobo and CORBA are going to bring on more bloat, but the idea behind these concepts is to reduce bloat and increase power. I have been following Gnome development fairly carefully, and I am very impressed with what they are coming up with. They are making great effort to implement everything correctly and elegantly. They are redoing their file manager to make it more powerful, faster, and more embeddable. Their new mailer is going to be truly next-generation. Their gnome-workshop will include the Gimp and Gnumeric, which are both already very advanced applications, as well as AbiWord, which is developing nicely. They are also working with the LyX people to do a *correct* gnome port, rather than how the KDE people did it; they will be using the LyX gui abstraction code to do things cleanly. Gnome is an extremely nice environment, and it is very configurable. Gnome 1.2 and Gnome 2.0 will be very impressive products, and they will be far more streamlined and faster than the previous generation. Please withold your flames until you actually research what GNOME is up to.
  • Uhhh..
    I saw about 15 posts from you saying that linux isn't worth it because the menus dont' get added automatically.

    Someone tells you that you can add them automatically, and you say that you'd rather do it manually than use the tool that is provided?

    I always wonder why people like you bother talking. You just want to complain about problems. You ignore any possible solutions, and then just go on doing what you normally do.

    You're not interested in learning anything, just convincing yourself that your way is the right way.
  • There is a dire shortage of available moderation points today, for sure.

    Can't moderate when no points show up. (uh, not that I would know :-) )

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