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Call me crazy, but I actually like the classic Windows look. I didn't like how they brightened it up in WinME/WinXP though (at least it could be switched back easily), and I'm not too crazy about Aero (though it has some damn nice features).

Yeah, that's the thing with taste.

I love Aero. I hated Vanilla XP, all the colours. But Aero actually makes OSX look kinda dated. KDE 4 has a lot of potential, though. As long as they get rid of some of the clutter (Dolphin!).

But, this is so subjective and personal that it mostly doesn't matter really.

The next release of GNOME will sport a new version of Nautilus that only shows one file at a time, to prevent confusing the user and cluttering the interface. It will also feature even more unused space above and below all toolbars and menu bars (which will themselves be removed in a future release as they are not necessary for interaction with the single file).

And the next relase of KDE will add 4 new menu entries in Dolphin, all chock-full with excellent new features like automatically calling your mother upstairs to bring you food in the basement, adding starcharts as meta-data on all your files, translating files to Klingon, printing out your documents and gift-wrapping them automatically if you supply Dolphin with a pair of robotic arms.. and there's more! It also comes with full schematics on how to build a very own kitchen sink of yours, including in-depth discussion on the best materials to be used and not only one but actually THREE different calculators for determining how big it should be! Amazing!

See, I can do it too.

Yes, except that KDE has also been reducing the amount of stuff in menus and toolbars, so that argument no longer works.

And GNOME has been adding functionality and configuration options, so neither does your argument. It didn't stop you from making yourself look like an arrogant, though.

Well GNOME added tabs and split view in the last two releases, that's more(KDE has had these nice features for a long time now).

Dolphin is able to look sleek and simple, with it even able to hide the menus. Spatial mode was never going to work for end users, unless they liked using OS's from the 80's and 90's.

oh c'mon, yours is really cluttered, here's mine
http://imgur.com/FWj0i.png

rub3nmv responded...

oh c'mon, yours is really cluttered, here's mine
http://imgur.com/FWj0i.png

If we are getting to the point when the only thing somebody can find wrong with an open source project as complex and ambitious as Gnome is the look of the Trash icon, then we are on the right track.

Those icons by the way are easily changeable by choosing a different theme.

Yeah, it's a compliment! Gnome is pretty decent actually. It just looks so dated. I just think that the default theme is important enough to be focused on just a tiny bit more than it is today.

But then, this is all about taste...

As I said, Gnome is really good on many areas. My wishlist would be to include something like "Homegroup". And maybe clean up the cluttered menus and create a control panel thingy instead.

It just looks so dated. I just think that the default theme is important enough to be focused on just a tiny bit more than it is today.

I agree to a degree. I personally find the icon theme pretty decent: it's not overly complicated, flashy nor does it try to be photo-realistic. The GTK+ theme and Metacity themes are quite bland though. But usually all distros use something other than the default anyway.

With some work GNOME can be made to look really good:
http://i43.tinypic.com/2rcxrg4.jpg

unmasking? are you nuts?!

Boilerplate text that some projects like to use whenever they have a new release. It's so overused that it doesn't mean anything anymore.

Do you expect them to revert to just dumping raw ChangeLog files with hundreds of changes *per project/component* onto users, instead of having a nicely formatted summary that just highlights the most visible changes they are susceptible to care about?

OpenOffice.org comes to mind as a textbook example of what not to do. Compare GNOME's release notes with http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.2.0.html#new for example.

Their "we have hundreds of changes, we can't list everything" catchphrase may sound silly to some of you, but 1) it is entirely truthful 2) it is good marketing.

But is it useful to anyone actually interested in the changes?

I prefer PHP's change log. The announcement summarises the big important changes most people will be interested in. But the actual change log, lists all of the actual changes. Sometimes with some of these projects you find a bug, fix it yourself or someone else submits a patch, see it accepted ( or rejected ) into the trunk, but never hear what release it makes it into so you can stop manually patching the source.

A readily available html page is easier/faster.

One summary/ one detailed change list. I think that's the best. The detailed one has links to bugzilla to see the specifics of each change. Its nice. The php team does a couple things wrong, but change logs are not one of them.

hmmm... double double Gnome...

I wonder the same. Nothing against Mono (I actually find it a great piece of software), but the lesser dependencies the better.

I wonder the same. Nothing against Mono (I actually find it a great piece of software), but the lesser dependencies the better.

I don't like Mono myself. Not because of the possible patent issues etc as they aren't valid here anyway, but because of the fact that Mono takes so much memory if you only run one or two Mono apps; it always has to load the VM and all that crap. It'd be less of an issue if I used 5+ Mono apps all the time as the VM is shared by all of them, but that's just not the case :S

I don't sweep the patent issues aside, but only time will tell what happens there.

My big issues are with applications written in mono/Java. I'm not sure it's the VM themselves that is the problem so much as the mindset it puts people in. Memory use isn't their problem anymore, and if the application is slow, it's the languages fault. I've met too many managed programmers unable to understand things in terms the computer does, i.e. data and instructions. They can only think in terms of objects. Worse still, those who think C++ or C is like assembler was. The gap in productivity between C or C++ and assembler is massive compared with the cap between C or C++ and a managed byte code language. There is no comparison. Even worse, thinking it's not worth learning any lower language then the byte coded language as the future will be byte coded languages. The language allows them to stay ignorant, their beliefs keeps them so. Byte code as the one true way of the future has been stated for a long time, and this future never happened. I suppose you could argue that with microcode x86 is now a form of low level byte code, but that's pushing it and I think x86 is suffering against ARM because of that when power foot prints matter more than Windows compatibility. Besides, if you do argue that's byte code, you can't argue it's managed. So it's like LLVM, which I have less of a problem with.

I feel the results seams to speak for themselves. Even if the application isn't eating memory like it's the most important app running, they all to often are unresponsive and take ages to start. I'll stick with C or C++ applications, or python applications stuck together from libs written in C or C++. Don't see why .NET/mono byte code "future" will be any more successful then the Java byte code future was.

Bit of a rant, sorry.

I think the patent issues, while not a non-issue, are, like you said, not extremely relevant. However, do keep in mind that Mono is only as useful as it is recent when compared to .NET. Should Microsoft desire to cripple Mono, they have a few billion dollars more that they can spend on developing features faster than the Mono team can possibly keep up. Mono lives at the whim of Microsoft so long as they control .NET development.

I'll be honest and say that I love .NET's more sane organization of standard libraries (over Java, and especially over every other language) and elegant syntax. But for that reason, I use Vala for much of my hobby projects.

Vala's got a very similar syntax, plus language bindings are a non-issue. I don't have to wait for the Mono team to decide to write a native port of my favorite C library. I don't have to write and maintain complicated wrapper code. At the worst, I can draw up a simple text file and valac does the Vala->C translation for me.

Add to that the fact that it runs about as fast as hand-crafted C, and you've got the best of all worlds.

Now, if only they could work on the docs...

Mono is part of GNOME's default installation, because by default Tomboy is also included. If you don't install Tomboy then Mono is not required.

If it can still be stripped out, that's good enough for me. Cheers. :-)

C# is one of the 'official' languages for Gnome.

C#, Python, and C are the languages used in the default install for the Gnome upstream project....

I on the other hand don't really mind mono per say, but I prefer knotes.

But something tells me the gnome team wouldn't consider including it in gnome.

Not aligned to a grid

Right-click -> Sort -> By Name.

Yeah, I think that happens when using compact layout or something like that, I really hate it.