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Flame KDE? I simply mentioned it and compared it. I don't see where the "flaming" is, in fact the first two times I mentioned its name on the article I gave it the upper hand on the specific issue discussed in the paragraph!

I think you are too touchy and you can't see the words "gnome" and "kde" on the same article.

If you were taken the time to understand the structure of the article you would see that the two times KDE was praised were on the two paragraphs that detailed the DEFICIENCIES of Gnome. Praising KDE at these two times DOES NOT MEAN that on all the rest of points KDE prevails or not. KDE is mentioned there to simply help make the case for these two gnome problems. This article is not a full comparison of the two DEs. But having used both, as a normal user, I still prefer Gnome over any other X11 DE. You are free to disagree and submit a comparison review.

Hey,

Don't get me wrong. I was simply agreeing with ralph. And you are welcome to disagree with both of us. We're simply the readers. What do we know?

"If you were taken the time to understand the structure of the article"

I read it over a few times to try to understand your summary paragraph. I couldn't. Maybe I am dumb.

Although I have no comments on the item of flaming, I would like to say your comment back seems a bit out of place. I do believe you should defend your article but the last sentence was a bit of place.

But who am I to be telling an OSN Staff member what to do.

I do not understand why he claims Gnome is the best X11 desktop when wherever compared to KDE he gave it the upper hand.

He is a she.

All in all I agree with this review, however, why the author thought it was a good idea to flame KDE in a Gnome review is simply beyond me.

Pardon? I thought the review was quite fair, and was pretty favourable to KDE about the way it treats its developers and gives them the tools they need. In short, both desktops have different things to work on in different areas.

No flame here...move along.

It appears that the Debian developers want GNOME 2.10 to enter testing in an orderly manner before introducing 2.12 to unstable. Remember that testing will become the next stable release and keeping this release procedure as smooth and organized as possible is much more important for Debian than pushing the latest packages to unstable as fast as possible. Here's a recent post suggesting that 2.10 may be in testing soon:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2005/09/msg00021.html

SMEG works, why couldn't they just use that if no one wanted to take the time to do it themselves?

As a GNOME user, I agree with you for the full 100%. Why they simply didn't implement SMEG, a menu editor that works fine, is extremely easy to use, is completely *beyond me*. I've been thinking about reasons *not* to integrate SMEG-- and I can't think of anything else but...

...an ego problem. Seriously.

SMEG can be the default editor. My Ubuntu Breezy installation uses it, so when you right click and do 'edit menus' it uses SMEG instead of whatever that other one is. But I'm not sure if it's because it's Ubuntu or because I already had SMEG before I upgraded.

...an ego problem. Seriously.

Nonsense. It has been the plan from the beginning to only offer the required amount of functionality. Adding items is not required, because you should never need it if applications are not broken. Even then you can easily add launchers to your panel, put them in a drawer if you are short on space. The fact that they don't appear in the menu is mostly a cosmetic issue.

If you need to fix broken applications and if you really want to make them appear in your menu, then it's not difficult at all to install a different menu editor.

You may very well disagree with this thinking and you may be right as much as you may be wrong, but talking about "ego problems" is really cheap and inappropriate. Seriously.

>Adding items is not required

And WHO made the STUDY to really tell if it's required or not??? Can you please direct me to the outcome of the user study made by the Gnome Project? Obviously me, Thom and others need the feature. I agree that for Gnome and KDE applications it should be considered "a bug" if an app comes without a working menu item, but there are other GTK, plain Qt, older X11 apps that don't care about the freedesktop.org standard, and as a user, I MIGHT NEED this application to my everyday work. Therefore, I would want to add it to my gnome menu. Therefore, the current gnome menu editor is too little, and if I may say so, too late.

Exactly, Eugenia, I was about to post pretty much the same comment.

I've just been browsing through mailing-list archives and gnome-bugzilla, and I can tell from all the posts that the amount of people wanting *normal* menu-editing, like any other DE or OS has, outnumber the people against it. Actually, I couldn't find *anyone* completely against users adding new menu items; most were indifferent to it (probably because only people like us join in ml/bugzila discussions, people that can do stuff like this manually).

Now, you are right that applications should conform to Freedesktop standards, and properly install a decent menu entry; however, not all apps will do that. Compare it to Windows; in essence, every app there should confirm to the admin/user divide in Windows; yet barely any app does that. So, there must be solution to this problem *inside* the DE that people use.

Other than that; how do you know 'normal' users do not need menu editing in GNOME, when it wasn't available for quite some time now? If I got a eurocent for everytime I heard someone complain about the lack of menu-editing in GNOME...

I called this an ego problem because as far as I can tell, the descision to make menu-editing *not* a priority is a developer-inspired descision; not a descision based on user feedback.

>>Adding items is not required

>And WHO made the STUDY to really tell if it's required or not???

Is a study really necessary? You seem to ignore certain points when you feel your position is being countered.
One point you completely blew by was, as stated in the post to which you wrote this reply, if the app isn't broken, the user wouldn't need to add menu items. In other words, if the app being installed includes a properly formated "app.desktop" file, as per FreeDesktop standards, the app would appear in the correct place in the menu. The user could then use GNOME's included menu editor to remove it if he/she so desired.
If, on the other hand, the app is broken(read:no "app.desktop" file), there are other ways to handle it aside from menu editing at the user level. Such as adding a launcher on the panel or desktop or actually writing the app.desktop file and dropping it in to the correct directory(generally /usr/share/applications).
IMO, handling menu editing at the user level is wrong. It should be handled at the system level with an option for the user remove items from their menus if they see fit. As it stands now, that's what we have. Provided, of course, that the app developers follow the standards laid out by FreeDesktop.

Nonsense. It has been the plan from the beginning to only offer the required amount of functionality. Adding items is not required, because you should never need it if applications are not broken.

Then what is the point of having such menu editor? I understand that the average user merely need to hide and move menu entries, but you should also think about the slightly above average user that might need these functionalities. At worst, he could enable an obscure entry in GConf.

Getting another menu editor is barely a solution. Having two programs that pratically do the same thing is bloat.

If you need to fix broken applications and if you really want to make them appear in your menu...

Though I am a GNOME Zealot, I agree this sort of functionality would be appreciated...

Ok, changed my mind. Better to enforce standards..
:P

Because Gnome is a platform not a distribution. Complain to your distributor.

Hey, should have existed? Why? Where is it written? Oh, I forgot all of you trolls paid for that. Don't you?

One of the advantages of the free software in general is the oportunity to change what you dislike, and adapt it to your needs. Most of the times you are receiving a high quality software for free. You don't pay. So, you can't just come and tell 'it should, it should'.

Your complains should be better placed in a gnome mailing list, with your comments _and_ arguments. That's what free software is all about. If you code, you can dot it. If you don't push for the things you want to see.

But I don't see any point in reply to a Gnome announcment that way. What I see as good, are comments based on arguments, and when I say arguments I don't mean 'personal reasons'.

I wonder if you trolls are as good as you say. So, why don't colaborate? It's much easier to just come and tell bad things, than help.

My god, I forgot you paid. And that you have MUCH better coding skill than gnome hackers. The problem is: you have only coded hello worlds.

Well, actually I have coded more than "hello worlds" but admittedly poorly. I don't deny that - I'm not a programmer and I don't pretend to be one. All you did was break out the usual "code it yourself argument".

You also get me wrong: I love GNOME and use it happily, but it does have it's flaws. The fact the 2.0 series have existed for 3 years without a proper menu editing solution is appalling. Would I be calling Microsoft out if they shipped Windows without a menu editor? You bet I would and so would you.

I'll say it again: 2.0 should not have shipped without a decent menu-editing solution, let alone 2.2, 2.4 and so on. The GNOME team have let themselves down badly on this front.

That's one of those KDE features. Probably not popular enough for GNOME or somethin.

Yeah, and I bet the day GNOME puts the feature in, it will be like -- Oooh look at this cool feature! Now GNOME is the BEST KDe out there.

Seriously, its a case of obfuscating the past -- George Orwell style, IMO. KDE has implemented each and every feature that GNOME has first but somehow it always gets more "media attention" once GNOME implements it, partial or otherwise.

GConf keys are only meant for power users, normal users on an enterprise environment might not even have access to the gconf gui. What I wanted is a real preference choice of which to use as default, and then interchange between them using Control+L as it currently is. Right now, not even the preference exists, but after you click Control+L and go to the input box you CAN'T go back to the path navigation on the same window without reloading a new window.

>apt-get nautilus-open-terminal solves that problem.

This is only for users with a debian or fedora though. FreeBSD or smaller Linux distro users won't be as lucky. IMHO, the problem here is not the absence of "open terminal" but the fact that the Nautilus developers haven't capitalized yet on the "Actions/Plugins/Scripts" power and instead of shipping some scripts/plugins by default (one of them could be the "open terminal on the current directory") they are downplay them and hiding them, literally.

"but after you click Control+L and go to the input box you CAN'T go back to the path navigation on the same window without reloading a new window."

Press escape. Yes, there should be a "close" button next to "Location", but the most obvious key shortcut works.

In addition to a little "x" beside the location bar, I'd also like to see the location bar open up when you type "/" in the main nautilus window, much as you do with the file selector.

To open a terminal anywhere, put this in an executable .sh script script in your nautilus-scripts:

exec gnome-terminal

That will open a terminal in the directory you are viewing in the nautilus window.

You can also open a r00t terminal like this:

exec gnome-terminal -e su

I have to agree with one thing. GNOME documentation sucks! Developer docs that is

I agree too, though they are improving, as they are more and more auto-generated.
Still, the problem is that tutorials and howtos are not maintained. They still are usable because Gnome has backward compatibility until 2.0, but if you remove all deprecated symbols, nearly all the docs are obsolete (except API reference docs).

But it took me days to figure out how asynchronous operations actually works with gnomevfs

Look, I'm no genius, I'm not even programming regularly, but I found in, say 5 minutes, a recent example on how to do that (and I was not even searching for that).

Days to figure out how gconf actually works

It took me minutes ... I found all the docs I needed. I'm trying to updating some of my old Gnome apps (that still works, but they are Gtk 2.0 apps) and so, I started learning recent Gnome and KDE. The most difficulties I had till now, is avoiding all the deprecated stuff, and I still could use GConf in less than an hour.

Do I need to restart gconf after installing schema files?

Have nothing to do with programming, but no you don't.

And I still have no bloody clue how to, when to, and if to use most of the libgnome libraries

Had nearly no problem with that. The only problem I had is that all these are marked deprecated (in the docs, not in the code), but most still have no equivalent. When equivalents are available, it's written in the docs.

Hacking on GNOME is no fun. It's tedious and you spend weeks just figuring out how things should work. When they do work though, it rocks.

I disagree, I have a lot of fun hacking on Gnome. At start, I agree that it is more tedious than it should, a book on Gnome 2.12+ development is long overdue. But once you grasped how it works, you develop pretty fast with it. I'm still in the discovering phase, and I've not used GnomeVFS yet (seems to be the hardest part), so perhaps I will change my mind soon. But even as I saw why GnomeApp is a mess and why most of libgnome{,ui} need to go, it's not difficult to grasp. My secret is that I use the DISABLE_DEPRECATED flags, so I catch every obsolete code very fast.

With respect to RAD. Use Python, PyGTK, GNOME Python and Gazpacho. That's all you'll ever need for RAD. Anyway good review overall.

Well, I still dislike python, because to this day, Gnome python apps still have memory leaks (I use mostly bittorrent) though it's improving. Anyway, in my way back to Gnome and KDE devs, I'm starting with emacs/vi for Gnome, will be continuing with Anjuta (which I like very much, but I removed old Anjuta 1, and Anjuta 2 is still to buggy to even start a project, perhaps I will be able to help once I master more of Gnome 2.1x dev) for Gnomemm and finally, will use KDevelop when I will be on to KDE dev.

>> Do I need to restart gconf after installing schema files?

> Have nothing to do with programming, but no you don't.

Actually you do have to restart gconfd or new schema files will not be picked up.

gconftool-2 --shutdown

or just kill the process. Failing to do so will mean apps will not get the default values specified when they read the keys.

Actually you do have to restart gconfd or new schema files will not be picked up

You can explicitely load them in your app though, that's what I planned to do anyway, at initialisation.

gconftool-2 --shutdown or just kill the process. Failing to do so will mean apps will not get the default values specified when they read the keys

That should be a bug ... Perhaps related to the cache. I suppose that's one big architectural problem of GConf if it can't be fixed. Now, with latest kernel using inotify, and latest GConf using it too if it is available in kernel, I suppose this can be overcome.

Well, make a change and colaborate with docs about what you learned ;-)

I love how you insist this is a flame. It'd give more respect if you quoted the full sentence.

"But having used both, as a normal user, I still prefer Gnome over any other X11 DE."

Now let's break this down. "But having used both." meaning the experience is there with both of the Desktop Environments that are being discussed here, KDE and Gnome. "as a normal user" this implying someone who can sit down and do their work, whether that's browsing the net, writing an article or email. "I still prefer Gnome over any other X11 DE" Now, notice that it wasn't just against KDE, but a preference over all other X11 DEs.

What's wrong with picking favorites? Just because I like Cinderella more than I like Guns and Roses, doesn't mean that I'm a bad person, or that I shouldn't write an article on how I prefer the sound of Tom Keifer's voice better than the sound of Axl Rose.

It sounds to me like you're just an idiot who is trying to start a flamewar more than anything. So just chill out and take what is meant by that sentence. I prefer Gnome over KDE too, for my own reasons. Does that mean I'm trying to start a flamewar?

'One small thing i miss a lot in Gnome: an easy way to browse the file-system as root. Everytime i need to do that, i have to open a terminal, which sucks. There should be some way to right-click the folder, type the root password, and browse the folder as root.'

Try this script:

#!/bin/bash
# opens a root-enabled instance of a nautilus window in selected location
# requires sudo priviledges and gksudo, which may involve security risks.
#Install in your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory.

foo=`gksudo -u root -k -m "enter your password for nautilus root access" /bin/echo "got r00t?"`
sudo nautilus --no-desktop $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_URI

Most of the installs of Gnome I've used (currently Debian Unstable with Gnome 2.10) has an option under Applications -> System Tools -> Run as different user.
This will bring up a dialog box for user and program.

Adding this sort of script manually would be beyond the casual user's abilities (although arguably the casual user should not need root access), but points to a more general issue to resolve with GNOME.

I agree with the GNOME philosophy of keeping the desktop as simple as possible, not providing feature bloat and especially not hacks to overcome other broken apps (eg: adding menu items).

However, I think there's a case for a 'gnome-extras', where a lot of these items, scripts, apps etc that don't fit in with the GNOME philosophy can be included. That way the base desktop can be customised easily to meet different user's requirements without bloating and obfuscating the base release.

Distro's targeting different groups of users might decide to include certain things from this gnome-extras section by default, saving the end-user from having to do so.

gksudo nuatilus

;)

It's that we invented the look&feel for Thunar. So Thunar is probably a pirate too.

That should read: It's not that we invented...

Well said.

I must agree in that Nautilus Scripts are to underrated, why ain't any distro using it? this is one of the greatest potentials of Nautilus and is barely used, Nautilus should come with at least 2 or 3 scripts by default than can do something usefull.

If a feature is generally useful, then it should be implemented in a more integrated way. Scripts are sub-optimal for this. What they are good for is to add features that are very specific to what a user wants to do, but no distribution can foresee this.


Another underated feature has to be the documents Templates, its so easy to create one in GNOME comparing it to Windows, and again, distros are not using it, if a distro includes OpenOffice then why not include a Template of an empty document? or a template of at least a text file?

Because templates are specifically not designed for creating empty documents. They are not good for this because either you have to leave out most document types or clutter the menu with dozens of entries. What they are meant for is for users to easily create their own templates for documents they often modify.

What I would like to see would be a generic and powerful way to create new documents of any type. That would be a required feature to make the document oriented workflow generally useful.

it's safe (if the user don't know exactly what the action will do, the right click drag'n drop show him/her the options before doing anything... or nothing at all!).

Try middle click drag'n drop in Gnome, you might like it.

Konqueror is an infinitely better file manager.... Sometimes I sort of with gnome would give up on this silly file manager notion (but that's cause I stopped using file managers after starting to use Gnome)...

What irritates me most is the new file selector though (from 2.6). Please oh please see in your finite wisdom (sic) to give me a way to TYPE INTO THE BLOODY THING! Gtk went from the best file selector to the worst inside one rel