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I feel much the same way. I use Gnome every day and I can't think of much more I would want from it really. I'm probably just a luddite.

Having said that, I would also like to see GNOME 3.0 have bit more of a direction.

Edited 2006-12-21 12:01

Why is Vista 3 steps back? Amazing how people just flame because they feel like it, especially after having never used the software in question.

-G

Why 3 Steps back? A new DE witch can only offers new features and designs with MORE and MORE Hardware Power is no Evolution, its just 3 Steps back. PS: I've installed Vista and its _S_L_O_W_.

Edited 2006-12-21 14:00

Vista is more than just a DE, it's an entire OS, with change made throughout. if you think it's just a DE, please stop commenting on something you know nothing about

The one thing in Vista which make the most change is the DE. And it is crap. If you are just another ms fanboy on Vista LSD, please stop commenting and go.

So? The upgrade from XP to Vista happens mostly through bying a new machine. And those machine handle Vista easily. Most PCs of, say, the last 3 years can handle Vista pretty good, some may need more RAM though, but it's not as big of a problem as you say.

>Most PCs of, say, the last 3 years can handle Vista pretty good,

Most? 50% of the PC sold are laptops which usually have not too powerful videocards, plus a non negligible percent of desktops have also low-end videocards.
--> I really doubt that your assertion is true.

That said, I agree with you: Vista 'upgrade' will happen mostly by buying new machine.

Looking at Microsoft's OS releases, it is more an exception than rule that their new OS releases take steps backwards instead of forward.

(The obvious exceptions being Windows NT and 95.)

So, it's a pretty good guess.

If everyone had this kind of attitude we'd still all be sitting in front a single-tasking command prompt.

I mean hey, why did we need the upgrades, we had Pong and 1-2-3, and WordPerfect ...

There's a hair to be split here. Yes, progress is good. No, inefficiency isn't good. Progress can be made efficiently. OS X and free software packages have shown that. Vista has a lot more features than XP, but its basic requirements are awfully high for just an OS.

You miss the point... we need no new major version to have a modern system. Every 2.* Version of Gnome brings many improvements, Features and Apps. This is not Windows where new apps, features and improvements came only ever 5 years. Windows XP and Gnome 1.4 came both in 2001. Gnome 1.4 to 2.18 ... BIG Evolution... but XP to Vista... oh please... If you like big app numbers... ok... then use another system... like... Mac OS... its by 10. MUCH bigger the crappy XFCE which is by 4... or Gnome *OMFGLOL* only 2... so... the BEST will be Windows Server __2_0_0_3__ what a great number. ;-)

I'd add that KDE has seen more polishing and development between e.g. 3.0 and 3.5 than Gnome has between the releases from v2.

In the FOSS world it's more important to release good than to release fast. Especially when both Gnome and KDE are at a level of usefulness that doesn't life-threateningly demand a new release for tomorrow.

We also shouldn't forget features that Gnome and KDE have for ages which certain other OSes still don't have (I won't list, I don't want a fight here, I just want to point out that even though releases seem to come slower these days, they have a fairly good position in features, usefulness and stability, which is not a bad position to be at).

Edited 2006-12-21 12:25

and what features would those be? Seems to me all the desktops are pretty feature rich right now, including 6 year old XP

Multiple desktops
Sensible Home directory (as opposed to My documents)
Memory Protection

after all C++ is in my opinion the most difficult language


I hope you're not suggesting the C mess that gnome desktop is today is "easier". C is a great and simple lenguage good for many things, but not for building a desktop. Even the gnome developers (silently) agree in that, by searching an alternative in java/C#. It's a sad thing that one of the reasons why gnome choose C was to make easier to use other languages, and then most of the gnome desktop "environment" (evolution, nautilus, gimp, gaim, xchat, etc) has been written in C.

If you had to rewrite Evolution from scratch, you'd do it in C + gtk + glib or C++? Personally I'd choose C++, or even C# or Java (even if the last two eat quite a lot of ram being vm-based)

Edited 2006-12-21 13:10

Actually, the reason they chose C was because it is fast, compiles on just about every platform, and allows them the make bindings for just about every language easily.

If you want to program for Gnome in C++, use http://www.gtkmm.org/

Actually, it's a fallacy that it's somehow easier to produce bindings for C libraries than for C++ libraries: in actual fact, tools like sip, swig or smoke use the extensive information that's available in C++ headers but not in C headers to do most of the binding automatically.

And it works: see the complete, up-to-date, high quality bindings of Qt and KDE for Python, Ruby, Java, C#.

There used to be others, like Perl, Objective C, plain C and more, but nobody seemed to need those (given that it's pretty easy to code in C++ with Qt already) and it wasn't worth keeping them up-to-date for no users.

Hey, are you the guy starring in Tremulous? Cause i've seen you there

Sry, ot.

don't start everyone knows that C is a clumsy language, C++ is far superior,

C++ is the most difficult to learn, but once you learn it you can can wield a power far greater than just simple C


Gnome devs chose C out of ignorance, there i said it
luddites

"look at the mess vista is"

the mess works fine IMO

" look at the mess vista is "

And where is that mess, excactly, in Vista? As someone above said - it works just fine.

"Microsoft pays people to do that and even they cant get it right"

Again - are you talking about Vista? What's so wrong with it?

"go suck Redmond"? You are giving FOSS people a bad name.

I second your post.

"We are talking about open source here. People working for free. All this crap talk trying to ruffle feathers must be a real kick in the guts to developers working on these projects for free."

Are you saying that the end product should be judged against different standards, just because it's "free as in freedom"? I think that's a very naive point of view...

no, I think his point isn't idealogical, as your painting it (like that'd be a bad thing...), but the simple fact that unlike osx/windows, where you're paying for the "priviledge" of using them and hence can expect a certain amount of return for your investment, with gnome/kde you generally aren't.

think of it this way, you pay somebody a thousand dollars to do some type of work on your house for you, painting it, constructing a deck, whatever. you can reasonably expect, and even if need be demand, a certain amount of quality for what you're giving all done in an agreed amount of time. on the other hand, let's say your buddy, purely as a favour to you, says he'll do the work for free. just being a nice friend and all that. what type of ***hole would then chew the guy out if he'd missed a spot in painting the wall, or the work wasn't done absolutely perfectly, or in this case, if instead of getting the work all done in 2 days, it took him a month. you may decide next time you'll pay for the work instead, but any reasonable person wouldn't be judging the two types of work by the exact same standards.


(note: I'm responding to your comment, not thom's article.)

As the FOSS proponents are so quick to point out, Free means libre not gratis. There are companies who do get paid for developing Linux DEs, like Novell/SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, etc. As such you can and should expect a certain amount of return for your investment.

Your argument which essentially boils down to "Hey, it's free. Don't knock it" doesn't hold water.

And how much did you pay for the distos you've used? And what percentage of linux users do you expect did so as well?

(not to mention the vast majority of what goes in any said distro isn't actually done by the distro maintainers themselves, but is largely just packaged up and customized by them to whatever degree. add to that the fact that even with the paid-for distros out there, most of them do in fact provide their distribution (in some form or other) free as in gratis for those who don't care to shell out for support contracts.)

Obviously the XGL novelty has worn off already and many are looking for the next new thing to brag to their friends.

I'll have to disagree with this. Xgl/Aiglx/Compiz/Beryl development is in full swing, and new plugins are still being developed. I think we're only at the beginning of what this new technology will provide. By the same time next year the Linux eye-candy will have left Vista and OSX in the dust.

(Note to Windows and OSX fans: this is good, at least if you like eye-candy, because it will prompt MS and Apple to turn up the development of new eye-candy features. This is why competition is *good*!)

You have misunderstood my sentance. I did not claim XGL is not in "full swing" or a problem at all. My comment is directed at the readers here that sit back and continue to use Windows/OSX/Whatever and load Linux/OS-whatever from cd/dvd to see what's "new". They just want to be impressed by something. They download the Mandriva DVD and look at the wobbly windows for 2min and rotate the cube for 1 minute then conclude that "KDE hasn't changed for 4 years" etc etc like Thom here infers. I personally think XGL and derivatives are definately on the top 5 developments in 2006. I don't understand this "competition" concept either. It's not a game/war/fight/race. The thousands of developers working on OS software are not competing against anyone and if anyone ever sat back and heckled me to hurry up and add this/that feature so they can stop using their favourite win/OSX app...I would give them the bird and encourage them to go elsewhere. We don't need the attitude.

Sorry, I completely misunderstood what you had said in the first post. I pretty much agree with all you've said.

I don't think you've ever tried making commercial software for Linux ...

Speaking as someone who's involved on a day to basis with trying to develop and test commercial closed source desktop (and non) applications for Linux and other OS's. It's true that it's not totally the fault of the Desktops, they're just another part of the general mess that makes the overall development cost vs. size of potential reward equation seem pretty unfavourable to a commercial company. I personally like Linux (used it for years), and I just wish it'd pull it's bloody socks up and sort out the inter operability between distributions, window managers and do something about backward binary compatibility, that'd go along way to improving the equation.

All the best

You'll never get backwards binary compatibility. Open source, remember? If you want backwards compatibility than either open your formats and code, or keep updating your closed drivers and closed applications.

I'm trying not to be an extremist so I won't say "everybody should open up their code, death to binary blobs". But if you want to hold back all the rest of the ecosystem, which is mostly open and evolving freely, just because you don't want to open up your small part... Sorry, that's asking too much. That's where the line is drawn.

Which is the unfortunate reason why we're never going to get much in the way of native applications from commercial companies for the various flavours of Linux whilst it persists (I'm not holding my breath whilst Linus is in charge).

Personally I think it's an approach that made sense when things were just starting out and changing a lot. Now it just smacks of poor design and makes the development and support more difficult and costly for both open and closed source developers alike.

All the best

Commercial companies want to do things that way because they want to make more money. The community wants to do things this way because the people making it up believe in freedom. If there's anybody who should compromise it's not the free software community.

Free software was never about the money, marketshare and all that. It's about people doing things they like to do and offering them to others along with a set of fundamental freedoms.

The community, as a whole, simply doesn't care about the money side of things, there's no central roadmap for all things FOSS, no ultimate goal, no plans to take over the world or stiffle competition, or marketing and so on.

If the corporations don't want to port their drivers and applications properly, let them be. It takes years sometimes, but one day they look around and see 3 different FOSS projects more or less successfully replacing their product completely. Which means they missed the train.

Take a look at the auto package page. Even if you're not going to use the format they have made quite a bit of the grunt work necessary to make cross distro binaries a reality.

I'm afraid we've looked at Autopackage and other similar things in the past and found they only partially help. What they do do is make it a bit easier to produce a single installable package that's more likely to work on a variety of different Linux's. However in order to make up one of these packages you've still got to generate and test the different binaries that go into it for each of the various different flavours of Linux you're going to attempt to support, and that's the bit that unfortunately costs.

All the best.

you mean ms macro don't alway work under openoffice?

does openoffice macro work under ms office?

we have done a lot of macro under openoffice that work fine

if you don't use crossover office forget adobe product

alternative to adobe product exist
if some movies artist use tool like gimp, scribus.... a lot company can do it

Regarding Adobe products, do not expect their releases for Linux anytime soon. Rather check out something similar, like Pixel - http://www.kanzelsberger.com

I agree with you. KDE4 is a bunch of promises and good intentions just like Longhorn was in 2003. Look at Plasma, for example, nobody in the KDE development team knows exactly WHAT is plasma beyond the merging of KDesktop, Kicker and Superkaramba, which isn't very innovative. If you ask they may say that "it's a new concept of desktop" or that "It will be revolutionary" but at the end of 2006 nobody has a clear idea of what they want to implement and there's no much to see in the SVN regarding Plasma right now. If they don't even have now a stable Kdelibs release, then I don't think in 6 months we may see something revolutionary. Maybe a QT4 port of KDE3 with a better infraestructure but I don't think we may see something spectacular at least until KDE 4.2 or 4.3 or even KDE5.

I think the problem with KDE is lack of funds and manpower. As clearly stated in the article itself

"KDE's biggest problem is a lack of manpower and financial backing by big companies. In the past, both Mandrake and SUSE were the major driving forces behind KDE development, but now, SUSE is part of the GNOME-centric Novell family, and Mandrake Mandriva has been delegated to the sidelines. "

Todays leading Distro's are all GNOME based, be it the ultra popular Ubuntu or the enterprise class RHEL, SLED.
No doubt plasma as an idea is too good, but what good an idea is if it is not implemented ?

However, I always believed in KDE folks and will still count on them. There have been some changes lately, Mark Shuttleworth became the first Patron of KDE.
http://dot.kde.org/1160932072/
He says, I quote
"With the growing importance of Kubuntu within the Ubuntu family, the time is right to support the project that makes Kubuntu possible - KDE."
With more people joining KDE project and enhancing it with money power, I think that KDE is on its way to fulfill all the promisses it made.

The proposed KDE4 system is indeed grandiose. Such a system requires much work into making sure the foundation is correct; otherwise the resulting system is flawed.

All features that KDE4 is promising us will depend on the KDE core library (kdelibs). The kdelibs are in the process of being rewritten and you will find no shortage of activity in this area of development. The KDE4 kdelibs are not yet complete. The specifications of the core technologies for KDE4 (such as Phonon and Solid) are not yet completed so work is still being done on them to get them to be correct.

Would you start building onto the build site before the foundations are firmly in place? If not, why would anyone do the same for KDE? The foundations required for KDE4 are not solid at this point in time. Be assured that there is work being put into KDE4. The people working on building a solid foundation for KDE4 before major work can done to bring the system together.

Absolutely version numbers have nothing to do with milestones of an application. NetBSD, for a number of years, released 1.0-1.6 before using the first number to denote a major release (2.0).

But I fail to see why the future of the Unix desktop relies on GNOME or KDE, both of which I have never used more than a few hours before installing my own choice for my desktop.

Agreed. Does Thom honestly think, because we haven't seen another major version number release that nothing major has been going on? This article is pure FUD. GNOME 2.12 is more different from GNOME 2.0 than 2.0 was from 1.0. Just look at the list of new applications and features since 2.0, not to mention all the freedesktop.org work (cario, dbus, avahi), UI improvements (svg icons, clearlooks, tango). GNOME also finally has a decent multimedia framework with GStreamer. The "incremental" improvements are a good thing. It means the code is stable and maintainable. I am way more happy now using GNOME/Linux than OS X, and I've been a Mac user since 1987. Personally I'd rather read an article about what major features or changes you must have in mind that we're all missing.

Deskbar innovative? Deskbar is very nice, do not get me wrong, but it is nothing more innovative than the search field of i.e. Spotlight which also allows you to launch applications and search for things. Heck, even Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search on Windows XP allow you to do this.

Deskbar innovative?

Maybe Deskbar isn't innovative, but Tomboy sure is.

Edited 2006-12-21 12:25

How the hell is tomboy innovative? It's a freaking sticky note program, EXACTLY like the 10000 sticky notes program before it.

I could barely tell the difference between tomboy and the other sticky note program for GNOME.... except the GNOME sticky note program loaded and ran faster.

How the hell is tomboy innovative? It's a freaking sticky note program, EXACTLY like the 10000 sticky notes program before it.

The innovation in Tomboy, if you didn't know, is the Wiki-like linking system to connect notes together. If you find programs like that useful or not is up to you.

So to sum up your argument:

OS X - Lots of incrimental point releases
Gnome - Lots of incrimental point releases

Too bad, Gnome is stagnating and OS X is blazing new trails into the future!

---

You may have some valid points, but you used some pretty weak arguments to make them.

I'd mod you up higher if I could.

" than the search field of i.e. Spotlight"

You meant e.g.?

Deskbar innovative? Deskbar is very nice, do not get me wrong, but it is nothing more innovative than the search field of i.e. Spotlight which also allows you to launch applications and search for things. Heck, even Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search on Windows XP allow you to do this.

To be fair, I actually agree with you on most parts of the article. I just think the use of Mac OS X as an example of the much more innovative competition was weak. The Gnome 2.x point releases don't seem to be much about innovation, but more about evolution and refinement. I see the same thing with the Mac OS X releases.

Spotlight which also allows you to launch applications and search for things. Heck, even Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search on Windows XP allow you to do this.

Well, you don't really know what you talk about:)

Deskbar was first made for all other actions you named, except search. It was later that search plugin for Deskbar got into the wild.

Look at the history of deskbar, you might learn something new.

btw. This is the first disappointing article from you. Usually I really enjoy your writings, but this one wasn't worth the time to read.

It could be summed into few question backfired at you.
Something not getting flashier from version to version makes no progress? What? Now new theme is called progress?
Something not releasing new version numbers makes no progress? Ok, Bump version for one single patch to 32435452546564.0, is that called progress?
Improving speed, memory efficiency is not called progress? I would never trade those for "just flashy".
Since when do things like XGL, AIGLX have something to do with desktop? In closed world, they are treated like that, in OSS they are underlaying structure of Window Manager where on top of it it resides something called desktop.

KDE has vision, they just weren't thinking in public a lot.
Gnome has vision too, read project Topaz notes. They will try to incorporate as much technology as possible in 2.x and then if (and only "IF") it shows that as mission impossible start reinventing the wheel. Same logic is used in kernel, 2.8 will only be used for really large structural changes. One time you cry for lack of stability, and the next time because there is? Don't get this logic. In Gnome, large structural changes would be treated as First Class Citizen objects. But, is that impossible to have in this structure? I think not.

while also increasing the speed [3] of the desktop with every release


I'm sorry but that is not a "feature". Those are fixes to architectural problems that weren't done right during the development of gnome and now they need to be fixed because people couldn't stand the resource usage. If gnome developers could spend their time improving the desktop with real features instead of fixing things, it'd be much better for everyone.

I'm sorry but that is not a "feature". Those are fixes to architectural problems that weren't done right during the development of gnome and now they need to be fixed because people couldn't stand the resource usage. If gnome developers could spend their time improving the desktop with real features instead of fixing things, it'd be much better for everyone.

Neither is it a feature in Mac OS X.

Edited 2006-12-21 12:26

Whatever... One thing that I like about Linux is that my computer gets better with age because speed improvements are made with every release.

Personally, I think it's a lot better than some other OS's that just seem to bog the computer down more and more when you upgrade software.

I disagree. On my old iMac G3 500MHz OS X runs a lot faster than current Versions of Ubuntu. Even GNU/Linux gets more bloated (I don't think more bloat is bad, I think it is necessary) over time.